Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Padre Peters is no longer with the wounded men, not even in his thoughts. He sits in his bunker and stares at the fire in the stove. In his hand, he weighs a small-format Bible, printed on India paper. It has travelled with him from the altar of the Church of St Andrew in Braunschweig to military cemeteries in Poland and the Ukraine, through field hospitals, bunkers and trenches, and finally found its way here, to Stalingrad. The black Morocco leather binding is as soft as velvet and the pages are like silk to the touch. He’s not about to let the Reds tear it to pieces with mocking laughter before his very eyes! He drops the Bible into the flames and sits and watches it curl up and its pages fan out as it is slowly consumed by the fierce, red-hot glow… Muddled thoughts keep skating over the surface of his consciousness. He’s lost any capacity to control them. What a hard road Padre Peters has had to travel! Cocooned in the robust armour of his faith, he has struggled and fought against the overwhelming horror like no one else. He has prayed for strength, found an inner strength, and inspired others to be strong. He has shone a light into hell. At least, that was once the case… but Stalingrad has shredded him, torn him to pieces, ground him down both physically and mentally; it has squeezed the last drop of strength out of him. What remains is a wreck, a floundering, helpless, rudderless wreck of a human being.

Peters is no longer master of his own fate. He has immolated himself.

Corporal Brezel bursts into the bunker.

‘Time we were off, I reckon, Padre! The doctors have left in the car, and the rest over there are getting ready to clear out. There’s already some shooting going on, down over on the far left – small-arms fire!’ He plonks a salami down on the table.

‘From the food stores. The men have just ransacked it.’

Padre Peters gets to his feet like an old man. He breaks the sausage in two, takes a bite of his piece and then pours himself a mug of communion wine from a canteen. Vacantly, he passes the canteen to Brezel, who takes a swig. Thank God, the corporal thinks.He’s coming to his senses again! He anxiously gathers up his few belongings. His history of the division is not among them. All the while, Peters sits on the camp bed, chewing the salami. He has no thoughts or feelings any more. Brezel, who is preoccupied with his own worries, eventually drags him to his feet, drapes his greatcoat round him, shoves a blanket and haversack under his arm, and takes him outside. The street is totally deserted. Deep silence still looms like a nightmare over the place, and everything seems to have perished. Yet this silence is deceptive; secretly, life goes on in a thousand different ways, albeit a forsaken, doomed kind of life. Peters feels nothing; aimlessly and passively he staggers along beside Brezel into the grey gloom. He has forgotten everything: the past, the present – and he has no conception of any future.

By the side of the road, a man is lying in the snow, covered with a coat, with a pillow under his head and a loaf and his wash bag beside him. He lies there motionless in the wintry solitude, with only his eyes showing any signs of animation in his bluish face. ‘Take me with you!’ he begs them quietly. ‘Take me with you!’

Peters sees the man but trots on mindlessly, utterly oblivious to his plight. He has seen too much, and experienced too much suffering… Even so, it is as though the solitary man by the roadside has surreptitiously planted a seed in his heart, which now starts to germinate vigorously. Thoughts begin to stir in his addled head, generating an unsettling humming and circling sensation that grows stronger by the second. One phrase above all starts to form from the background of white noise and push itself to the fore: ‘He saw the man and passed by on the other side.’ The biblical reference jolts Peters out of his stupor. Without warning, he stops dead in his tracks. He seizes Brezel by the forearm and stares wide-eyed into his startled face.

‘Saw the man and passed by on the other side,’ he mutters.

Brezel is alarmed. ‘Come on, we’ve got to keep moving!’ he urges, tugging at the padre’s arm.

But Peters stands his ground like a stubborn mule.

‘Saw the man and passed by on the other side,’ he repeats, turning aside. Stiff-legged, he starts to walk back the way they’ve come.

‘Padre!’ Brezel calls after him. ‘Padre!’ He really has gone mad, he thinks despairingly. He’s gone out of his mind; there’s no helping him any more. He doesn’t dare follow. His strength, too, is at an end. And now the crackle of gunfire resumes behind them.

Peters kneels down beside the wounded soldier. He wonders how on earth he got here. Some exhausted comrades may have left him here and put the pillow under his head as a final mark of their impotent concern.

‘Take me with you,’ he murmurs, over and over. ‘To Stalingrad!’

Peters lays a hand on his brow. It’s as cold as ice.

‘No, no, lad!’ he says quietly. ‘We’re not going to Stalingrad. What would the two of us want with Stalingrad? We’ve got our Dear Lord, and the only path we’ll take leads to him.’ His own words strike him as new. The crippled man looks up at him, silent and attentive. His eyes probe unknown realms. Peters takes off the silver crucifix that he wears round his neck and, holding it fast, prays with the man and gives him communion. He still has some altar wine left in his canteen and some wafers in his pocket.

Time drifts by silently. After slipping imperceptibly into the arms of death, the invalid by the roadside has gone into rigor mortis. Padre Peters stands beside the dead man, contemplating his calm, relaxed and peaceful face. A sense of profound loneliness suddenly folds him into its stifling embrace. His gaze falls on the crucifix in his hand… ‘And surely I am with you always…’ It is as if he is waking from a state of deep unconsciousness. Peters breathes a heavy sigh. What a Doubting Thomas he was! He can feel strength flowing into his body from the crucifix in his hand and from the dead man’s transfigured features. With a great upsurge of joy, he realizes that he can still help. And, isolated as he is, abandoned by everyone else and all alone with his crucifix, he comes to a momentous decision.

Peters covers the dead man with his coat and departs. But not in the direction of Stalingrad. He walks back through the abandoned town of Gumrak. But now he sees it through waking eyes. To his left is the cemetery. There, the bodies lie cheek-by-jowl, from a time when it was still possible to bury corpses. Each grave has its own cross. And there’s the house where the lieutenant lies dead, whose eyes they shot out. How often he’d come away from there feeling enriched and humbled by the young lieutenant’s confidence.

‘And surely I am with you always, to the very end of time.’

The frozen bodies of men still lie outside the door to the railway station. But there is no sentry there now, barring their entrance. No one outside wants to get in any more, while no one inside can now leave. The silent, desperate plight of the four hundred or so men lying in the darkness there screams out into the hush of the village. Peters moves on, towards the advancing Russians. He’s not thinking of himself. He senses that he, a priest, can’t hope for much leniency from the enemy. But death, whose gruesome presence he has now felt beside him a thousand times over, no longer frightens him. He thinks of the others, of this or that soldier in their foxholes and the men in the sepulchral station house. And he also calls to mind the blind lieutenant… Perhaps things aren’t as bad as he’s always imagined them, timid soul that he is? Maybe there are human beings on the other side too? He’d encountered genuine human beings many times in the farmhouses of the Ukraine, wherever he went.