‘A hospital? Sorry, I don’t know if there is such a thing round here,’ Breuer answered.
And while he was still mulling over this strange encounter, someone in the crowd said something about the ‘District Commander’s Office’. Of course. How could he have forgotten? The headquarters of the commander of the Central Stalingrad district! The phrase, which immediately conjured up images of German order and efficiency, had a magic effect on those who heard it. Their faces lit up. Of course, the Stalingrad DCO was the responsible authority here. It’d do something to help them, surely!
As a lorry towing a flak-gun limber passed, Breuer and Görz hoisted the lieutenant onto it and swung themselves up after him. No one shooed them off. The truck trundled down the street into the city. When it halted briefly at a road junction, they hopped off. A sign with the letters DCO on it pointed them to the left. Yes indeed, order evidently still prevailed here, thank goodness! From a way off they could make out an imposing building, which must have been about five storeys tall, standing out from the ruins around it and looking remarkably intact.
Two soldiers were walking towards them. Their eyes were shining.
‘Have you heard, Lieutenant, sir?’ one of them called. ‘The advance guard of our tank divisions has entered Karpovka!’
‘Yes, yes, we heard about that!’ replied Breuer, waving them aside.
There was no point trying to reason with madmen. But that went against the grain with the corporal. ‘Hey, you two, hold it right there!’ he ordered, beckoning them to approach. ‘You blokes lost your tiny minds or something? Don’t you dare go spreading rumours like that around, d’you hear?’
‘But it’s true!’ wailed the man who’d spoken, incensed by the corporal’s harsh tone and lack of faith. ‘We just heard about it at the District Commander’s Office, ain’t that right, Georgie boy? Straight from the captain’s mouth! The news just came through!’
In no time at all, a circle of stupid, credulous faces had formed round the little group. The second soldier nodded in affirmation.
‘Two SS Panzer divisions have broken through!’ he went on, waving his hands about in excitement.
‘It’ll only be a matter of hours before they get here! We ought to spread the news round town!’
For a few moments, Breuer felt his heart beating faster. Could it be true? They hadn’t heard anything from the front for days… But then he laughed inwardly at his own foolishness. What did he care?
A crowd of hundreds was gathered outside the commander’s office. The rumour was doing the rounds there too. Groups of men began peeling off in all directions. Over the entrance to the courtyard hung neatly painted signs with instructions for men going on leave and men looking for their quarters. Oh yes, order still reigned here, all right! The three men squeezed their way into the overcrowded inner courtyard. The entrance to the building proper was cordoned off with wooden barriers, and guarded by military police with steel helmets, gorgets and rifles. Breuer pushed his way through to ask one of the policemen if they were taking in wounded men.
‘Not now – come back in about two hours!’ came the brisk, indifferent answer. ‘We’re just in the process of, ah… reorganizing.’
‘Reorganizing, eh?’ Breuer glanced up at the windows of the building.
‘There’s word that tanks have reached Karpovka. You heard anything about that?’
The man looked askance at the lieutenant.
‘Yeah, rumour has it!’ he growled.
‘From what I hear, that rumour started right here!’
‘Well, don’t go looking at us, mate! We don’t know anything about it!’
Breuer turned away in disgust. So that was how it was, was it? Some people were being fobbed off with talk of ‘reorganization’ while others were being fed the line about ‘tanks in Karpovka’. Their sole concern was to get people off their backs by telling them what they wanted to hear. No, there really was nothing to beat German efficiency!
The multistorey stone edifice of the Central Stalingrad District Commander’s Office, a modern apartment and office block with central heating and toilets that was visible for miles around, had in all probability once been intended to be the proud seat of a powerful regional administration. But that had never come to pass.
The institution of the District Commander’s Office, which in fact consisted of nothing more than a handful of military police, a general heading the outfit who was no longer fit for any other duties, and a few officers, had set up operations in the basement of the building, safe from bombardment. The far less secure storeys above ground, however, had been swamped – long before the great flood of troops retreating to the city had begun – by wounded, sick and displaced soldiers seeking a final refuge there.
It is night. Huddled up close together, Herbert and Geibel are hunkered down on the stone floor of a gloomy corridor. The signals lorry set them down outside the DCO building. They were turned away by the guards but managed to gain access through a badly secured back door. The cold is preventing them from sleeping. Geibel is moaning from the pain of his wounded leg.
As soon as it gets light, Herbert goes off to explore their new surroundings. The corridors and stairs of the building are filthy and full of rubbish, while the icy toilets are stalactite caves of frozen excrement and urine. The pungent stench of a wild animal’s cage wafts towards him out of the dark, crowded rooms… Herbert realizes that he has a lot to learn about Stalingrad. A whirling sensation in his head threatens to overpower him. His knees buckle and he has to lean against a doorpost. ‘Oh my God,’ he stammers to himself. ‘Oh my God…’
‘What’s up with you, then, eh?’
Herbert looks up. To his right, squatting against the wall of the dimly lit room amid a tangle of sleeping men and blankets, is a soldier. On his head is a Romanian lambskin hat, pulled so low it squashes his ears down. He looks like some venerable gnome who’s been sitting there for a hundred years. He looks at Herbert through a pair of curiously lively squirrel’s eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ the gnome persists. ‘Got the collywobbles, have you? Or the runs?’
‘What, me?’ mutters Herbert, peering into the room. ‘Nothing wrong with me. But…’
‘What, nothing?’ says the man. ‘Nothing at all? A picture of health, eh?’
His little eyes widen with astonishment as he says this. Herbert imagines it’s how Red Indians must have looked at the first white people.
‘Then you can stay here!’ the gnome blurts out, clapping his hands like a delighted child. No sooner has he said it, though, than his voice becomes tearful.
‘There’s no one here to look after us! We haven’t had anything to drink since yesterday… We had one bloke here, he was almost completely healthy like you. Just his left hand and his ears lost to frostbite. He used to go down and bring us up some snow. But yesterday he went out and never came back…’
Herbert drags Geibel up the two floors and deposits him, for the time being, by the door. The cold night spent on the flagstones has just about done for him. His teeth are chattering incessantly.
‘Herbert, mate,’ he moans, ‘I think the bone’s broken after all!’
Herbert takes a look at the wound. Geibel’s heavily bloodstained, encrusted trousers are stuck fast to his leg. It proves impossible to pull them down. The gnome looks on with interest. He seems contented that at least one of the newcomers has ‘copped one’.