19. DON’T SHOOT A DEAD MAN!

When we were retreating from Vukovar, we covered almost twenty or thirty kilometres in retreat and passed by Šid. As we were going through there, we came upon a minefield. It was early morning, at dawn. Before we reached it, we could hear a machine gun firing from a house right beside the railway line we had to cross. A whole group of soldiers was moving together, a battalion or more, because we were retreating as a group. The machine gun was firing at someone, somewhere, in some direction. We could hear the shooting.

As the company nurse, I was at the rear with two or three other fighters who were carrying supplies and a stretcher. As I was about to cross the railway line, I turned around and could see exactly where the machine-gun nest was, up on the house. I think I even saw the German soldier. And I wondered why he wasn’t shooting. He had seen me crossing. Then I thought it must be some kind of soldiers’ solidarity — “Don’t shoot a dead man.” That was how I understood it: don’t shoot a dead man, because we had already been defeated. Somewhere along the way, we had already been killed. And he didn’t have the heart to shoot a dead man.

So even in war, when you have a weapon in your hands, when there is an order to “Fire!”, a person still answers to his own conscience, to his own sense of humanity, even though it is war.

Later, that story proved true for me.¹

* * *

Here I’m talking now about where we came upon the minefield, where the dead sheep were. For us to get through, the sheep had gone ahead and set off the mines, and then we passed through. Or perhaps someone else had passed through ahead of us earlier. I followed the tracks of my unit, because I had fallen more than a kilometre and a half behind, looking to see whether anyone was wounded or had been left behind and needed my help.

After we crossed the Bosut River, we reached a place called Nemci. I fell asleep in a corner, and when my unit was leaving they called and called for me, but since they couldn’t wake me, they left me there. When I woke up, I set off again, hurrying to catch up with my company.

* * *

So many people were being killed, every day. One night there were only fourteen fighters left in our company. And it was clear that we were not going to survive all that slaughter. Troops were passing right over us. They were coming from Greece; this was their corridor for crossing Serbia. They were moving through the front where there were still German forces holding open their line of retreat. And every night it was as if they were going to trample us alive. It wasn’t only gunfire — living forces were moving right over us.

¹ This refers to the later story, The “Expert” Nurse. ↩