Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member by Philip Freiherr von Boeselager Read Free Book Online Page A

stubbornly. Despite the cover provided by artillery camouflaged in a nearby forest—and which unfortunately once landed a shell among our own troops—we were not able to reach the houses on the village outskirts. We had to fight for a house, a fence, a vegetable garden. The enemy firepower dramatically increased and was concentrated on the northern sector. This shift in the Soviet defenses seemed to me inexplicable, although it was tragically simple: the German head adjutant, who was supervising the telephone connection and at the same time commanding the artillery battery, hadn’t received the message ordering the division to retreat. The Russians, finding the pressure on their south and west flanks relieved by the departure ofthe cyclists, had shifted all their efforts to the cavalry squadron, which, kneeling or crawling in the snow as the light faded, persisted in a vain attempt to move forward. It was at that point that a searing pain flattened me. I had been hit in the abdomen. I didn’t have much time to think about my fate or even to suffer, because I lost consciousness. When I came to, I managed to stay on the battlefield for a while. The situation was becoming increasingly desperate. Grenades were exploding in the icy snowdrifts, throwing up little columns of snow and powder along with bits of wood and glass. The wounded men’s cries of pain, mixed with the crackling of machine-gun fire, shattered the late afternoon; as if through the fog of a slow nightmare, the sound managed to reach my consciousness, despite the blood I’d lost, and despite the sensation of both immense weakness and a certain light-headedness that comes with being seriously wounded. Snow began to fall, heavy, thick, and abundant, but it did not mute the din of the fighting. Soon the light machine guns began to jam. Only the horses were still going about their task, heroic, impassive, moving out damaged equipment and wounded soldiers.
    The squadron had already lost thirty-five men. I was wounded again, this time in the left shoulder. I nonetheless had the strength to give the order to retreat at nightfall. The few dozen men who were still on their feet, helped by the inexhaustible horses, hurriedly loaded up the equipment, the wounded, and the frozen bodies ofthe dead, and set out to look for the battalion, whose location they no longer knew. It seems that they walked for hours in the fresh snow, carrying me on a stretcher. The scouts were in the lead, and were sinking thigh-deep in the snow. The men were stumbling with fatigue, but got up again when they came in contact with the wet snow or were scratched by the ice.
    I owed my survival solely to the attention of my men and to the devotion of one adjutant in particular. During the night, we ran into the battalion’s physician, who gave me first aid and dressed my wounds. “Lieutenant,” he said, “to have any chance of surviving, you must not eat anything for the next several days. Absolutely nothing!” He gave me an entire carton of cigarettes to ward off hunger, and loaded me on a sleigh driven by a Russian prisoner. This man, who had been captured a month earlier, was one of those Russians who viscerally rejected communism and hoped that a German victory would mean a return to the old order. For ten days he drove me over the icy plain. He was a teacher and spoke a little German, but my physical condition prevented me from conversing much with him.
    At the Syschevka railway station I was loaded—and that is the right word—onto a freight train, along with forty-two other seriously wounded men. The train remained for three whole days at the station in Orel, without any care or food being given to the wounded. The moans ceased, one by one. Half of the wounded diedof the cold. Aerial attacks on the station killed a number of men. I, however, escaped with a piece of shrapnel in my right knee the first night, and another in my left tibia the following night. The few survivors were taken