And besides, it was too late now. Too many men had perished in Stalingrad for anyone to try to abdicate responsibility for their deaths now through some Damascene conversion. No, only one course of action remained open to him: to pursue the path he had set out on to the bitter end, with his head held high. He looked down on the others with unutterable contempt, those wavering figures using a cowardly compromise to try to find an ignominious way out for themselves. The old world was dying, and he would die with it. He was determined to save face and to die as the last representative of the old order – the last true knight.
Among the officers sitting in their rotten cellar like they were in a molehill, the mood veered between crazy momentary hopefulness and bleak despair. Breuer was the only one who had been overcome by a great sense of calm. Things became progressively brighter and clearer to him. His thoughts kept returning to Lieutenant Wiese and the little ginger-haired bloke. Wiese, whose words he only now began to truly understand, had foreseen the course this German tragedy would take and its likely outcome more clearly than anyone else; but he had lacked the strength to convert his awareness into action. That was what had broken him. And what about Lakosch? The little corporal surely only had a very vague appreciation of the bigger picture. Yet he had had the courage to act, quite unilaterally, off his own bat and on his own authority, in defiance of all the rules and conventions. New signs were appearing on the dark wall, and the script was becoming more legible by the minute.
The entrance to the house wasn’t easy to find. You’d scarcely have imagined that an undamaged cellar lay beneath the badly damaged storeys above. Nevertheless, in the corridor and the rooms underground, especially in the vestibule, where Dr Korn had set up an observation room, there were constant comings and goings. No one was especially bothered by all this activity. The only surprise came when Captain Gedig, the divisional adjutant, suddenly appeared in the basement and announced his intention of moving in.
‘Heavens above, what an honour!’ Captain Eichert greeted him with dry sarcasm. ‘The entire divisional staff assembled in our modest little abode!’
But when he took a closer look at the new arrival, his desire to mock suddenly evaporated. Something wasn’t right!
‘No offence, Gedig,’ he said seriously. ‘Of course you’re welcome. Where are the others, though? Isn’t Unold coming too?’
The captain took a long draught of the hot coffee that First Lieutenant Schmid handed him. His eyes looked in bewilderment over the rim of the billycan lid. But at first all he did was drink. Then, taking a deep breath, he set down his makeshift cup.
‘The others?’ he asked. ‘Which others? Seems you’re well behind the times here. Unold did a bunk ages ago!’
‘Damn and blast it!’ Breuer blurted. He recalled the leather coat he’d spotted that time at Stalingradski airfield.
‘What? How come?’ the others all asked at once, clearly stunned at the news.
‘Unold’s gone? So he managed it then, eh?’
‘What do you mean, “managed”?’ Gedig broke in testily. ‘He didn’t manage to do anything. It’s a crazy business. I’m not even sure I should be telling you about it—’
‘Come off it, will you! We’re entitled to hear what happened to our divisional commander!’
Gedig dropped his coy attitude and launched into his account. As he spoke, the reticence he’d cultivated as an adjutant fell away.
‘Okay, you heard he was promoted to full colonel on the twenty-second… Oh, you didn’t? Yeah, supposedly for service beyond the call of duty in defending the Cauldron. He also swung it for Engelhard to be promoted to major. Hey, wouldn’t you like to be a major too, Eichert? I tell you, right now’s your best chance. You can all get a promotion! And a German Cross, a Knight’s Cross, whatever you want. All you need to do is go over to High Command and tell them about your heroic deeds. Business is booming over there – a fire sale at knockdown prices!’
‘Get on with it!’ the men urged. ‘What happened with Unold?’
‘Unold, yeah, right… So, the next day he’s vanished into thin air. Snuck off to the airfield and flew out!’
‘What? Pissed off, just like that? Impossible!’
‘Without any orders? But that’s… that means…’
‘Yeah, we didn’t want to believe it at first either. When it came out what had happened, the shit really hit the fan at High Command. Schmidt immediately radioed the Army Group. They were just as astonished at their end. For a colonel on the General Staff charged with the special task of organizing supplies to behave like that, just before the balloon went up, seemed like insanity even to them. In any event, they hauled him up in front of a court martial, charged with desertion. Yesterday we heard that he’d been shot. Engelhard was completely devastated at the news; he blew his brains out yesterday evening in our bunker.’
The gaggle of men had fallen silent. All of them had got to know the lieutenant colonel personally at some stage, and for the most part not from his best side. And no doubt everyone was thinking the same thing at this moment: Unold – a workaholic, bursting with ambition; heartless, but with a sharp, caustic intellect and a brutal, unbending will. A General Staff officer with a future. And yet men of his stripe always failed miserably when the chips were down…
Captain Eichert had buried his head in his hands.
‘I could never stand the bloke,’ he said at length. ‘A smarmy bastard who stopped at nothing to get what he wanted. But flying out like that… My God, I just don’t understand what’s going on any more!’
‘Really? Don’t you?’ Captain Gedig gave a forced laugh. By now, his adjutant’s smooth veneer was entirely gone. ‘Surely you’ve had enough object lessons by now! Look at Hube and Jaenecke[4] – what about them? Or that big cheese of a flak general, whatever his name was… Pliquet,[5] I think. Come on, gentlemen, open your eyes! Then you’ll see what’s going on!’
‘Pliquet? Don’t know him. Who’s he then?’
‘He was in charge of air operations here for a while. He flew out too, as far as I know.’
‘You must know him, surely, Görz!’
‘Yes, I do,’ muttered the corporal. ‘Better than I’d like to, in fact.’
And Görz proceeded to tell them things that most of them had only heard about through rumours. Major General Pliquet had been the commander of the only flak division in the Cauldron and was put in charge of all air force units caught within the encirclement. He was a bon vivant and was insistent on maintaining a lifestyle befitting his status. That was why, last Christmas, when it was decreed that no more parcels should be sent to troops in the Cauldron because of lack of space on aircraft, he still had a batch of turkeys flown in for his staff officers’ dinner table. Mind you, that wasn’t to say that the general had no concern for the troops’ welfare! Every so often, he’d generously donate to the men a bottle of the cognac that he had his batman bring in by the crateload via the air bridge. On the fourteenth of January, when things began to get dicey, he flew out of the Cauldron with a fighter escort to ‘present his report’. And because he was travelling ‘on official business’, he refused to take any wounded men with him. He was duly awarded the Knight’s Cross by none other than Hermann Göring himself, and never returned. Instead, a radio message was received to the effect that he had come back on a plane and spent ages circling over the airfield at night but had been unable to land due to ‘heavy ground fighting’ and ‘the presence of enemy fighters’. On the night in question, around fifteen transport planes carrying supplies had landed successfully at the Pitomnik aerodrome and flown out again with casualties on board.
4
Hube and Jaenecke – for Hube, see note on page 265; General Erwin Jaenecke was, like Hube, one of the last high-ranking officers to be flown out Stalingrad before the final German defeat.
5
‘Pliquet’ – a thinly disguised allusion by Gerlach to General Wolfgang Pickert, commander of the Ninth Flak Division, who flew out of the Stalingrad Cauldron on 13 January 1943.