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of the end! “But of course, without suffering.” He hinted at making the sign of the cross and went on, in his way of pushing everything to an extreme: “I don’t want to die wretchedly—not like one of those stinking lumps of humanity I saw lying in the field hospital, groaning away.” He made me promise to stand by him in death, one way or another.
    But the following day we were unexpectedly separated once again, and Buck said, as we parted, that hehoped to get through the war, despite everything. With a smile he said, “That goes for you, too. No wretched dying!” Already ten steps away from me, he stopped and shouted half to the side, “One so rarely finds a friend!” Afterward I tried for a couple of days to find out through Lieutenant Kühne where he had been deployed, but without success.

    Joachim Fest’s friend, Reinhold Buck
    My company was sent to Euskirchen near Bonn to lay glass mines on a half-finished military airfield. The newly developed explosive devices looked like preserving jars, and when they exploded burst into countless tiny splinters that caused terrible wounds. Day after day, as we worked out in the open, American Lightning fighter-bombers would appear and use us for target practice as we lay exposed amidst the glass jars gleaming in the sunlight. That was the next set of dead I saw. After nightfall we fetched them from the field and laid them out in a hall; finally, together with the corpse in the tree, I got to twenty dead. Then I stopped counting.
    Back in Cologne-Wahn we spent the days, and occasionally the nights, practicing pontoon-building, often standing up to our knees in water in the icy River Sieg, and a couple of times we even tried it in the fast-flowing Rhine. After about two weeks we were informed a room at a time that the next day we were starting out for Mettmann near Cologne. The reason given was that Montgomery, although with some delay, was moving toward the Rhine. The approaching end of the war began to make itself felt in the muddle with which we were sent back and forth. Even before we took up position inMettmann, the deployment was broken off and we were ordered back to our starting point.
    That day we stood shivering for several hours in a forest of thin, awkward trees. Without warning we heard a whistling sound and at the same moment two shadows, which we took to be a new type of American plane, flitted over us, no more than one or two hundred feet above our heads, so that we threw ourselves to the ground looking for shelter. Later, we found out that they were Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter-bombers, which, powered by jet engines that had recently gone into mass production, flew faster than the speed of sound. Immediately, there was talk again of “miracle weapons” that would change the course of the war. Even as we were still talking about them we had to assemble again and received the order to get onto trucks which had just driven up.
    That, however, was not yet the end of the confused deployment situation. About thirty miles farther south we were just as abruptly given the order to get out and march. At Leverkusen we passed a military hospital where we took a short rest, surrounded by staff cars and military ambulances. Pitiable sounds came from the buildings near us; doctors and male nurses were running around shouting; in the corridors we found long rows of bandaged figures, looking like shrunken larvae, and between them tubs full of sawn-off limbs.
    Around midnight we crossed the railway bridge near Cologne’s cathedral, where a cold smell of burning wafted toward us from the riverbank. The streets along which we marched consisted of buildings “blown through” bythe wind, as the popular phrase had it; in between them we made our way over blackened mountains of rubble and hills of ash. Whole facades covered by missing relatives’ or friends’ messages stood ghostlike in the emptiness: HANNES, WHERE ARE you? GISELA . 6 When a gust of wind blew over the