20. Juli 1942
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| 20: –Kremennaja[1] | 
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| 21.: –Warwarowka–Michailowka–Nowo Astrachan[1] |
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The wide floodplains of the Donets lowlands give us a lot of trouble in places. Yesterday we crossed a swamp[2] via log roads and a small bridge. This always takes a lot of time because the vehicles have to drive individually at long intervals and very carefully. And if a vehicle sinks and gets stuck, the whole march comes to a halt. Today, the wheels of our vehicles grind through deep, loose sand. We follow the riverbed of a small Donets tributary[3] down in the valley bottom, but close to the valley slope. At last a village[4] appears at the top of the slope. The path to it leads diagonally up the slope and is quite steep. The valley slope here is about eight to ten metres high. With a last effort, our well-behaved horses climb the path that leads into the village.
Now the days go by again in the very familiar rhythm of a brisk advance. Get up in the morning, wash, have breakfast, get ready. Then the companies line up on the streets. The leading company, which changes every day, sets out on the march, the others thread their way in from the byways, and then the long line of columns stretches across the vast, hot steppes of southern Russia towards the Don. We have left the wide flatlands of the Donez floodplains behind us. After hours of marching in the shimmering heat of the sun, we reach our destination for the day, a village, in the early afternoon. If the situation allows, quartermasters are sent ahead to brief the arriving units and guide them to the designated accommodation. The horses are unhitched and supplied, the soldiers take the most necessary equipment to the quarters. The vehicles remain loaded. The sub-leaders inspect the quarters and make the usual reports and then they too are off. In the course of the evening, the marching orders for the next day are issued. Finally everything sleeps in anticipation of the next morning. Only the quarter guards and vehicle guards do their nightly guard duty. And the next morning it’s on again, eastwards, into the Don steppes.
We have reached one of the typical giant villages often found in the steppes. The official business is done. I have taken off my uniform and walk around in gym shorts. I live in a corner house and there is a girl standing at the opposite corner house. When I ask her if she has billets, she says: “Yes, four men”. The whole thing seems incredible to me. I go into the house with her and find that apart from her and her mother, no one lives in the house. Then she laughs in my face and is happy that she has teased me. The four men were quartered here in the past. She points to some photos in a small frame on the dresser. Photos of German soldiers.
In another house an old babushka[5] is lying asleep in the hallway. When I touch her, she is terribly startled, rises and goes into the living room grumbling.
In 30-km marches daily, we push forward into the vast steppes between Donets and Don rivers, directly into the great Donbogen (arc of the Don). We cross the deep hollows of the Donez tributaries. The endless steppe plateaus between these hollows are bleak and treeless. At the moment we are passing through a particularly barren landscape. Even the villages here are smaller and poorer. The earlier villages often had front gardens with wooden fences. Here, the small clay cottages are surrounded by low limestone walls. The whole settlement is without tree or shrub. A lost human settlement in a boundless, bleak expanse. We follow the path, which disappears in the distance. The treeless grassland stretches as far as the eye can see. Sometimes there are sparse, brown tufted grasslands, sometimes greenish-colourful areas with waist-high, densely growing grasses in which your feet get caught when you try to walk through. The villages are 25 to 30 kilometres apart, and between them stretches the immense, boundless, desolate steppe.
Anyone who has ever experienced this boundless expanse understands the melancholy that grips the Russian soul at the sight of this formless bleakness. And anyone who has ever experienced the extent of untamed and unpredictable forces of nature in this country - be it extreme degrees of cold and icy storms or blazing summer heat and catastrophic droughts - senses something of the shaping power of the elements on the Russian soul. They are reflected in the nature of Russian man, in the immoderateness of his emotional outbursts, his brutality as well as his good nature. The Russian is like the landscape and nature in which he lives and which has moulded him: Melancholic, excessive, unpredictable (see also below).
With us marches a Cossack battalion.[6] It is one of these Turk battalions[7], consisting of volunteers from all Soviet peoples, fighting against Bolshevism, against Great Russian domination, for their national and cultural freedom. The battalion commander, the company commanders and some of the non-commissioned officers are mostly Germans. You have to get used to the otherness of these people. Their appearance does not correspond at all to our ideas of soldierly discipline and order, but they are wild warriors. And that is how they are passing us by at the moment. A real bunch of gypsies. The column consists of a long row of the usual small panje carts on which the Cossacks lie on their bellies and let themselves be driven around. One of them plays a dashing tune on an accordion, and a few others sing along. Some of the Cossacks are on horseback. The spiess, an SS sergeant, rides in a real carriage. Next to him sit two girls who are probably used as kitchen staff and girls for everything. Sutlers of the 20th century.
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- ↑ 1,0 1,1 KTB 257. I.D., NARA T-315 Roll 1804 Frame 000933
- ↑ The area around Jampol is indeed very swampy
- ↑ possibly the Krasnaya
- ↑ possibly Kremennaya
- ↑ бабушка, grandmother
- ↑ This was the Cossack Squadron of the XXXXIV A.K., which according to KTB 257. I.D., NARA T-315 Roll 1804 Frame 000932 was subordinated to 257 I.D. from 18 July 1942; Details see above.
- ↑ The unit apparently was not a real Turk battalion.