The Mask in the Snow - a short story

Snow swirled around; a penetrating wind howled across the steppe. His feet and fingers completely numb, Oberkanonier Werner Thiess shuffled forward through the drifting snow, rifle at the ready. He was patrolling the length of his artillery detachment's perimeter, on the look-out for individual groups of Red Army soldiers trying to penetrate the line. It was getting dark. A snow storm would be the ideal cover for such raids. Exhausted, frozen and starved, Thiess's movements were slow and painful. He longed for the end of his patrol, when he could just fall asleep for a few hours...

He had not yet abandoned hope, cut off in the Stalingrad cauldron along with the German 6th Army since November. Thiess disciplined himself not to think of his Rhineland home, of warm days, white wine and fair maidens; instead, he'd focus his mind on dreaming of small, realistic pleasures - a mess-tin full of horse-meat stew, some hot ersatz coffee, a second pair of socks, a night undisrupted by enemy shell-fire. A big man, Thiess had lost weight and musculature since the onset of winter; he felt feeble. Still he pressed on through the snow and howling wind, wiggling his toes and fingers to keep the blood circulating.

Ahead of him, amid the snow flurries, he thought he could make out the shape of a small person - maybe a child... he readied himself to shoot, but before that he fumbled with his ammunition belt to see how many clips of bullets he had left... he had none. He suddenly realised he had no more than three or four shots in his rifle, and that was it. His unit had not had new supplies delivered to it for nearly three weeks. So he paused for a moment, then very slowly moved forward, finger on the trigger. The figure didn't move. Thiess got to within a few metres, not knowing what to expect. What he saw amazed him. A theatrical mask, the mask of Tragedy, a face hideously distorted in pain and anguish; the mask was attached to an upright stick with a length of barbed wire; below the mask, powdered with loose snow, a child's brown woollen coat, with big brown buttons. The wind was making the whole ensemble shiver as though with cold.

Thiess stared at it in a state of incomprehension. What was it doing there? Who had placed it here, kilometres from the nearest settlement? Why? His eyes, no longer able to shed tears, gazed at the mask... He looked around - nothing; just the wind, and this mask, and him.

He woke up with a start. He was in his unit's dugout, huddled under his greatcoat and rags. The patrol... that... mask... had he really seen it? Had it been there? Had he been hallucinating? Outside, the temperature was -22C, though the wind made it feel far colder. Inside the dugout it was a little above freezing, the stench of filthy lice-ridden bodies permeated the dense air. Thiess flopped onto his rudimentary bunk, so exhausted that he couldn't even remember returning to the dugout. He'd been awake for the entire night before, and his mind was playing tricks with him. What had happened during the patrol? How did he get back? Did it... matter...?

Lying in the next bunk was that thin Silesian boy Stanislaus. He'd been lying there for three days, hardly moving. Thiess looked at him; his eyes were staring white in the darkness of the dugout; he was no longer shivering. In the young artilleryman's gaunt features Thiess could read an acceptance of fate, a readiness to die. He'd seen it before. Gently, Thiess reached over and removed the greatcoat that covered Stanislaus's legs and feet. The boy's eyes looked trustingly at him, somehow accepting the theft by his comrade. Thiess used the coat, with the vestiges of warmth still left in its threadbare fibres, to wrap his own legs and feet.

Across on the other side of the dugout, someone had set up a wind-up gramophone and was playing the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Thiess listened; the poignancy of that soprano's soaring voice resonating around that dugout was unbearable. He had always considered himself a strong man. Yet as the orchestra swelled and the soprano hit those high notes, the emotion aroused by the music was profound pity; pity for his dying comrades, pity at his own fate. He had witnessed such barbarous inhumanity in this war. This would strengthen his will to control his emotions, he told himself as he participated in the slaughter of civilians, but now he felt his iron soldier's will to survive slipping away... but that mask in the snow? Did he really see it? At a time like this, such a thing seemed to concern him greatly. Thiess felt himself drifting in and out of consciousness, the image of that mask taunting him.