Straight after supper, a drumhead court martial was convened. It consisted of Lieutenant Colonel Unold, Captain Engelhard, and Unold’s batman as a representative of the other ranks. Lakosch refused to explain to the court why he had acted as he did, but the fact that he clearly reiterated his intention to defect to the enemy made the verdict a foregone conclusion: death by firing squad. Unold confirmed the verdict in his capacity as acting divisional commander and immediately after passing sentence summoned Captain Endrigkeit once more. ‘I want to draw a line under this business as quickly as possible and with the minimum of fuss,’ he told him. ‘God knows, we’ve got plenty of other things to worry about right now. So I’m ordering that the judgement should be executed at first light tomorrow. The firing squad will be made up of military police. I’m putting you in charge of carrying out the execution!’
Up to now, the captain hadn’t uttered a word about the whole affair. Now he broke his silence.
‘You want me to shoot the lad?’ His broad East Prussian accent rose from the depths of his beard as if it were coming out of a dense forest. ‘No, Lieutenant Colonel, sir, I can’t. I just can’t do it.’
For a moment, Unold was speechless. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Had everyone here gone mad? He pulled himself together and decided to overlook this act of insubordination. After all, the old captain was only a reservist, and he wasn’t from high up the social ladder either. There was no point taking such people very seriously.
‘What kind of nonsense is that, Endrigkeit?’ he said with forced joviality. ‘There’s no one else I can entrust this task to, see. You’ve got experience in these matters! I mean, this won’t be the first time you’ve executed someone.’
‘No, it’s just not on,’ the captain replied. ‘I can’t do it.’
Unold’s frayed nerves finally snapped.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ he shouted. ‘Have you gone completely crazy, or what? I’m giving you a direct order, and that’s an end of it! Tomorrow morning at nine sharp you’ll come and report to me that the sentence has been carried out. And you haven’t heard the last of this, either!’
Captain Endrigkeit walked out across the open steppe. He felt the need to clear his head and straighten things out in his own mind. The lacework patterns of the frost-encrusted snow crunched beneath his feet. The rolling attack by the Russians had even forced its way into the silence of this desolate winter landscape. The air was humming with the drone and howl of aircraft engines. Up above, agile fighters pulled breathtaking turns. Over to the west, at low altitude, ground-attack aircraft skimmed over the Rossoshka Valley, unleashing fiery-tailed rockets from beneath their wings with an evil hissing sound onto unseen enemy forces below. High up in the sky, reflecting in the afterglow of the sun, which had already sunk below the horizon, were the tiny fuselages of a squadron of bombers. Black mushroom clouds erupting on the ground marked their progress.
The captain, though, took no notice of any of this. His gaze was turned inwards. They were expecting him to shoot Lakosch, the very lad who had saved him from a real fix that time by the skin of his teeth? Endrigkeit was a tough nut. He’d had to carry out many an execution and hadn’t been greatly concerned about the whys and wherefores. But this business was beyond a joke. To go and do such a thing to a bloody rascal just because of an act of sheer stupidity! If only he’d been a thug, or a real criminal…
Suddenly making up his mind, he turned around and trudged over to the bunker. The sergeant standing guard there opened the door and lit a candle for him. Lakosch sat huddled in the corner of the unheated room. When the captain entered, he got to his feet. Endrigkeit was irritated at the feeling of pity he felt welling up inside him.
‘What were you thinking of, you miserable wretch?’ he blustered. ‘Thought you’d just do a runner, eh? And leave your mates in the shit, right? And now they can shoot anyone who does that! So how does that make you feel, eh?’
All of a sudden, when confronted by this bear of a man, Lakosch felt very small. It was like when he was a kid and was about to get a thrashing from his dad for doing something stupid.
‘I… I’m very sorry, Captain, sir,’ he stuttered, ‘for causing you all this trouble. And the thing about my mates, well, I hated doing that, I really did – but I’m at my wits’ end. I just can’t take any more of this!’
And then it all spilled out of Lakosch. Everything that had been seething inside of him for weeks and tormenting him to the point where he took his final desperate step now erupted from him like a stream that had been long dammed up. He spoke about his youth, about his father, who had been murdered in a concentration camp, about his belief in the Führer and a ‘German socialism’, about the war and his experiences in Russia, and finally about how his whole world had collapsed after overhearing a conversation quite by chance. And he went on to explain about Seliger and Harras and the German communists who were over there behind Russian lines working to try to save the men of the Sixth Army…
In the meantime, Endrigkeit had sat himself down on the bench next to Lakosch and lit his pipe. His anger had subsided. He sat in silence and listened to the little driver, who was sometimes halting in his delivery, while at other times he tripped over his words in his haste to get them out. Endrigkeit blew out dense clouds of smoke. So that was how things stood, then. Unold really ought to hear this. However, no sooner had this thought occurred to him than he immediately rejected it. He knew it would be pointless. The Prussian army wasn’t interested in people’s motivations.
‘So you see, I didn’t do it out of cowardice, Captain, sir,’ Lakosch said disconsolately. ‘And I was actually thinking of my comrades… given that there are Germans over on the other side. So I started thinking that maybe the Russians aren’t like they’re painted and wouldn’t go slaughtering everybody … and that there might be a truce and the army might be saved if one of them from over there explained how things really are with the Russians.’
Lakosch waited in vain for an answer. Endrigkeit sat silently, looking straight ahead. Once again, an indistinct feeling of irritation was rising in him. How simple things had been in the past, God damn it! Back then, a deserter was a scoundrel, a traitor to the Fatherland who could be dealt with summarily. But now, all of a sudden, things weren’t so straightforward any more. Loyalty, justice, honour, duty, obedience – this all suddenly appeared in a very questionable light. And even love of the Fatherland had now instantly taken on an ambiguity. Why had this set of concepts, once so rock-solid, suddenly become so shaky? Were the Nazis to blame for this as well? Or was it Stalingrad? Endrigkeit liked simplicity and clarity. He’d lost his bearings in this new landscape. And that appalled him.
Faced with the captain’s ominous silence, Lakosch had also stopped talking. He held out a grubby envelope to Endrigkeit.
‘If I might be so bold as to ask the captain for one last thing,’ he said hesitantly, ‘my mother’s address is on this envelope. If the captain would be so good as to write and tell her that… well, that I got back on the right track after all.’
Endrigkeit turned slowly to face the little driver and gave him a wide stare. His broad chest rose and fell with the deep breaths he was taking. Without warning, he sprang to his feet. ‘Get out!’ he roared, his whole body shaking. ‘Out! Get lost, you wretch! And be quick about it, or I’ll kick you up the backside, d’you hear, you wastrel? And don’t show your face round here ever again, you miserable specimen!’