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

The soldier grinned. He let go of his nose for a breath, then pinched it again and continued.

“‘Manstein has retreated. Hitler has deserted you. Winter has found you. Every seven seconds a German soldier dies in Stalingrad. One… two… three…’”

He dropped his hand from his nose. “Over and over.”

Nikki understood. Months back, when he’d first encountered Russian propaganda, it had seemed silly, easily ignored. But inside the Cauldron, any offer of relief, even from a Red loudspeaker, had to be considered. Surrender or death. Everyone in the Sixth Army knew one or the other was their likely fate. The repetition of the messages broadcast on the battlefield or here on the radio joined with the lice, hunger, danger, and raw fear to strip the men’s nerves another layer.

“Tell me,” Nikki asked, “about Manstein.”

For every soldier in the Cauldron, the name Manstein symbolized hope. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein was going to smash through the Red ring and free them from the Kessel.

It was common knowledge that the Sixth Army was too weak and short on supplies to force a breach in the enemy forces. The breakthrough would have to come from outside. The rescue mission had fallen to the brilliant Manstein, hero of the July siege at Sevastopol. For the month since the circle had closed around them, rumors flew among the men. “Hitler hasn’t forgotten us,” they agreed, gripping each other by the shoulders, holding on to one another as if to keep themselves from floating off the planet. “Hitler’s sent Manstein to come and get us out.”

On December 12, twelve days earlier, those hopes became a reality when Manstein struck. The field marshal led thirteen divisions out of Kotelnikovo, striking furiously at the Russians in a narrow salient out of the southwest. After ten days of hard charging, hacking at the Reds in repeated lightning attacks like an ax against a tree, one of the panzer divisions, the Fourth under General Hermann “Papa” Hoth, pushed to within forty kilometers of the Sixth Army’s perimeter.

“I watched them coming,” the soldier said. “Every night, we’d look south. We could see the flashes getting brighter, you know; we could hear the fighting when the wind was right. We’d jump up and shout, ‘Give it to them, Papa! Come and get us!’ We knew they were coming. We knew it.”

The engineer turned full toward Nikki, to be certain to impart all of his story with the pain behind it. His eyes narrowed, projecting the images into Nikki’s eyes.

“Last night the lights started fading. We just stood there in the dark, with our hands out, you know, like children. And then the lights were gone. Manstein had turned around. We got quick orders to pull back. The Russians were coming our way. That’s when our truck got hit.”

He patted the lathe. “So here I am. That about settles it, I think.”

Nikki studied the engineer’s hand on the machine. He could sense the connection there, an old, true one. This man had loved his machines. They’d put his feet on the ground, walked him into manhood with their screeching and sparking. The same was done for me in the fields by Father’s cows. I was raised among them, understanding their ways, nature’s habits. Now it was all near an end.

The engineer’s gentle strokes on the lathe were like a man touching his own tombstone. Without looking up, the soldier said, “I think I’d like to be alone, Corporal.”

Nikki nodded. He wanted to pat the man on the shoulder. He reached out but did not touch him. He walked away.

The sound of a single rifle shot beat Nikki to the doorway. He did not want to turn back to look but he could not overcome his sense of his own fate, an urge to watch and remember what was happening here in the last days of the Sixth Army in the Cauldron. Others, he knew, would ask someday about the sorrow of these men. Nikki would tell them.

He would tell them about the quiet machinist lying beside the lathe from Boblingen in an empty shop room, facedown in a spreading scarlet bloom of despair. And the gaunt men in the next room with bellies full of dog. These were men who did not get up from their places on the floor to see what had happened to the quiet fellow who’d shared their Christmas Eve meal or even inquire about him when Nikki sat back down in their circle.

Nikki spent that night in the Barricades factory. He did not go again into the shop where the engineer lay dead. Let the room be his shrine, Nikki thought. Let him lie there in peace near his lathe. It’s a better place than any I could drag him to.

The conversation around the lantern was hushed and strained, as if coming from under a great weight. The men talked of their homes, their civilian jobs, their women and children. One spoke to the group in a voice almost too hushed to hear and described himself as though he were already dead. He wondered how his family would fare with him gone forever. His wife and three boys would go to live with his mother, who’d make sure the boys learned some manners and read some books. His wife was a good woman, a hard worker, but coarse, a country girl. This sent each man into a reverie of his own over the fates of his kin after his death in Stalingrad.

In the hallway, the two guards waited for their hour-long shifts to end. Nikki said he did not have his rifle with him but would take a turn on guard. One of the men thanked him and handed over his Mauser.

Nikki walked to the hall carrying the weapon. He’d not held a gun in more than a month, not since he’d carried Thorvald’s. The heft in his hand, heavy with purpose, brought images bursting out of his fingers and arm. Gripping the rifle, he felt he’d grasped again a link in an endless, evil chain, a succession of guns, swords, knives, arrows, spears, clubs—weapons extending backward and forward into time. He saw bodies scattered everywhere, ten billion bodies lying across time, across an eternal barbed-wire fence. He held the rifle away from him. Look at this thing. Metal and wood, that’s all it is. But it’s also a door, an opening that the devil and death and all that hates man and life can march through. Amazing what this thing can do, amazing what we’ll do with it in our hands. Nikki leaned the rifle against the wall. He turned his back and walked to a window overlooking a factory courtyard.

He stood at the window, absorbing the precious calm of this Christmas Eve. After a while, a barrage bathed the concrete walls and floor of the courtyard in shimmering red. A pop of green added its tint to the shadows in the courtyard. The two colors swirled, mingled, and were joined by amber and white flickers from overhead. In the night sky, hundreds of colored flares raced their sparkling tails into the sky to explode at their highest points.

Nikki ran to the stairs. He climbed two stories for a better view and sprinted to a window to look over the courtyard wall.

In a giant semicircle, spreading from the Orlovka River far in the northeast to Tsaritsa Gorge on the Volga downtown, German soldiers lobbed flares into the sky to salute the holy season. The display was awesome and beautiful, as if the giant rim of a volcano were erupting while the center remained dark. The ring of colored fire in the sky marked the outskirts of the German troops in the Kessel.

Everything around Nikki danced; his hands, cheeks, and white tunic jittered in the flashes of color. After minutes, the lights and crackles faded and slowly, reluctantly, stopped.

Then the silence over the city was deeper, as though when the merriment was done it had crashed and left a crater. Nikki turned from the window. Through the broken glass came the sound of men’s voices drifting on the wind.