The bunker on the edge of the village housing the regimental Staff HQ is full of officers. Captain Eichert reports for duty. A giant of a man detaches himself from the group and comes over. It’s Colonel Steigmann. His face looks tired, but his gaze radiates energy and determination.
‘Good that you’re here,’ he says, giving the captain’s hand a forceful shake. ‘We’ve been eagerly anticipating your arrival.’ He goes over to the map, laid out on the table. ‘The battalion here is… it’s taken heavy losses, so we’re replacing it. So, this area here will be your sector. It’s an exposed, windy corner right on the border between divisions. The Russians like to try to exploit that… Where are you from, incidentally?’
‘Pomerania, Colonel, sir!’
‘Oh right, a Pomeranian, eh? That means we have pretty much the whole of Germany represented here. I’m mostly surrounded by totally unfamiliar faces now; there’s hardly anyone left from my old regiment. The heavy fighting during the retreat and then trying to defend this position here have taken their toll. The Russians keep shooting us to pieces with their artillery and rocket launchers in this open terrain. Not to mention the frostbite… yes, it’s fair to say the attrition’s been high. What kind of signals equipment have you brought with you, by the way?’
‘Very little, Colonel – in fact, nothing! We’re a “fortress battalion” and we’ve only just been assembled recently on a shoestring.’
‘That’s bad news, very bad,’ the colonel replies gloomily. ‘Our entire ability to fend off the Russians here depends first and foremost on a smoothly functioning intelligence network.’
He turns to the map once more. ‘Look, see these here, that’s “Max” and “Moritz”: two large hulks of knocked-out tanks. You’ll recognize them straight away out in the field. They mark where the Russian line runs. Then there’s the depression over here, and after that some fields we can cover with curtain fire – we’ve called them “Platinum”, “Silver” and “Gold” – and then the areas with flower code names. And up here are the infantry’s observation posts. See – it’s a really tight network. And all the positions are connected by ’phone, so everyone knows what’s going on across the entire sector. And if a single Russian dares to show his head anywhere, he gets the whole of the division’s artillery down on his head like a ton of bricks.’
Eichert finds himself delighted and terrified at the same time by this masterly mechanism, which can only operate if every cog turns exactly as it should. And here he is with his men, this bunch of hopeless bumblers… He feels like a stable boy who’s been sent to service a steam locomotive.
‘I can see you’re surprised, right?’ laughed the colonel. ‘Without all this, the Russians would long since have broken through and overwhelmed our little force here!’
But as the captain proceeds to give him more information about the composition, equipment and combat readiness of his battalion, the colonel’s face takes on a very grave expression again.
‘You know,’ he says finally, ‘two hundred and seventy extra men in the trenches, that’s all well and good, of course it is. But if I’m honest with you, I’d rather you’d brought me ten canny old infantrymen. One time, a while ago, they sent us three hundred Luftwaffe personnel. Within two days, they’d all been wiped out, every last one! The shit really hit the fan over that, I can tell you. But it’s not sheer numbers that count.’
He paces up and down a few times before stopping in front of the captain.
‘It’s a disgrace,’ he says, ‘to deploy your battalion here in the state it’s in. I’ll have another word with divisional HQ presently. But in the meantime, you’d better take up position in the trenches. There’s nothing else for it.’
Padre Peters makes his way through the village to the dressing station. He has accompanied Fortress Battalion I and intends to stay in this sector for the duration of the unit’s deployment. All of a sudden, he stands stock still. In front of him, carefully stacked up against the side wall of a house, is a heap of bodies. They are clad only in shirts and long johns; some of them are completely naked. The greenish-yellow, rigidly frozen corpses are covered in brown spots of dried blood. Their faces are frozen in either a rictus of death throes or an expression of apathy. At that moment, a new consignment of bodies is being unloaded from a sled. Troops are busy undressing them and sorting through uniforms and pieces of equipment. One soldier is kneeling and using both hands to hold one of the bodies by the head, which consists only of a forehead with a ruddy mess of flesh below, while another soldier attempts to tug a felt boot off its foot. They are chatting loudly and unconcernedly and are treating the task they are engaged in like some workaday activity. Padre Peters has encountered death in a thousand different forms. He has seen it often enough to know that constant contact with it has a way of desensitizing a person. But even among medical orderlies and work parties detailed to bury or rebury corpses, he is used to seeing a vestige of reverence, which at least helps maintain a semblance of dignity. This is the first time he’s seen men handling their fallen comrades like they’re logs of wood.
He goes over to have a word with the old sergeant who is there to collect up the dead men’s dog tags. The man lifts his head and looks at the person addressing him. Without more ado he flares up, his hoar-frost-covered moustache trembling with anger. ‘So what are we supposed to do?’ he asks, his voice quick and hoarse. ‘There’s no way we can transport them out of here any more! Almost every day, there’s another mountain of them. This lot here are just the ones from yesterday, from Kazatchi Hill, and this isn’t all of ’em either. What’s that – you want to know if we have a cemetery?’ He gives a hollow laugh. ‘Oh yeah, we’d have our work cut out there all right! And some nice crosses on the graves too, perhaps? Ha ha ha, crosses!’ He shoves his face close to the padre’s, who recoils in alarm from the dangerously unstable look in the man’s eyes. And now the sergeant barks at Peters: ‘You should have thought of that beforehand! We chuck ’em in the gravel pit back there, right? Shovel a bit of snow on top, and then some more bodies, and then more snow, that’s the way it goes! What are you looking at me like that for? We didn’t want it to be like that. It’s not our fault!’
The padre turns away. He’s lost for words. Around his chest, it feels like he’s wearing a breastplate of ice, beneath which his heart is burning and trembling.
In the so-called ‘reception bunker’ of the main dressing station, he is met by a blast of smoke-laden fug. The room is full of soldiers with dirty field dressings round their heads and limbs. They are sitting on the narrow wooden bench along the back wall or squatting on the ground and quietly enjoying the modicum of warmth in the bunker. Somewhere beyond them, another soldier is moaning in pain. His muted cry of ‘aah… aah… aah’ punctuates the passing moments like a time signal.
The young assistant doctor gives the padre – by now a familiar face – a brief nod. He is in the process of unwinding a grubby strip of rag from the hand that a thin and worried-looking soldier is holding out to him. The smell of carbolic mingles with a sweetish, putrid stench. As the doctor unravels the final bit of the dressing, a blackish, gelatinous mass comes away with it. The doctor is holding the skeleton of the young man’s five fingers, now stripped clean of all their flesh. He gazes in silence at the white bones.