11. Januar 1944
At dawn, I get out of the bunker and experience a sunrise that I have seen in such splendour only during my seafaring days[1] on the seas.[2] The boundless, vast, treeless snowy landscape lies in dazzling white under a pale blue sky. The eastern horizon glows in all colours of red from pale yellow to burning dark red. Its burning abundance of light is refracted in billions of snow crystals, glittering and glistening like sparkling diamonds, reflecting the sunlight in tiny, flickering stars a thousandfold. An enrapturing, overwhelming sight. But just as everything in this strange country is of extreme proportions, this indescribable beauty of nature is accompanied by its bitter flipside: the extreme, biting iciness. So I disappear underground again like a mole, curl up in my blanket and try to sleep the day away. Occasionally I get up and take a look outside. But dazzled by the abundance of radiant daylight, which is still reflected multifold by the immaculate white blanket of snow, I retreat back into the darkness of my burrow. The beauty of God’s nature shines here for us in vain.
When I sleep, the field telephone is always next to my head. As I am a light sleeper, I wake up immediately when it rattles. The messenger, by contrast, sleeps like a bear. Before he’s up, I have finished the call.
It’s freezing cold, but it’s not snowing much. Still, the snow is so deep that our heavy field kitchen has to drive eight-in-hand to bring the food to the front. And then it still takes four hours to cover the eighteen kilometres from the village to the front. It’s just unimaginable distances in this country. Recently, however, they have been bringing the food in infantry carts. These are light, two-wheeled, all-terrain carts, of which one horse can pull several at the same time on normal roads. We go easy on our horses this way. However, the food is a little colder because it has to be brought in buckets, which don’t keep the heat as well as the kettle in the field kitchen, which is constantly heated on the way.
It’s quiet on our front now. Perhaps Ivan is now trying his luck on other fronts after failing miserably with us.
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- ↑ The author had once wanted to become a merchant ship officer and had travelled to Chile on the training sail ship “Padua”; he also kept a vexilli.net/ diary of this.
- ↑ On 9 Jan there was a sunny morning, on 11 Jan it was at least partly clear in the army area, at -5°C (KTB 6.A., NARA T-312 Roll 1492 Frame 000381/405).