Searching without map or compass for the tracks of his platoon that led behind the Soviet front lines, Lechner lost his way in the white night in which harmless snowdrifts turned into blackish humps in the moon’s shadow and snow-covered humps into harmless snowdrifts when the moon shone on them. In the morning he had no idea where he was in the ups and downs of what all looked like the same hills and valleys. There was no smoke, no tent, no line of trenches to be seen, nothing but a rolling, flickering void in which, here and there, a green-covered crag showed up blackish against the southern slopes. Gullies hollowed out the snow blanket. He broke through into water holes. Marching through snow that melted by day and froze to a pitted crust at night wore him out. Feeling sure that he would quickly meet a Soviet unit, Lechner had eaten his provisions in, two days. He shot a grouse to pieces with a volley from his submachine gun. When he tried to light a fire to roast it his lighter gave out. The raw meat resisted his teeth. He still had his iron ration, and he divided it up to last for another two days. It could hardly take longer than that to contact the Red Army. On the evening of the fourth day he scraped the last shreds of pork out of the tin. He still did not reckon with starving or freezing to death, but he made up his mind to make the remaining mouthful of hard biscuit last for the next two days. He lived through the first night in which hunger kept him awake, tossing and turning, wrapped in a blanket and a piece of tent canvas, on a patch of moss at the foot of a steep, snow-covered mountainside, and dreaming of steaming bowls of Tyrolean noodles and great plates of mushroom omelette followed by a huge bowl of lentils that he spooned up more and more ravenously. Every night after that, and later on in his daydreams as well, his gluttonous gobbling ended up with this brimful, never-ending bowl, for he did not care for stewed fruit or other sweet things. His mossy bed was sheltered from the wind by the branches of bent-over birches huddled together for protection and warmth. In the morning he chewed leaf buds and spat them out. He could not bring himself to swallow them. He abandoned his ammunition belt and his bread pouch with the hand grenades in it. On the fifth evening he heard a grey wolf howling near by, he saw the eyes gleaming in the dark but his volley only sprayed up snow. He seemed to have forgotten that he could also fire single shots with his submachine gun. His strength waned faster than his rations. On the sixth night he shot at the wolf again and missed it. He stayed prostrate until well into the forenoon the next day. On this, the seventh day, he only crept forward step by step.
(illustration by Giancarlo Romero)
When he looked back about midday, he saw the wolf on his track, its snout to the ground. The wolf was yellowish-grey with dark spots on its head. Its flanks were shrunken, the matted fur on its breast turned to bristles towards the neck. Its bushy tail trailed in the snow. It squatted down on its haunches, yawned so that Lechner could see its yellow fangs between its rosy jaws, and uttered a mournful cry. The war had frightened away the herds of reindeer. They were his food. Only the leaping snow hares with their underground hiding places and the flighty grouse that fluttered away before his nose into the bushes still lived their anxious lives in his hunting grounds, making a fool of him, the hungry tundra wolf hunting alone in the spring. Lechner shot twice more. The third time he scrabbled up some earth to rest his gun on. White needles pricked his eyes and he saw the wolf, flickeringly now, through blinding tears, creeping nearer, step by step through the day, foot-lengths nearer every hour, his wretched snout and tail trailing in the snow. On the evening of the seventh day he came to a region he thought he had seen before, although the white needles now pricked his eyes constantly. He followed a track not yet obliterated by the change from thaw to freezing, so that he could see it through his snow glasses in spite of the painful flickering. He thought he must have wandered up into the southern sector of the Litsa front – weak, snow-blind, without a compass – hundreds of miles straight to the north. "So it’s the same old thing," he murmured, for he had got into the habit of talking to himself. "So you can start all over again, you can’t get away from yourself, you’re stuck with yourself. Nobody’s going to do it for you. Your place is with your own chaps, the Rosskopf platoon is your job, you’ll have to live or die with it. Ha I my friend, you wanted to make things easier for yourself, you swine, you wanted to have it easier, didn’t you?" He found a slope free of snow, a mossy patch, a little copse of budding birches. When he lay down he felt his bread pouch with the hand grenades in it at his back. "So you’ve been going round in a circle, always back to where you started from, that’s it," he murmured, laughing wildly and, raising himself with a groan, threw the hand grenades one after another into a swampy puddle. A fountain squirted up after each explosion. Clumps of marsh flew through the air with the splinters. Lechner was too weak to crush the percussion caps with the butt of his submachine gun, so he chucked his re-found ammunition belt into the puddle, too. He scratched under the snow in search of berries, shoved moss into his mouth, tried to cat birch-leaf buds again and after he had vomited up again and again everything he tried to swallow, he gobbled up the last hard biscuit that was his ration for the next day. He dropped off to sleep with an indifferent glance at the wolf’s gleaming eyes, now nearer than ever; the wolf stretched out, raised his snout, ran his tongue over his lips and howled his misery to the stars. Lechner woke up and saw the wolf five paces away, on his haunches, the spittle running down from his mouth into the bristles and snarls of his fell. Was it an animal with his own human feelings – hunger, love, loneliness, longing for company? Lechner felt as light as a feather, free of the pangs of hunger, he need only rise and fly away from the deserts of the earth. He would certainly hit him if he shot now. But on the point of doing it his index finger slipped off the trigger. The thin volley tore a bloody strip in the animal’s fell. If he had been capable of a clear thought in the black world behind his snow glasses, Lechner would have cursed himself for destroying the hand grenades and the reserve ammunition. If he had been capable of it, with his confused brain and the pain of the white needles, he would have sworn to keep his last three shots until the moment when the wolf – or man – was certain to leap. But the human animal or animal man waited a mass of greed for living flesh, a mass of skin and bone. His deadly enemy’s hands could still hold the thundering pipe. Lechner abandoned his skis; they had become leaden weights on his feet. He marched on before daybreak. Marched! Not looking for a path behind dark glasses through the flickering slits of his bloodshot eyes, no, feeling his way across the next couple of yards of gleaming white, he dragged himself a few steps farther, fell on his knees, crawled a stretch, then dragged himself up again, walked bravely a few yards farther, sank down in the squelching snow, dragged himself along by the green brush and managed to cover five miles or so from dawn till dark through a valley sheltered from the wind, to a Lapland hut made of clods of earth. Here he scrabbled up a small pile of bones from the hearth and gnawed them clean of leathery scraps of muscle. He could not chew them. He gathered the bones together under him before the eyes of the lurking wolf at the entrance hole. Then he gloried in dumplings swimming in mutton stew, twined spaghetti round a fork, but that was too slow and he shoved it into his mouth with his fists and the fat dripped out of the corners of his mouth. In between he saw the wolf’s fangs gleaming between its rosy jaws. After that it was lentils, just plain lentils, that he spooned up out of the ever-brimming bowl. The queer thing was that his hunger grew the more he gobbled out of the brimming bowl, whose steaming, glorious-smelling contents never got less. Night fell, the eyes gleamed at the entrance hole, and then platoon commander Rosskopf was there, he drank schnapps in gurgling swigs, without stopping, and threw the empty bottles out of the window. He – or the wolf – had shoved his chest through the hole, crept half a pace further in and Lechner could almost have grabbed him. He would have to get him alive, he thought, and take him home to the zoo. Then your name will be on the plate: "Canis lupus rosskopf, Lapland, presented by Lance Corporal Lechner, 141st Mountain Infantry Regiment." He cowered back the half pace that the wolf – or Rosskopf – had advanced into the hut. He knelt down, and through the burning slits between his swollen eyelids, through the night of his snow glasses, he searched in the twilight seeping in through the hole the shape of the schnapps-drinking wolf who had just thrown the empty bottles through the window.
When Rosskopf leapt, the gun was between him and the living flesh, breastbone pressed against the mouth of it, the flame bit into him, the thunder drove him back. Lechner pressed the trigger while Rosskopf, with burning eyes, crept towards him on his belly. In a last flare-up of the will to live he pressed the trigger wildly with his index finger. The hammer clicked in the empty gun. Rosskopf, bleeding, still tried to leap, but at each effort blood spurted out of his chest. Inch by inch he crept nearer his deadly enemy. Lechner was too weak to hit him, too weak to escape him. Whoever gave in first would be the other’s prey.
Towards midday Lechner stared out over Rosskopf in his death throes at the shimmering glaze of the rolling desert and saw his last mirage in that desolate end of the world. He wanted to curse, shake his fist, draw his pukko – but all he could do was to crouch down on all fours, a brother to the wolf, and turn his blind face up to the shadow moving towards the entrance hole. He and Rosskopf, who was dying, rolled over together, then, as the first shadow bent down to the hole, a remnant of his dying consciousness suggested that the Red Army men had come…. "Tovarishchi," he tried to say, but he saw and heard and said no more.
Along with the unconscious mountain infantryman, the scout patrol summoned by the sharp tack-tack of the salvoes, brought back to the first-aid station behind the German-Finnish line the skull and fell of a wolf that the raving man had called "Rosskopf."
The Choo Choo Train
By Nancy Robinson
The dry brown sycamore leaves were drifting gently from the trees as the sun sank toward Mountain Creek Lake. The temperature was a perfect sixty-eight degrees and the sky so clear it seemed to sparkle. We had loaded the luggage in the old black and white ‘57 Oldsmobile and settled the children in to the back seat for the drive to Union Station and the beginning of a new adventure for them. This was their first time to ride a "choo-choo" train.
I was apprehensive, an attitude taught to me years earlier by my mother. She was always worried. She was afraid that we’d miss the bus or train or that our papers wouldn’t be in order or that her hat would be "wrong." These horrible things never seemed to happen, but she believed that it was best to be emotionally prepared. I had tried to prepare my two, three, and four-year old children for a long train ride away from Daddy. I didn’t know whether or not they understood, but they did seem to realize that they were going on the "choo-choo" train.
Tom, the eldest, was on his very best behavior. His excitement was visible in his controlled motions. A hand would reach of its own volition to touch something. He would see it and pull it back. The feet would wander off to allow the eyes to inspect some new visual wonder in the huge train station, and he’d notice and direct them back to the group.
On the other hand, Dick, the second child, had no such scruples. As usual, when he saw something that he wanted to touch or hold, he did just that – quickly, preventing anyone from intercepting him. Keeping ahead of Dick was a constant challenge.
The baby Harriet was confined in my arms, so she was no problem. Her sparkling, blue eyes seemed to take in everything around her, promising a lively time with her when she became mobile.
We purchased our tickets and walked through the station, down the long tunnel to the trains. The youngsters were subdued at the sight of the passenger car, much larger than they had imagined. They were delighted to find that the tracks came right inside the building, and they were awed by the size of the wheels which were as high as the baby was tall.
The conductor, impressive in his blue uniform and gold braid, leaned down and assisted Tom up the high steps, then offered his hand to Dick, who, for once in his life, stood absolutely still. The combination of the strange man in blue, the giant step, and the glimmering steel monster had overwhelmed this child. I carried him into the car. Harriet was quite pleased to be transported by the friendly conductor.
After the children were settled in their seats there was a moment of quiet as the Silver Eagle glided almost silently down the gleaming twin rails leaving the old station. I pondered the improvements in rail travel since I was a child. This passenger car was conditioned with clean, filtered air, its temperature thermostatically regulated. The lights were bright, and the windows were sparkling. The streamlined engine put out no black puffs of coal-dust filled smoke, and it traveled smoothly, without the jerk-chug-jerk-chug of the old locomotive.
My reverie was interrupted by an anguished cry from Tom, and I looked up to see tears rolling down his suddenly sad little face. Surprised, I asked him, "What’s wrong, Tommy?"
His reply gave me some food for thought, as my choice of words in explaining this trip had caused disappointment for my child.
