Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

But for him, at least, it was all over now. With a feeling of quiet elation, he took in the view of the hilly landscape with its copses and villages, a sight he had not seen for so long. It was like emerging from a nightmare. And now the Don was behind him. He would not be crossing it for a third time. Next spring, once the division was refreshed and rested and had entered the fray once more, the battle for Stalingrad would be decided once and for all.

The village of Verchnaya-Businovka is situated in the northern part of the great elbow of the Don River. A narrow strip of wooden houses runs for several kilometres along the flat valley floor, broken only by small clumps of trees, a grey wooden church and a brick house of several storeys in the urban style, where the German occupation forces had set up a hospital. The whole place was now heaving with supply units. The divisional staff had established its headquarters here.

Sonderführer [1] Sonderführer – literally ‘special leader’. A rank in the German Army (Wehrmacht) and SS assigned to specialists without any military training who were drafted in for their expertise in certain areas, such as interpreting, civil engineering, archaeology, and finance and administration. Fröhlich was strutting through the rooms of a wooden farm cottage, issuing orders. Now that he found himself within the four walls of a proper house again, all his bourgeois pretensions to a civilized life had resurfaced. His beak of a nose poked into all corners of the bare room and lighted with satisfaction on the shining icons reflecting the flames of two candles. Within a few hours, the building would be lit with electric light; the generator had already been installed. But it would still take a lot of work to make this place into suitable quarters for Division Ic.

‘I want these windowpanes spick and span and a table and five chairs in here by first thing tomorrow, understood?’

The pallid woman following him at a distance nodded. She stroked the hair of the small boy clinging to her skirts and gazing wide-eyed at the stranger in their house. They were now living in the tiny stable and had to sleep between the hooves of the one horse of theirs that hadn’t been requisitioned.

‘Will they come?’ the woman asked.

‘Who?’ Whenever the interpreter Fröhlich spoke to Russians, he had an unpleasant habit of half-closing his eyes and looking past the person he was addressing.

‘Our lot – the Bolsheviks, I mean.’ The woman was afraid because her husband was collaborating with the Germans.

‘The Reds?’ Fröhlich gave a curt laugh. His Russian was hard, like beaten metal. He was a Baltic German. ‘Listen, if German soldiers are occupying somewhere, no Bolshevik’s coming near the place, get it?’

Stupid bitch, he thought to himself. Still pinning her hopes on Batyushka[2] Batyushka – ‘Little Father’, a term of endearment traditionally used by Russians of their leaders, and dating from tsarist times, when it was held up as the complementary quality to the epithet ‘ Grozny’ (‘awe-inspiring/terrible’). Stalin!

Private Geibel came in, clutching a bundle of clean straw under his arm ready to make up a bed against the long wall of the cottage. His face, round as a pumpkin, was flushed with a calm, contented glow. For months on end, they’d known nothing but steppe, foxholes and ruins. And now this little hamlet with the unpronounceable name seemed almost like home. There wasn’t even any danger here from enemy aircraft if the German troops’ stories were to be believed. He spread out the straw, put some blankets on top of it and carefully smoothed them flat. He felt happy.

In the room next door, Corporal Herbert was tinkering with a large cooking range in which a wood fire was already crackling. He was fishing potatoes out of a bowl of water with his long fingers, peeling and slicing them in the twinkling of an eye and dropping the honey-yellow slices into a huge iron frying pan. He was the unit’s clerk, very fair-haired and blue-eyed, and did all the domestic chores. He was one of those tender flowers that can only thrive in the forces in the rarefied atmosphere of an office.

By the time the potatoes were sizzling in the pan, Lakosch had joined them and watched as they went about their business. He had just driven up in the staff car after dropping off the first lieutenant at Division Ia to submit his report. His shock of ginger hair glowed like flames in the flickering light cast by the range.

‘Wow, Herbert, fried potatoes! It’s three months since I last tasted those, maybe even four. Reckon I could eat the whole panful single-handed?’

‘Like you aren’t already famous enough for your gluttony!’ replied Herbert drily as he lifted a pan of boiling milk off the heat. Lakosch took the opportunity to pop a particularly crispy slice of potato into his mouth. When Herbert turned back round, Lakosch’s face was still contorted with pain from the piping-hot morsel he’d just consumed.

‘Keep your fingers off my frying pan, you pig! At least wash your grubby mitts first!’

‘Ooh, get him!’ rejoined Lakosch. ‘Barely five minutes out of the shit and already acting like he’s Lord Muck! Plenty of time for that sort of thing later, it’s not like you’re going home tomorrow! Anyhow, frying pan – that reminds me, have you heard the one about the frying pan? As the actress said to the bishop…’

‘Put a sock in it!’ cried Herbert, covering his ears. Lakosch rarely hit the mark with his jokes; he told them too often. On the other hand, he was never offended by rejection.

‘Come on, Herbie, old son,’ wheedled Lakosch. ‘Why don’t you bake us a cake tomorrow? You know, one of those nice yellow ones of yours. The lieutenant’s still got some baking powder left, and we’ll get Panje to issue us some flour.’

‘You’ll get sod all from me!’ replied Herbert, though he was flattered by this open acknowledgement of his culinary skills. Lakosch sidled up to him and winked.

‘Hey, I know something you don’t – some really big news! You’ll be gobsmacked when you hear it. But I’ll only tell you if you bake us a cake.’

‘Don’t talk crap!’ Herbert said. ‘Here, pass those potatoes – no, on second thoughts, get the milk pan, and I’ll carry the spuds.’

Once Breuer had arrived too, they sat by candlelight round the big potato pan, slicing off large hunks of army bread, drinking milk and swapping stories about the journey.

‘By the by, your colleague at Corps HQ sends his best,’ Breuer told Fröhlich. ‘He’s living like a king there, isn’t he, Lakosch? Got his own place, with a Russian housekeeper and two volunteer servants. The staff officers there live the life of Riley, I tell you… it’s like some luxury casino. They’ve even got their own cinema, just like in peacetime!’

‘I don’t understand why they’ve sent us here, then,’ said Fröhlich, poking around with his knife in a tin tube of processed cheese, which as usual refused to yield up its contents. Breuer shrugged.

‘A few new Russian divisions have appeared at the front over there, and it’s put the wind up the Romanians. So we’re here to put our shoulder to the wheel and settle their nerves.’

‘What does Lieutenant Colonel Unold have to say about that?’

‘Moral support, he calls it. “Give them moral support round the clock!” We’re supposed to supply them with gramophones, games and boxes of books. He says we’ve been lying around in the shit for long enough. He even wants me to get hold of the Rembrandt film to show here in three days’ time.’

The Sonderführer chuckled: a mirthless, self-satisfied laugh. So, not for the first time, he’d been right all along: this supposedly big-deal ‘mission’ was nothing but an interlude, an assignment that could be measured in days. Like a passenger getting off a train during a brief station stop to stretch his legs and cast a quick glance backwards before setting off once more, never to see the place again. Fröhlich didn’t live up to the meaning of his surname – he wasn’t a happy person at all. Sure, he was optimistic, but his optimism wasn’t of the bright and breezy kind that others find appealing. Rather, his outlook was stubborn, dogged, unshakeable as an air-raid shelter, and constantly on the defensive.