Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘Breuer!’

Breuer winces in fear. He holds his breath and listens… Yes, there it is again.

‘Breuer… I’m here!’

The first lieutenant stumbles over a tangle of limbs to a bundle of rags in the far corner. The grey light filtering through the bunker cover falls on a yellowed face, with what looks like parchment stretched over it; the contours of the man’s skull shimmer through his taut skin. A downy beard covers a pointed chin. Two unnaturally large eyes sunk in deeply shadowed sockets are trained squarely on him. Breuer feels his knees buckle.

‘Wiese – is that you?’

The man’s mouth, no more than a thin line, opens in a feeble smile, revealing the exposed roots of his top teeth.

‘Yes, Breuer, I… to think it’s come to this!’

There’s another thump of falling shells, very near this time. The corrugated iron rattles loudly, and snow and earth crumble down into the bunker. The tangled heap of bodies shifts and groans. Someone mutters prayers, hurried and fearful. Breuer has stooped over the sick man, as if to shield him. ‘My God, Wiese,’ he stammers, ‘how did you end up here – in this awful dump?’

Wiese had closed his eyes momentarily. Now they open, large and clear, once more. It is as though his failing body has redirected its last vestiges of energy into these eyes.

‘You can’t mock God’s justice!’ [3] ‘You can’t mock God’s justice’ – quotation from St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, chapter 6 verse 7. he proclaims earnestly, showing wisdom beyond his years. Breuer still can’t understand what’s going on. He presses his comrade for answers. Wiese doesn’t appear to hear him. He keeps talking all the while, quietly and calmly.

‘It’s so hard to die… like this.’

And he tells Breuer, haltingly and incoherently, about his feelings of guilt.

‘I saw it all coming and didn’t do anything to stop it. I thought I could choose my own path, just for myself, aside from the mainstream… And I’ve been punished for that.’ Sometimes, his train of thought gets muddled and his eyes glaze over; but he always rallies and becomes lucid again. He talks about his life, his parents’ house in a small town in the Rhineland, and his schooldays. His father had wanted him to go to university and become a teacher. But he didn’t want that and had joined the German railways instead, so he’d have the freedom and leisure to devote himself entirely to music and his beloved books when the working day was over. And fate was kind to him, even in this conflict. He’d come through the war unscathed, untainted. And then came the incident with the burning plane…

Breuer has heard all of that before. But today it is bathed in a new light, under the merciless glare of a clear-sighted self-awareness. It makes Breuer forget all his pain and his own hopeless position.

‘I’ll stick by you, Wiese! I’ll get a doctor and find us something to eat… you just wait, you’ll make it through all right!’

Wiese dismisses Breuer’s words with a wave of his hand.

‘At night the faces of all the dead crowd round me, looking at me… You didn’t know anything… But I did, I knew everything, Breuer. And I said and did nothing! I wanted to be the only righteous person among all the lost souls. And I’ve paid the price for it. God cannot be mocked!’

Tiredness forces Lieutenant Wiese to pause. Breuer is shaking, all too painfully aware of his own impotence. What’s going on here cannot be happening; it’s blasphemous folly! He wants to help but has no idea what he should do. In the gloom, he tries to make out if Wiese has a dressing, or any signs of a wound. But all he can see is a ragged, sticky, brown-stained greatcoat. A hand is pushed towards him.

‘It’s good that you’ve come, Breuer. It makes things so much easier now… Here, have a look through my coat pockets, will you, the right one? I’ve got papers, letters and my pay-book. Be a good chap and take all that stuff with you? For my parents, my fiancée.’

Breuer’s hand searches tentatively through the coat until it finds the inside pocket and feels inside. He recoils in horror. His fingers have encountered a warm, sticky mass. He looks aghast at the motionless eyes that hold him with their wide and knowing gaze… Slowly he withdraws a filthy packet of papers. He’s tongue-tied and can barely get his words out.

‘My God, Wiese, I don’t even know if I’m going to—’

‘You’re right: there’s no way back now. I’m sure you’ll make it home, though – someday. A different person in a different world… I just know it. Now go, will you? This is no place for you, Breuer. Please go now. Please!’

Breuer leaves the bunker…

He wanders out on to the main road with its hard-packed surface of snow, where a cordite-smelling haze of shellfire still hangs in the air. Strewn across the roadway are mutilated bodies, scraps of flesh and severed limbs. The pools of blood are still fresh and red and gently steaming. Lorries roar past like hunted animals. Breuer takes none of this in. In his mind, he’s still talking to his dying friend. Guilt! The word burns in his soul. ‘Yes, we’re all guilty!’

A figure approaches him and makes to pass by without a word of greeting. Breuer does a double-take.

‘Padre Peters!’

A dead-eyed face turns to look at him.

‘Padre, please, come over here, quick! Wiese’s lying in a bunker out there. Lieutenant Wiese: you know who I mean! He’s at death’s door!’

The padre passes a weary hand over his sunken face.

‘Wiese – the little lieutenant… Yes, there’s lots of men dying here. But I must get to the station now… What’s the matter with you, by the way? An eye injury? Why don’t you walk with me, maybe the doctor might be able… There’s not much for him to do round here any more. Anyone who can still walk has moved on already.’

Breuer staggers after the padre in a daze. His thoughts are far away. He trips over dead bodies and wounded men, and eventually finds himself facing a doctor.

‘What’s the problem? Eye injury? You know this man, Padre? Oh, shi… look, with an eye injury you can get flown out, as a priority case even! I’ll write you a note here. You don’t need the army’s authorization any longer. At least you can still walk fine. Get yourself over to Stalingradski and see if you can still get a plane out.’

Saying this, the doctor presses an exemption note into his hand. He seems pleased that he can still make a difference here on something that matters.

Breuer stands outside the station. He looks blankly at the card he’s holding, with its red border and little attached ribbon. Funny, it looks like a parcel dispatch note. So, it’s as simple as that… And a sudden realization hits him. My God, he’s free! This is his passport back to life! Everything else fades into irrelevance… Fröhlich’s risky escape plan, his comrades, the grisly Dance of Death going on around him, his dying friend… it all begins to fade away like a bad dream. But taking its place in his pain-filled head there comes a resurgence of the distant, long-vanished past, stretching out a thousand arms to him and taking on gigantic proportions. Irmgard, the children, the daffodils in the garden, the lilac hedge, the bookcase full of books, the little library he’d built up and so loved – he’d see all that again, in just a few days’ time! Just for the loss of one eye, he thinks, a small price to pay for everything to be back the way it used to be! But somewhere in a recess in his brain there also lurks a dark thought: the twenty-fourth… God cannot be mocked! But it’s of no consequence any more; it’s lost all the power it once had.

And so, with death all around him but now gripped by an ardent desire to live, he who was already marked to meet his maker hurries on towards the airfield at Stalingradski.