Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

The procession moved on to the east. Its route was lined with dead and wounded, to whom no one paid any attention. A few stragglers brought up the rear, then emptiness and silence closed in once more. The captain’s face had turned pale.

‘Fuck it all!’ he muttered. ‘This fucking shit!’

Breuer thought this an opportune moment to go and search out his men who had decamped the night before with Captain Fackelmann.

Fackelmann had indeed discovered a line of bunkers at the head of the gorge that ran perpendicularly ahead of the main front and which, after about eight hundred metres, joined a larger crossing gully. They were occupied by pioneers from a bridge-building unit, who were in a state of considerable uproar. After some initial difficulties, Fackelmann was able to find enough space for half of his men. The rest, along with troops from the pioneer battalion, took up front-line positions in hastily dug snow holes along the lip of the gorge. These men were relieved every two hours, so that everyone managed to get at least a couple of hours’ shut-eye that night.

The commander of the pioneer battalion, a major in the reserves, was a dignified gent with grey hair and distinguished features (Fackelmann learned later that he was a professor at a technical college). He received the captain with a mixture of relief and indignation.

‘Just look at my battalion!’ he groused, polishing his gold-rimmed spectacles. ‘We were six companies at one time… almost a thousand men. And all of them experienced specialists, excellent and irreplaceable men worth their weight in gold. And now look what they’ve done to us! At the beginning of January we were deployed as infantry for the first time. All my old crew fighting as infantrymen! Seventeen of them froze to death in the first night alone. And when we got back to our base – I only managed to bring half of them back – all our trucks and equipment had been blown to pieces by bombs. Our priceless kit and our special vehicles – all gone! My adjutant, an architect from Vienna, an Austrian with a really sunny disposition, well, he couldn’t take it any more and shot himself.’

The old man wiped his eyes with a trembling hand.

‘And now we’re here, and we’ve been detailed to dig defences… just eighty of us. That’s all I have left. All the rest are either dispersed, or dead, wounded, starved or frozen to death or have been drafted into other units… And the day before yesterday this first lieutenant appears, some lah-di-dah little jackass, you know the type, I’m sure. Tells us the front has been breached! And that we’ve got to hold this position to the last man! Of course, he promptly clears off himself. And we’re left sitting here, seeing nothing, hearing nothing and not knowing our right hand from our left. No doctor, no telephone, no food… but all the same, we’re supposed to hold our position! To the last man! I ask you, what kind of madness is that? Is there any rhyme or reason to it? Is that any way to treat people? Oh, that devil, that bloody devil!’

Fackelmann got to hear this last exclamation from the old man many times, without ever knowing who he meant by it.

The night passed peacefully. From first light, though, mortars began landing in the gorge. Every now and then, a burst of machine-gun fire, from some distance away, whistled over their heads. Later that morning, Fackelmann went in search of the lieutenant colonel of the Pioneer Corps, who was reputed to be encamped with the rest of his unit around the corner in the larger gully. He was met by a wizened figure with a malevolent expression and short, bandy legs. His stature had earned him the nickname ‘radish-dragger’ among his men (‘if you stuck a radish in his arse, the top’d drag along the ground’). He greeted Fackelmann in his comfortable bunker in the foulest of moods.

‘What news have you got about the situation, then?’

The captain said he regretted he knew nothing.

‘Nothing? What are you doing here, in that case? Why have you come here at all, in fact? Oh, reinforcements for the defensive front, are you? Great, then you can start by taking over the first two hundred metres of my sector here! I’ve got to shift further to the right. I’ve got no support down there.’

The captain’s timid reply that he wasn’t actually under the lieutenant colonel’s command went unheard by the little gnome’s malformed ears.

‘You keep a civil tongue in your head, understood? I’m not leaving this bunker here come hell or high water! Wouldn’t dream of it!’

Fackelmann was relieved when Breuer appeared. But the lieutenant didn’t bring him any cheer either. Taciturn and indifferent to the captain’s loud complaints, he soon moved on to try to track down Fröhlich. He found him in a remote bunker with no heating, which he had picked out as a hidey-hole. Breuer then went to find his men. The first person he came across, behind a snow rampart, was First Lieutenant Nasarov, with his two Hiwis in tow. They were all carrying captured Russian weapons. Nasarov had put on Breuer’s motorcycle jacket over his Russian greatcoat. He smiled at Breuer from beneath his fur cap and slyly showed him the red collar flashes and the enamel Soviet star that he’d got hold of somewhere to lend the finishing touches to his uniform when they put their escape plan into action.

‘Goot, goot, Lyevtenant, sir,’ he said in broken German. ‘All will go very goot!’

Geibel and Corporal Herbert sat crouched over a machine gun. They were frozen stiff, from the wet snow soaking them to the skin through their clothes, but otherwise in good spirits.

‘Look over there, Lieutenant!’ said Herbert, pointing over the bank of snow. A long column of vehicles could be seen moving in the far distance. Breuer reached for his field glasses.

‘Well I never!’ he exclaimed in a puzzled tone. ‘Could those be ours?’

Herbert couldn’t suppress a laugh.

‘Ours? No, it’s the Russians! They’ve been dashing about there since first light.’

Breuer put his binoculars down.

‘Damn and blast it!’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘It’s come to that already, has it? If only we could lob a few shells in among them! But with what, eh? Oh well, no matter.’

He turned back to his men.

‘OK, as you were; we’re going to stay back here as planned, come what may! Everything’s disintegrating, and it’ll all fall apart here soon as well. If the retreat is sounded or the position’s overrun, we’ll assemble individually in the bunker over there and wait until the coast is clear.’

He clapped them both on the shoulders.

‘Our scheme’s got to work – just as long as our side doesn’t go and ruin it by breaking out themselves!’

The two men nodded and laughed.

Around midday, urgent shouts are heard at the western end of the line.

‘The Russians! The Russians are here!’ A Soviet patrol on snowshoes has pushed forward into the corner between the main German defensive line and the gorge. The men up front start shooting; some of them have got up out of their snow holes and are shouting and waving excitedly. Captain Fackelmann is no infantryman, but he realizes straight away that the men standing up over there on the ridge are blocking the line of fire from the main defensive line, where the Russian patrol was spotted some time ago.

‘Lie down!’ he yells. ‘Are you crazy? Lie down!’

All the yelling and shooting had lured the ‘radish-dragger’ out of his lair.

‘Unbelievable!’ he screeched. ‘That’s what passes for soldiers nowadays!’

Saying this, he sets off up the slope without more ado, his little dachshund’s legs pounding away furiously.

‘Everyone listen to my commands! Follow me! Chaaaaarge!!!’