After several hours, the major and his companion returned. The lieutenant colonel was still unsuspecting, while Siebel’s downcast face revealed that no progress had been made on the defences. He brightened up, however, when he saw the cheerfully lit room and all the wonderful food on offer.
‘Good heavens!’ he cried, ‘I’m bowled over! It’s a real Land of Plenty here! Okay, let’s forget about all the crap for now! Let’s just live for once in our lives. In three days, we’re all going straight to hell anyhow… Haven’t we got anything to drink, though?’
They most certainly did. For a small consideration, and with due deference to the major’s Knight’s Cross and wooden arm – which the first lieutenant told him about – the paymaster had let Breuer have a couple of bottles of Hennessy cognac.
By January 1943 the village of Pitomnik, formerly situated southeast of the aerodrome, only continued to exist on the map. Where rows of wooden farmhouses may once have stood (two or three broken-down shacks and a few charred remains of fireplaces were the only remaining signs of habitation), a huge collection of vehicles had now assembled. Lorries, cars, tractors, buses and self-propelled howitzers of all types were parked up there, camouflaged with whitewash or still asphalt-grey, covered with snow, immobile and dead. All the life of Pitomnik had fled beneath the ground, which was tunnelled through and riddled with excavations like those of giant moles. In the days following the tenth of January, a constant influx of troops arriving from the west boosted the numbers of people living this troglodytic existence.
The scene is one such bunker, identical to countless others; it lies buried deep underground, is warmed by the glow of a small cylindrical stove, and is crammed full of men. They squat on the floor or squeeze together in a standing position, surrendering themselves gratefully to the little bit of warmth and shivering whenever the entrance hatch opens for a moment and the winter night pokes its icy fingers into the room. And the hatch is opened frequently. New figures flow down the steps in a steady stream, and their frozen rigidity slowly melts as the heat radiating from the stove thaws them out.
Jammed between stinking, silent bodies crouches Lieutenant Harras. His head, shrouded in a field-grey balaclava, is leaning against the tacky earth wall, and his fur cap has slipped down over his eyes. He dozes fitfully, and his breathing is laboured in the stuffy miasma produced by damp clothes and boots, frostbitten limbs and suppurating wounds. His wounded hand, which he’s rested on his drawn-up knees, is causing him intense stabbing pain under its filthy dressing. Some terrible days lay behind him, since he’d been cut off from the rest of his unit in the wake of the big Russian offensive.
The rightful owner of the bunker, a paymaster who has been shoved to a corner of the table by this unwelcome invasion of his space, is sitting by candlelight and feverishly totting up long lists of figures with the help of two soldiers. Once again, the sums don’t add up. Hardly a day goes by when provisions aren’t pilfered from the supplies bunker. His piggy little eyes skim suspiciously over the dull faces all around him before returning to check on the piles of tinned goods, loaves of bread and the large portion of fat that he has piled up in front of himself on the table as a precaution. Every time Harras’s gaze lighted on this table, he found himself seized anew by blind fury. The moment he arrived here he’d asked the paymaster for some food. The man had looked him up and down.
‘Got your unit with you?’
‘Unit… no, I’m on my own.’
‘Then I can’t give you anything. According to regulations I can only issue rations to entire detachments, not to individuals.’
And he refused to budge from this position, despite all entreaties and threats. Neither Harras nor any of the other solitary soldiers who were milling about here got so much as a bit of bread from him. Harras felt like punching the fat bloke in the face. ‘You fucking bastard!’ he thought bitterly. ‘You stubborn, stupid little pen-pushing arsehole!’ And at the same time he felt an anger welling up inside him at his constant ill fortune. During a bombing raid on the airfield, he’d managed to filch some crispbreads and a few packets of glucose from the backpack of a junior doctor, who’d dashed off to attend to some screaming casualties. But immediately afterwards, his little stash had in turn been stolen from him in a bunker… ‘You just can’t trust anyone any more!’ he concluded sadly. ‘Time was it would have been unheard of in the German Army for a common soldier to steal from an officer.’
‘Lieutenant!’
Harras feels an elbow prodding him tentatively in the side. A pointed little face with round, sharp eyes looks imploringly at him from the white-fringed hood of a camouflage jacket.
‘Have you got anything to eat by any chance, Lieutenant, sir?’
Harras turns away. Such an idiotic question doesn’t deserve an answer.
‘Do you have any idea where the staff is now?’ enquires the shrew-like face, undeterred.
‘Which staff do you mean?’
‘The divisional staff of the Third Motorized Division.’
‘No.’
The little fellow carefully rubs the back of his hand along his damp nose.
‘Pity,’ he replies. ‘When someone escapes from the Russians, they’re really meant to report to their staff… And when all’s said and done, at least there was something to eat over there.’
Harras pricks up his ears.
‘Were you captured by the Russians too, then?’
‘Yes, sir!’ the man in the hood nods eagerly. ‘They caught us at Dubinsky or whatever the name of that dump is – me and two others from my unit and a couple of Romanians. They got all matey with the Romanians straight off, but they treated us okay as well.’
Harras perks up all of a sudden. Some of those around him also begin to stir from their half-slumbers.
‘Whassat, you were with the Russkis?’
‘Come on, mate, spill the beans! What was it like?’
The little man is pleased to find himself suddenly the centre of attention, and really gets into his stride.
‘The Russians… well, let me tell you, they’re no slouches! Actually they’re as smart as whips. So, first of all they took our weapons off us and then our pocket knives and watches and cigarette lighters. Then they gave us something to eat: bread, as much as we wanted, and sausage and bacon and cheese…’ The men are hanging on the speaker’s every word, like children being told about paradise. ‘… then this commissar turns up – you know, one of them in the black uniforms – and he speaks perfect German and he asks us whether we’d like to go back to our own side and tell them to end the whole thing right now. Well, one of our lot didn’t want to. He was thinking it’s a trick and they’ll shoot us in the back. So he stayed put there. But me and the other bloke said yes straight away, and they let us go.’
‘What, they released you just like that?’
‘Yeah, they gave us back all our stuff and packed us off back to our lines… and they stood laughing and waving at us as we left.’
Silence. Then one of the men asks, hesitantly: ‘So why didn’t you just stay there?’
‘Stay there? Pah, what do you know? We were happy to be away from there again! Who’s to say they weren’t just being friendly for propaganda reasons? And once they start taking more prisoners, they’ll do ’em all in!’
‘Dead right!’ ‘Yeah, it’s all a big con. Nothing but propaganda!’
‘Well, hang on, lads, I’m not so sure about that…’
‘Tell me,’ asks Harras, ‘did you run across any Germans when you were over there? You know, emigrés and the like?’