David Robbins - War of the Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad

Drawing partially on Nikki’s observations and frontline savvy, Ostarhild presented a vivid picture of the current status of the battle. The attack on Stalingrad had become a series of violent, personal battles. The Germans, in small groups, might occasionally grab a block of ruins or even reach the Volga in or around the factory district. Once they’d consolidated their gains by digging in, the units often found themselves cut off by Russians who moved back across the narrow corridors the Germans had cut. The wounded were frequently unreachable; the dead were left to stiffen in gruesome postures on the ground. The men were losing all hope of personal survival. They continued to fight, but too often their strength was the result of alcohol or contraband amphetamines. Ostarhild depicted the Nazi soldier as unshaven, weary from lack of sleep or relief, ridden with lice, fearful of spending another Russian winter in battle, and having lost all sense of the Reich’s greater purpose in bleeding for this city. Now, they fought—Ostarhild quoted the words of a battlefield reporter—”only for the ultimate obsession: to get at one another’s throats.”

The Russian position in the city was equally perilous. Along a three-mile stretch, the Reds clung desperately to their diminishing portion. In some places the riverbank was less than a hundred meters from their backs. Along with a throttled reserve of ammunition and a fantastic casualty rate, the Russians’ looming problem was that the Volga—the Red Army’s only link to its supply lines—was quickly growing unnavigable. The huge ice floes from the north that annually clogged the river had begun to tighten, but the Volga would not freeze solid enough to permit ground transport over it for another four or five weeks. Until then, the Reds’ reinforcements and supplies would be drastically reduced, if not cut off altogether.

The young lieutenant was asked by his commanding officers if this, then, was not a good time to mount one more large offensive. Ostarhild had anticipated the question: he knew the instant he heard it that he couldn’t answer honestly. A true response would not have been what the staff wanted to hear nor what they were prepared to pass on to General Paulus, the head of the Sixth Army. In his heart, Ostarhild felt the common soldiers had grown too disorganized, too cold in the shadow of their own doom to take part effectively in any more major assaults. As an intelligence officer, he’d censored hundreds of letters from the troops addressed to loved ones back home. Without exception, the letters displayed a deep brooding over their bleak prospects for returning to Germany alive. Command had responded by ordering all such letters intercepted and impounded. No sense depressing the home front with defeatist claptrap, they’d said.

Instead of laying before the officers the naked truth, Ostarhild spoke carefully, choosing terms he knew would be politic for their ears. The German soldier will fight bravely, he said, regardless of the assignment. But the generals had to act quickly before the window of opportunity closed. Ostarhild kept to himself his dread that the window had slammed shut weeks ago. Another offensive might be successful, he said, especially while the Russians’ supply lines were threatened by the river. But Germany faced several new obstacles here in early November. The weather, the men’s physical condition, and low morale certainly had to be addressed, but equally dangerous to the Reich’s presence in Stalingrad was the growing number of enemy snipers.

The Red sharpshooters had adapted to the destroyed urban terrain far better than the Germans had, Ostarhild observed. They were rapidly becoming very effective. The enemy snipers were responsible for untold casualties, including many among the officer corps. A conservative estimate ranged between one and two hundred wounded or dead per day.

The casualties came in such a terrible way, too—from a distance, from an unseen rifleman who crawled off and escaped detection. The snipers delivered death always as an awful, bloody shock. The men in the trenches had come to believe there was no haven from them. Any movement, even while smoking or relieving themselves, could draw a sniper’s attention. The thought of being hunted through a telescopic sight, of being marked unknowingly with invisible black crosshairs and then selected for a bullet in the brain and instant death, was a chilling, ugly prospect. The men were demoralized. Worse, they were becoming paralyzed.

Ostarhild showed the generals a file folder of clippings from the Russian military newspaper Red Army and the locally printed trench news sheet In Our Country’s Defense. Attached were translations prepared by his staff. He brought their attention to the articles under the heading “From the Front” by a Russian commissar, I. S. Danilov. These were stories of a newly formed Russian sniper school in the 284th Division under Colonel Batyuk. “Obviously,” he concluded, “the Russian command has seen the value of just such a sniper movement. But I doubt even they could have foreseen just how troublesome their snipers would become.”

General Schmidt, Paulus’s aide-de-camp and the ranking officer in the meeting, nodded while he scanned the translations.

“These articles,” he said, “make a very big show over this sniper Zaitsev, the one they call the Hare. He appears to be the brains behind this sniper school.”

Ostarhild agreed. “Yes, sir. He’s Siberian, a hunter from the Urals. Their press is building him up as their prototypical sniper, a great hero.”

Schmidt tapped the papers with the back of his hand.

“Then I think it would be very good for the morale of our men to catch this hero Zaitsev and blow his goddammed head off.”

Schmidt read a few moments longer. The general looked up and beamed around the room with a fat smile.

“And from the looks of things, this fellow Danilov has been quite a help to us.” He held up the sheaves of In Our Country’s Defense, shaking them at Ostarhild. “What we have here, gentlemen, is a catalog of all of Herr Zaitsev’s tactics. It seems to be quite lengthy and complete, wouldn’t you say, Lieutenant? How he thinks, what ruses he prefers, and so on. Tell me: in your opinion, will these help us catch this Russian son of a bitch? This little Red rabbit?”

The other generals in the room sniggered. Ostarhild nodded and said, “Yes, sir, they should.”

“Then wire back to Berlin on my orders,” Schmidt said, standing to conclude the interview. “Tell them we want to kill the best sniper in the whole Russian army. Send me the best German sniper. The very best. Immediately.”

TWO DAYS AFTER OSTARHILD’S MEETING WITH THE General staff, on the afternoon of November ninth, Nikki stood in a swirling snowfall at Gumrak airfield, fifteen kilometers west of the city center. Gumrak’s single landing strip and lone blockhouse formed the closest air link between Germany and Stalingrad. In the last months, the name Gumrak had taken on both joyful and dire connotations among the soldiers of the Wehrmacht embattled in Stalingrad. Gumrak meant you were going home, perhaps bouncing in a seat, safely watching Russia grow small and fade into the mist; perhaps, and all too likely, in the darkness of a canvas bag. They’ve surely run out of pine boxes by now.

Nikki squinted through the whipping whiteness of the snow. He watched the Heinkel He-111 bomber roll to a stop on the runway forty meters from his staff car. This was the first snow of the winter. It came a full month before the early dustings Nikki remembered from home in Westphalia.

The roar of the bomber’s engines peaked and cut back. The blades flipped to a halt. The plane brooded in its own silence for several minutes. No one came to meet it or stepped out of it. Nikki bounced on his toes to stay warm, his hands buried deep in his pockets, the flakes catching on his eyelashes.