Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘Got you, you fucking dog!’ growls Fröhlich, completely unmoved by the Russian’s apparently friendly intentions. Cautiously he pokes his head out from under the lorry. The tanks have veered off to the left. They have forced the fleeing Germans to leave the road and are driving them across the steppe into the thickening fog. Fröhlich crawls out from his hiding place. He kicks the Russian’s cap aside and strides over to the signals vehicles. A driver is trying to get the coughing engine of one of the lorries to turn over. A knot of distraught men has gathered round. Herbert is just helping the shaking Geibel up onto the truck. Fröhlich climbs aboard too. His good mood has returned.

‘Ha, we really stuck it to ’em, eh?’ he brags. ‘Pack of bloody filthy swine! Thought they had us in the bag here, didn’t they? Ha! We can still show ’em a thing or two! Specially when we’re properly dug in in Stalingrad, right?’

The others don’t respond. They’ve found a sack of wheat on the lorry and are busy chewing the hard grains with grinding teeth. Finally the engine roars into life. The driver steps on the accelerator and crashes through the gears, sending the heavy vehicle on a wild, hurtling course down the highway.

The fog grew ever denser as the night set in. The route along which the long column of fleeing men was slowly and haltingly making its way through powdery snow entered uncharted territory. Again, for the umpteenth time, Breuer stopped to wipe the sweat from his burning face. A raging fever was thumping and hammering away in his head and sending black waves of migraine across his field of vision. The bulging pockets of his army greatcoat tugged down on his shoulders like lead weights. Would this march never end? They must have been underway for an eternity already and put countless kilometres behind them. With no destination in sight, nowhere to call home (even a foxhole would do!) and cast adrift from everything that had gone before, if he had been alone in the hostile winter night he would probably have thrown himself down in the snow, never to rise again. But he wasn’t alone. He and the corporal were supporting the wounded, listless Lieutenant Dierk. Breuer himself had no idea what possessed him, at this desperate time when every man scarcely had enough strength to save his own skin, to drag this broken and clearly half-dead man through the night. Perhaps it was just the dread of loneliness that drew living creatures to one another.

‘Come on, Lieutenant, sir!’ urged Corporal Görz (he had, in the meantime, introduced himself to Breuer). ‘It can’t be far now. And we’ll be bound to find somewhere we can doss down. Especially with our bag of goodies…’

He triumphantly brandished the kitbag of provisions he was carrying. The two men took a firmer grip under the lieutenant’s armpits and pressed on.

A procession of vehicles – three or four cars and a lorry, all keeping a sensible distance and in good order – was inching its way past others that had ground to a halt and got wedged against one another. An officer was supervising the tricky and dangerous operation.

‘Steer left! … Left, I said! I suggest you stick your nose out of the car so you can see where you’re going, you halfwit!’

Breuer stopped. The voice struck him as familiar.

‘Von Horn?’

The man he’d addressed turned round and walked over, bringing his blond-bearded face close to that of the questioner. A monocle flashed at Breuer. He couldn’t suppress a smile. A monocle – amid all this chaos? Oh well, why not! It was some people’s way of keeping things in order.

‘Ah, Breuer, it’s you!’ The officer’s voice sounded clear and fresh. ‘This is all a bit of a closing-down sale, eh?’

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Why, to the municipal theatre of Stalingrad, of course! It’s where all the best people are headed, don’t you know? The curtain’s about to go up on the final performance there!’

‘Can you take us with you?’ Breuer asked.

But the Tank Corps adjutant had already leaped onto the running board of the last car and vanished like a shadow in the night.

They must have struggled on about another kilometre when Breuer stopped again. He tried to peer through the fog that was shrouding the road and growing denser by the minute. ‘Look over there!’ he shouted. ‘Aren’t those houses?’

Corporal Görz cast a sceptical glance over at the vague dark shapes in the grey wall of fog. ‘Come on, Lieutenant, sir!’ he replied. ‘The city can’t be far off now, honestly!’

‘No, we can’t go on – it’s too much. Just look at him, will you?’

Dierk was hanging limply from the shoulders of his helpers. His breath was coming in choking gasps. They wouldn’t get much further with him in that condition. The corporal recognized that too. They turned off the road and made for the dark something, which began to emerge more clearly from the surrounding grey as they drew nearer. Indeed, it was a house – actually, more of an unprepossessing log cabin whose windows and doors were boarded up. The corporal knocked, but the house remained lifeless and silent. Should they break in? – A short way off, there seemed to be another house. It was dark and shuttered like the first. But here they could smell smoke and feel some warmth, and through the gaps in the boarded windows they made out chinks of light. Breuer tugged at the door, which was bolted from the inside. ‘Open up!’ he shouted.

Nothing stirred. He banged his fists against the boarded windows and kicked so hard at the door that the wood began to splinter.

‘Open up! Open up!!’

Inside, a door banged. There came the sound of whispering voices and faint footsteps were heard approaching the front door. In the freezing air, the mist of someone’s breath came out through the gaps in the boards.

‘Open up, God damn it! We’re German officers! … Open up or we’ll blow the place to pieces!’

Hesitantly, the bolt was slid back. Breuer pushed open the door. In the darkness, he could discern what looked like the figure of a woman, and behind her another person; stumbling over clutter, he entered a kitchen. Behind him, the corporal dragged the lieutenant in.

The kitchen was bright and full of soldiers – men just like the thousands who were roaming around the fields out there. Some were sitting there still wearing their greatcoats or with bandages wrapped round their heads, while others were busy unwinding the stinking rags from round their feet or warming themselves and brewing tea at the hot cooking range. In among them were some others, clean-shaven, with clean clothes and the pale faces of people who spent their time indoors – evidently the occupants of the house. A wizened babushka was pottering about at the stove. She was the first woman Breuer had set eyes on in the Cauldron, just as this was the first house in it that he had stepped inside. Seeing that they were officers, she obligingly pushed open the door to the adjoining room. Görz and Breuer stared open-mouthed at the brightly lit scene that met their eyes. A table laid with a blue woollen cloth, a red plush sofa, two beds piled high with cushions, some dusty pot plants and walls covered with faded framed photographs and matt-gold icons. As they entered the parlour, a girl, barely twenty, with shining black hair and a broad, fresh face, flitted past them with an anxious yet inquisitive expression, trailing behind her a waft of cheap perfume. The whole scene was as improbable as an absurd dream, but at the same time exhilarating in its unquestionable reality.

A corporal, clearly taken aback by their intrusion, got up from the sofa.

‘These are staff quarters!’ he said, in an unmistakably Slavic accent.