Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘How about that, then?’ he crowed. ‘Daddy’s brought home the bacon! Pass me a knife!’

As they were tucking in, with bulging cheeks, one of the medical NCOs came in, a small, inoffensive man with an ascetic face that looked like it had been transplanted to this war zone from a monastery. Normally he was welcome in Peters’s bunker, but today that was clearly far from the case. He immediately twigged to the hostile atmosphere. He went and sat down quietly in a corner and tactfully refrained from noticing the loaf on the table. All at once, Peters lost his appetite. He pulled out a loaf from under the camp bed and pushed it over to the corporal.

‘There, that’s for you!’

The corporal thanked him sheepishly; he stroked the loaf lovingly and sniffed it but then left it be. With studied insouciance, Brezel explained how they’d come by this unexpected cornucopia. The Franciscan monk was incurious to a degree and so the conversation dried up. After a while he stood up to go.

‘So… can I take this loaf with me?’

‘No, you’ve got to eat it here!’ said Peters gruffly. ‘If you take it away with you, you’ll be left with…’ He broke off, transfixed by the long, serious and not remotely reproachful stare the corporal was directing at him.

‘You’ve no idea how much I’ll enjoy that, Padre,’ he said quietly. Peters’s pale face became so drained of blood that it took on a sickly greenish hue. He began shaking uncontrollably. He reached under the bed again and pulled out another loaf – and a second, and a third, and eventually a fourth, all the remaining loaves.

‘There… there! Take the lot… just take them!’

It was like a sudden attack of self-destructiveness. He even threw in the rest of his own half-loaf.

‘Go on, take it! And clear off!’

Without a word, the medical NCO gathered up the dark loaves and disappeared. His eyes were shining. Five loaves! With a bit of adroit cutting, they could get twenty slices out of each loaf. That meant two hundred men, two hundred hungry, wounded men would get an extra half slice of bread today!

The poet Brezel slunk around Peters’s bunker like a whipped dog. He didn’t dare speak to the padre. But Peters had retreated far back into the shadow of his corner. He was weeping.

A heavy grey pall hangs above the ground. The harsh frost has disappeared. The dry snow still makes a noise when you tread on it, but it no longer emits a sharp, tormented squeak; now it sounds more like the lazy croaking of disgruntled frogs. First Lieutenant Breuer is making his way through the scattered foothills of the gorge to the airfield at Gumrak. He is trudging along the winding footpath, often sinking up to his knees in the deep snow and stumbling over abandoned foxholes. Behind him, the voices of his comrades and the sound of sporadic gunfire grow ever fainter. He steps out on to the open plain. A light wind playfully whips up little eddies of snow. In the distance, the blurred outlines of stationary vehicles begin to emerge from the surrounding gloom. He heads towards them. Under his frozen, brown-stained head dressing, a blinding headache is raging in his skull, pulsating right through to the roots of his hair and rendering his thoughts dull and confused. Thousands of men are being torn to pieces by shells, he thinks, thousands bleed to death or die of their festering wounds, or of the cold… And one man who’s remained hale and hearty and unscathed then goes and falls over and pokes his eye out. Like he wasn’t in Stalingrad at all, but somewhere in Berlin, or Königsberg! For that, he won’t even get a badge identifying him as one of the war wounded. How stupid it would be, he thinks, how ignominious if he were now to die from this injury!

Abruptly, he finds himself in an abandoned town, walking past ransacked, wrecked vehicles, past burned-out aircraft fuselages, bent radio antennae, and blasted concrete bunker roofs. No people, no smoke, no signs of life at all. Everything lies extinct in an abyss of solitude. Now and then a shell fired from somewhere or other and heading for who knows where whines over his head with an evil zisssch sound. An overpowering urge takes hold of him simply to crawl into a hole in this forsaken place, to avoid seeing or hearing anything more and slowly drift into sleep. Tomorrow is the twenty-fourth of the month. Tomorrow it will all be over and done with…

Breuer stops dead. He is breathing heavily. His gaze fixes on a figure he suddenly sees standing there, grey and sunken-eyed, by the entrance to a bunker.

‘Hey! Hey, you there!’

He is shocked at the sound of his own voice. The man doesn’t move. He looks across at Breuer like a timid deer. Then, all of a sudden, he gives a start and disappears in a single bound into the bowels of the earth.

This place gives Breuer the creeps. He moves on, quickening his pace. Eventually he comes upon a road that bends off to the left, which he takes without thinking. Signs of a village appear somewhere off in the distance. Whooo-sh-sh comes a tearing sound high above his head. Up ahead, three large sulphurous mushroom clouds billow into the sky. The ground quakes slightly, followed by the dull rumble of the heavy explosions. They must have hit Gumrak… Breuer breaks his stride for a moment. He wonders whether he ought in fact to avoid the place. But he baulks at the thought of wading through deep snow. It’s all of no account anyway. Tomorrow is the twenty-fourth.

Gradually, the village takes shape against the snowy backdrop. White-roofed sheds, a stone building with several floors, a sturdy, round tower with a swollen head, and then some railway carriages and stationary locomotives. The scene changes radically on both sides of the road. The snow looks scorched here, and all kinds of debris are lying scattered around – splintered pieces of wood from barns, fences and farm carts, along with rocks and steel rails. In between, circular bomb craters yawn, and the black holes of exposed cellars and bunkers with their roofs blown apart. From the innards of this devastated landscape, thin blackish wafts of smoke rise and drift along the ground. Mingled with this haze, which has an acrid smell of burning, is a hint of that sickly sweet stench that had lain like a nightmarish miasma over the sites of the battles fought during the hot summer of ’42. A smell of cadavers. Off to one side, more shells fizz by. Violent impacts shake the ground. The fire is concentrated on the southern exit of the village. A figure is poking around in the debris to one side of the road. It looks like a very old woman, but is actually a soldier. Once again, Breuer is hit by a paralysing feeling of exhaustion. Where should he head for now? The Staff HQ in Stalingradski will have long gone. They’ll have taken cover somewhere, waiting for the end to come!

The figure has vanished underground. At the point where he disappeared, a light plume of smoke is twisting up, suggesting human life. Breuer totters over piles of rubble and makes for the spot. He slips down into a hole in the ground. It is a small, dark opening, covered in makeshift fashion with a piece of concealed corrugated iron. Chinks of daylight coming through the gaps at the edges of this ramshackle cover illuminate dirty puddles on the floor. Breuer ducks down. He presses his back against the wall, his hands groping along the damp clay. His good eye struggles to make out any details in the semi-darkness. Are those figures cowering silently against the walls or lying prone on the floor dead bodies? They’re certainly not moving or speaking… No, they’re not dead – there’s the man he’d spotted outside squatting in front of the small doorless stove! He’s feeding damp pieces of wood into the fire. Stolidly, and oblivious to any interruption, he stares with dead eyes into the blaze; his mouth hangs open and his lower jaw trembles like a dotard’s. But there really are some corpses here too! The terrible smell that he smelled outside gives the game away, this disgusting stench of sweat, pus, human excrement and… decaying flesh! Breuer can feel his whole body beginning to shake. He’s seized by an urge to get away from this place – anywhere but here! Frost, snow and loneliness suddenly seem inviting compared to this ghastly mixture of the decomposing dead and the decaying living. But he still hesitates to leave. He’s just heard someone call his name, surely! Is he feverish, hallucinating? Is his pain-wracked head mocking him? There it is again, more clearly now, but still sounding like it’s coming through a wall: