‘Disgraceful!’ he suddenly snaps at his patient, whose whole body is shaking like a leaf. ‘It’s a bloody disgrace that you’ve been going around with it like this for so long, d’you hear? Don’t imagine for one moment that this’ll get you a free pass home!’
The man’s mouth gapes helplessly. His gaze wanders in uncomprehending horror from his mutilated hand to the surgeon’s furious face and back again. The doctor regains some of his composure.
‘Well, don’t gawp at me like an idiot, man!’ he barks. ‘It’s no big deal, anyhow! They’ll snip off the bones, and in a week or so you’ll be able to shoot again. Off you go, get yourself over to the operation bunker!’
He turns to his next patient, who extends a filthy foot to him. The toes are a midnight-blue colour.
‘I’m bloody sick of these endless cases of frostbite!’ shouts the doctor. ‘They should lock up the lot of you! You know what this is, don’t you? It’s self-mutilation! I know you lot! You know how to play the system all right, don’t you? Well, you’ve come to the wrong person here!’
The soldier’s eyes grow moist.
‘What are we supposed to do then, Assistant Surgeon, sir?’ he asks, on the verge of tears. ‘We never get to take off our boots! We’re on sentry duty day and night, and when we aren’t we’re building defences. And all of us are stuck in foxholes the whole time!’
‘Right, get some ointment rubbed into that and then be off with you! And don’t show your face here again!’
Things go on in the same vein for almost an hour. Eventually, peace descends. The doctor emits a heavy sigh, mops his sweaty brow and sits down on an upturned crate. The padre looks at his harried face, trying to guess his age. Twenty-six, twenty-seven maybe? Yet he looks like he’s wasting away from the strain of a century’s worth of suffering.
‘My God, Doctor!’ he says quietly, ‘I hardly recognize you! What’s got into you?’
The doctor leans forward and looks wide-eyed at the chaplain. He waves his hand in the air, in an undecipherable gesture.
‘Save your breath, Padre!’ he exclaims. ‘I know precisely what you’re going to say, every word. Hold your tongue, I beg you!’
He slumps back against the wall and lights a cigarette with shaking hands. He inhales the smoke in long drags and blows it out up to the ceiling. Slowly he grows calmer. Then he begins to speak, quietly, as if talking to himself.
‘I’m from an old medical family. I studied medicine out of a love for mankind… to reduce the suffering in the world and to try to conquer death.’ He gives a short, cynical laugh. ‘What grand dreams we have when we’re young! Now I’m not a doctor any more. It’s not possible. The men here with second- and third-degree frostbite, see, they turn up in their hundreds every day. As a doctor I ought to be sending them home.’
He pauses to light another cigarette from the stub of the previous one.
‘And that’s not the worst of it either. About a week or so ago, they started bringing us the first cases of consumption, men who were emaciated down to the bone and completely exhausted, and who’d given up eating and even speaking. You’ll get to see them by and by. There was nothing we could do to help; they just wasted away and died. We’ve already had more than twenty cases in the division. Recently, we had one of them on the autopsy table, he was one metre eighty tall and weighed just forty kilos. His skin tissue was like it had been desiccated, not an ounce of fat on his entire lanky frame. We reported this case to the High Command. You know what response we got back? “Quite impossible!” was what they replied. “It must be some new, unknown form of disease.” They’d send a specialist, they told us.’
The doctor gets to his feet. He paces up and down the bunker in long strides, a red flush of agitation marking his sallow cheeks.
‘A specialist for the dead of Stalingrad, Padre! A specialist who can peddle a suitable lie to the folks back home about the great charnel house here. No, Padre, anyone who planned on remaining a doctor here would spend all day and night howling with impotence and shame and rage at the fact that all of this is even possible!’
Padre Peters is devastated by what he’s hearing.
‘Doctor,’ he says earnestly and imploringly, ‘please don’t give up on yourself! Think how much more dreadful it would be if you and your colleagues weren’t here! Day after day I see what you all do for our sick and wounded men here. Your readiness to help and make sacrifices is beyond measure! I refuse to believe your work is all in vain, Doctor. And even when you can’t give any medical help, a kind word or a friendly look at the right moment can work wonders. Don’t give up on yourself and your profession, I beg you!’
The doctor stopped in front of Peters and looked at him, his eyes ablaze.
‘What do you know?’ he yelled. ‘Am I even allowed to be a doctor any more? Even if I still had the will and the capacity to be one, I’m not permitted to practise my profession any longer. A few days ago, the Corps’ chief physician was here, and kicked up one hell of a stink. Far too many men being signed off sick, he said! We shouldn’t be making a great big song and dance about every stupid case of frostbite… the men were nothing but malingerers… we needed to be hard, ruthless… we oughtn’t to forget that we were army officers first and foremost, and that we should keep the requirements of the Wehrmacht uppermost in our minds. The army needed every man that could still carry a rifle… So that’s the way things are here, dear sir! We’re required not to give a rat’s arse about suffering, starving, freezing human beings. Our sole focus should be on the man who can shoot. You’ve got it easy, Padre. You’re only called upon to help people when they’re dying. I have to bellow at them to make them go on living. All that’s expected of me is to harangue sick people back to health! Do you imagine I can still grant myself the luxury of a heart, or feelings of pity? Who takes any pity on me? Your God, maybe, who’s letting us all die in misery here? You’ve still got it so easy, for the present at least. But just you wait: you can see which way the wind’s blowing here! Watch out, ’cos tomorrow you’re just as likely to get an order to raise the dead so they can die one more time for the Führer and the Reich!’
The doctor flings himself down on his camp bed in utter exhaustion. Padre Peters senses that he ought to say something, but words fail him. ‘Waking the dead, yes, that’s it!’ he thinks to himself, and feels the full weight of his own impotence. It strikes him that he couldn’t awaken anyone any more, not even this young doctor, who’s still alive and yet already dead – dead inside from the sickness of Stalingrad.
The long column of the fortress battalion marches towards its forward positions. As they proceed, the front grows ever more lively and more threatening. Bizarre silhouettes of ruined houses, wrecked vehicles and shot-up tanks line their route. The harsh rattle of machine-gun fire drifts over to them, and every so often the fierce explosion of a round from an anti-tank gun splits the air. Yellow and red flares shoot up in a shower of light and sway slowly back to earth. Their evil glow and flicker paints ghostly dancing shadows on the snow. An atmosphere of great tension hangs over the line of marching men. All of their lassitude has been swept away. The agitated thudding and stumbling of their stamping feet mingles with low whispers, terse shouts and commands and the tinny jangle of equipment hanging from their packs, which they try in vain to muffle somehow. The pathfinders at the head of the column warn them in hushed tones to keep quiet and be careful. A little further on, the path divides. This is the fork where the individual companies have to split up. All of a sudden, there are three bright, reddish flashes in swift succession, and three explosions blend into a single dull thud. Mortars – they’ve been spotted! The men have scattered and flung themselves to the ground.