The Sonderführer, meanwhile, has summoned Corporal Herbert in order to go through all the details of the escape plan with him one more time. He senses that the time for a decision is close at hand. Suddenly the door flies open and the captain is standing on the threshold, with his spindly legs and his praying hands, yet he seems larger than usual, almost like Breuer. He yells something, but as the words leave his mouth they are drowned out by an ear-splitting crash. A fearful blast shakes the room, hurling Fröhlich into a corner. Beams splinter and a fog of thick dust fills every nook and cranny. There is a smell of burning, of scorched flesh…
After quite some time, Fröhlich struggles to his feet. Gingerly he pats himself down to see if he’s been wounded. The skin has been torn from his hands, his face has been blasted with grains of sand, and he can feel one of his eyes beginning to swell up and close.
‘Hey, anyone here still alive?’ he asks, noticing how strange his voice sounds.
‘Yes, I am,’ Herbert’s voice replies tearfully from somewhere. ‘Pass me a cigarette, will you?’ The captain has collapsed in the doorway. The tank shell has torn right through his chest. He lies there like an empty sack. His face is frozen mid-scream in a waxen rictus of terror. Fröhlich and Herbert lift his body out of the pool of blood it’s lying in and lay it on a camp bed. Without thinking, the corporal starts to tug off Fackelmann’s felt boots as Fröhlich looks on numbly. Suddenly he snaps out of his shocked daze.
‘Get out!’ he shouts. ‘Over to the shelter! I’ll get Nasarov!’
But the Russian is nowhere to be found. He’s vanished, as if the ground has swallowed him up. Fröhlich runs around all the forward positions and through every bunker. He is beside himself with frenzy and fear. But the three Russians have disappeared without a trace. No one has seen hide nor hair of them. Fröhlich pauses for a moment in his fruitless search. He begins to realize what’s happened… Mad with despair, he reaches for his holster to end it all. But then he comes to his senses. And in this moment, Sonderführer Fröhlich suddenly transcends his former self. For the first and only time in his life, this foolish fantasist sees the truth. He sees the awful plight of the men here and he realizes that he has to lead them now. In a flash, he is calm and clear-sighted.
‘Attention, everybody!’ he shouts into the general confusion. ‘I’m in command now! All the men of the divisional staff – assemble and get ready to decamp!’
A few minutes later, what remains of Fackelmann’s task force winds its way in a long line back through the gorge, under intensified Russian bombardment, towards the airfield at Gumrak.
Gumrak! What a hideous word, how far from the soft-sounding, lilting, caressing names of the Russian villages. What a torturous consonance of dull hopelessness and cruel destruction. Gum – rak! Don’t you feel the hunger in your guts at the sound of this word? Or the tearing, nagging ache of your suppurating wounds? The groaning death rattle of a tormented life? Can’t you hear in it the crunching of the snow, the crackle of the frost in the walls of houses, the roar and blast of bombs, the splintering of planks and beams, the cawing of the black birds that fly up from frozen-stiff bundles of human flesh? Gum – rak! Gum – rak!
Around fifteen kilometres west of Stalingrad, sprinkled on the huge white platter of the steppe, a handful of gloomy wooden houses and dilapidated shacks cowered by the side of the railway tracks running north. The presence there of buildings providing shelter and of track-mending materials (still in use until recently), plus the proximity to the headquarters of German Army High Command, was reason enough for the place to have drawn the diligent attention of long-range Russian artillery and repeated visits by Soviet Air Force bombers. They used a water tower to help them to spot and home in on their target. Anyone who knew the hamlet tried to give it a wide berth. Vehicles sped along the streets here like they were being hounded.
In this dismal place, surrounded by the constant stench of death, stood the Sixth Army’s only field hospital. This was the main assembly point for the huge numbers of crippled men who, bewildered and disorientated, streamed in from all corners of the Cauldron seeking help and salvation. Here, unable to go any further, they holed up in unprotected nooks and crannies, at first overcome by sheer desperation. Little by little, though, they increasingly resigned themselves to their fate, a fate the vast mass graves of the cemetery here left them in no doubt about.
Padre Peters had remained in Gumrak. This terrible place held him fast in its grip. The army pastor stationed there, who over several weeks had tried to bring help and solace, had been buried when his bunker took a direct hit from a bomb. Peters took his place. His regular beat took in the densely packed wooden houses along the road; often one or other of these would be razed to the ground overnight by bombing or shelling. He crawled into the few unlit bunkers that remained in a landscape pitted with craters or stumbled over the train tracks to lines of railway carriages on sidings. These were home to the so-called ‘lightly wounded’. Often he would spend minutes crouched between the iron wheels, with bomb splinters humming around him, before the sliding doors were pushed open to let him in. Not infrequently one of the carriages took a hit and each time, as if by some miracle, out of the twenty or thirty occupants some six to ten got out alive. To keep the carriages warm, they burned the wooden crates that shells came packed in, stacks of which were piled up at the entrance to the village. The wounded men had to fetch them themselves. They also had to forage for their own food. Because the daily ration of sixty grams of bread that the army had once set aside for the wounded had long since dried up, they would wait for sick horses to keel over or hobble to the abattoir three kilometres away, where, if they got lucky, they could pick up a bloody chunk of horsemeat or a handful of oats. Apart from that, all they had to eat were the scrapings from empty cans of tinned meat and snow.
In the ten days he had been there, Padre Peters had celebrated communion twice in the larger of the two stone station buildings. This was no easy task; the stairs and corridors were crammed with men who were either wounded or dead. It was hard to tell which, because, as the shockwave of exploding bombs smashed the windows, one after the other the resulting gaps were bricked up, cutting out what little natural light was available. At least this made the building slightly warmer. Finally, one morning, when a bomb fell no more than a couple of feet away from the outer wall of the building into the cesspit of the latrine and blew out all the remaining glass, without causing any other damage, the interior was plunged into an airless total darkness. Thoroughly demoralized, the doctors at the field hospital suspended almost all their operations.