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

Just after dawn, a motorcycle roared by his window to the battered department store across the street where Ostarhild had kept his desk, where the haggard captain now sat. Nikki stood to see the goggled, snow-caked rider run up the steps. More news, he thought. More intelligence. More truths about what’s happening here and out on the steppe. Good. Tell them all, messenger. Get on your motorcycle and spread the word.

Nikki had nothing to eat. He could have found a field kitchen to give him his day’s ration of two ounces of bread, one ounce of meat paste, and a third of an ounce each of butter and coffee. But he didn’t want to wait in line today. He would stay hungry to help keep him alert.

He looked at his rifle, left leaning against the bread shelves for a month. He took in the basement walls, his backpack, his bedroll, and the lantern without fuel. These were all the protection afforded him by the German army. They were not enough.

With his knife he cut his canvas pack into strips and swaddled his boots. He sliced the bedroll into three long pieces, wrapping one strip about his torso beneath his coat. One went around his shoulders. The last, cut again, was divided into pieces to cover his neck, ears, nose, and hands.

He walked up the steps to the street. Snow twirled in corkscrews on the wind. The sky was locked tight in clouds. His wrappings stole the edge from the cold.

He tucked his arms and walked west ten blocks to the No. 1 Train Station. He chose a train track, wrenched and tangled but still a steel ribbon running true to the south. He followed it.

Nikki moved through the city. Bundled men hurried past him. No one stopped to ask where he was going. Each soldier was deeply involved with himself. Cutting through the whipping chill, they flapped their arms and leaned at the waist, ducking their heads to make themselves smaller targets for the biting cold. These men are just staying alive, Nikki thought. Everyone does it his own way. Life, no matter how many people are around you, is a private chore.

For four hours Nikki followed the rail. Often it disappeared beneath the snow. He kept to it by dragging his boots deeper to find the big wooden ties. Sometimes the rail curled up out of the snow like a crooked metal finger beckoning him onward.

He walked past many landmarks, famous for the fury of the fighting around them in September and October. He recognized Tsaritsa Gorge, Railroad Station No. 2, and the bloody grain elevator. The grain silos, hard by the Volga, had been held for ten days by fifty Red defenders against three divisions. Now the elevator was blackened by fire and silenced by the heaps of dead needed to win this pinpoint on a map for Germany.

South of the grain elevator, Nikki left the city center and entered the residential outskirts. The wooden workers’ houses and shacks here had all been trampled by tanks and artillery. Nothing was left standing, not even trees. Snow covered the landscape to form smooth white hillocks interrupted only by a board or a pipe sticking out of random drifts. The neighborhoods were gone, the residents evacuated or killed. In their place were the invaders, stumbling around, huddling in foxholes against the wind or peering over the tops of trenches.

By early afternoon, Nikki had walked six kilometers past the grain silos. The growing concentration of men kicking aimlessly through the powder and tanks with snowy faces told him he was nearing the southern frontier of the Sixth Army’s hedgehog formation. Some of the men strung barbed wire. Others knifed through the weather on their way to a tent or a trench, or just to keep moving, Nikki could not tell.

Doom, he thought. It thickens with the snow, it darkens with the hours. It grows on these men’s faces like beards.

He approached a group gathered around an oil drum holding a wood fire.

“Is there a lot of action here?” he asked.

A soldier looked straight into the fire.

“What do you mean by ‘action’? Fighting?”

“Yes.”

“Sure, there’s plenty of action. We fight the cold, the lice, the shits, hunger, each other.”

The man looked south across the open, glistening land where Russians were massed behind the veil of wind-driven snow.

“And yeah, we fight them when they want. Where you from?”

Nikki nodded his head behind him, to the north.

“Downtown,” he said.

“Oh, fuck. You’ve seen it. What are you doing here?”

“Walking.”

The soldier’s smile lifted the blond stubble on his cheeks. “Yeah.”

Nikki took off his mittens to hold his hands close to the jumping flames in the barrel.

“Have the Reds taken many prisoners?”

“You mean,” the soldier said, “do the Reds take prisoners?”

Nikki nodded.

“Yeah. Sometimes. Sometimes not. Depends on how mad they are that day. Usually they’re pretty mad. You can hear them going crazy, screaming and shooting at prisoners, guys who’ve dropped their guns and put their hands in the air. The Rumanians west of here are getting hammered. It’s nasty. I saw it, and I ran back here and I’m staying here. I’d rather starve, thank you. Fucking Russians. It isn’t right.”

“They’ve got a reason to be mad,” Nikki said.

The man spat into the fire. It hissed quickly and was gone.

Nikki reached under his parka to his inside pocket for the envelope containing his orders. The papers were stamped Intelligence. Nikki remained assigned to Lieutenant Ostarhild’s unit of gatherers and listeners. He was cleared to go anywhere on the battlefield unescorted. He put his mittens on and clutched the envelope. He wanted the papers ready now.

Nikki turned from the fire to look south to the Russian lines. The cold slapped his cheeks. He pulled the canvas muffler over his mouth and nose. He spoke to the man beside him through the wrapping. The cloth caught his breath and warmed his lips.

“I’m a dairy farmer,” he called through the freezing wind and the crackling of the fire. “From Westphalia.”

Nikki walked into the whirling white.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF JANUARY 8, 1943, THE RUSSIAN forces manning the Cauldron around Stalingrad paused in their liquidation of the encircled Sixth Army to await the results of a surrender offer tendered by the Russian command to the commander of the German forces, General Friedrich von Paulus. The terms of surrender were generous, accompanied by a promise from Stalin to annihilate the Sixth Army if it continued to resist. The next day, the offer was refused and the battle resumed.

The decision to reject the Russian proposal was made not on the scene by Paulus but by Adolf Hitler from his Wolf’s Lair castle in East Prussia. Anyone who had seen firsthand the suffering of the Sixth Army could not have asked them to fight another day.

Hitler determined that Paulus and his emaciated, shivering troops would remain in “Fortress Stalingrad.” They would be a tragic but strategic sacrifice, one necessary to tie down Russian forces and allow the remnants of Army Group Don under Manstein and Sixth Army Group B near Rostov, commanded by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, to retreat north. Hitler correctly feared the resurgent strength of the Red Army, and he needed Manstein in place to bar the coming Red advance.

At 0805 the morning of January 10, the Russians renewed their attack on the Cauldron in a massive action, triggered by an hour of artillery bombardment blanketing the German positions. At precisely 0900, a thousand Russian tanks and waves of fresh infantry leaped into the fray. The ring drew tighter by the hour. The Reds knifed into the Nazi forces, reclaiming in a single day hundreds of square kilometers that it had taken the invaders months to conquer. German infantry and motorized divisions fought bravely but without stamina. Their resistance shattered quickly.