The stretcher-bearers carry eighteen corpses out of the stables, men who have succumbed during their final, desperate battle to stay alive. But the remainder have been defeated and sit sunk in silent lethargy, having surrendered themselves to the inevitable. They don’t even stir a muscle as the thump of exploding shells grows louder, or when an officer dressed in a white fur overjacket and clutching a machine-pistol enters the room, followed by a handful of soldiers.
‘What are you still doing here, doctor?’ the man calls. ‘Clear out this instant! This is where the main defensive line is now!’
‘Are you telling me the main front… runs right through this building?’ the surgeon asks, dumbfounded. He unbuttons his blood-spattered rubber apron and lets it fall to the ground.
‘That’s right! We’re going to try to halt the Soviet advance here again.’
‘Yes, but…’ He glances briefly at the officer and then casts his eyes over to the dark, silent space at the back of the room. The officer follows his gaze. He realizes what the doctor is getting at and says nothing. Then he looks at the doctor once more, shrugs his shoulders, and walks out. Now that he has been wrenched from his numbing surgical procedures, the surgeon’s actions take on a nervous haste.
‘Finish up!’ he shouts. ‘We’re leaving!’
His assistant packs away the instruments, while medical orderlies drag equipment outside. The last vehicle’s engine is fired up. The staff doctor and most of his company have already left. The surgeon stops Padre Peters.
‘I’m going to have to prevail upon you, Padre, to assemble all those who are still mobile in some shape or form and walk them down to Gumrak.’
‘So who’s going to stay back here with those who can’t get away?’
‘I will,’ says a quiet voice. It’s the other army chaplain, the Catholic padre. This ‘I will’ hangs in the room like an omen. It brooks no contradiction.
‘I’ll leave three days’ worth of rations here for you,’ says the doctor. He doesn’t mean it to sound sarcastic; it’s just force of habit.
Padre Peters takes his leave of his fellow chaplain with a silent handshake. What could he say anyhow? And who knows which of them has drawn the shorter straw? The men who await certain death in a building that will shortly be swamped by the tide of battle, or those who have to drag themselves out and face the uncertainty of a twenty-five-kilometre-long march through the snow and the bitter cold? Doesn’t this spell the end for all of them, one way or another? Padre Peters dismisses these gloomy thoughts and rushes out. He still has one more task to perform.
The area outside is now deserted. White-clad figures are scrabbling around on the far side of the valley. Infantrymen digging themselves snow holes. An 88-millimetre flak gun is being set up at one corner of the stable block. Tank shells hiss over the escarpment. Where they land, a small yellow cloud of smoke can be seen above the snow. Further to the north, a string of bombers passes undisturbed across the sky. The ground shakes under the impact of the thudding bomb blasts.
Behind the building, the handful of medical orderlies have mustered all the walking wounded. A group of around eighty men so far, though their number is constantly swelled by others emerging from houses, foxholes and gullies. What is it that attracts them all, what drives them on? Is it the conviction that hope still resides at the place they’re being led to? Or is it the lure of the legendary field hospital at Gumrak, or the magic word Stalingrad? Out here in the icy wasteland of snow, soldiers’ crazed pipe dreams transform Stalingrad, that bombed-out, shot-up pile of ruins, into a Promised Land that holds out the prospect of a roof over one’s head, warmth and food. Maybe they are drawn by the little handcart being pulled along by the orderly there, with a few meagre loaves and tins of food on it? Or is it simply the naked animal instinct for survival?
Padre Peters scans the marching column that is just setting off slowly. What a picture of abject misery it presents. Are those figures dragging themselves along there still human? Those figures draped in tarpaulins and blankets, hobbling along and supporting one another, their heads swathed in white bandages, their arms in splints, their legs in lumpy plaster casts, their feet resembling club feet from the straw or pieces of rag they had wrapped around them? Yes, these emaciated bodies, these waxen yellow skulls and these grotesquely swollen faces covered in chilblains belonged to people. And these two soldiers carrying their stricken comrade along in a tarpaulin despite being scarcely able to stand upright themselves – my God, yes, these were all human beings! They had all lived and erred and sinned. But could a person be so guilty that they deserved this fate? No! Padre Peters’s innermost being screamed the word. Dear Lord, no, this cannot be Your will! My God, why hast Thou forsaken us?
The sky is overcast. Whirling snow sweeps over the procession as it makes its arduous way down the ice-crusted road. A soldier is dragging himself along between the padre and one of the medical orderlies. He can hardly lift his feet and is tottering about like a drunkard. His head, swaddled in a woollen scarf, is lolling backwards and swinging to and fro. His glassy eyes stare up at the sky. Peters is clinging on to this man for dear life. He is in the grip of an obsession. He must save this one man here, this hopeless case, at all costs. Then everything will be all right.
Just once, he cast a glance back at where they had come from. As he did so, he thought that some horrific apparition was mocking him. The building in the distance, which they had left just an hour before, was in flames… Now he didn’t look back any more. What lay behind him was erased for ever. And so he does not notice how, behind his back, the ranks of marching men begin to thin, as every so often a man collapses into the snow, never to rise again.
Hours pass. Littering their route are dead men who have keeled over and been mercifully covered by the falling snow. Vehicles overtake them, rushing past: empty or nearly empty lorries, or buses crammed with wood, crates, furniture and beds. But none of them stop to exchange their senseless, inanimate cargoes for the living.
A village appears, teeming with people. They take a short rest and shelter from the wind in the lee of the houses. The blast of exploding bombs nearby forces them to move on. Many remain behind, while others join their ranks. Onward they march, into the night, which is closing in from the east, the never-changing night of searchlights, blackout screens and bombs. In the darkness of a ravine, they come across a convoy of halted vehicles, heavy three-axled lorries with their radiators buried deep in wind-blown snowdrifts. The men rush up to them. These are some of the same trucks that only this morning… It’s so quiet, uncannily quiet. No sign of any drivers or orderlies. Every shout in this desolate place has an eerie echo. They climb up onto the trucks. There they all lie, just the same as when they were loaded up this morning, but now they are dusted with snow, frozen stiff and dead. And now the living fall upon the dead, dragging off their blankets, tearing the clothes from their hard-frozen bodies, screaming, jostling and tussling with one another to get hold of any warm piece of clothing they can lay their hands on… Oh God, why hast Thou forsaken us?