English Translation

The March of the Unabated They were pulled out of their defensive section and marched 120 km, mostly on foot, towards a space in which one needed the unbroken power of each one of them, because a great decision was made here. They, the executioners of orders and nothing else, did not suspect anything of their new task, as well as the scope and importance of the struggle in which they intervened, remained closed until the last days of disintegration. Some may have secretly thought that it was now time for a few days of rest, perhaps there were many who thought so. Didn't they march again, and wasn't that a lot of new and meaningful things after a bunker life for weeks? And besides, was not the measure of the benefits that the leadership had demanded from the first day was soon full? The early evening was already about to break in. They still marched, companies in train strength, their weapons were towed by tired horses on a panje sled. In front of the leaders, nothing else recognizable but by the thin silver litz, which looked only little out of the hoods of their anoraks, then this heap of men, gray figures, who wandered over the endless plane, without a word, because the march required all the forces, and they had learned to keep at home with them. He who met them had to stop, look after them and understand that they had to seem alien and closed to anyone who did not share their life. Through many villages they marched on their way to the new front and in a few fan- ited accommodation at night. The urgency of the order limited their sleep to the limit of the tolerable and in the sky of bitterly cold nights stood still the stars, when they were drunk and dazed by the sticky air of their narrow sleeping rooms on the road, in order to form themselves for a new day march. Then each one of them knew that they would be needed again for a new mission, and then they showed again how they are: a curse or a shrug was all they sent after their unfulfilled desire for well-deserved rest, and also in it a kind of modest pride became clear that the leadership could demand and demand such a tearing test as of course. They came at the right time, they were slowly moving forward, unerring, and their marching colonies were moving on longer and longer. The eisiga wind, which always stands here like a thin, buzzing sound over the endless expanse, chased floury snow over their way, that they often stood for hours only with their heads and shoulders above the white storm and inclined into the wind direction laboriously moving forward, with ice-glued eyelashes and a thick ice layer on the headguard where it protects the hastily breathing mouth from the icy air. Then came again one of the icy days with a cold that pulls everyone's mark out of the bones and which is hopelessly delivered to everyone who does not find a warm room at night. This march was an endless chain of suffering for leaders and men, but when they went into provision, everyone was there who could still crawl. They marched in small columns through the city of S. On one of their streets they saw the first dead Soviet soldier lying and knew that it could not be far now. Again it became night and they went under, for the last time before the attack. A battery of light field-hubits had come up on the outskirts, and the small blind windows of the pitiful huts. In which the men forced themselves together for the night to expect the morning standing and sitting in terrible tightness in half-sleep, trembled at every shot. Four kilometers from them lay one of those villages which was ordered to take them. The battery shot all night into the village and already at the first shots houses went up in Flemmen. And the men who stood before their dwelling in the first hours of the morning saw the burning houses, and the glow of the flames shone red over their faces when they were 79