His cap is set at a jaunty angle above black earmuffs. His left arm is in splints and heavily bandaged. A camouflage jacket is draped across his shoulders like a hussar’s fur cape.
A keen easterly wind has got up, and is blowing powdery snow across the airfield. It seems that Stalingradski is only a temporary airstrip. A really quite restricted area of relative flatness, but pretty uneven for all that, with some treacherous dips in the surface and lots of small man-made hummocks dotted about. Breuer can’t make out what they are: piles of corpses, no doubt, or perhaps discarded equipment. As testament to the hidden dangers here, several wrecked aircraft are scattered around the airfield’s perimeter. These are the planes that Breuer spotted from the road. The tail of one is sticking out of the ravine that lies at the airfield’s southern end. Nearby, an ill-defined black mass of something is moving, jelly-like. As Breuer draws closer, the details become clearer. A mass of people is milling about there. People? Distorted reflections of human misery, more like – sick and wounded soldiers and men gone to rack and ruin, crippled, hobbling around using sticks, propping themselves up on home-made crutches or leaning on one another for support. These had once been men – Germans, Romanians, soldiers and officers alike, as revealed by their tattered uniforms. And now? Now they have become a bellowing, seething, hate-filled mob. Nor does the melee show any signs of abating; instead, it forms a self-contained mass, swirling round some unseen focal point, as everyone fights to ensure they get the elusive, illusory ‘first seat on the plane’. Standing to one side is the flight dispatch officer, his legs apart like a ringmaster, tense and ready to spring forward at a moment’s notice. The pistol in his hand guarantees he is shown respect. Everyone knows he’ll open fire without hesitation if the violence and chaos spill over from the jostling mass. His voice is hoarse from shouting; it sounds like rusty tin.
‘For the last time – if you lot don’t fall in line this instant, I’ll pull the plug on the whole show! That’s right – I’ll radio all the incoming pilots to return to base, I’m telling you!’
Various figures are circling like jackals around the periphery of the group. These are the wounded, starving and freezing men who couldn’t get to see a doctor anywhere and who haven’t been fortunate enough to secure a sick pass home. Yet they still live in hope. And bodies are lying in the snow, not all of them dead. Some are still crawling around while others are trying to get back up. One man is lying there with his kitbag under his head. He’s not moving a muscle. His eyes are all skew-whiff, like a broken doll’s. His mouth is hanging open and out of it, from deep within his chest, there comes a gurgling, sobbing, unintelligible scream of anguish…
Breuer holds his hand in front of his face. Only one eye, he thinks crazily. How good that only one eye is witnessing all this! He realizes that he must fight here, fight for his life, ruthlessly and brutally, that he must turn into an animal before he can become a human being again. And yet he feels like he’s paralysed. So that’s that! Hadn’t he always suspected it would come to this? Had he ever seriously imagined… Exhausted, he slumps down in the lee of a wrecked aircraft fuselage to get out of the biting wind. The major sits down beside him, fishes out a pack of cigarettes and offers one to Breuer.
‘Sheer lunacy, eh? Stuffing these planes full of chaps like that!’ he witters. ‘I mean to say – I’m wounded myself,’ he continues, cheerfully waving his bandaged arm, ‘but let’s face it: what the devil are they going to do with cripples like that back home? There’s no question of returning them to front-line duties. And just think of the effect blokes like that will have on people’s morale. Don’t get me wrong; I’m only saying this from the point of view of how to wage a war rationally… but priority really ought to be given to general staff officers, and competent commanders, and specialists and healthy infantrymen… They’re always going on about being ruthless but when the chips are down, it’s a different story…’
‘Yes, yes,’ mutters Breuer distractedly. His attention has been caught by a droning noise that’s growing louder by the minute. A dark shape emerges from the uniform grey blanket of cloud; as it descends and gets larger, its markings become clearer. At a low altitude, it executes a careful turn over the airfield to check out the terrain before coming in to a bumpy landing and taxiing to the end of the strip.
A new spasm of unrest convulses the heaving mass of those who have been thrown together here from all over the place, men who have been wrenched from their final moorings and stripped of their last bit of security. But no one makes a dash for the aircraft; order hasn’t yet broken down to that extent. The dispatch officer has shot down two men already today. There’s a tussle among the group to try to form an orderly queue, and to secure a place at the head of it. One man has detached himself from the crowd. Egotism impels him to appoint himself leader. ‘Line up in ranks of three!’ he shouts. ‘There are more planes coming! Either we all get out of here or none of us will!’ But it’s all to no avail. The men are beyond the reach of reason. They start pushing forward again on the right – five, six, ten abreast. This enrages those on the left. ‘Shove off! Get back in line!’ they yell.
Pandemonium ensues. ‘What? Whaaat?… I was here long before you…’ – ‘I’m a colonel, sir! A colonel!’ – ‘Smack the bastard in the mouth!’ A flurry of punches are thrown. Yells of fury and pain. The sounds of splintering wood and of groaning bodies thudding into the snow. ‘Ow! Ow! … Aaaargh…!’ Boot heels stamp on the fallen as they lie on the ground, crushing the life out of them.
Stalingradski airfield has become an arena for combat between wild beasts. What price humanity now? Or comradeship, discipline and honour? Or sympathy or brotherly love? Are people nothing but animals? Though even animals have a sense of loyalty and gratitude. What is man?
Surreptitiously, meanwhile, another phalanx of men, three abreast, has formed to one side. The dispatch officer selects a dozen or more soldiers from their ranks. They can’t believe their luck. They run pell-mell like some deranged mob for the plane, which has started to rev its engines. They tug, shove, tumble and scramble their way up the ladder. The radio operator, who is standing in the cabin door, lays into the knot of men with his fists.
‘Get back there, you pack of filthy swine! You’ll tear this old crate apart if you’re not careful! The pilots are officers, I’ll have you know…’
The dispatch officer has rushed up too. Swearing volubly, he tugs apart the tangle of men at the aircraft steps. Breuer gives a sudden start. The person in the leather coat there, isn’t that…? But by now all twelve of the men have vanished into the aircraft cabin. Their faces appear, one by one, in the murky windows. Two soldiers from the unit detailed to pick up air-dropped food deliveries trot up. The dispatch officer points to the man lying in the snow with his head on his kitbag. By now, he’s stopped screaming. They lift him up and carry him over to the aircraft. The radio operator bends down.
‘What’s all this then?’ he asks, nonplussed. ‘Since when do we fly corpses out?’ Only now do the soldiers take a closer look at their burden. Then they glance up at one another. ‘Oh shit!’ one of them murmurs. The dead man arcs through the air into the snow as they fling him aside. He doesn’t need to fly out; he’s gone home already.
The plane’s engines roar, its propellers whipping up clouds of snow as the big machine shudders and starts to roll forward on its splayed undercarriage. Suddenly a man bursts out from the crowd and bounds forward. What’s his game? Has he lost his mind? At full stretch, he lunges desperately at the departing aircraft’s tail end, and somehow finds a handhold. His legs flail wildly in the air. The dispatch officer’s hoarse cry of rage mingles with the howl of the engines. He chases after the lumbering machine, which hasn’t lifted off yet, stops and raises his pistol, and then fires – once, twice. Up ahead, a soldier on the back of a truck unshoulders his rifle and shoots… The man falls from the aircraft and is hit by the passing tailplane; his body somersaults a couple of times and then comes to rest, motionless.