DRIEST OF ALL WARS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 September 1941, Page 6

DRIEST OF ALL WARS

THIRST STALKING NAZIS RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN. GERMAN JOURNALIST'S STORY. (The following article from the “New York Sun” was written by a German journalist drafted as a soldier and assigned to one of the German Army’s propaganda companies.) With the German Army on the Eastern Front, July 29. —This war is the driest of all wars, because it leads past too few water mains—fewer than in Poland and fewer than in France. Flap down your dust-coatcd eyelashes, comrade, and think back. Think of France: Wasn’t that one vast water fountain compared with this country? Yesterday we passed a village as we rolled along the marching route of our panzers. Four hours before we had located it on our map: Now it must be still 10 kilometres away, now only five, new just one more —fhere it was, the village. There was the first house and there, too, was the first bucket-well. Down deep with the pail—up it came with mire and mud. On to the next well! This yielded only a brownish broth. The wells had already been drawn dry by our comrades. So once again we cannot wash ourselves tonight. Wash? Why, we haven’t the faintest intention of washing. There' isn’t water tor that. All we want is to just dip our hands once, just to cool our burned brows and necks a bit. This morning we were to drive through the city of M (obviously Minsk). We figures it out: There must be so and so many hydrants—for drinking, for cooking, for washing, for filling our field flasks. When we reached M we didn’t come to M —for it is something that doesn’t exist any more and you can’t come to it. We reached M only according to our maps —for M was in reality nothing but a bit of smouldering landscape. I say landscape because the chimneys which remained standing between the wooden houses looked from afar like trees. The fleeing Soviet had with his artillery shot M into the ground and burned it down carefully.

JUST THREE GULPS ASKED. Back home in our German garrisons a field flask full of water isn’t worth a straw. There it merely weighs down the belt from which so many other things are already hanging. But a field flask with drinking water, tea or coffee today in the East is worth more than anything that can happen to you. That comrade begs as though he wanted borrow 100 marks from you. Or he offers you other luxuries in exchange—a whole frying pan full of butter, a dozen eggs, 100 cigarettes—whatever he just happens to have. The other day one lad offered for one field flask full of tea a pair of boots which he had found abandoned in Soviet barracks and which he really intended as a substitute for his own, which were already dilapidated. The loveliest vehicles in this war are those from whose tops protrude little--stovepipes —the field kitchens. Not on account of the pork roast which they offer you, and not on account of the pea soup, but solely on account of their tea. Whether the field kitchens are standing or moving they are always surrounded. And if it- be only three swallows, comrade! TWO CUPS TO WASH IN. In peace time the field kitchens usually heat their kitchens for drinkables twice daily, once for the morning, once for the evening coffee. In this war they haven't become cold for a single hour. They boil 10 and 12 times during the day and night. One can come to them of mornings at 4, or nights ah 11, during the pause between skirmishes, or in the midst of the din of battle—their chimneys invariably exuding smoke, and their kettles will grow cold for the first time only after the last shots of this campaign have been fired. How was it, anyway, at home? How many metres of waterspout did one need every morning for washing a face that after all was really quite clean? Yesterday for the first time in a long while I was privileged really to wash and shave myself. It was a veritable dissipation I indulged in with that water. Why, I had two whole drinking cups full of water for it! The other day in an abandoned villa of high Soviet Commissars we ran into a tremendous booty: We didn’t take the phonograph, nor the booljs and cut glass candelabra, but five empty wine bottles. Then one comrade panhandled his way up and down our materials avenue and “touched” the field kitchens. Each filled one bottle for him. Unfortunately, the fifth bottle sustained a crack from hot tea. The comrade was roundly blamed for acting so carelessly—why didn't he warm tip the bottle slowly?

WANTS WATER ABOVE PEACE.

The saddest soldiers’ eyes I have encountered anywhere were on the bridges across the large rivers, across the Berezina, the Dnieper. Eyes of men who for days hadn’t come off their dirty, grimy vehicles and out of their hot, dust-covered jackets and trousers and who now —the burning sun bn a sweaty military cap—were crossing the cool water. Never have there been such sad, thirsty eyes during so proud a ride, during their ride across the great streams of an opponent who is for ever retreating further eastward. We yearn for so much —for example. for one hour without the din of battle; for one stretch of summer landscape that doesn’t smell of conflagration and death; for one walk through a street of peace with children’s laughter and the clinking of glasses reaching your ear from a jolly window. Yet all this becomes threadbare and infinitesimal compared with the yearning for the great water, for water for drinking, for bathing, for nonsensical wallowing. For this is the driest of all wars!