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

The soldier who’d walked out in disgust at the jamming broadcast had arrived two hours ago. He, like Nikki, was one of the thousands of German nomads set loose over the city by the demise of their units. This soldier—Nikki did not know his name—had retreated from the outer reaches of the Cauldron on the steppe. In his platoon of engineers, he’d been the last man alive. He wandered east to the city center. When he could stand no more cold, the whipping weather drove him indoors. He walked through the Barricades, unsure of what he was searching for; feeling only a growing hunger and weariness. The men of this squad, as they had with Nikki, invited the engineer to join them for a Christmas Eve meal. Earlier that morning, they’d killed and cooked their two Doberman mascots. The rest of their original company, which had numbered over fifty a month earlier, when they were first assigned to the Barricades, were no longer alive to vote against the feast. The engineer settled into the ring of new comrades and accepted a smoke. He related without emotion the fate of his squad. They’d all died when their vehicle was hit by tank fire in one of the hundreds of skirmishes with the Reds on the rim of the Kessel. He’d been lucky; he was riding on the truck’s running board and was blown free of the explosion. He ended his tale with a shrug, repeating a word softly, with a somber laugh. “Lucky.”

Since Thorvald’s death five weeks before, Nikki had also become a battlefield wanderer. Lieutenant Ostarhild was presumed dead on the steppe, but Nikki’s assignment to the intelligence unit had not been countermanded, so he felt free to continue his expeditions around the city. He became a collector of forlorn tales. The men, from the ruins downtown and Mamayev Kurgan to the factories, all believed they’d been forsaken. Their hope that Hitler would rescue the Sixth Army before they were annihilated was being starved and bled out of them an hour at a time.

Despite the Russians’ commanding position on the steppe and the weakened state of the German troops there, the Reds never quit their harassing attacks in the city proper. Nikki understood the Russian tactic: if they can keep us on the defensive here in the city, we can’t switch to the offensive. We can’t break out of the Kessel. This is their aim, to eradicate the Sixth Army.

In the face of this constant onslaught, Nikki had witnessed courage and feats of determination that redefined what he knew of the human spirit. German soldiers—exhausted, demoralized, and without enough food, ammunition, or even hope-—had continued to fight with discipline across Stalingrad. The Reds gave them no rest, not even leaving their holiday radio broadcasts untouched.

But if Nikki was to give his intelligence report tonight, he would not tell of the fortitude and order of many of the German troops. He would describe scenes of horror. He’d seen black-eyed men, cannibals, circle like vultures waiting for the wounded to die, to snatch them away while still warm. These ghouls were hunted and shot on sight; special patrols had been organized to ferret them out. Even so, roving bands of human-flesh eaters, fatter and rosier of cheek than their starving comrades, haunted the corridors and rooms of the factories and houses. Their number was growing along with their boldness and desperation.

In his account of these last days in Stalingrad, Nikki would also tell of incredible, numbing stupidity. He’d watched He-IIIs, those few that could find breaks in the weather to fly over the Kessel, drop their supplies not on Sixth Army positions but on top of Russians who’d learned to mimic German signal flares. In other places inside the ring, Nikki saw famished German soldiers run to be the first under a parachute when it lowered its cargo to the ground. The men fought each other to tear at the collapsed chute, ripping the silk away to get at the pine crates, shoving like rude piglets. These men opened shipments not of the ham and milk powder, bullets and warm clothing that would keep them alive but tons of marjoram and pepper—this for troops who were killing rats and dogs and grilling them. Another time, the Luftwaffe made the men a gift of a thousand right boots. Nikki’s favorite story in all of Stalingrad this past awful month was the airborne delivery into the Cauldron of a million carefully wrapped Swedish contraceptives.

Mostly, Nikki would report upon doom. Each day over a thousand soldiers in the surrounded pocket died. Many succumbed to wounds suffered against the advancing Reds on the steppe. Others had taken their bullets fighting in the city. But by far, the vast number of corpses Nikki saw piled and protected from the cannibals by their sullen mates had been ravaged by frostbite, typhus, dysentery, or starvation. There was no fuel in the Kessel to run generators for heat or tanks for defense or trucks for transport out of the ring. As a Christmas gift to his remaining quarter million men, Paulus allowed the slaughter of the Sixth Army’s last four hundred horses. These were animals that were themselves withering away from too much duty and not enough food. The men, the weather, the fighting, and even the rare laughter were all spoiled and dying in Stalingrad. Everything inside the Cauldron, like a poisoned river, had been seasoned with doom.

Nikki remembered the holiday feast he’d shared with the men around the radio only an hour before. For the first time in weeks, his stomach was full. He did not let himself think about what lay in his gut. The meat had been red and warm, lapping over his plate in a large portion and well flavored with marjoram. He rose stiffly, the way he always did after the big Christmas Eve meals at home. He walked into the adjoining shop room.

The chamber had a heavy oaken floor designed to hold machinery weighing several tons. Overhead the weary remains of lifts and pneumatics hung in tatters. Chains cascaded from the walls and rusted rafters, giving the room the jangling feel of a dungeon. The machines had been unbolted from the floor and moved months ago by retreating workers. All that remained was a metal lathe in the corner. The engineer who’d walked in from the steppe stood by it with his hand on the gearbox.

Nikki approached quietly and looked at the lathe. The nameplate riveted to the motor housing carried the inscription of the machine’s maker: Oscar Ottmund, Boblingen, Deutschland.

The soldier stroked the nameplate. “Back home, I was a machinist,” he said.

Nikki nodded. “I was a dairy farmer.”

“I’ve never been to Boblingen. Is it nice?”

“I don’t know. I never got very far from Westphalia. Cows don’t take holidays.”

The soldier stroked the lathe casing. “I could make this work, you know. Back home. I could make this sing.”

Nikki patted him on the shoulder. He was close to Nikki’s age. though the war had made them all older.

“Not me,” Nikki laughed. “If it doesn’t moo or fire a bullet, I’m lost.”

The soldier laughed. The war had made them brothers, too.

Nikki searched his pockets for something to give the soldier. It was Christmas Eve. He found nothing.

“What’s it like out on the steppe?” he asked.

The soldier dropped his hand from the lathe.

“Russians. They’ve got it. Ten thousand artillery pieces, a thousand tanks, a million men, all of them running back and forth. You don’t know where they’re going to hit next. They come out of the fog, out of the snow, the sky, the ground. The steppe’s full of ravines and crevices. We roll past them and they jump up behind us. You can’t see distances because of the snow. And every night, they keep up the noise.”

The soldier pinched his nose to ape the tinny sound of loudspeakers. “‘German soldiers,’” he squeaked, “‘lay down your weapons. Your war is over. Come over to warm food and shelter.’”