Once again, I slept poorly; that seemed to be the rule in Pereyaslav. The men grunted and snored; as soon as I dozed off, the teeth-grinding of the little Waffen-SS cut into my sleep and pulled me out of it abruptly. In this groggy drowsiness, Ott’s face in the water and the skull of the Russian soldier became confused: Ott, lying in the puddle, opened his mouth wide and stuck his tongue out at me, a thick, pink, fresh tongue, as if he were inviting me to kiss him. I awoke anxious, tired. Over breakfast, once again I was overcome with coughing, then with violent retching; I slipped out to an empty hallway, but nothing came up. When I went back to the table, Häfner was waiting for me with a teletype: “Kharkov has just fallen, Hauptsturmführer. The Standartenführer is waiting for you in Poltava.”—“In Poltava?” I pointed to the sodden windows. “He has to be kidding. How does he expect me to get there?”—“The trains are still running, from Kiev to Poltava. When the partisans don’t derail them. There’s a Rollbahn convoy that’s leaving for Yagotin; I called the division, they said they’ll take you. Yagotin is on the railroad, so from there you can get a train.” Häfner was truly an efficient officer. “Fine, I’ll go tell my driver.”—“No, your driver will stay here. That Admiral will never get as far as Yagotin. You’ll travel with the Rollbahn in one of their trucks. I’ll send the driver with the car back to Kiev when it’s possible.”—“Fine.”—“The convoy leaves at noon. I’ll give you some dispatches for the Standartenführer, including the report about Ott’s death.”—“Fine.” I went to get my kit ready. Then I sat down at a table and wrote a letter to Thomas, straightforwardly describing the previous day’s incident: You discuss this with the Brigadeführer, since I know Blobel won’t do anything, aside from covering himself. We have to learn from this, otherwise it might happen again. After I finished the letter, I sealed it in an envelope and put it aside. Then I went to find Ries. “Tell me, Ries, your little child-soldier, there, the one who grates his teeth. What’s his name?”—“You mean Hanika? Franz Hanika. The one I showed you?”—“Yes, him. Can you give him to me?” He raised his eyebrows, taken aback. “Give him to you? Why?”—“I’m leaving my driver here; I left my orderly in Kiev, so I need another one. And in Kharkov I can have him put up in a separate room, that way he won’t bother anyone anymore.” Ries seemed delighted: “Listen, Hauptsturmführer, if you’re serious…I’m all for it. I’ll go ask the Obersturmführer; I don’t think he’ll have any objections.”—“Fine. I’ll go tell this Hanika.” I found him in the mess, where he was scouring pots. “Hanika!” He stood at attention and I saw he had a bruise on one cheek. “Yes?”—“I’m leaving for Poltava and then Kharkov. I need an orderly. Do you want to come?” His strained face lit up: “With you?”—“Yes. Your work won’t change much, but at least you won’t have the others on your back.” He looked radiant, like a child who has just received an unexpected present. “Go get your things ready,” I said to him.

The journey by truck to Yagotin remains for me a long wandering, an endless foundering. The men spent more time outside the trucks pushing than in the cabs. But as terrible as the mud was, the idea of what would come later scared them even more. “We have nothing, Herr Hauptsturmführer, you understand? Nothing,” a Feldwebel explained to me. “No warm underclothes, no sweaters, no winter coats, no antifreeze, nothing. The Reds are ready for winter, though.”—“They’re men like us. They’ll be cold too.”—“It’s not that. Cold can be dealt with. But you have to be equipped, and they are. And even if they aren’t, they’ll be able to improvise. They’ve lived with it all their lives.” He cited a striking example he had from one of his Hiwis: in the Red Army, the men received boots two sizes bigger than their actual foot size. “With the frost, the feet swell, and then it leaves more room to fill them with straw and newspaper. We have boots that are just at the right size. Half the men are going to end up in the infirmary with their toes amputated.”

When we reached Yagotin, I was so coated in mud that the noncom in charge of the station didn’t recognize my rank and greeted me with a torrent of abuse because I was tracking mud into his waiting room. I put my kit down on a bench and retorted harshly: “I am an officer and you are not to speak to me like that.” I went back out to join Hanika, who helped me wash up a little at a hand pump. The noncom apologized profusely when he saw my insignia, which were still those of an Obersturmführer; he invited me to take a bath and have dinner. I gave him the letter for Thomas, which would leave with the mail. He put me up in a small room for officers; Hanika slept on a bench in the waiting room, with some men on leave waiting for the train to Kiev. The station chief woke me up in the middle of the night: “There’s a train in twenty minutes. Come.” I quickly got dressed and went out. The rain had stopped but everything was still dripping, the tracks were gleaming under the bleak station lights. Hanika had joined me with our kit. Then the train arrived, its brakes squealing for a long time, in spurts, before it stopped. Like all the trains nearing the front, it was half empty; we had our choice of compartments. I lay down and fell asleep. If Hanika ground his teeth, I didn’t hear him.

When I woke up we hadn’t even passed Lubny. The train stopped often, because of alerts or to let priority convoys pass. Near the toilets, I met a Major from the Luftwaffe who was returning from leave to join his squadron in Poltava. It had been five days since he left Germany. He talked to me about the morale of the civilians of the Reich, who remained confident even though victory was slow in coming; very amiably he offered us a little bread and sausage. At the station stops too we sometimes found something to snack on. The train kept its own time, I didn’t feel hurried. At the stops I lazily contemplated the sadness of the Russian stations. The facilities, barely built, already took on a dilapidated look; brambles and weeds invaded the railways; here and there, even in this season, one could see the burst of color of a stubborn flower, lost among gravel soaked with black oil. The cows that placidly wandered onto the tracks seemed surprised each time the roaring whistle of a train came to disturb their meditation. The dull gray of mud and dust covered everything. On the paths alongside the tracks, a filthy kid pushed a ramshackle bicycle, or else an old peasant hobbled along to the station to try to sell us some of her moldy vegetables. Slowly I let this endless ramification grow in me, this vast system of tracks, of switches controlled by idiotic, alcoholic laborers. At the marshalling yards, I watched interminable lines of dirty, oily, muddy freight cars waiting, full of wheat, coal, iron, gasoline, livestock, all the wealth of occupied Ukraine seized to be sent to Germany, all the things men need, moved from one place to another according to a grandiose, mysterious plan of circulation. Was that the reason why we were waging war, why men were dying? But even in everyday life that’s the way it is. Somewhere a man wastes away his life, covered with coal dust, in the stifling depths of a mine; elsewhere, another man rests warmly, clothed in alpaca, buried in a good book in an armchair, without ever thinking whence or how this armchair, this book, this alpaca, this warmth reach him. National Socialism wanted every German, in the future, to be able to have his modest share of the good things of life; but within the limitations of the Reich, that had turned out to be impossible; so now we were taking these things from others. Was that fair? So long as we had the strength and the power, yes, since as far as justice is concerned, there is no absolute authority, and each people defines its own truth and justice. But if ever our strength weakened, if our power gave out, then we would have to endure the justice of others, terrible as it might be. And that too would be fair.