Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘It’s just so perishing cold, Sergeant Major! And besides, with the kind of food we’ve been getting, I wouldn’t make it fifty metres!’

Harras took a deep breath and prepared to bawl out Lakosch for his impudence. But at the last minute, he checked himself. He was due to leave the staff shortly, and everyone knew it. That sort of thing could compromise your authority. It’d be more sensible to quit on a positive note. So he changed tack and adopted an avuncular tone.

‘Look, lad, it’s really not on! Just think about it: we might still be stuck here in the spring. And when the little offerings you’ve laid start thawing out, imagine the pong! Have a care!’

Lakosch responded in kind to Harras’s banter.

‘Yes, sir! On the other hand, though, has the Sergeant Major considered that it’s actually fertilizing the steppe? Who knows, we might end up growing potatoes here… Shame you’re going to be leaving us and miss all that, Sar’nt Major!’

Speechless with rage, Harras uttered something incoherent, before turning on his heels and striding off. Lakosch buckled up his belt. After just eight days, he could already pull it two notches tighter, he noted with alarm, and walked over to the Volkswagen, which stood alone and unprotected in the cold. It too would be for the knacker’s yard soon. The clutch and transmission had pretty much had it, and it took hours to get it started in the morning. ‘You’ve served us well, old girl!’ muttered Lakosch, gently stroking the car’s whitewashed door panel. ‘Twelve thousand kilometres on Russian roads, that’s no mean feat. Manstein ought to get a move on; otherwise he won’t find you still alive!’ With a practised movement, he unclipped the two bucket seats from the front of the car and, whistling, carried them down into the dugout.

Lakosch dubbed it the ‘trunk’, plain and simple. It was clear what he meant by it. With the ribbed patterns on its rough clay walls, pickaxed out of the frozen ground, the shallow dugout bunker occupied by unit Ic resembled nothing so much as the inside of a steamer trunk. Just above the head height of a standing man, its lid comprised a layer of planks covered with soil. Admittedly, you couldn’t open this lid, so in order to exit the bunker you had to clamber up five slippery steps hewn out of the clay and heave open the corrugated-iron entry hatch with sufficient force to stop the fierce wind blowing it back down on your head. The fact that you were surrounded on all four sides by earth meant you were perfectly safe from shrapnel, and also ensured that the little trench heater had an easy job keeping the place warm and snug. Initially, when the entire Staff HQ had had to make do with only four bunkers, they’d had to share this space of about eight square metres with the mess orderlies and the men from the signals unit. During the day, it was just about tolerable, at a pinch, so long as everybody squatted on the ground and didn’t move around too much. But at night the thirteen men had been packed in like sardines in a tin, jammed against, and even on top of, one another. And woe betide anyone who dared to shift position or start scratching himself when the lice embarked on their nightly round through the pile of bodies! Later, when they got more space, just two of their former bunker-mates remained: Lieutenant Wiese, the head of communications, and Senta.

‘Well,’ Breuer ribbed Wiese, ‘as an intelligence officer manqué , so to speak, you’re already part of the family! Your people’ll be glad to be shot of you for a while – and we’re delighted to have you here with us!’

Wiese was only too happy to stay. Senta was part of the family, too. Senta was a small yellow-haired bulldog bitch, which Lakosch had saved from being shot by a pilot officer somewhere down on the Don. Since then, he’d become besotted with the animal, flying off the handle one time when Herbert referred to it as an ‘ugly beast’. Once there was a bit more room, a table was cobbled together. Breuer and Wiese invariably bunked down together on top of this at night, top to tail. Sonderführer Fröhlich, meanwhile, slept underneath, where there was no danger of suddenly plummeting to earth. On the other hand, he’d sometimes crack his head painfully against the boards when explosions in the night woke him and made him sit up with a start. Also, this arrangement ensured that there was plenty of room for the others to bed down on the – fortunately boarded – floor of the bunker.

The daylight that penetrated the bunker through a narrow glass window along the top edge of the long wall was opaque. Even dimmer was the light at night from a small oil-lit storm lantern. Yet they were proud of this precious item, which Lakosch had purloined from another unit’s bunker. Every three days, he scrounged a little diesel oil from the sergeant in charge of the motor pool. When Geibel broke the lamp glass one day while cleaning it, the others could have lynched him. But they managed to fashion a new glass out of a conserve jar, and the lamp continued to cast its meagre light on the few pictures that had been put up on the walls to try to make the place seem a bit more like home. One of these was a photograph, set in a frame made from the golden-yellow cardboard of a file cover, showing Breuer’s wife and their two boys. Next to Wiese’s bunk was a colour reproduction on a postcard of Matthias Grünewald’s Stuppach Madonna . But the principal ornament in the bunker was a poster produced by a soldiers’ magazine, printed in red and black ornate lettering on yellow paper and bearing a famous quotation by the sixteenth-century humanist Ulrich von Hutten:

‘Doesn’t sit well with me at all,’ said Lieutenant Wiese. ‘Dreaming of past happiness is the only thing that keeps me going.’

Fröhlich took quite a different view. It was he who had hung up the poster, and felt himself inspired anew by it every day.

‘Hutten was a truly great man,’ he told Geibel, who never failed to lend a willing ear to his lectures. ‘It’s almost like he wrote that specifically with us in mind. If only he was here with us now… But just you wait and see; we’re going to send them packing. Watch how the Russians turn tail and start running for their lives once we get started! – “I break on through.” What a brilliant rallying cry, eh?’

Little homilies like that were generally followed by long disquisitions on the current military situation. Fröhlich went on to explain how the Russians might soon be facing encirclement and annihilation themselves, if only… Corporal Herbert, whose temper had become very frayed of late, couldn’t bear to listen to Fröhlich’s drivel. He either threw in snide interjections or left the bunker for the duration. Breuer often found himself staring pensively at the quotation on the wall. He found these sentiments from a former age deeply moving.

The surviving elements of Colonel von Hermann’s Panzer division were also based at Dubininsky, almost exactly in the centre of the Cauldron. Its role there was to act as a reserve intervention force for the army. If the Russians happened to ‘kick up a stink’ anywhere – if they broke through the main line of defence ordered by Hitler, that is – von Hermann’s unit was required to ‘iron out’ the problem. Rather more accurately, Major Kallweit described their task as ‘playing fireman’. The remains of the artillery regiment under Colonel Lunitz, the twenty tanks of the tank regiment that the mechanics had somehow made serviceable again, and the newly formed ‘Eichert Battalion’, comprising former gunners, men from the logistics and signals units and the remains of the defunct tank destroyer detachment, were run off their feet. For, unfortunately, a stink arose all too frequently, especially on the northwestern section of the front, where divisions that had been seriously depleted during the withdrawal found themselves in very unfavourable terrain. Much to the chagrin of the divisional CO, every time the battalion’s units returned from their rotating sorties to this section, they did so pretty badly mauled. One morning, the rumbling sounds of fighting in the northwestern sector seemed to go on for ever. There seemed to be one hell of a stink over there. When Colonel von Hermann came back from a conference at the Corps in the afternoon, Unold, his composure now restored somewhat by the fact that the situation had stabilized – at least for the time being – since the terrible days of the withdrawal, handed him their mobilization orders, which he’d just received from High Command.