Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Breuer flopped down on the sofa.

‘Sorry, old chap! Looks like you’re going to have to make room for the three of us.’

All of a sudden, he felt unburdened and relieved. But he was also well aware of how deceptive this enchanted picture of cosiness and security really was.

The corporal did not get up again to make any further trouble; he could see that he was outranked. Breuer set about piling up the contents of his pockets on the table, while Görz, without more ado, laid the semi-conscious lieutenant down on one of the beds. At the sight of the cans of food and the loaves, the corporal’s face brightened considerably. He was visibly relieved. As Breuer was getting comfortable on the sofa, a rosy-cheeked NCO came in with another girl. They were chatting away intimately in some Slavic language or other. The mystery of this place and its occupants was soon explained. They had stumbled upon the staff office of a Croatian artillery regiment, which was attached to a German infantry division fighting on the Volga front. Breuer now recalled having seen a lorry out on the road with the familiar insignia of that division: a stylized fir tree with a line through the crown and an ‘S’ beside it. The troops had reinterpreted this ingenious rebus [5] ‘this ingenious rebus’ – the German word for a fir tree is Tanne ; replacing the first letter with an ‘S’ gives ‘Sanne’, the commander’s name. – which was meant to represent the name of the division’s commanding officer, General Sanne – in their own inimitable way: the division was commonly known as ‘Shit in the Woods’.

‘You’re in clover here, aren’t you?’ Breuer said to the newcomer, as he took one of the pre-sliced loaves from its tinfoil wrapping. The Croatian NCO smiled sheepishly but dismissively at the suggestion. Görz emptied out some braised tinned meat into a billycan lid. They tucked in and talked about the day’s events.

‘Things are going to get pretty nasty here too, and fast!’ reckoned Breuer. ‘The Russians aren’t far away. The airfield at Stalingradski’s already been evacuated.’

The Croatian’s eyes widened. They clearly had no idea what was coming. His conversation dried up and after a short while he got up and left. The old woman brought in a steaming samovar. Görz gave the lieutenant, who was awake but clearly unaware of where he was, a few sips of tea, talking comfortingly like a mother to him as he did so.

‘Hit in the arm by a shell burst,’ he explained in response to Breuer’s enquiry. ‘Plus he got shot clean through the upper right thigh – and the frostbite on his feet is really bad… And now it looks like he’s got brain damage as well…’

He tucked the lieutenant in and then went to make up a bed for himself on the floor, where the Croatian NCO was also planning to bunk down. Breuer took the sofa, while the Croatian corporal occupied the second bed. After the light had been turned out, one of the girls came in and joined him, whispering and giggling. Despite being dog-tired, Breuer slept fitfully on his strangely soft bed. He was repeatedly disturbed by the couple’s canoodlings and by Dierk’s heavy breathing. At length, he sank into a leaden state of oblivion.

After several hours, at around four in the morning, he was rudely awoken by the sound of people crashing about and agitated voices. The Croatians had put all their boxes of paperwork on the ground and were rummaging through them by candlelight. The girls were standing over them, crying.

‘Hey, what’s going on?’ The corporal raised his worried face.

‘General alarm,’ he replied in a subdued tone. ‘All combat units to the front, and the staffs and clerical units to central Stalingrad!’

‘Right, we should hit the road again then, too!’ said Breuer briskly, pulling on his boots.

Görz had already brewed coffee and made up some sandwiches. Now he went to rouse Dierk. The rest had clearly done the lieutenant good; he was able to sit up at table and eat something. After nodding briefly to Breuer, he stared ahead with an expressionless face. It wasn’t clear whether he had actually recognized him.

After a generous breakfast, the three men set off, rested and fortified, and with the girls’ laments and the muted oaths of the busily packing Croatians ringing in their ears. The farce was at an end and the tragedy was about to unfold.

The track they were on turned into a road. Through its patchy shroud of snow shone the steely sheen of ice. The group of fleeing soldiers had become ragged and strung out. Here and there, an exhausted cluster of stragglers limped along, as the odd vehicle sped by, heading for the city. To the side of the road stood signposted bunkers, silent and abandoned, along with the roofless ruins of humble little dwellings and overgrown gardens with black trees whose shredded crowns were lost in the fog.

Pulling the small toboggan that he’d scrounged from the Croatians, Corporal Görz was always some way ahead of his two companions. Of the three of them, he was the most robust. Breuer could feel the exertions of the past few days in his limbs. His injury was also hurting badly again. After their abrupt departure from the Croatians’ house, the feeling that they had been abandoned hit him once more with redoubled force. Things had become rather different since yesterday. His surroundings, which the vision through his one good eye made into a surface lacking any depth, appeared strangely altered. Sure, he was still in the midst of the same wretched figures, but the connections between people and things seemed to have changed. It was all different, totally different… Breuer shot a sideways glance at the lieutenant, who was tottering along next to him on his frostbitten legs with a gait that looked like he was walking on stilts. He had rallied overnight and with mute determination had refused all offers of help. He was still refusing to speak, maintaining a horribly frosty silence.

Nothing about him recalled the enthusiastic young officer of former times. His face resembled a cratered field after a battle. Suddenly overcome with emotion, Breuer caught hold of Dierk’s arm.

‘Dierk, old son! What’s got into you? Talk to us, for God’s sake!’

And at the same time, he was thinking: What’s got into all of us, for that matter? The lieutenant turned his face towards Breuer for a fleeting instant. His blank expression dismissed the query out of hand. What’s got into us…? Breuer tried to summon up images from the past: his study at home, the green chair with the standard lamp beside it, in whose warm light he used to sit and read; the faces of his wife and children; that last pleasure-boat trip to the sand dunes of the Curonian Spit, just a few days before he’d been called up to take part in a ‘short-term exercise’, which in the event had turned out to be endless. It was no good. Everything had become pallid and blurry in his memory. The world as it existed before the war had been extinguished; he could only dimly discern its outlines like he was peering through a veil. He could not understand how, just a short while ago (had it been the day before yesterday? Or yesterday?), he had been looking forward so excitedly to breaking free and flying out of the Cauldron. Where had he planned to go? There was no going back now. How had it come to this? Had that Breuer from the past, whose death date Schoolmaster Strackwitz had foretold, actually died in the night before the twenty-fourth? It almost seemed to be so. Maybe that upstanding, amenable Breuer, who was so well grounded in considerate middle-class respectability, really had perished along with everything that he thought, believed in, held dear and longed for. What remained was an empty vessel devoid of hope, inured to pain, and containing nothing but a hollow, boundless emptiness. ‘I do not dream of past happiness…’ No, he didn’t dream of anything any more. Had it even warranted the name of happiness, that complacent, superficial day-to-day existence, only disturbed now and then by the mild irritation of childish worries, where you just let yourself drift along like you were immersed in a warm, soporific stream? Hadn’t it all been just self-deception, a grand illusion whose inevitable and logical conclusion was the dreadful unmasking of Stalingrad? A cruel hand had swept across the board and in a stroke wiped away the cheerful signs of a false happiness. All that was left behind was the empty blackboard. Would new signs ever appear on it one day, pointing towards a new future?