After several hours, at around four in the morning, he was rudely awoken by the sound of people crashing about and agitated voices. The Croatians had put all their boxes of paperwork on the ground and were rummaging through them by candlelight. The girls were standing over them, crying.
‘Hey, what’s going on?’ The corporal raised his worried face.
‘General alarm,’ he replied in a subdued tone. ‘All combat units to the front, and the staffs and clerical units to central Stalingrad!’
‘Right, we should hit the road again then, too!’ said Breuer briskly, pulling on his boots.
Görz had already brewed coffee and made up some sandwiches. Now he went to rouse Dierk. The rest had clearly done the lieutenant good; he was able to sit up at table and eat something. After nodding briefly to Breuer, he stared ahead with an expressionless face. It wasn’t clear whether he had actually recognized him.
After a generous breakfast, the three men set off, rested and fortified, and with the girls’ laments and the muted oaths of the busily packing Croatians ringing in their ears. The farce was at an end and the tragedy was about to unfold.
6
Die – And Rise Again!
The track they were on turned into a road. Through its patchy shroud of snow shone the steely sheen of ice. The group of fleeing soldiers had become ragged and strung out. Here and there, an exhausted cluster of stragglers limped along, as the odd vehicle sped by, heading for the city. To the side of the road stood signposted bunkers, silent and abandoned, along with the roofless ruins of humble little dwellings and overgrown gardens with black trees whose shredded crowns were lost in the fog.
Pulling the small toboggan that he’d scrounged from the Croatians, Corporal Görz was always some way ahead of his two companions. Of the three of them, he was the most robust. Breuer could feel the exertions of the past few days in his limbs. His injury was also hurting badly again. After their abrupt departure from the Croatians’ house, the feeling that they had been abandoned hit him once more with redoubled force. Things had become rather different since yesterday. His surroundings, which the vision through his one good eye made into a surface lacking any depth, appeared strangely altered. Sure, he was still in the midst of the same wretched figures, but the connections between people and things seemed to have changed. It was all different, totally different… Breuer shot a sideways glance at the lieutenant, who was tottering along next to him on his frostbitten legs with a gait that looked like he was walking on stilts. He had rallied overnight and with mute determination had refused all offers of help. He was still refusing to speak, maintaining a horribly frosty silence.
Nothing about him recalled the enthusiastic young officer of former times. His face resembled a cratered field after a battle. Suddenly overcome with emotion, Breuer caught hold of Dierk’s arm.
‘Dierk, old son! What’s got into you? Talk to us, for God’s sake!’
And at the same time, he was thinking: What’s got into all of us, for that matter? The lieutenant turned his face towards Breuer for a fleeting instant. His blank expression dismissed the query out of hand. What’s got into us…? Breuer tried to summon up images from the past: his study at home, the green chair with the standard lamp beside it, in whose warm light he used to sit and read; the faces of his wife and children; that last pleasure-boat trip to the sand dunes of the Curonian Spit, just a few days before he’d been called up to take part in a ‘short-term exercise’, which in the event had turned out to be endless. It was no good. Everything had become pallid and blurry in his memory. The world as it existed before the war had been extinguished; he could only dimly discern its outlines like he was peering through a veil. He could not understand how, just a short while ago (had it been the day before yesterday? Or yesterday?), he had been looking forward so excitedly to breaking free and flying out of the Cauldron. Where had he planned to go? There was no going back now. How had it come to this? Had that Breuer from the past, whose death date Schoolmaster Strackwitz had foretold, actually died in the night before the twenty-fourth? It almost seemed to be so. Maybe that upstanding, amenable Breuer, who was so well grounded in considerate middle-class respectability, really had perished along with everything that he thought, believed in, held dear and longed for. What remained was an empty vessel devoid of hope, inured to pain, and containing nothing but a hollow, boundless emptiness. ‘I do not dream of past happiness…’ No, he didn’t dream of anything any more. Had it even warranted the name of happiness, that complacent, superficial day-to-day existence, only disturbed now and then by the mild irritation of childish worries, where you just let yourself drift along like you were immersed in a warm, soporific stream? Hadn’t it all been just self-deception, a grand illusion whose inevitable and logical conclusion was the dreadful unmasking of Stalingrad? A cruel hand had swept across the board and in a stroke wiped away the cheerful signs of a false happiness. All that was left behind was the empty blackboard. Would new signs ever appear on it one day, pointing towards a new future?
‘Nice of them to let us know, eh?’ said Corporal Görz, pointing at a large sign by the side of the road. On it was the warning: ‘Attention! Road under enemy surveillance! Don’t drive in groups!’ The road into Stalingrad they were on was situated on high ground. In clear conditions it must have been visible from the far bank of the Volga. Now only the odd shell whistled aimlessly overhead. The few small houses on the city outskirts here that still offered any kind of shelter were crammed with people, while thousands of others still roamed the streets, leaderless and milling about in all directions. If the Russians had been in a position to send over a squadron of bombers…
The three of them found themselves standing on the lip of the Zariza Gorge. In among the snow and the debris and rubbish scattered about, the entrances to caves yawned blackly in its steep slopes. Crowds of men had gathered there too. Where could they find some shelter? Or were they fated to die out in the open, like so many before them? Clambering over the ruins of a wooden shack that had been knocked down, Breuer came across a flight of steps leading underground. A murmur of voices was coming from below. They descended the winding steps cut into the earth to a barricaded plank door. The corporal started kicking it.
‘Open up!’ he bellowed. ‘German officers!’
The voices fell silent within. Then they heard, clearly and unmistakably, someone respond with the infamous line from Götz von Berlichingen.[1] This stung Görz into a fit of fury.
‘You bunch of fuckers!’ he yelled. ‘Open up right now or I’ll—’
Breuer restrained him.
‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Just leave it. None of that stuff cuts any ice any more.’
Weary and despondent, they dragged themselves back to the main road that led to the city centre. As the day had progressed, more and more people had joined the throng there. Now, in between the wooden houses, the odd tall stone building had begun to appear. Yet on closer inspection these turned out to be nothing more than the façades of houses, behind which stood huge piles of rubble. And the specimens of humanity wandering about there over the bomb debris, through the tangles of barbed wire and past burned-out tramcars – they, too, were nothing but ghostly reflections of people: masks, façades hiding piles of wreckage…
‘Where… where’s the ho-… ho-… hospital, then?’ said a beaky figure, thrusting his bird-like face at Breuer. He was hobbling along, propping himself up on a home-made cudgel, and with huge bundles of rags tied round his feet. A greatcoat that was far too large for him hung off him like a sack. Hunched over, with twisted limbs and convulsed by an uncontrollable shaking, he looked like a witch from a fairy tale.
1
‘the infamous line from