Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Corporal Brezel – now there was a real character! The very first day after his arrival in Gumrak, Peters had screwed up his courage and climbed the freestanding, wobbly ladder to the top floor of the station building. After proceeding through a dark passageway filled with axes and severed horses’ legs, he emerged into a small, improbably clean attic room. A wizened little man with a crumpled face and a flowing mane of hair rose from behind a table strewn with papers and photographs and, with a mixture of soldierly stiffness and urbane politeness, bade him take a seat. That was Corporal Brezel, a poet in civilian life, but for the time being the custodian of a small group of Russian prisoners whose duties included cleaning-up operations and foraging dead horses for the field kitchen. In return, the Russians were given the horses’ legs, their only source of food, while the men at the abattoir sometimes put by a bit of tongue or liver for the corporal. As a sideline, though, sitting up here in his lofty perch while bombs and shells exploded all around, the corporal was also, at the behest of his staff officers, writing the history of his division. This was a commendable task, in so far as the division in question was clearly about to become extinct. Brezel proudly showed the padre his draft chapters and the photographs he’d collected: snaps of exercises and inspections, head-and-shoulders portraits of officers in full dress uniform, and bathing scenes from beaches on the Bay of Biscay. In addition, oblivious to everything that was going on down below, he penned verses about whatever took his poetic fancy: the nerve-jangling drone of the ‘sewing machines’, the searchlights playing in the night sky above the airfield, the riot of colour unleashed by the rising sun. And all the while he was so happy and positive that even Peters found himself momentarily jolted from his state of lethargy by the sight of this bizarre poetic idyll, like that famous painting by Spitzweg seen through a distorting lens. [2] ‘that famous painting by Spitzweg’ – The Poor Poet ( Der arme Poet ; 1839), by the nineteenth-century German painter Carl Spitzweg, is one of the most famous examples of the Biedermeier period of art, characterized by its choice of homely, sentimental themes. It shows a struggling poet living in a rundown garret and composing his works under an umbrella to protect himself from a leaking roof.

Two days after their first encounter, Brezel appeared in Peters’s bunker with a cheery ‘Top of the morning to you, Padre!’ While the corporal had still been in bed, a shell fired from across the Volga had smashed through the window of his attic room, pierced the wall close to where he lay sleeping and exploded somewhere down on the street. ‘God gave a merciful sign and his servant heeded the warning,’ said Brezel when wrapping up his story. After this incident, he had brought his divisional history to an abrupt conclusion, summarily released his Russian prisoners, for whom there was no more food anyhow, and, furnished with the material for a new poem, had left his room to take a stroll.

From that day forward, he lived in Peters’s bunker, gladly performing the duties of a sacristan and making sure the place was neat and tidy. He foraged wood for the little stove, carried out the dead and cadged petrol from passing lorries for the thirsty home-made lamp he had fashioned out of a tin can and a piece of rag. They would use its dim, guttering flame to eat by (when they had some food), to melt snow with and to catch lice. And Padre Peters took refuge from the horror that skulked in the dark corners of the bunker by reading the white pages of his Bible in the small circle of light it cast. The words flickered before his eyes. His strength was at an end.

Brezel was the person who ensured that they didn’t starve to death.

He was always on the alert. He kept an eye out when the Russian auxiliaries came to the tower with their horse-drawn sleigh to collect water. Wounded men and shady freebooters tended to gather there, hanging around in the hope that one of the emaciated nags might keel over and die. And when the Russians weren’t looking they’d even help things along a bit, toppling the horse and falling upon it like wolves. Brezel, who despite his highly strung artist’s temperament stood his ground manfully, emerged triumphant, his blood-stained sidearm still in his hand and waving a hunk of meat covered with shaggy horsehair, which he braised for hours on the stove. As he did so, he composed poems on the faithful look in horses’ brown eyes.

The equilibrium of Brezel’s sunny disposition was never disturbed. Only one thing bothered him: the state of mind of the padre, who couldn’t even summon up the energy to be grumpy any more. That was a bad sign for sure! In addition, he’d got such strange bees in his bonnet of late, one might well have imagined he’d gone insane… For instance, one time Peters returned clutching beneath his arm a pair of shapeless straw overshoes that he’d found tucked away under the seat of an abandoned vehicle from the baggage train. No one thought anything of it. But Peters spent the whole of that evening sitting muttering to himself. And in the middle of the night – as usual, bombs were raining down – he got up abruptly and took the shoes back. Brezel shook his head. ‘He’s losing his mind,’ he thought to himself, with touching concern. The next morning, he went to see what Peters had been up to. The lorry was still standing there, in the middle of nowhere. A soldier had just discovered the shoes and was feeding them to his horse.

On another occasion the padre came back from one of his perambulations laden with ammunition belts and a machine gun, which he had salvaged from a wrecked aircraft. The corporal shook with laughter at the sight.

‘What on earth do you want with that, Padre? Honestly – dragging a thing like that round with you!’

Peters shot him a dirty look.

‘Don’t stay here on my account! Go on, clear off, go and hole up in Stalingrad for all I care! I at least mean to stay and fight here, yes sir… to the last bullet… to the last man standing!’

The machine gun had to be stowed under the camp bed. Once it was out of sight, the padre promptly forgot all about it.

Also, in the middle of reading something, Peters would suddenly give a violent start. ‘Listen, can’t you hear those monsters grinding their teeth? All their screaming and groaning?’

Brezel could hear nothing but the regular heavy breathing of someone sleeping in the corner.

‘That’s my domain,’ the padre whispered. ‘I’m the King of the Dead of Gumrak!’

As Peters was returning one day from the nearby airfield, where he’d gone to deliver the post, he passed two soldiers dragging behind them a tarpaulin full of loaves of bread. Peters hadn’t seen any bread for days. He swooped down on the men like a hawk.

‘Hey, where do you think you’re going with that?’

The two men, a sergeant and a corporal, stopped in their tracks, uncertain what to do. They clearly had a guilty conscience.

‘Planning to eat the lot yourselves, were you, eh? Unbelievable! That’s just not on—’

Peters was shaking with hunger and greed. He dug his hands into the pile of frozen loaves and rummaged around.

‘How old are you?’ he suddenly asked the nonplussed sergeant. ‘Thirty-six, eh? Right, give me three of those loaves! And you too. Three loaves apiece, that’s not asking too much! That’s just behaving like decent human beings.’

And before they could stop him, he’d stuck six loaves under his arms and made off with them. He did some sums in his head as he walked: six loaves between two men at the rate of half a loaf per man per day – that meant they’d last six days all told! For six whole days he and Brezel could stuff themselves, really eat till their bellies were bursting. He was whistling to himself as he walked down the bunker steps. Brezel’s eyes almost popped out of his head when he caught sight of the loaves. His respect for the padre suddenly shot up, though he also felt a twinge of something like envy that he hadn’t managed to pull off such a coup himself. Peters was more cheerful than he’d ever seen him.