This house of misery, which frequently shook from the impact of artillery shells nearby or bombs dropped in the night by planes, had cast its spell over Padre Peters and refused to let him go. The images of this horrific world followed him into the spells of fitful sleep he managed to snatch at dead of night. There was that trench beside the shed, for instance, full to the brim with amputated limbs… and the untold number of new ‘admissions’ every day, who lay outside in the snow and were forced to wait until space was made for them inside. The medical orderlies sullenly weaved their way between them, here and there dragging to one side the stiff cadaver of someone who had lost too much blood and had not survived the severe frost. Padre Peters had to witness all of this. Then there was the field surgeon here, a tall, gaunt fellow who wore a permanent hangdog expression and who barely slept, keeping himself awake with coffee and other stimulants. In the light cast by an oil lamp, he would stand over the simple trestle table that served as an operating table and worked with cramped hands on opened-up bodies that steamed in the chill air like a washing tub. He was in the habit of weighing up the seriousness of the men’s injuries with curt dispassion: ‘Stomach wound – that’ll take an hour. Can’t do anything about that… not now, anyhow.’ Not now; that meant never. But in an hour, he and his team here could perform three amputations; if they immediately wrote off one hopeless case, then there was a slim chance they could save the lives of three other men. It was a simple calculation, dreadful in its sober logic.
Padre Peters saw all this, day in, day out. And he saw assistants and orderlies keel over during operations from lack of sleep; he saw wounded men lying there apathetically, sunk in profound hopelessness and waiting silently for the end to come; he saw those who, out of sheer desperation, tried to help themselves and, either by using subterfuge or by summoning up their last remaining strength, somehow managed to get themselves as far as the operating table. When they were rebuffed and told to get lost, they begged the medical staff to be merciful and put a bullet through their heads or give them a lethal injection. He saw the feverish waves of renewed hope swell up over the lines of men whenever the surgeon major managed to flag down a couple of empty lorries and dispatch thirty to forty men, primarily those with brain or eye injuries, to the airfield at Pitomnik, or when a rumour frequently spread and given credence – namely that German tanks were approaching – was revived and did the rounds once more.
And he saw starving men, emaciated by dysentery and bouts of diarrhoea – not the countless men in this condition who perished of sheer weakness in snow holes out in the open somewhere, but the few who still had sufficient strength to drag their hopes to this field hospital. He looked into their mask-like, twisted faces, which had a bluish pallor to them, and their wide, staring eyes that glowed feverishly in dark hollowed-out sockets, and watched them wolf down the food that was handed them like wild animals, only to double up on the floor, wracked by violent stomach cramps, just a few minutes later. The doctor would shrug his shoulders: ‘Nothing to be done; their bodies just won’t accept solids any more. What they need is two months’ worth of glucose injections.’ And for a few seconds, Peters would see a fleeting mirage of white hospital beds, light, sun, and nurses in crisp white uniforms with kindly eyes and soft, gentle hands…
Peters saw day by day how the stretcher-bearers would stumble in unfeeling monotony with their loads to the place behind the shed, where the Russian Hiwis scraped out makeshift graves in the snow to bury the long line of corpses. And he stood in attendance while this was going on and noticed how one of the Russians pointed at the pile of bodies that had just been unloaded and announced in broken German: ‘Lives! Still lives!’ And he was right, there was a man among the corpses who was still alive! His mouth opened and closed in grinding motions in his frozen face, while the fingers of one hand, lying listlessly in the snow, tightened and unclenched again in the same rhythm. Without a word and with a studied air of indifference, the bearers heaved their burden back up onto their shoulders and trudged back to the stables.
Padre Peters saw all of this, and he saw it as a human being whose gaze was fixed not on the husk of the body but on the kernel of the soul. The men who were suffering so anonymously here, dying in his arms, in agony or with curses on their lips or in harrowingly dumb submissiveness, were not in Peters’s eyes simply soldiers, serial numbers or cannon fodder. Each of them revealed himself – often in deeply moving last testaments – to be a profound and multi-faceted individual blessed by God. They had all worked and loved and hoped and gone astray; they were the loved ones of women and children or the object of a mother’s anxious concern. As he looked on, this misery multiplied into a penitential procession by a whole people, and suddenly all the suffering and death broke over Padre Peters with unchecked force. He agonized and prayed to God to give him strength. And the inner strength he gained from these prayers he channelled into the services he conducted in rotation with his young colleague from the other denomination. Here he found words that, for a few brief moments, filled the dismal room with light and warmth and provided succour to the soul when the hand of the doctor could no longer help the body. It was in moments such as these that he truly felt his career to be a vocation.
But the situation went beyond all human endurance. The tide of misery threatened to engulf him. At that point, the part of his being that remained untainted triggered a kind of automatic self-preservation mechanism. Like in a leaking ship, the bulkheads within him shut fast against the overpowering swell of suffering, only letting through what his soul was able to deal with. This meant that, at times, he was totally abstracted, carelessly stumbling over the rows of wounded soldiers and oblivious to the groans of the men he trod on. Utterly unaware of what he was doing – if he’d realized the full extent of his actions, he would have been horrified at himself – he gradually learned, just as the surgeon standing there at his blood-soaked operating table had done, to apply a kind of triage system to his pastoral care. His brain would automatically register when a person was in dire need of spiritual comfort or could forego it, and he would only deploy the valuable psychological forces of empathy and sympathy in priority cases, dismissing anything that fell outside this category. Accordingly, he had begun by offering up a short prayer for the dead who were being buried outside. Now he gave that up. Every prayer for the dead was one less he could expend on men who, for the time being at least, were still clinging on to life. For all his active involvement at the dressing station, Padre Peters knew full well that everyone who came here was already marked for death and that the only question remaining was in what precise manner they would depart this life.
When the division had been relieved by a motorized division from the south at the start of January, Colonel Steigmann was the only one among his comrades who did not greet this switch with unalloyed delight. Sure, this relief was fully deserved, and the fact that the best-equipped unit in the Cauldron was now taking over the defence of its most difficult sector seemed to be in everyone’s best interests. But the self-confident, supercilious way in which the officers of the relief unit had looked at his tried-and-tested defensive system… he hoped these gentlemen wouldn’t have any nasty surprises! But everyone else was over the moon at being transferred to the quiet and well-secured southern sector. They really had been saved by the skin of their teeth; this was almost like a holiday! And there had been no envy or annoyance when the advance parties of the new unit came to cast a condescending eye over their pitiful defensive positions. ‘So this is where you’ve been living, eh? Oh well, no matter, no matter. We’ll build everything ourselves! We’ve brought whole columns of lorries along with building timber and T-beams!’ Fine then, so much the better! Good luck with that! Their own division at least were sick to the back teeth with this miserable sector, which they’d defended at such a high cost in blood.