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fields of ruins we felt grit crunching between our teeth. Sometimes someone opened a hatch or removed the cardboard from a cellar hole to see who was coming along the street; in other places white faces appeared in a square hole in brickwork. Pointlessly, some sirens suddenly howled. The pathetically swelling sound involuntarily reminded me of Liszt’s Les préludes , which had accompanied the victory announcements of the Russian campaign on German radio and had not been heard for a long time. Instead, the talk now was constantly of a “straightening of the front,” the camouflage term which the propagandists of the regime had invented for “retreat.”
    On the night of March 8, 1945, after crossing the Rhine again, we reached the town of Unkel, which was on the right bank of the river opposite Remagen. 7 Exhausted by the marching and our impressions on the way, we were granted “an hour’s rest.” Then we each received twenty rounds of ammunition, after which wecrawled up a wooded slope as far as the meadow which bordered it. At the other end of the meadow, about two hundred yards away, was an isolated farmhouse which lay in darkness. At the edge of the woods we got the order to dig one- and two-man foxholes at intervals of ten yards. Now we were also told that the American Ninth Tank Division had captured the undamaged Ludendorff Bridge only hours before and an armored advance guard had already crossed. Several attempts by the Germans to blow up the bridge or to smash the American units had failed.
    When all the orders had been issued, Mahlmann called me over and instructed me to dig a two-man hole in an advanced position about seventy yards from the farmhouse. Surprisingly, he ordered the hole to be excavated a couple of yards this side of the edge of the woods in the open meadow and personally led me there in the shelter of the trees. When I asked why the foxhole was not to be dug in the woods like all the others, he simply retorted that it was not for me to ask questions here. After all, since Lieutenant Kühne had maintained with such conviction that I was so uncommonly eager for final victory, I should surely obey every order without hesitation. Then he ordered me, while standing at the edge of the wood, farther out into the open field. “Go on! Start now!” He went back into the trees to (as he said) check the work of the others. As I dug up the soil, we came under fire; the ground was plowed up without me being able to tell where the shooting was coming from. Once someone started to scream, which turned to whimpering, butthere, too, I couldn’t tell whether it was an American or one of ours. Now and then a machine gun tap-tap-tapped through the black, empty night.
    At about six in the morning Mahlmann came back and only now did I realize that he wanted to use the two-man foxhole with me. He let his stocky body down beside me, grumbled about this and that, and finally ordered me to be lookout, because he wanted “to have the pleasure of a brief nap.” A fine drizzle started again and I covered us with the tarpaulin. When he woke up in the first light of dawn, he asked whether anything had happened and whether I had observed any movement in the farmhouse. When I replied in the negative, doing so in quite unmilitary fashion with my mouth full (because after eating my “iron ration” I was chewing a heel of bread I had saved up), he demanded that I should look again. When I replied that after two days without food I wanted to eat this piece of bread first, he shouted at me abruptly and quite incautiously that I was constantly contradicting him. “And that with a trial awaiting you! It’s going to stop!” he bellowed. “Once and for all! It’s an order!” When I went on chewing at my crust, he shook his head and grumbled, a bit more quietly, that he had to do everything himself.
    Calming down, he asked in an almost resigned voice, “What’s happened to discipline?” He scrambled around for a moment