Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

But as the captain proceeds to give him more information about the composition, equipment and combat readiness of his battalion, the colonel’s face takes on a very grave expression again.

‘You know,’ he says finally, ‘two hundred and seventy extra men in the trenches, that’s all well and good, of course it is. But if I’m honest with you, I’d rather you’d brought me ten canny old infantrymen. One time, a while ago, they sent us three hundred Luftwaffe personnel. Within two days, they’d all been wiped out, every last one! The shit really hit the fan over that, I can tell you. But it’s not sheer numbers that count.’

He paces up and down a few times before stopping in front of the captain.

‘It’s a disgrace,’ he says, ‘to deploy your battalion here in the state it’s in. I’ll have another word with divisional HQ presently. But in the meantime, you’d better take up position in the trenches. There’s nothing else for it.’

Padre Peters makes his way through the village to the dressing station. He has accompanied Fortress Battalion I and intends to stay in this sector for the duration of the unit’s deployment. All of a sudden, he stands stock still. In front of him, carefully stacked up against the side wall of a house, is a heap of bodies. They are clad only in shirts and long johns; some of them are completely naked. The greenish-yellow, rigidly frozen corpses are covered in brown spots of dried blood. Their faces are frozen in either a rictus of death throes or an expression of apathy. At that moment, a new consignment of bodies is being unloaded from a sled. Troops are busy undressing them and sorting through uniforms and pieces of equipment. One soldier is kneeling and using both hands to hold one of the bodies by the head, which consists only of a forehead with a ruddy mess of flesh below, while another soldier attempts to tug a felt boot off its foot. They are chatting loudly and unconcernedly and are treating the task they are engaged in like some workaday activity. Padre Peters has encountered death in a thousand different forms. He has seen it often enough to know that constant contact with it has a way of desensitizing a person. But even among medical orderlies and work parties detailed to bury or rebury corpses, he is used to seeing a vestige of reverence, which at least helps maintain a semblance of dignity. This is the first time he’s seen men handling their fallen comrades like they’re logs of wood.

He goes over to have a word with the old sergeant who is there to collect up the dead men’s dog tags. The man lifts his head and looks at the person addressing him. Without more ado he flares up, his hoar-frost-covered moustache trembling with anger. ‘So what are we supposed to do?’ he asks, his voice quick and hoarse. ‘There’s no way we can transport them out of here any more! Almost every day, there’s another mountain of them. This lot here are just the ones from yesterday, from Kazatchi Hill, and this isn’t all of ’em either. What’s that – you want to know if we have a cemetery?’ He gives a hollow laugh. ‘Oh yeah, we’d have our work cut out there all right! And some nice crosses on the graves too, perhaps? Ha ha ha, crosses!’ He shoves his face close to the padre’s, who recoils in alarm from the dangerously unstable look in the man’s eyes. And now the sergeant barks at Peters: ‘You should have thought of that beforehand! We chuck ’em in the gravel pit back there, right? Shovel a bit of snow on top, and then some more bodies, and then more snow, that’s the way it goes! What are you looking at me like that for? We didn’t want it to be like that. It’s not our fault!’

The padre turns away. He’s lost for words. Around his chest, it feels like he’s wearing a breastplate of ice, beneath which his heart is burning and trembling.

In the so-called ‘reception bunker’ of the main dressing station, he is met by a blast of smoke-laden fug. The room is full of soldiers with dirty field dressings round their heads and limbs. They are sitting on the narrow wooden bench along the back wall or squatting on the ground and quietly enjoying the modicum of warmth in the bunker. Somewhere beyond them, another soldier is moaning in pain. His muted cry of ‘aah… aah… aah’ punctuates the passing moments like a time signal.

The young assistant doctor gives the padre – by now a familiar face – a brief nod. He is in the process of unwinding a grubby strip of rag from the hand that a thin and worried-looking soldier is holding out to him. The smell of carbolic mingles with a sweetish, putrid stench. As the doctor unravels the final bit of the dressing, a blackish, gelatinous mass comes away with it. The doctor is holding the skeleton of the young man’s five fingers, now stripped clean of all their flesh. He gazes in silence at the white bones.

‘Disgraceful!’ he suddenly snaps at his patient, whose whole body is shaking like a leaf. ‘It’s a bloody disgrace that you’ve been going around with it like this for so long, d’you hear? Don’t imagine for one moment that this’ll get you a free pass home!’

The man’s mouth gapes helplessly. His gaze wanders in uncomprehending horror from his mutilated hand to the surgeon’s furious face and back again. The doctor regains some of his composure.

‘Well, don’t gawp at me like an idiot, man!’ he barks. ‘It’s no big deal, anyhow! They’ll snip off the bones, and in a week or so you’ll be able to shoot again. Off you go, get yourself over to the operation bunker!’

He turns to his next patient, who extends a filthy foot to him. The toes are a midnight-blue colour.

‘I’m bloody sick of these endless cases of frostbite!’ shouts the doctor. ‘They should lock up the lot of you! You know what this is, don’t you? It’s self-mutilation! I know you lot! You know how to play the system all right, don’t you? Well, you’ve come to the wrong person here!’

The soldier’s eyes grow moist.

‘What are we supposed to do then, Assistant Surgeon, sir?’ he asks, on the verge of tears. ‘We never get to take off our boots! We’re on sentry duty day and night, and when we aren’t we’re building defences. And all of us are stuck in foxholes the whole time!’

‘Right, get some ointment rubbed into that and then be off with you! And don’t show your face here again!’

Things go on in the same vein for almost an hour. Eventually, peace descends. The doctor emits a heavy sigh, mops his sweaty brow and sits down on an upturned crate. The padre looks at his harried face, trying to guess his age. Twenty-six, twenty-seven maybe? Yet he looks like he’s wasting away from the strain of a century’s worth of suffering.

‘My God, Doctor!’ he says quietly, ‘I hardly recognize you! What’s got into you?’

The doctor leans forward and looks wide-eyed at the chaplain. He waves his hand in the air, in an undecipherable gesture.

‘Save your breath, Padre!’ he exclaims. ‘I know precisely what you’re going to say, every word. Hold your tongue, I beg you!’

He slumps back against the wall and lights a cigarette with shaking hands. He inhales the smoke in long drags and blows it out up to the ceiling. Slowly he grows calmer. Then he begins to speak, quietly, as if talking to himself.

‘I’m from an old medical family. I studied medicine out of a love for mankind… to reduce the suffering in the world and to try to conquer death.’ He gives a short, cynical laugh. ‘What grand dreams we have when we’re young! Now I’m not a doctor any more. It’s not possible. The men here with second- and third-degree frostbite, see, they turn up in their hundreds every day. As a doctor I ought to be sending them home.’

He pauses to light another cigarette from the stub of the previous one.