Colonel von Hermann was walking along the narrow path that ran for a stretch along the face of the escarpment just above the valley bottom, and led to his quarters. The location was quiet and peaceful, and everything was laid out like they were going to live here for all eternity. At the entrance to the well-entrenched bunker, which was built into the cliff side, stood colourful signs decorated with witty slogans and caricatures of the occupants. It was a regular knights’ fortress here: drawings of Iron Crosses all around – that was the chief adjutant’s section; a picture of a pair of compasses and a ruler – the cartographic unit; while the greyhounds there surely denoted the dispatch riders’ unit. At that moment, two soldiers were busy taking down a sign bearing the inscription ‘Wholesale Warehouse’ and a row of horses’ skulls hung above it.
‘What’s all this, then, Stegen?’ said the colonel in passing to the officer who was overseeing the work. ‘On the move again?’
‘Yes indeed, Colonel, more’s the pity! Though pretty soon there’ll be nowhere left to go. First it’s the quartermaster and all his stores we have to make room for, and now the Eighth Corps comes creeping round here, looking for space. Even their C-in-C was here in person. So now we’ve got to give over five of our best bunkers to them. Couldn’t you lay down the law, Colonel? After all, this is meant to be our area here!’
‘Sorry, Stegen, no can do,’ replied the colonel, moving on. ‘I dare say we’ll all be having to bunk up a bit more in the few days we’ve got left here.’ The captain gave him a puzzled look as he went on his way.
The chief of operation’s bunker had all the creature comforts of a cosy living room: carpets, a battery-powered desk lamp and separate sleeping alcoves. On the small stove built of red bricks with white pointing stood a set of cast-iron stove tools. It was much the same story with the forward companies, too. They were at a stable front here and had got themselves settled in for the winter as comfortably as possible. The chief of staff was stretched over the map, drawing in troop positions. He straightened up when the colonel walked in. The C-in-C was small and slender, with neatly parted, glossy black hair above a round face. He had a fleshy nose and a somewhat glazed expression in his eyes. This look of his was a legacy of a time-fuse explosion in Kiev, which the lieutenant colonel had been the only person in his unit to survive.
‘Colonel Steffen reports that he has just beaten back another attempted breakthrough at his sector, under his personal command,’ announced the colonel. ‘We’ll have to put in for another Knight’s Cross for him. And then we’re supposed to take over the defence of this group of houses here from the 305th as well. They can’t squeeze any more men out of our unit, so now they’re just making the sector we have to cover bigger. It’s outrageous!’
The colonel had come to a halt by the desk without taking off his coat. ‘Listen, Dannemeister,’ he said, ‘the western front of the Cauldron has collapsed. It’s all over! Hube’s come back from the Führer’s HQ with the suggestion that, as a last resort, we should make a kind of Alcazar in the ruins of Stalingrad.’
The lieutenant colonel flung his pencil down on the table.
‘That’s sheer insanity!’ he roared. ‘And are you telling me the Army High Command’s going along with that? Has everyone here gone stark raving mad? How much longer are they going to dance to the tune of this crazy corporal? The Officer Corps, the generals and the field marshals – the whole German general staff is letting itself be led by the nose by this upstart, incompetent, loud-mouthed little thug? It’s enough… enough to…’
He stared at the wall and clenched his fists, ready to strike an unseen opponent.
‘Pull yourself together, Dannemeister!’ the colonel rounded on the chief of operations. ‘Don’t forget that you’re an officer! I won’t stand for any criticism of the Führer in my presence, understood? You can think what you like as far as I’m concerned, but keep your thoughts to yourself!’
The lieutenant colonel was startled by the unexpectedly sharp tone of the colonel’s rebuke. Cowed into submission, he asked quietly, ‘So what do we do now, Colonel?’
‘What do we do?’ the colonel repeated in astonishment. ‘You’re asking me that? You’re a soldier yourself, man! We’ll follow orders, that’s what!’
The apathetic mood of indifference that had come over Lieutenant Wiese prevented him from speculating on why the colonel had chosen him, of all people, to be his adjutant. He never took him on inspection tours, gave him no tasks to perform and left him entirely to his own esoteric devices. But Wiese was shaken out of his ivory tower when the colonel summoned him out of the blue one evening.
‘There are professional and personal reasons why I’ve ordered you here,’ said von Hermann, pushing one of the two chairs in his room towards Wiese and offering him a cigarette. ‘We’re in the endgame, Wiese; the Cauldron’s falling apart. The final act of the tragedy has begun.’
The lieutenant looked wide-eyed at the colonel, who in the meantime had stood up and was slowly pacing up and down the room.
‘No one will want to hear the truth about Stalingrad,’ he went on, ‘but I honestly believe Germany needs to know about it. There must be men over there with the courage to report what really happened. And that oughtn’t to be just a soldier, it needs to be someone who can… well, who can tell the story from a human perspective, if you catch my drift? And I’d also like…’ – here his voice gave a slight tremble – ‘I’d like it if my wife heard from the right person something that I can’t put down on paper – about how we met our end here, and also… how our son died.’
Wiese slowly rose to his feet. He had turned white as a sheet.
‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ the colonel went on, ‘you didn’t know, did you? Yes, he’s dead. Anyway, the Corps has been ordered to appoint a messenger to the army group. I’ve nominated you, Wiese. Everyone was in agreement. You’ll fly out tomorrow from the airfield at Pitomnik. Here, take this package. My wife’s address is on it. You can collect the other officers’ letters tomorrow from the adjutant.’
Wiese felt like his legs were made of lead and the room swam before his eyes. The colonel looked at him, seemingly waiting for an answer. Then he placed his hand on his shoulder.
‘I quite understand, Wiese,’ he said in fatherly tones. ‘Just make sure you get on that flight. After this war, Germany’s going to need men like you who aren’t just soldiers.’
Searching for an adequate response, the lieutenant was tongue-tied. But then he blurted out something really stupid, something every soldier would have laughed at because it was so out of place and old-fashioned, reminiscent of the spiked helmets and shaven heads of the Prussian military:
‘At your command, Colonel, sir!’
2
Look What They’ve Done to Us!
First Lieutenant Breuer lay stretched out on his plank bed with his eyes closed. He could feel the lice crawling slowly up and down his prone form. His body, emaciated by dysentery and hunger, burned and itched all over. But that wasn’t the worst of it. There was also corruption that ate away at a person from the inside.
That final night in Dubininsky, he’d drawn a line under everything in the belief that that fateful order – ‘The position is to be held to the very last man!’ – was going to be carried out to the letter. Like the fool he was. Could he really have thought for one moment that a man like Unold would see it as his solemn duty to be the last man to fall at Dubininsky? Hadn’t he known that the ‘last man’ always meant someone else and never yourself? Well, he knew it now!