Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘Before,’ he says, nodding down at them, ‘when they still hurt, I kept rags tied round ’em and bundles of straw. But now they don’t hurt at all, not in the slightest in fact. Only my legs and knees are giving me gyp now. So I don’t need to keep changing the rags on my feet any more. Quite practical really, eh?’

They drag the three dead men out by their feet into the corridor. The gnome says he reckons they won’t decay in the cold out there. Then Herbert goes down to collect some snow. In the meantime, the gnome lights an open fire in the middle of the room. Acrid smoke billows out of the door.

‘I… I’ve got… some wheat grains here,’ coughs Herbert. ‘But it’s… it’s not enough to go around everybody.’

‘No problem,’ says the gnome. ‘All they want is water.’

They sit round the smoking fire, using one hand to dangle mess tins with the wheat in them on sticks over the flames while wiping their streaming eyes with the other.

There’s another dreadful incident during the night. A shot rings out. Herbert gives a start, and then feels something warm dripping on him and trickling down. He shouts in alarm and struggles free from where he was wedged sleeping, lashing out all around in fear as he does so. But there’s nothing to be seen. So he curls up in a ball and lies there trembling and wide awake until dawn breaks. Then he sees what happened. The lieutenant with the stump of an arm has blown his brains out by putting a gun in his mouth. He’s lying slumped forward on his face. The back of his head is missing.

Lieutenant Dierk was asleep on the ground in a free corner. The other two were sitting against the wall. They, too, were exhausted by the hours they’d spent roaming around. One of the tins of meat had gained them entry to the little house where they now found themselves. It was unbearably hot in the building. The stink of unwashed bodies lay on their chests like a stifling blanket. Around ten Romanians – enlisted men and officers – had spread themselves out in the room. They sat around, lolled over the bare wooden table, and lay or cowered on the floor. Only their eyes were still animated in their otherwise expressionless, dreadfully emaciated faces. Large and black, they smouldered with bitter resentment and hatred. One man was poking the wood fire that had been lit in a tiled stove. A sultry tension hung over the room. Whenever anyone spoke, his words, underscored by jabbing hand gestures, stabbed home like sharp pecks from a bird’s beak. Surreptitiously, they kept casting looks of undisguised greed at the bread and tins of food that Görz unpacked from the kitbag.

‘We can’t stay here,’ the corporal told Breuer under his breath. ‘In the night, they’ll finally work up the courage to do us in.’

From an adjoining room came the sound of someone crying. When the door opened, they could see that the room was full of civilians – men and women of all ages, and children. Children, thought Breuer. How could children be living in this hellhole!

‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you all along,’ he said to Görz. ‘How on earth did Dierk get into that state?’

The corporal shrugged his shoulders and stared at the ground.

‘Yeah, I’ve no idea what’s got into him,’ he replied. ‘I mean, I’ve only known him for a few days, but in the beginning he was quite different.’

Breuer was astonished.

‘What – you mean to say you’re not from his platoon?’

‘No, I’m from a heavy flak unit. We were stationed at Pitomnik, then later we were transferred to Gumrak. Finally we got involved in the ground fighting there, defending the airfield with our two 88-millimetre guns.’

‘You were at Gumrak airfield?’ cried Breuer. ‘We were there too, in the Gontchara Gorge!’

‘Oh, right, we were over on the west side, right out in the open on that flat area, a few hundred metres behind that shot-down Focke-Wulf Condor, if you can remember. That’s when Lieutenant Dierk came to us. He’d reported in person to the colonel with his handful of men and their 20-millimetre flak guns. Said he’d come from the west and that his unit had been badly mauled at somewhere-or-other, and so on. Well, of course, the colonel was only too happy to have him on board. Two four-barrelled AA guns, that’s not to be sneezed at! … That was on, now let me think … On, hmm… yeah, it was on the nineteenth… That’s right, just five days ago… Everything went haywire for us in Gumrak. We were having to deal with up to thirty air raids a day, and that was no easy task with our knackered old guns. And on top of that, there was nothing to eat! The food store was being looted like nobody’s business. And there were drumhead courts-martial and firing squads… And then our commanding general just pisses off on a plane one day… You must have heard about that, right? No? Well, I’ll tell you all about it some other time.… And then when everyone could see that the game was up, they go and throw us into fighting on the ground. The sighting mechanism on one of our eighty-eights was up the swanny, so the colonel told us to just aim along the barrel. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ve all had it anyway!” That’s how desperate things were with us. Everyone was sick to death of the whole business… Anyhow, when the lieutenant turns up – bear in mind he’d already been shot in the arm and contracted frostbite by then – first thing he tries to do is give us a pep talk, going on about “fighting to the last man” and “the whole of Germany’s looking at us” and “unswerving loyalty to the Führer” and such. You can imagine, that immediately got him in hot water – “Knight’s Cross hunter” and “cheeky little twerp” were some of the politer insults that came his way, sometimes to his face. And in all honesty, it was pretty naive of him to arrive and start strutting around like that. Even so, I dunno what it was, but somehow I couldn’t be angry with him. He was different from those standard-issue tub-thumpers, and it was clear he wasn’t after medals or personal glory. I saw straight away that he genuinely believed what he said. It was like… yes, like a child who believes in Father Christmas. And even when it slowly dawns on the kid that it’s all a fake, he still goes on believing, just because it was such a lovely dream. I’m sure that’s how it was with Lieutenant Dierk. And I felt truly sorry for him, ’cos I could see how much it got him down that the lads wanted nothing to do with him. And his own men, who were still minded to defend him, clearly also thought of him as a bit of a dreamer, as a big kid…’

Corporal Görz turned to look at the lieutenant, who was moaning every so often in his fitful sleep. An elderly man dressed in respectable clothing and a girl had come in from the next-door room. Preoccupied with his thoughts, Breuer watched as they leaned against an old sideboard and ate a few seeds from a bowl and spoke quietly to one another. The girl had a black ponytail. Carelessly, she spat out the husks onto the soldiers sleeping on the floor. From time to time, a loud explosion shook the damaged windows. Sporadic disruptive mortar fire – evidently the Russians weren’t particularly straining themselves. They knew what the outcome would be.

‘So, two days later,’ Görz picked up the thread of his story again, ‘the Russians advanced on the airfield, about three or four battalions I guess, coming down from the escarpment in march formation. And there we were, with just our two eighty-eights behind a snow bank, right out in the open! Plus a company of infantry in front of us. And they weren’t even proper infantry, just blokes from the transport division with a reserve officer in command… At eighteen hundred metres, the Russians fanned out. Three tanks push forward ahead of them to about fifteen hundred metres. Well, we get one of them with the first shot. And the second takes a direct hit as well, from our gun with the buggered sights, what’s more! With the second shot, it explodes in flames. But then all hell broke loose! The third tank had got wise to us. Certainly, it was total madness to go taking potshots at armour when you’ve got no cover or camouflage! Suddenly there’s an almighty bang and the barrel flies up and the gun base splits open like… well, like a rosette. The captain of the gun crew and one of the men were killed instantly. And the rest hit in the stomach by shrapnel; they were reeling round the thing like crazy spinning tops, yelling in pain.… Even so, for some reason the attack ground to a halt, and we got a bit of peace and quiet overnight, except for one of the transport boys’ machine-gun positions up front, which the Russkis hit three times in succession with anti-tank rounds. The tank we’d hit kept burning all night… When it got light, we could see the enemy were still out there, lying in the same positions. They’d stayed there out in the open the whole night, in freezing temperatures! All these little figures in brown uniforms in the snow, just like on the parade ground. The officers were standing upright behind the lines and using hand signals to point out targets. With the one gun we had left, we destroyed two more tanks. But they still had around eight or ten in total. All of a sudden, there’s a massive explosion again. A shell had punched right through the eighty-eight’s gun shield, blowing the hands off the man in the direction-finder’s seat. He rushes around screaming and flailing about with the bloody stumps. A second shell scores a direct hit on the ammunition pile… So, that was the end of us. And then the cry goes up “Russian breakthrough on the left!” That was where Dierk’s second gun was positioned. And it turned out that his crew had gone, just legged it without firing a single shot! I’ll never forget the look on the lieutenant’s face… But he quickly recovered his composure and shouted “Counter-attack! Follow me!” And he started charging towards the Russians on his knackered legs, with a machine-pistol in his hands. And no one followed, not a single man… It had begun snowing again by this stage, pretty heavily too. I saw him fall flat on his face once. And then we heard him shouting: “Hurra, hurra, hurra…” like some lunatic. The Russians scarcely fired a shot; they must have been too astonished. The rest of our men simply shrugged their shoulders and said “Stupid bastard!” We were really fed up to the back teeth with the whole affair… But it didn’t sit right with me. We can’t just leave him to die like a dog out there, I thought to myself. I couldn’t get that image of his face out of my mind when he learned that his men had just done a bunk. So when night fell I set out with a couple of other men to try to find him, in driving snow. It was no easy task, let me tell you… But finally we tracked him down in one of our old bunkers. He was sitting in a corner with his face buried in his hands. There was a dead Russian in the other corner. On the way back, a sniper got him in the leg and me in the arm. Since then, we haven’t been able to get a sensible word out of him… So now’ – here the corporal blushed like a schoolgirl – ‘I’m hitched to him for keeps. I know it’s all nonsense, but… well, I was the one who got him out of there… and he’s not much more than a boy, in all honesty… plus it makes things a bit easier for me not to be all on my tod.’