What has become of the ideal of speaking truth to power? wonders the lieutenant. Frederick the Great’s officers had thrown their daggers down at the king’s feet. How come their modern counterparts were so craven? How had that happened?
He finds no answer to this puzzle.
The artilleryman is still lying right beside him, seemingly waiting for an answer. Should he tell him what he’s just been thinking? It wouldn’t exactly be consoling.
‘Chin up, man!’ he forces himself to respond. ‘We just need to hold out here for a couple of days. Then things’ll get better, for sure! The division’s promised us some winter togs… and the Führer’s thinking of us; he won’t forget us. What was that he told us? “You can rely on me with rock-like confidence!” Well, you can bet your life on that!’
Captain Eichert lies on an earth bench cut out of the back wall of the bunker. Someone has thrown a coat over him; he’s asleep. The dim glow of the flickering candle flits across his grey face, casting a sharp profile of his backward-sloping head onto the clay wall. From his open mouth, in fits and starts, comes a stertorous snore, which changes now and then into a deep moan that seems to emanate from his chest. The captain is dreaming. He’s standing alone on a dead- straight road receding to a vanishing point in the far distance. This road is lined on both sides with dead soldiers sticking rigidly out of the ground like telegraph poles, their heads buried in snow. It’s Victory Boulevard, and the Führer is due to drive down it. Captain Eichert takes a sighting down the row of soldiers to check that they’re all correctly aligned. Suddenly he feels invisible hands take hold of him and try to shove his head down into the snow. ‘Stop!’ he cries out in horror. ‘The war isn’t over yet! I’m not dead yet!’ He struggles in vain to free himself, but the strange arms grasping him are impossible to shake off. ‘Not dead yet?’ a voice laughs. ‘Ha ha ha! The whole army has to form a guard of honour! You too, Captain!’
Eichert wakes with a start of terror. Looming over him he sees the face of his adjutant, who is shaking him by the shoulders.
‘Captain!’ he shouts in alarm. ‘Captain, sir!’
‘Yes… what… how… yes? What’s the matter?’
‘Captain, sir, there’s a sound of fighting coming from the left sector, and it’s growing louder! Seems like it’s all kicked off down there!’
The battalion commander is already on his feet, cursing.
‘On the left, you say? Dierk’s sector?’
The field telephone rings and he picks up the receiver. It’s Lieutenant Dierk on the line and he’s very het up.
‘I wanted to call you straight away, Captain! It’s a real mess down here… the Russians have broken through, they caught us with our pants down…No, I haven’t got a clear overview of the situation yet… The anti-tank gun on the left isn’t firing any more. And on the right? We’ve locked that down as best we can, sir.’
‘I’ll be down there myself right away, Dierk!’ says the captain. He hangs up and calls the regiment. The answer he receives isn’t encouraging. The battalion must deal with the breakthrough as quickly as they can with their own resources.
The captain manages to secure the services of a handful of older, more experienced troops from one of the other two companies. With their help, Lieutenant Dierk is to drive the Russians back from their positions at daybreak the next day. The lieutenant, though, is in total despair.
‘That won’t do any good, Captain!’ he declares. ‘The Russians have made a really major breakthrough. And they appear to be constantly reinforcing as we speak. There’s no hope of us plugging the gap without some stronger forces of our own!’
The captain shrugs his shoulders. He too has little faith that the operation will succeed. But in the event, the planned counter-attack never takes place. The next morning – with a fifth of the battalion already incapacitated by frostbite – the Russians launch a large-scale assault of the kind the division has become increasingly accustomed to in the last few weeks across the entire sector controlled by the regiment. The attack is executed with extensive armoured and artillery support. Colonel Steigmann’s curtain-fire system inflicts heavy losses on the enemy. Four waves of attacking troops are beaten back. Only the fifth wave finally succeeds, as evening falls, in widening and deepening the area that has been breached. Several Russian tanks break through and cause havoc in the artillery emplacements.
All that Captain Eichert can salvage from his battalion the following morning is a group of around forty men and two officers. For the third time, the ‘Eichert Battalion’ has ceased to exist.
6
Is There Really No Way Out?
Göring had done what he could. It wasn’t what he had promised. No convoys of heavy transport gliders flew to Stalingrad by moonlight; but alongside the old ‘corrugated-iron’ Ju 52s, which suffered heavy losses, a few of the more modern Heinkel He 111 bombers put in an appearance. In addition to the cargo they carried in their fuselages, they could also transport food in their bomb bays and petrol in their tanks. A few obsolete Ju 86s – a type now consigned to a training role in Germany – were even pressed into service. Now and then, the troops trapped in the Stalingrad pocket would lift their heads and stare in wonder as a large, four-engined machine approached and circled majestically over the aerodrome at Pitomnik. These were either Focke-Wulf Condors, hastily redeployed from the south of France, or Ju 90s, which came straight from Sicily and were still being flown by the factory’s own pilots. Although these heavy transports had a payload of around five tons apiece, their principal effect was on morale, for only a handful of these showpiece aircraft were sent on the Stalingrad run at any one time, and even these presently came to grief while attempting to land on or take off from the snow-swept airfield. The food situation had by now become critical. Two hundred grams of bread a day for an infantryman in the trenches, and one hundred grams for everyone else. The horses were all skin and bone, and the cavalry captain from the First Romanian Cavalry Division who had been so concerned about his equine charges back in Businovka could surely never have dreamed that every last one of them would one day end up in the pots of German field kitchens. All that now remained of their carcasses were the bleached white bones protruding from the snow beside every road. Russian prisoners, starving Romanian soldiers and the hordes of wounded men who drifted from hospital to hospital in hope of admission had picked them clean in their desperation.
Hunger was also rife in the Intelligence Section’s bunker. Fröhlich’s head steadily shrivelled and began to take on the unappealing look of a vulture, Herbert had lost all interest in the business of cooking and flew off the handle if anyone quizzed him about it, and even the well-padded Geibel started to become visibly more emaciated. Breuer, though, who had never fully recovered from his bout of dysentery, observed with alarm how day by day not only his physical strength appeared to wane but also that his mental powers were increasingly deserting him. It was only with the greatest of effort that he was able to concentrate on his work.