Derek Lambert - Vendetta

Meister, flattered that Paulus was confiding in him, now more than ever suspecting an ulterior motive, said he supposed they would.

‘Well first of all,’ Paulus said, lighting another cigarette, ‘they will have to remember that the Führer ordered me not to abandon the Stalingrad pocket. If I disobeyed Hitler then there is no reason why my officers shouldn’t disobey me, no reason why the troops shouldn’t disobey their officers.’

Another Ju-52 fell out of the bleak sky, found the runway, hopped along it, then leaned to one side digging a wing into the frozen mud. As it settled an ambulance and a fire tender sped across the airfield.

Paulus took little heed: a crash landing was nothing new. ‘The historians,’ he said, ‘will also have to ask themselves whether, if I had ignored Hitler, I would have had the strength to break out. The food to sustain a long march, the amunition to feed the guns, the gasoline to fuel the mobile columns.’ He lowered his head, knowing the answers.

‘There is another consideration,’ he said after a while, abandoning the historians. ‘By holding out in Stalingrad I am tying down enemy forces which could be attacking our positions elsewhere. I am giving other German commanders breathing space, time to consolidate.’

Consolidate, Meister had learned, usually meant retreat. He said: ‘May I ask a question, Herr General?’

‘Of course.’

‘If the Führer gave the order to break out would you do so, bearing in mind your second reason for staying put – lack of supplies.’

‘We Germans are a disciplined nation which is another way of saying we are obedient.’

An orderly brought coffee. It tasted of walnuts.

‘Yes,’ Paulus went on, ‘we would try to break out and our soldiers would fight heroically. But here in Stalingrad even greater calls are going to be made on their courage because there will be no rewards, no glory.’

‘If Gruppe Hoth gets through could we escape through their bridgehead?’

‘Escape? I think you mean break out.’ Paulus prodded the pyramid of cigarette ends in the ash-tray with one finger. ‘I thought at one stage that Hoth might make it, just as I thought that Goering would send adequate provisions. No longer. Hoth is only twenty-five miles or so away but his men are exhausted. The Russian Sixth Mechanised Corps is attacking him, Rotmistrov’s Seventh Tank Corps are moving in…’ Paulus prodded the cigarette butts once more; the pyramid collapsed.

‘Couldn’t we go out to meet Gruppe Hoth?’ We, the general and I, joint Sixth Army strategists!

‘On foot? On horseback? Do you know the most important commodity that Junkers,’ pointing at the crippled aircraft, ‘has brought?’ And when, although he guessed, Meister shook his head: ‘The fuel in its tanks. Napoleon once said, “An army marches on its stomach.” But not tanks, armoured cars, trucks…’ Paulus swallowed the dregs of his coffee. ‘It has been hinted that I might be offered an important post in the OKW, if I break out. I’m afraid someone else is going to get that job.’

The orderly returned to remove the cups. Outside the ground crew were crawling over the stricken Junkers, ants feeding off a winged insect. One slipped on a frozen puddle and lay still for a few seconds before climbing laboriously to his feet. Meister felt suddenly cold; he swayed.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, Herr General.’ He bit the inside of his lip. Blood flowed, the cold leaked from his skull. He blamed the heat of the room after the frost. And hunger.

‘You may sit down if you wish.’

‘I’m all right,’ Meister said.

‘Then I’ll stand up.’ Paulus stood at the window. Staring across the steppe to Germany, Meister thought. ‘You’re probably wondering why a general is confiding in a private. Well, I have a very good reason: you are the only person now who can give my men – more than a quarter of a million of them – any sort of victory. So you see, I think you should know our exact position.’

Meister stared uncomprehendingly at Paulus.

‘A Christmas victory,’ Paulus said softly. ‘That’s what we need. Before I have to cut the rations again.’ He picked up a typewritten sheet of paper and read from it. ‘Seven ounces of horsemeat including bones; two-and-a-half ounces of bread; two-fifths of an ounce of fats; two-fifths of an ounce of sugar and one cigarette. Just one.’ He stared at the cigarette smoking in his hand. ‘I will eat the same as the men but I can’t do without my drug.’

Meister said: ‘Excuse me, Herr General, but I don’t understand.’

Paulus said: ‘Antonov has re-crossed the river.’

He produced a map; an inglorious substitute for the arrow-slashed cartography that had once adorned his desk, little more than a sketch of the Russian positions huddled along the banks of the Volga inside the city and the German dispositions opposite them.

Paulus said: ‘To think we came all that way,’ removing one hand from the map and signposting Byelorussia, the Ukraine, the Kalmyk steppe, with it, ‘but we couldn’t take those last few metres.’

Meister waited.

Paulus said: ‘The Volga froze completely on December 16 converting the Soviet positions inside the city into a front line rather than a beleaguered outpost. Supplies and reinforcements are reaching them by sled and lorry. Antonov crossed on December 19 and has taken up a position somewhere there.’ Paulus prodded a cross on No Man’s Land.

‘May I ask how you know this, Herr General?’

Misha?

‘That needn’t concern you. But I will tell you this: there was no great secrecy involved. It was almost as if the Russians wanted us to know he had returned. Almost as if Antonov wanted you to know.’

‘And you want me to go after him again?’

Paulus said: ‘I want him dead by midnight on the twenty-fourth. A Christmas present for the Sixth Army.’

The Volga was peace. A broad white aisle leading to an altar of harmony. Only four days earlier it had been war. A wound running with the pus of battle. Then overnight, the ice-floes had knitted and the healing snow had fallen.

The truck taking Antonov and Razin, both in winter white, back to the west bank travelled swiftly along an ice road marked with stakes. Occasionally it skidded but the driver, a teenager with a dangerous face, laughed; it could skid all the way to Astrakhan as far as he was concerned.

Ahead lay the stumps of Stalingrad, white and gentle now. Snow fell hesitantly.

‘How many Stalingrads can you see?’ Razin asked massaging his arm.

The double vision had stayed with Antonov for a long time and hadn’t really focussed satisfactorily when he had been discharged from the hospital but the doctors had been so sceptical that in the end he had told them what they wanted to hear.

‘Only one,’ he told Razin.

His eyesight was accurate most of the time; it was only when he concentrated that it multiplied.

The driver, steering with one hand, said: ‘I hear you’re going after the Fritz again.’ The truck uprooted a stake. ‘How are you going to find him?’

‘He’ll probably find me.’

The driver wound down his window and flicked a cigarettebutt through it. Cold swarmed into the cabin. Antonov pulled the hood over the thick blond stubble growing from his shaven scalp.

‘Then he has the advantage?’

‘Not necessarily. Not if I’ve got a good vantage point.’

‘How do you know he’ll be there?’

‘I don’t. But he’ll be somewhere in the pocket if he hasn’t been killed.’

If Meister found him he hoped it wouldn’t be Misha’s doing.

‘Make sure you get him,’ the driver said. ‘Before Christmas. We need a shot in the arm now that all the death and glory boys are outside Stalingrad. What did we do? Just hung on while the vermin threw everything they’d got at us, that’s all. We retreated, they’re advancing. We were gallant defenders, they’re fucking heroes. Yes,’ the driver said, swinging the truck into a ponderous skid to avoid an oncoming sledge, ‘you get him, I’ll be the first to shake your hand.’