Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘Anywhere behind our lines. No, not to Pitomnik; that’s pointless… To Gumrak! There’s still room there!’

‘To Gumrak… But what about vehicles, Colonel? And petrol… No, we don’t have any left! Twenty lorries, Colonel… or fifteen at a pinch… or ten at the very least! Ten lorries, Colonel!’

‘My dear fellow, what are you thinking of? Where am I supposed to get hold of ten trucks? No, you’ll have to fend for yourselves! Besides, you’ve got a better overview of the situation from where you are. You’ll manage it somehow, I’m sure!’

‘But… Colonel… Colonel!’

The line goes dead. He’s hung up!

The doctor jumps into a VW Kübelwagen and roars off into the snowy night, taking the road to Karpovka, before climbing up to the burning town of Bolshaya Rossoshka, pockmarked by bomb impacts. There, he drives around visiting divisional and regimental staffs, logistics units and supply depots. Almost everywhere he goes, he is shunned and ignored. And even in the few places where he’s given a hearing, they quickly tell him they’re very sorry but they can’t help him. They’ve got their own problems to worry about.

As he’s driving along, he falls foul of a Russian ‘U2’ on its bombing run. Thirty metres ahead, it sets a radio van ablaze. Together with the driver, he pulls two wounded men from the burning vehicle. Two new casualties to add to the six hundred – that’s all he returns with from his nocturnal foray.

But then, the next morning, things unexpectedly fall into place. Twelve lorries draw up, hissing and steaming, outside the field hospital. An empty supply column that had been bringing munitions up from behind the lines. Losing no time, orderlies and doctors carry out the moaning, whimpering wounded. They are packed on to the open flat-bed trucks like cigars in a case. Thirty to forty men per vehicle, each wrapped only in a single blanket. Would they ever reach their destination? And where was that, anyhow? Even so, how promising this uncertainty was compared to the awful certainty of remaining behind!

Padre Peters hurries to and fro, helping carry patients and load them up, and offering consoling words and dressing wounds. Despite the cold, the sweat is streaming off his brow. He keeps hard at work to avoid having to think too much.

‘Hello, Padre!’

Peters looks up into a wild face.

‘We know one another! From the divisional staff. Lieutenant Harras!’

So, this is Harras, is it, the elegant Harras? The padre offers him his hand without a word. Only now does he notice the filthy, blood-soaked rag wrapped round the officer’s hand.

‘Padre, might you be able… look, could I go on one of the lorries?’

‘On a lorry?’ the padre echoes. ‘Certainly not! You can still walk, can’t you? But I’ll see if I can do something about that wounded hand of yours. Come and see the doctor with me, maybe he can get you a fresh dressing.’

The lieutenant gives a start and quickly hides his hand behind his back.

‘No, no,’ he mutters, ‘but thanks anyhow! That won’t be necessary. It’s a clean shot, straight through. No thanks!’ Saying this, he steps aside.

The trucks are full. The drivers close up the side flaps and secure the latches. The troops of the escort detail jump to their feet and the lorry engines chug into life. The fat tyres crunch into the snow and the heavy vehicles begin to roll forward slowly. This activity suddenly galvanizes the miserable, shot-up, starving mass of humanity that is milling about or sitting around on the ground. All those who have assembled here in the crazy hope that some miracle might happen leap into action, storming the trucks as they move off, trying to secure a handhold anywhere, on the side panels or the mudguards or the handle of the driver’s cab door. They stumble and trip over one another, or kick each other to the ground, or are dragged along for a stretch before they are shaken off and crushed beneath the wheels of the vehicles behind.

But more than two hundred men are still left lying inside the stables! Over two hundred seriously wounded soldiers hear the noise of the departing lorries. And it dawns on them that no one will be coming to fetch them any more. They have been abandoned. The surgeon, who has kept on working tirelessly throughout (though to what purpose, who can say?), is startled by the concentrated animal-like howl that goes up around the room, as if from a single throat, and then dissolves into a cacophony of individual sighs, groans and roars, mounting over and over again. He sees how, in the semi-darkness at the back of the room, the mass of men lying there begins to stir; he sees faces twisted in pain, the whites of men’s eyes shining, torsos swaying this way and that, limbs stretching, hands with no strength in them being balled into fists; and he notices how men who have lain there for days as motionless as if they were dead suddenly raise themselves up and fall over one another. He sees the grey mass propel itself slowly and clumsily towards the exit, like a river of lava, and then watches as it subsides and solidifies. The groans and screams tail off into a helpless whimpering.

The stretcher-bearers carry eighteen corpses out of the stables, men who have succumbed during their final, desperate battle to stay alive. But the remainder have been defeated and sit sunk in silent lethargy, having surrendered themselves to the inevitable. They don’t even stir a muscle as the thump of exploding shells grows louder, or when an officer dressed in a white fur overjacket and clutching a machine-pistol enters the room, followed by a handful of soldiers.

‘What are you still doing here, doctor?’ the man calls. ‘Clear out this instant! This is where the main defensive line is now!’

‘Are you telling me the main front… runs right through this building?’ the surgeon asks, dumbfounded. He unbuttons his blood-spattered rubber apron and lets it fall to the ground.

‘That’s right! We’re going to try to halt the Soviet advance here again.’

‘Yes, but…’ He glances briefly at the officer and then casts his eyes over to the dark, silent space at the back of the room. The officer follows his gaze. He realizes what the doctor is getting at and says nothing. Then he looks at the doctor once more, shrugs his shoulders, and walks out. Now that he has been wrenched from his numbing surgical procedures, the surgeon’s actions take on a nervous haste.

‘Finish up!’ he shouts. ‘We’re leaving!’

His assistant packs away the instruments, while medical orderlies drag equipment outside. The last vehicle’s engine is fired up. The staff doctor and most of his company have already left. The surgeon stops Padre Peters.

‘I’m going to have to prevail upon you, Padre, to assemble all those who are still mobile in some shape or form and walk them down to Gumrak.’

‘So who’s going to stay back here with those who can’t get away?’

‘I will,’ says a quiet voice. It’s the other army chaplain, the Catholic padre. This ‘I will’ hangs in the room like an omen. It brooks no contradiction.

‘I’ll leave three days’ worth of rations here for you,’ says the doctor. He doesn’t mean it to sound sarcastic; it’s just force of habit.

Padre Peters takes his leave of his fellow chaplain with a silent handshake. What could he say anyhow? And who knows which of them has drawn the shorter straw? The men who await certain death in a building that will shortly be swamped by the tide of battle, or those who have to drag themselves out and face the uncertainty of a twenty-five-kilometre-long march through the snow and the bitter cold? Doesn’t this spell the end for all of them, one way or another? Padre Peters dismisses these gloomy thoughts and rushes out. He still has one more task to perform.