Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘B-But Lieutenant, sir!’ Fröhlich stammered.

‘Ah, it’s you, Fröhlich… Yes, I’m off now. I’m leaving.’

‘Leaving, Lieutenant? You can’t leave now! Where will you go? And besides, we’re still planning. I mean, what’ll happen to our breakout, sir!’

‘Breakout? Ah yes, breakout… You’ll have to go it alone now. What day is it today exactly, Fröhlich?’

All the while, Breuer’s hand pawed aimlessly at his head bandage.

‘The twenty-third, sir. But you’ve got to—’

‘The twenty-third! Right, right… That’s okay, Fröhlich. All fine and good. I’ve just got to learn to see. Learn to see, Fröhlich, even with no eyes… If you get lucky and make it through, say hello to my wife from me!’

The Sonderführer called Herbert and Geibel over to help him deal with this delicate situation. But Breuer had a childish obstinacy about him.

‘No, no, I’ve had enough… I’m going to Gumrak… or back to the Staff HQ.’

‘Then at least let one of us come with you! You can’t go out on your own like that!’

‘Nonsense! You just make sure you manage to escape! Go on now, best of luck to you. Break a leg!’ Breuer attempted to crack a smile but only succeeded in producing a pained grimace. Then he stumbled off. The three men watched him leave in silence until he disappeared round a bend in the path. Geibel swallowed hard a couple of times and sniffed theatrically.

Over the course of the morning, the Russian mortar bombardment increases in intensity. Occasionally, nervous bursts of machine-gun fire sweep the gorge, or a tank round punches a blackish hole in the steep side of the balka facing the enemy line. High up above, heavy artillery shells whine over to the rearward positions. Otherwise, though, nothing happens. Now and then the noise of moving columns and the faint sound of fighting drifts over from the right. No one knows what’s going on there, as the pioneer battalion has no telephone contact with that sector. Captain Fackelmann also finds the failure of any orders to materialize and the absence of any communications with the rear deeply unsettling. He still sweats profusely, despite having lost all his former corpulence.

Around midday, the man who he’s sent over to the positions occupied by the anti-aircraft battery and its captain comes back. Even from a distance, he starts waving his arms in agitation.

‘There’s no one there any more! They’ve all cleared off – along with our first platoon!’

He tells the captain that he found every last bunker abandoned. The radio telephone equipment was still in place. But all attempts on his part to call the command post on the airfield were in vain; no one was answering.

As fast as his weakened legs will carry him, the captain runs over to the major’s position to confer about the situation. All of a sudden there comes a terrified shout from the gorge:

‘Tanks! Tanks!’

Fackelmann climbs up and peeks over the snow ramparts. It’s true! Up ahead there, barely a thousand metres away, three tanks are advancing like turtles towards the mouth of the gorge. My God, what can they do now? All they’ve got are their rifles and two malfunctioning machine guns! And no one in proper command… There he stands now, Alois Fackelmann, the proprietor of a furniture shop, with cold sweat breaking out on his jaundiced brow. There he stands, with sole responsibility for almost sixty of his compatriots, ignored, abandoned and betrayed by the High Command and the Corps and the division and the officers in command of the airfield. And this Captain Fackelmann – who up to this point has only been responsible for matters pertaining to the canteen menu, and who is now utterly alone and left to his own devices as a military commander, and is in complete possession of his mental faculties and fully conscious of the painfully limited options open to him – takes a decision in this instant that no Paulus and no Seydlitz and none of the corps commanders have had the courage or the force of will to take: namely, to lay down his arms and to cross the line into the unknown, in order to save his men from reeling headlong into a senseless massacre. And in order to save himself, he’s not ashamed to admit. Because living to run a furniture store seems to him more sensible than dying for nothing. Yet this man Fackelmann, who is only a temporary officer and wholly inexperienced in infantry matters, has no idea how to put his momentous decision into action. And in the search for urgent advice, he scrambles down the slope and makes for Fröhlich’s bunker, which is on the other side of the gully.

The Sonderführer, meanwhile, has summoned Corporal Herbert in order to go through all the details of the escape plan with him one more time. He senses that the time for a decision is close at hand. Suddenly the door flies open and the captain is standing on the threshold, with his spindly legs and his praying hands, yet he seems larger than usual, almost like Breuer. He yells something, but as the words leave his mouth they are drowned out by an ear-splitting crash. A fearful blast shakes the room, hurling Fröhlich into a corner. Beams splinter and a fog of thick dust fills every nook and cranny. There is a smell of burning, of scorched flesh…

After quite some time, Fröhlich struggles to his feet. Gingerly he pats himself down to see if he’s been wounded. The skin has been torn from his hands, his face has been blasted with grains of sand, and he can feel one of his eyes beginning to swell up and close.

‘Hey, anyone here still alive?’ he asks, noticing how strange his voice sounds.

‘Yes, I am,’ Herbert’s voice replies tearfully from somewhere. ‘Pass me a cigarette, will you?’ The captain has collapsed in the doorway. The tank shell has torn right through his chest. He lies there like an empty sack. His face is frozen mid-scream in a waxen rictus of terror. Fröhlich and Herbert lift his body out of the pool of blood it’s lying in and lay it on a camp bed. Without thinking, the corporal starts to tug off Fackelmann’s felt boots as Fröhlich looks on numbly. Suddenly he snaps out of his shocked daze.

‘Get out!’ he shouts. ‘Over to the shelter! I’ll get Nasarov!’

But the Russian is nowhere to be found. He’s vanished, as if the ground has swallowed him up. Fröhlich runs around all the forward positions and through every bunker. He is beside himself with frenzy and fear. But the three Russians have disappeared without a trace. No one has seen hide nor hair of them. Fröhlich pauses for a moment in his fruitless search. He begins to realize what’s happened… Mad with despair, he reaches for his holster to end it all. But then he comes to his senses. And in this moment, Sonderführer Fröhlich suddenly transcends his former self. For the first and only time in his life, this foolish fantasist sees the truth. He sees the awful plight of the men here and he realizes that he has to lead them now. In a flash, he is calm and clear-sighted.

‘Attention, everybody!’ he shouts into the general confusion. ‘I’m in command now! All the men of the divisional staff – assemble and get ready to decamp!’

A few minutes later, what remains of Fackelmann’s task force winds its way in a long line back through the gorge, under intensified Russian bombardment, towards the airfield at Gumrak.

Gumrak! What a hideous word, how far from the soft-sounding, lilting, caressing names of the Russian villages. What a torturous consonance of dull hopelessness and cruel destruction. Gum – rak! Don’t you feel the hunger in your guts at the sound of this word? Or the tearing, nagging ache of your suppurating wounds? The groaning death rattle of a tormented life? Can’t you hear in it the crunching of the snow, the crackle of the frost in the walls of houses, the roar and blast of bombs, the splintering of planks and beams, the cawing of the black birds that fly up from frozen-stiff bundles of human flesh? Gum – rak! Gum – rak!