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

The song grew, spreading around the Cauldron the way moments ago the fireworks had. Nikki sang, too.

Inside the ring we are perishing, he thought, his voice rising with the unseen others. But up there where we send this song, beyond the clouds, touched only by the tinsel of starlight and moonlight, it is a silent, clean, good Christmas.

NIKKI WOKE WITH A START IN HIS CORNER. HIS JOINTS groaned; overnight, his limberness had been sapped by the icy floor. He rose to his knees, and the chill greeted him. It was colder by far than the day before.

He limped to a window where the men went to relieve themselves. Working the buttons on his pants, he looked east toward the Volga. Snow whipped over the landscape like salt pouring from a box. During the night a blizzard had settled over the city. The temperature outside must be deadly. Merry Christmas, Nikki thought, to the Sixth Army.

When he was done, he walked through the room past the waking squad members. Their grumbles showed the misery of rising to another day of Stalingrad. Nikki climbed the stairs again for a look west out the window, over the courtyard toward the steppe.

His vision was stopped by a curtain of driving snow. The wind wailed wrathfully outside. Above the moaning gusts he heard the unmistakable pounding of artillery. Cannons and katyusha rockets were raining down with the snow into the Cauldron onto German heads this Christmas morning.

Nikki and the men busied themselves ripping up floorboards to build a fire. By late afternoon, the blizzard had slackened. Scraps of metal were arranged on the floor to make a brazier; wood was laid in it and lit with newspapers. The fire’s wash warmed Nikki’s hands and face while his back stung with the cold.

From the small radio, the scratchy voice of Joseph Goebbels filled the room. Hitler’s minister of propaganda narrated the military’s Christmas show, claiming it was being broadcast from around the empire of German-held countries. The minister assured the public that all was well and strong with the Nazi armies fighting for their future.

Goebbels’s high voice screeched from the radio like a maddened eagle. His confidence is shot thin, Nikki thought. He’s using too much force, pounding down his words like artillery, like he’s trying to kill something with his voice. He’s trying to kill fear, kill doubt. Everything everywhere is fine, he says. Everything is good for Germany. We’re winning, the world cowers from us. Don’t worry for your sons. They’re wrapped warmly in Germany’s destiny.

The minister of propaganda chanted out a list of cities conquered by the Wehrmacht, taking his audience on a grand excursion of the Third Reich’s front lines. In each locale, the soldiers gave a brave rendition of a holiday carol to send a reassuring Christmas wish home to their loved ones.

“And now, from Narvik,” Goebbels crooned. The men around the radio joined in while soldiers stationed north of the Arctic Circle on the Norwegian coast led them in “Good King Wenceslas.” Even singing, Nikki suspected the carolers were not really in Norway but in a professional studio in Berlin. The singing was too good, too sharp, to be a chorus of fighting men.

“And in Tunisia,” Goebbels shouted when the song was done. Another expert male chorus rendered “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.” The men around the radio swayed, their faces flickering in the firelight. They touched shoulders while they sang. The glow reflected off the rims of their eyes and on moist trails down their cheeks. A tear welled in Nikki’s eye. He wished for the teardrop to grow. He sang while it swept down his chin. He rejoiced in the tear’s chilly damp. It was good to feel so full, to cry and sway with these men, lost as he was. The watering of his vision as he blinked gave a prism to the sparkling flames in front of him.

Nikki sang and cried. He sensed at last the break he knew was coming, like the snap of a frayed cord. He was no longer, in his heart, a soldier of the German army.

He was finally unbound as he sang, evicted from his duty by the lies and manipulations pouring from the radio as well as by the senselessness he’d witnessed and taken part in over the past four months. Goebbels is doing his duty, telling the German people all is calm, when the whole black truth is we’re dying here in Stalingrad, in Europe, Africa, everywhere. And soldiers and civilians around the world, they’re dying with us, doing their duty.

Nikki let his tears flow. Enough. I’ve done my duty in Stalingrad. I’ve left behind me a warrior’s trail of bodies. It’s what was asked of me. Now it’s done.

Duty. We Germans cling to it like it was a shawl to keep us warm. We’ll do anything in its name. How cold will we be when the shawl is ripped away, when the liars are silent at last and the duty we had to their lies dies with them? What will the believers do then? They’ll claim they didn’t know, their leaders were false to them! Better to kill duty at the first sign of a lie from your leaders; smash duty right then. Throw it off you like a snake that’s dropped on you from a tree!

With duty gone from around your shoulders, you see all the lies clearly because duty makes you blind. Look down at duty, with a broken back now, hissing weakly up at me from the floor. I see everything revealed. Hitler. Stalin. Churchill. Mussolini. Roosevelt. Hirohito. Like the men singing on the radio, a chorus of liars. They must be liars because this war they’ve told us to wage cannot be the truth for mankind. It must be an insane lie!

I have no duty to Germany any longer. My allegiance is only to me now, to my life, given to me by God alone. My love is only for my family. Because Hitler has abandoned me and lied to me, my contract with him is broken. I won’t kill his enemies, and I will not meet my fate under his orders. I am free.

The melody waltzed to a close. The men stopped swaying. Many wiped eyes on their sleeves.

“And now,” Goebbels’s voice bellowed with pride, “from Fortress Stalingrad.”

The men stared at each other, incredulous.

“From here?” one said.

“I don’t believe it!”

“There’s no one from the radio here! When did they get here? Today in the blizzard?”

“This is shit! Goebbels is lying!”

“Did you hear that? Fortress Stalingrad? Damn it!”

“Was the whole show a lie? What do you think?”

Nikki rose from the circle of shocked soldiers. Now they know, too, he thought. Good. Men should know truths while they die.

Nikki leaned down before he walked away from the fire. He touched the soldier nearest him on the shoulder.

“Thank you,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

The man looked up with wet eyes. His brow was crinkled and imploring. His mouth hung open. His features spoke to Nikki: You are on your feet. You are going somewhere. Take me with you.

Nikki took his hand from the soldier’s shoulder. “I’m going home,” he said. Should the soldier rise and come along, Nikki would be glad of the company.

The man gazed up at Nikki. His face, turned from the fire, was halved by shadow. He shook his head, his grief a weighty crown.

Nikki walked to the door. Behind him, the broadcast of the Christmas carol from “Fortress Stalingrad” cracked off like an icicle.

NIKKI FOUND HIS BEDROLL IN THE DARK. EXHAUSTED and cold, he laid his head on his pack. The tips of his fingers and toes ached with a white sort of pain as if crusted in ice. He wiggled them while he curled on the floor. Sleep overtook him quickly and carried him to morning on dreams of walking through a swirling mist.