A CHRISTMAS STORY ON THE EASTERN FRONT CORPORAL CELERIZO WRITES TO THE BRIDE

 

Dear Aderita;

I received your letter yesterday. Those from the Commandant's horsemobile brought it. I had not been able to make the delivery in seven days because we have had one of the epoch-making blizzards. These are storms and not those of Bierzo. Thank you for the bonuses with the nougat and the bottle of cognac. He stops the shot and the picture of the Baby Jesus that we have placed in a prominent place in the shack and Jesusín looks like a sun and I don't know how with those white diapers he can endure the thirty-something two below zero. How is God and he can do everything! Well, you see, we got involved singing Christmas carols like crazy people and then we all cried like fools. Even Lieutenant Müller, who commands the barrier and is a dry-looking Prussian soldier who seems unsentimental, had tears rolling down his face. I also appreciate the mask, especially knowing that it has been knitted by you with a toquilla that belonged to your grandmother. We taste the bottle of Carlos III in love and fraternal friendship. Corporal Seidenbaum brought out some sausages and several bottles of brandy, which they call schnaps around here, along with a bottle of vodka that he took from a Russian they had taken prisoner, and someone took out a guitar and a tambourine. And out of sorrows. You will say that we are drunks but no. Without some heat in your stomach here you will curl up because, as I told you, it is much colder here than in León. You will say why do I tell you these things. Well, I don't have anything to tell you. Here there is only snow and snow. Even the trees sink beneath the white slope. Christmas carols. We sang La Marimorena and he Tañen Bum. We are a mixed section of German and Spanish artillerymen. My unit was so decimated in the last few days that forces had to be pooled. We understand each other as we say, but I have learned some German, although I almost understand Ruski better, which seems less difficult to me, and I know several phrases in that language. One that we learned when on the long marches on foot from Grodno to this area called White Russia we entered the isbas or shacks of the half-destitute peasants dying of thirst and hunger and they came out to greet us with barefoot children, smiling grandmothers and poor old men. covered in rags. And there the usual chant. And menia sti ñiet karovo ni malieko which means our cows have died, we don't have milk. But the poor people gave us soldiers what they had and lit the samovar and warmed us tea with a little bread. The kind grandmothers crossed us on our foreheads because that's how they are Aderita Christians and I didn't assume that because I had told us that they were the lost communist and red Russians. Well it's not true. In the huts, even the most miserable ones, there were images of Our Lord and the Virgin. They have a lot of devotion to the Mother of God who they call Blogodortisa. The little lamp lit day and night reminded me a little of the altar in my town when we went to the rosary and genuflected on our knees before the Blessed Sacrament. Russians do not kneel, they bow and cross themselves continually. They say that to scare away bad spirits. These good people impressed me and I asked myself what we have come to do here on this earth to spread death and destruction. Many doubts assail me Aderita. Here is a Major Schmidt who says that the invasion of Russia was Hitler's mistake. That we all believed that what had to be changed was the inequality between the poor and the rich. Schmidt says that the devil got into the Führer's crazy head. And this is crazy. The truth is that the Russians did nothing to me because here we don't see the communists that were in Spain anywhere, but rather humble, plain and long-suffering people like the Castilians, of course Commander Schmidt only expresses those doubts when he has already been in the country. body five or six glasses. And as for his shirt because he can be arrested, I am the corporal piece of a cannon that we call eight. Eight. I got tired of shooting at the Russian planes and I managed to shoot down some of them, but more and more are coming, they are a swarm. Russians and Russians at all hours. They attack in a rush and without breaking the gesture. A few batteries ahead of ours have succumbed to their push. It is natural: they fight for their homeland, for their land that the Germans took from them, believing that the steppe was Jauja.

The other day they took out ten or twelve Wehrmacht members who were stuck in some foxholes. They were German, almost children. Their feet were frozen, you could hear the music of Stalin's organs day and night. We stop them for the moment, but soon they bring reinforcements and attack and attack. In the background the sky turns red. It's the hell of Stalingrad. Yesterday convoys of destroyed battalions were passing by. They were Romanian infantrymen. Things are looking bad, dear Aderita. And tomorrow, Christmas Eve, I turn 22 years old. Why have I come to Russia, God? An inner voice tells me that to change the world for ha

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