Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘What’s the meaning of this?’ Silence. The lieutenant colonel got to his feet. ‘What do you want?’ he asked sharply. The soldier right at the front took off his cap like a supplicant. Tousled hair was poking out of his balaclava. The left side of his face grimaced in an incessant twitch; it made him look as though someone was constantly jabbing him with a needle. ‘Just wanted to warm up a bit, sir. We’re—’

‘So you thought you’d just burst in here without so much as a by-your-leave, eh? Without knocking? Unbelievable. This is a staff billet, understood? A staff billet! So, about-turn now and out you go!’

The troops hesitated, staring in disbelief at the officer. The lieutenant colonel’s face flushed.

‘Never heard of such a lack of discipline!’ he muttered. He went and stood right in front of the men. ‘Are you hard of hearing or something? Don’t you understand? Make yourselves scarce!’

The men didn’t understand. All they understood was that they had spent weeks on end lying in snow holes with frozen limbs and one hundred and fifty grams a day bread ration each; and that, deserted by the High Command and hounded by the enemy, they’d dragged themselves for hour after hour through terrible cold; and that here was a bunker, a bunker such as they had never set eyes on since they’d begun the siege of Stalingrad, with electric light and a warm stove and benches and tables and beds with mattresses; and that this bunker was virtually unoccupied. That was what they understood. But in ten years of military service, they’d had it dinned into them that the only way of expressing their wishes was to keep shtum and that, when asked, the only reply that was expected of them was ‘Yes, sir!’ And they’d learned that lesson well. The most terrible war of all time had been started with lies and betrayal. They’d kept quiet about that. They had been used as instruments for the oppression and abuse of foreign peoples. They’d kept quiet about that. Foreign countries had been pillaged through their efforts and finally they’d been led deep into the heartland of Russia, as far as Stalingrad, where they’d been ordered to fight, starve and freeze and where, if they’d fallen sick or were wounded, they were left to die in conditions you wouldn’t even leave an animal to die in. They’d kept quiet about that. And when someone who was unsettled by the unspoken questions in their faces spoke to them, they simply replied ‘Yes, sir!’ like they’d been told to. And so it was that they kept quiet again when they were expected to understand that this warm bunker hadn’t been prepared for the likes of them, but for the others – those who had the power to decide over life and death – and that they were destined to die. And even if they didn’t understand that, they still said ‘Yes, sir!’ to it, albeit not in as many words. So, slowly and exhaustedly, they shuffled backwards towards the door, casting a last stolen glance at the wonderful pleasures of this room as they went.

Even so, the lieutenant colonel was not left to savour his victory. The door kept opening time and again, and finally it remained open the whole time. The lieutenant colonel was at his wits’ end. He telephoned the Corps and asked for a military policeman to be dispatched on an urgent service assignment involving the establishment of a new front. And one duly arrived, put on his steel helmet, hung his shiny breastplate round his neck, and with the help of these symbols of authority shooed the unwanted guests out into the darkness.

Meanwhile, it had grown cold in the bunker. In addition, the lights had gone out.

‘Oh, that’s just great!’ the lieutenant colonel muttered to himself. ‘Just great! And that’s how we’re hoping to win this war, is it?’

He pulled out his slippers from his leather suitcase, lit a candle and sat down in front of the rekindled stove. That was how Siebel and Breuer found him when they returned in the late evening, dog-tired and frozen through. Major Siebel had thrown himself into the pointless task he’d been assigned with a zeal that would have been worthy of a far better enterprise. He had really sunk his teeth into the task, as if the outcome of the whole war depended on its success. The Corps’ military policemen and their commander had vanished, one by one. Only at the railway crossing where Breuer and Siebel set up their checkpoint did they manage, with some difficulty, to scrape together a force of around fifty men. They were standing around there starving and with their teeth chattering; some collapsed there and then. But food and accommodation proved impossible to find, let alone any materials for constructing defences. And so the major was forced to send them away again. And when, as the evening drew on, the ever-increasing stream of retreating soldiers made any further effort impossible, Siebel drove to the High Command. There, they could scarcely even recall what the assignment was. Unold had already disappeared. ‘So, right,’ he was finally instructed, ‘fair enough: your role in the operation is complete. The Fourteenth Corps, which was due to occupy that sector, is now in place. It will take over the task of building the defensive line.’

The task of building the defensive line! Recalling this phrase, Siebel chuckled grimly to himself as he gathered up his things at the bunker.

‘What’s going on, then?’ asked the lieutenant colonel uneasily.

‘We’re shipping out, back to our unit.’

‘What about me, then? What are my orders?’

‘You? You’re free to do as you please. Maybe you can even look for your artillery columns. You’d better start right here in the gorge, though! It’s crammed full of vehicles. Some of your lot are bound to be among them.’

The lieutenant colonel jumped up.

‘That’s outrageous! Simply turfing an officer out on the street like this, quite outrageous… I’ll file a formal complaint! I’ll go straight to High Command with this!’

He flung his slippers and washing kit into his suitcase and threw on his fur coat.

‘With this fantastic level of organization,’ he grumbled, ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we lost the war. But at least in this case there’s no doubt who’s to blame. The top brass, that’s who, this bloody idiotic top brass!’

Breuer sat down at the table and laid his head on his arms. The impressions of this day, the dreadful, pitiable scenes of the German army in retreat and the chaotic scenes back at the railway crossing, all this had shaken his mental equilibrium to the core. He would have liked nothing better than to just crawl away somewhere and hide, and not to hear or see anything any more. Couldn’t this old man just shut his trap for once? He shot the lieutenant colonel a furious glance – and suddenly he remembered where he knew this face from. The pince-nez, the centre parting, the little moustache – and that expression…

‘So,’ said the lieutenant colonel in parting, ‘I hope I’ll eventually see you all in my machine-gun company!’

Gripped by an insane fury, Breuer leaped up and launched himself at the lieutenant colonel. ‘ Who ’s to blame?’ he screamed. ‘The top brass? No, I’ll tell you who’s really to blame. You are – yes, you! You and all your bloody kind! With all your jingoism and the warmongering you use to poison children’s minds – all your fine talk of steel helmets and swagger sticks and the red-white-and-black flag and “Let’s March to Victory Over France”. You are to blame, you and no one else – Mister Schoolmaster Strackwitz!’

He’d grabbed the lieutenant colonel by the lapels of his fur coat and was shaking him like a bundle of straw. The old officer’s eyes were bulging out of their sockets, and beads of sweat were forming on his brow. He thought he’d been transported to a madhouse and began to doubt his own sanity. With a sudden strength born of desperation, he wrenched himself free of Breuer’s grip, snatched up his suitcase and ran out. Only when he was safely outside did he pull out his pay-book to check for himself whether he wasn’t actually the schoolteacher Strackwitz, instead of the same old Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Sauer from Breslau, a Great War veteran drafted back into military service in 1936, and before that a successful travelling salesman dealing in vacuum cleaners.