Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘No, no, please just take the money… I might lose it.’

The train snorted its way into the station. Brakes screeched, doors slammed and the darkened platform was filled with rushing people.

‘Werner,’ the girl said, and her voice sounded strangely muted. ‘Werner, I’m begging you, please don’t lie to me… not now, just when we’re about to part. You… you’re going to Stalingrad, I know it!’

The captain took her hands in his. He said nothing. He gazed deep into her desperate eyes. The look he gave her was full of hurt. And of love. And of parting: a painful, painful parting. He bent down and tenderly kissed away two shining tears that had appeared on her cheeks. There was a sharp blast of a whistle, and the train began to pull slowly out of the station. The captain swung round, leaped up on to the running board and gave her one last wave.

‘Werner!’ the girl cried, her voice choked with tears, and she stretched out her hands to him. Then, whispering, she uttered his name once more before letting her arms drop, forlornly. The train rumbled off into the darkness.

‘To Stalingrad,’ she thought, and felt the blood surge to her heart. ‘To Stalingrad – I’ll never see him again.’

A figure tramps with long strides through the bright, moonlit night. The mammoth’s footprints he leaves behind in the encrusted blanket of snow, from the heavy felt boots he is wearing, are instantly filled in again by the biting east wind. It assails the solitary traveller time and again, its incessant gusts tugging at his heavy overcoat and trapping it between his legs, and piercing his clothes and balaclava with its icy needle-jabs. The glimmer of the stars has been extinguished by the milky light of the moon, but an invisible star is guiding the traveller. The figure is Padre Peters. Behind him, he is dragging a little sled with equipment. He is making for the head of the remote gorge where the main field dressing station is located. Since the order came through that the wounded and sick could only be flown out with the express permission of the chief medical officer, field dressing stations and hospitals have become full to bursting. The number of men dying of cold and hunger grows by the day. But still the big transport planes, each of which can evacuate around thirty-five wounded, regularly return to the airfields they set out from with empty spaces. The padre has been working his way up the long gorge for several minutes now. He knows the way; he has been here many times before. But today he appears to have gone astray, despite it being almost as bright as day. Then, momentarily, a strip of light flashes somewhere off to the side. Ah, yes, there it is at last! That must be the mobile operating theatre. From the large vehicle, parked in a hollow excavated from the slope of the ravine as if in a garage, a medical NCO emerges and walks towards him. He is carrying a large pail, from which something naked and bloody is protruding, surrounded by stained bandages and torn scraps of uniform – a freshly amputated leg.

‘Good evening to you, Padre,’ the man greets him, his voice trembling from the cold. ‘It’s been all go here today again… what a great Christmas!’

Padre Peters climbs the steps up into the lorry, pulls aside the tarpaulin, and opens the wide door. For a few seconds, he’s dazzled by the bright reflection of the creamy white walls inside. The acrid smell of disinfectant stings his nostrils. The head doctor, identifiable by the peaked cap he’s wearing, is just completing the final stitches under the intense glare of the operating lamp.

‘Evening all!’ says the padre. ‘You ought to signpost your dressing station better, doctor! It would have been a shame if I’d missed you today.’

‘Signpost!’ With a hollow laugh, the surgeon chokes back the reproach he was about to utter, and instead repeats the padre’s word. ‘That’s all we need! So we can become even more overrun than we are now, eh? As it is, I’ve no idea how we’ll ever manage to treat all these patients. The place is jam-packed. Fifteen to twenty deaths on the operating table and, if we’re lucky, thirty to forty men evacuated is all we can get through in any one day – yet a hundred new patients show up daily! Day and night, it goes on. We’re barely getting any sleep nowadays…’

He passes his surgical assistant the instruments and wipes his damp brow with the back of his hand.

‘It’s a bottomless pit, I tell you. It can’t go on like this.’

His face is grey and haggard. The assistant drapes his fur jacket round his shoulders and goes outside, with the padre following. In the middle of the gorge is a large marquee housing the wounded. It has not, as is customary elsewhere, been sunk into the ground as protection against the cold and flying shrapnel. The fierce wind is shaking at its canvas sides and blowing drifts of snow in through the gaps at the bottom. Inside lie the injured men, tightly packed together. Even the narrow passageways are crammed with stretchers. A little trench oven in the middle of the marquee is crackling away busily, but it only manages to warm those in its immediate vicinity. Two storm lanterns, hung from the tent poles, emit a guttering light that doesn’t reach the far corners. Next to one of the lamps stands a construction of wooden battens roughly nailed together, which is meant to represent a Christmas tree. Three candle stubs are burning on it.

As Peters walks in, a few of the men lift their heads. A whisper goes around the tent: ‘It’s the padre, the padre!’ – ‘You see, didn’t I tell you? I said he wouldn’t forget about us on Christmas Eve!’

‘Thanks for coming, Padre!’

‘What news is there, Padre? Tell us! Is it true our tanks are still in Kalach?’ In front of one of the lamps, Padre Peters hangs a colourful poster showing the infant Jesus in the manger. Next to it he sets up the record player he’s brought with him. What should he say to the men? He knows how things stand.

‘Let us put our faith in God,’ he says solemnly. ‘His Will be done!’ Saying this, he sits down under one of the lamps and starts reading them the Christmas story. His voice, pure as freshly fallen snow, fills the tent. Silence descends. Only the steady, rambling delirium of a severely wounded soldier and the uneasy drone of aircraft overhead form a backdrop to words lost in the mists of time, but which now bring childhood memories flooding back:

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn…

Silent tears run down grime-encrusted, frostbitten faces. For a few minutes, the men who are lying here in abject misery forget the pain, the hunger and the cold. And now from the gramophone comes the sound of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The soaring notes of the organ resonate around the marquee. The padre has put the loudest needle he can find on the playing arm to try to drown out the din of aircraft engines, which is increasing by the minute. Suddenly a roaring sound rushes through the air, and their hearts stop beating for several moments. Wummmmp! The earth shudders, the tent poles shake and the lamps flicker wildly. And once again – ssischschsch… wummp! That was a close one! And now the noise reaches a terrible crescendo of howling intensity. Bomb splinters tear and hum through the canvas at the top of the tent, which pitches and shakes like it’s caught in the eye of a storm. There follow moments of fearful, helpless tension… then a collective sigh of relief. So, they’ve got away with it again! The aeroplane engines die away, and the powerful notes of the organ soar upwards in triumph. Padre Peters goes along the lines of wounded men. Here and there he squats down, asking questions and offering words of encouragement and consolation. An NCO who had had both of his feet amputated just the day before is keen to tell his story.