Once we started moving again it was with the whole machinery in place, with a total of 150 men. First came the 100 men making up the combat squads, three sections with each their sergeant or officer as their leader. The sections were yet again split up into three groups with a corporal or young officer in charge of each group. Behind us followed four horse drawn wagons filled with ammunition, clothes and other useful materials, lastly came the wagon containing all of our provisions which was quickly nicknamed the soup cannon.
Every soldier naturally carried their own equipment which in addition to the green standard uniform, boots, helmet and rifle consisted of a small breadpack and a rucksack with carpets and tent fabric. Every man also had to carry around a bag containing a gas mask which no one believed would ever come into use, and mine was used to carry my ration of sugar. At this time of year the weather was still relatively dry, but would occasionally become unpredictable. The days where the sun shined and kept the roads free of mud, were days that were used covering many kilometers on our daily marches on the roads which had no fortifications in sight, and were often very poorly paved, if they even were paved.
It was not every day that we would see cities or houses on the route, but luckily the marches were planned in such a way that we would always end our day in a village where we would spend the night. The procedure itself was very simple: We would split up in groups of roughly 10-12 people and find a house to sleep in. We therefore lived and slept in the same rooms as the foreigners who lived in the houses, typically women and children together with older men, the rest were taking part in the war. It was a slightly uncomfortable experience to sleep in the foreigners homes but we all quickly adapted a more accepting attitude to our conditions. The houses themselves were not works of art.
A typical foreign house would typically be log houses constructed with thick trees. Internally there would often be a barn or a shed in one end, and one room for the family in the other end of the house. The barn would usually have a cow or two and a small collection of chickens. The walls were either raw and untreated or covered in newspapers, it was hard to spot a house which did not have at least a little black mold. In the middle of the house there would usually be a a big, brick oven, which would be used as a cooking surface and an oven. It took some time to get used to using such an oven without burning our food, but when the foreigners taught us to wait until the burning wood had become smoldering embers we had the joy of frying eggs on pans using their old ovens.
It did not take a long time before we really started enjoying the foreigners houses, especially once the end of the year started approaching.
When the oven was no longer being used the old would sleep preferably on the oven, while mothers and children would lie together in beds with sheepskin. It was not everyone who happily accepted us. Some were scared and others were annoyed and angry at us marching directly into their house. But when they cursed the war and complained to us, we would curse the war right back at them, it helped in calming the mood down. While on the march many of us would practice more and more of foreign words like bread, meat, butter, light and fire. Knowing a few words would make the diplomatic process of going into another persons house uninvited much easier. The further we went forward the more the signs of war would show themselves. We entered a plain where it was obvious a war had been going on. There were many traces of fighting.
Destroyed foreign tanks, trucks and weapons were strewn all over, spoiling the view of the nature around us. Next to a small hill we found small holes covered with sticks, leaves, grass and dirt. They were used as small bunkers and abandoned when the attacks moved on. Whether they were build by us or the foreigners I could not tell, but we started using them as sleeping spots during the night. It may have been a primitive way to get by, but with a little straw and leaves in the bottom it quickly turned into a confortable spot for almost 3 men. It was during a night where I slept in one such hole that I realised I had gotten visitors: Lice. From this point on we had to treat them as a kind of pet, and I would never truly get rid of them on the front.
For this reason, a morning ritual for me became to sit with some of my underwear and remove as many lice as possible, so only as few lice as possible would cause me discomfort. When a lice was caught it was easy to kill it by destroying it between two fingernails. Unfortunately not all of my comrades realised the use in keeping the pests at bay. They would scratch themselves roughly when they were bitten by the lice, and some would scratch themselves to such an extent that they would bleed. When we once in a while came to houses with a bathing room, we used the opportunity as much as possible in order to rid ourselves of the lice. It only worked for a short while, and the lice would quickly infest every piece of clothing we cleaned. For some periods of time we would have to make do with a shower a month, some would have to live with one shower every two months and when the hygiene problems were so severe, it was obvious that we would have issues.
For the rest of the month, and for much of the start of the next month we would continue our march to the front. The summer weather was no longer with us, and the roads would become softer as the rain started to pick up. The earth became soft and deformed easily, and the many vehicles that had used the roads before us made it almost impossible to proceed forward without issues. Almost half the time we spent marching was spent getting my comrades on their feet again after they had tripped in the mud. Even if every wagon was tied to 4 horses, they would get stuck many times each day. In order to get a wagon out of the mud, the coachman would need to make the horses pull the wagon in a 90 degree angle, so as to only pull the front part of the wagon. This would free the wagon, but usually this progress would only last for a moment and the whole procedure would have to be repeated again. It is worth mentioning that the sharp turns would take up a lot of space on the roads, and would force everyone behind to march around the wagons, and into the even muddier ground next to the roads and cause delays and misery for the soldiers.
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It was not an enviable job to be a coachman, even if they could sit on the horses or the wagons while the others had to walk. Every day we slept somewhere new and were therefore moving forward to the front and its battlefields. We saw no actual combat in our march but small and simple graveyards would appear more frequently as we marched, indicating that we were approaching a place of misery. A lot of ruined material was also by the sides of the road, and I could see a few bodies of foreign soldiers which had not yet been removed. It was by no means a sight I wanted to see but here, as well as later in the war, I would come to realise that there was no time for compassion, not to oneself or the others. The dead were not the ones we could help, and therefore there was no need to worry or think about them. The days went on like this in the apparently endless plains. The vehicles constantly had to deal with the possibility of sinking into the morass, and we soldiers had to march for longer and longer before we reached our evening quarters.
Due to the weather, the transport of supplies also became a challenge. It was otherwise one of the things that had functioned absolutely perfectly since our arrivel. But now the pace at which we marched could not be matched by our supplies, and we had to consider other means of getting our food. Our sergeant, who was a baker before the war, was given the task of baking bread to the entire company. He was not pleased with this work, as the baking had to take place in the evening or at night while the others slept, and this did not earn him any vacation since we all had to march forward the next day. Despite this baking our rations had shrunk to less that what we were used to. Due to the lack of food we were given the permission to hunt for extra food. Until now it had been illegal for us to take poultry and animals from the locals but this rule had been discarded. Luckily the plains around us were populated with chickens, ducks and geese, and it was not an issue to get meat to go along with the bread.
I wrote a letter to my parents regarding this very topic at this time:»I hope you are all as well as I am. At the moment our lives are good and we have a house to rest in. The civilians in the house provide us with chickens, roasted potatoes and so much more. We might have to stay in this foreign land for the winter. It is not that bad, and it will no doubt not be a problem« I wrote in my letter.
On the first day that hunting animals was permitted, I managed to shoot a duck and have it prepared, and I will never forget how well it tasted. I had no seasoning to give it a flavour, and yet I can never forget how good it tasted. I realise now that I have never eaten anything since that day have tasted something that good. On another occasion I was with one of my comrades, a man who I only realised later was the man with motion sickness, to steal a goat from a local family. In reality we had plenty of food at this point, and it was mostly for the thrill that we had it butchered and cooked. It did not taste very good, and we had acted very rudely to the family, who we had taken the goat from. When we had finished it, we hid the bones and skin under the floor of the house where we slept, and when the woman of the house questioned us the next morning, in order to at least get the skin from us, we told her we had no idea what she was talking about.
This is all a terrible shame, as the skin had great value to them. The whole occasion belongs to one of those that I look back on in shame. As the month went on the winter was starting to get worse. The cold did not stop as the sun rose, the ice cold wind would tear at us, and it would only snow more and more. The company was therefore almost immobile a couple of days, while the group of 10-12 men I was part of was sent out to explore the terrain further ahead. It was a long days march of about 40 kilometers, where we were alert and cautious the entire trip, due to having been told that there were partisans in the area. We never met any, but the last village we visited had apparently been completely abandoned. The houses looked like they were in an alright state, but barely any people lived in them. The few people in the city who were there could only complain about the lack of food, we were in other words getting close to a real war.
From what I had heard from conversations between the sergeant and some of the officers, it was dishonest to say that there was an actual front. The fighting would take place from village to village, and this would certainly be the case now in the winter since we had a great need for places to rest and get away from the cold. The attacks themselves would be made from forested areas, if possible, and the foreigners were very good at attacking from a forest early in the morning when it was still dark. Our company had yet to be in an actual fight with the foreigners but it now became obvious, that it would not take long for this to change.
One night we were woken up by the sounds of a gasoline firebomb being thrown into some of the houses in the village we were staying in, and in the middle of the day there would also be shots from the forests that were around the village. Luckily they were very far away, and we had no targets to return fire to. Instead, we got used to travel inside villages while accompanied by the sound of faint gunfire.