(4 of 7)
All around us was the detritus of defeat and retreat -- the final testament to a last desperate attempt to hold the line against the Soviet onslaught. The roadside ditches were filled with small arms and ammunition left behind by fleeing soldiers. Tanks and self-propelled artillery squatted in the fields, abandoned after they ran out of fuel. Twice we came across the corpses of German soldiers dangling from trees, cardboard epitaphs pinned to their chests: i am a deserter. The children gawked, but no one else seemed to pay much attention.
The road was teeming with humanity. Retreating soldiers, many without weapons; trucks, pushcarts, bicycles, anything with wheels-loaded with people and their belongings; slow columns of those on foot, most shuffling, a few stepping out briskly, hardly anyone stopping. "Keep moving!" was the shout up and down the line-and they moved. Faces that were angry, sad, empty; eyes that questioned: How close were the Russians? Where was safety? What was ahead?
The Red Army almost caught up with us early the second day. I awoke to heavy firing all around. "Get out, get out!" Mother shouted, half pushing me over the truck's tailgate. With everyone scrambling off, she followed with my brothers; my sister was slung in a rucksack on her back. We stepped into mayhem: a vast jam of stopped vehicles, soldiers and civilians running for cover, explosions throwing up steel and dirt. A soldier grabbed me and dragged me under a cement culvert. We were in a narrow valley in which the road and a railway trestle, halfway up along one of the side slopes, ran parallel. A train was stopped on the track, the huge red crosses on the carriages brilliant in the morning sun. "Ivan is mortaring," the soldier said. "The swine is shooting at a hospital train." By now, men were struggling out of the carriages, then trying to get underneath to find protection against the shelling. In the bright light their bandages stood out whiter than white.
The scene is sharply etched in my memory, but it unrolls like a movie at half speed, the white figures swimming slowly against the green of the hill. I think I was too excited to be afraid. Twenty years later, when I knew better, I would find myself under a similar culvert along a red dirt road in Vietnam's Central Highlands, where a U.S. Army patrol I was accompanying had come under Viet Cong mortar fire. Half paralyzed by fear, I tried to tell myself to be calm-and suddenly saw the train scene flash back so clearly that it seemed to be unspooling right then and there.
In the confusion of that earlier morning, fear had risen only when I realized I had lost sight of Mother. Then I heard her calling my name, and I saw Peise. He had his submachine gun pointed at a soldier. "Get that thing out of my way," he yelled at the top of his lungs, motioning to a truck that was blocking his. The soldier hesitated, as if to call Peise's bluff. The sergeant fired a burst in the air, and the man backed off, jumped into the cab of his vehicle and rocked it out of the way. When I spotted my mother, her face was ashen. The baby was still on her back, and she had her arms wrapped around my brothers. "I thought I'd lost you for good," she said. We scrambled back on our truck, which Peise had by now maneuvered into the clear. She took a length of heavy string and tied the family together by the wrists. "That's the last time anyone gets lost," she said.