Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘What do we do if tanks come?’ he asked in great anxiety. ‘Does this thing make any kind of impression on them?’

‘Yeah, course it does!’ said Lakosch. ‘You’ve just got to aim at the observation slit.’

Geibel only had a vague idea of what an observation slit was.

‘Surely you can’t make out where they are at night, though?’ he said doubtfully.

‘Well,’ replied Lakosch with the lofty disdain of the expert, ‘if that doesn’t work, just climb on top, open the hatch and chuck in a grenade.’

‘But we don’t have any grenades!’ said Geibel, growing ever more alarmed.

‘Then chuck in anything that comes to hand, a brick or something. That’ll confuse them, and they’ll come out of the hatch. Or you could try jamming your bayonet in the tank tracks. Then the tank’ll go round and round in circles till it runs out of petrol.’ Geibel gave Lakosch a distrustful sideways glance. He could never tell if he was being serious or not.

Hours passed without anything happening. By this time, it was probably already after 4 a.m. The fogs from earlier in this confusing day had given way to flurries of snow. Staying out in the open in these conditions half the night was anything but pleasant. The men had not been issued with winter vests and long johns, or warm felt boots. As a result, in no time they began to freeze piteously in the slushy snow, whose dampness seeped through even their padded topcoats, and their mood sank to rock-bottom. Sergeant Major Harras stood out on the road and strained to peer into the darkness through his binoculars. Suddenly, he thought he heard voices in the distance. He listened intently, his heart beating fast. There it was again! Definitely voices. And now he could make out the other unmistakeable sounds of a column of marching men. No doubt about it, they were on their way! How many of them might there be? A company, a battalion?

‘Take up your positions!’ he ordered quietly. Hoarse voices, thick with tension, murmured the command down the line. ‘Take aim!’ Harras was determined to let the enemy (even if they were an entire battalion) get so close he could see the whites of their eyes before unleashing a sudden volley of gunfire on them. The sounds of the approaching column grew more distinct. And now, in among the voices, he could hear the clatter of mess tins and shouldered weapons knocking together. Marching along without a care in the world, it seemed. The tension was unbearable… There they were! For a few brief moments, a gap opened up in the light flurry of snow, revealing a dark mass of troops. They were already very close! Harras’s hands were trembling so much he could barely hold the field glasses still.

‘Get ready!’ he hissed, raising his hand… Then, abruptly, he lowered his binoculars and yelled, ‘Don’t shoot! Lower your weapons!’ Through his field glasses he had spotted tall white fur hats. They were Romanians.

Sergeant Major Harras, suddenly brought back down from the lofty heights of dreams of heroism to an all too prosaic reality, could not afford to lose face in front of his men. So, behaving as if this was what he’d been expecting all along, he called on the pitiable, leaderless gaggle of Romanians to halt and subjected them to a grilling. They hadn’t come from Manoylin, as it turned out, but from the front sector held by the First Romanian Cavalry Division. The unit had disintegrated after the Russians had launched their surprise assault the previous evening, attacking quite unexpectedly from the flank as well as from the rear. But what about on their way here? No, came the answer, they hadn’t encountered any Russians.

The rest of the night passed without further incident. As morning approached, the rapid-response force was relieved by other units, which HQ had cobbled together from various supply columns in the region. Weary and downcast, the men staggered back to their quarters. Even Sergeant Major Harras had lost some of his customary stiffness. Once more, he was forced to put his aspirations on hold. He’d also come to realize that thin leather top boots, however elegant, were not the ideal footwear in which to spend a night out in the cold and damp, and that this war had some distinct downsides.

Heavy snow had been falling since early morning. From daybreak on, Romanian troops had been wending their way through the village. The fat snowflakes piled up on their black and yellowy-white lambskin hats, clung to their earthy-brown greatcoats, and stuck, wet and cold, to their unkempt beards and wild eyebrows. The troops passed through one by one, or in smaller or larger clusters, looking exhausted and miserable and not speaking. Here, a rifle dangled from a slumped shoulder, and there a machine gun mounted on wheels was being dragged behind a pair of stumbling feet, but for the most part they had divested themselves of everything that was of no use in protecting them from cold and hunger. Either freshly discarded and fully visible or already half-covered by the white blanket of snow, a litter of weapons, gas masks and steel helmets lined the road, along with metal boxes crammed with full ammunition belts. The wounded, with injured feet wrapped in rags and sackcloth, crept slowly past, or limped along on crutches, dragging their shot-up limbs bound in grime-caked field dressings. The lucky ones had managed to get hold of horses and swayed along, perched singly or in pairs on their bony backs. Some even more fortunate individuals had found places on creaking horse-drawn carts; driven on with yells and blows, the wretched draught horses inched painfully forward, pulling the massively overladen wagons behind them. As the hours passed, the stream of humanity grew ever more dense and unstoppable, increasingly unreal, improbable and ghostly in the grotesque forms it took as the situation unfolded. It was as if Napoleon’s Grande Armée on its retreat from Moscow had risen from the dead.

Corporal Herbert stood at the window with Fröhlich and watched dumbfounded as the dismal procession filed past.

‘It’s just awful,’ he said, ‘that this has happened to us!’

‘Us?’ bristled Fröhlich. ‘What do you mean, “us”? Can’t you see it’s the Romanians? This sort of thing could never happen to us!’

The army of refugees had just one aim in mind: to find food and rest. Like a plague of vermin, the wretched horde swarmed into farmhouses, outbuildings and stables. But like a saturated sponge, the village wasn’t remotely in a position to absorb this unforeseen flood of human beings. Crowds massed in front of the field hospital and the mess hall. Anyone whose legs could still support them moved on, making for the south and the east, ever onward, to anywhere that was out of range of the Russian tanks and Stalin organs.

The straw hut in the courtyard of the house requisitioned by the Intelligence Section, where the house’s former occupants, the Russian family, now lived, was overrun with Romanians. Breuer had also turned over the entrance hall of his billet to them. He was hoping to glean some information about developments at the front. But it was fruitless. They didn’t even listen to his questions. They just fell to the ground where they stood, utterly exhausted, collapsed on top of one another and started snoring. Latecomers trying to get into the house had to clamber over a mountain of arms and legs; those they trampled on didn’t raise a peep. As they warmed up and thawed, their filthy clothes, boots and bandages gave off an animal stench. Lakosch and Geibel stood outside by the fence to prevent any more people from entering.

‘Nix, nix! Komplett, komplett!’ they called out, using the curious lingua franca that had evolved on the Eastern Front from the constant commingling of Russians, Romanians, Germans, Italians and other nationalities, as they pushed the crush of people pressing forward back on to the street.