‘Oh, that’s just great!’ the lieutenant colonel muttered to himself. ‘Just great! And that’s how we’re hoping to win this war, is it?’
He pulled out his slippers from his leather suitcase, lit a candle and sat down in front of the rekindled stove. That was how Siebel and Breuer found him when they returned in the late evening, dog-tired and frozen through. Major Siebel had thrown himself into the pointless task he’d been assigned with a zeal that would have been worthy of a far better enterprise. He had really sunk his teeth into the task, as if the outcome of the whole war depended on its success. The Corps’ military policemen and their commander had vanished, one by one. Only at the railway crossing where Breuer and Siebel set up their checkpoint did they manage, with some difficulty, to scrape together a force of around fifty men. They were standing around there starving and with their teeth chattering; some collapsed there and then. But food and accommodation proved impossible to find, let alone any materials for constructing defences. And so the major was forced to send them away again. And when, as the evening drew on, the ever-increasing stream of retreating soldiers made any further effort impossible, Siebel drove to the High Command. There, they could scarcely even recall what the assignment was. Unold had already disappeared. ‘So, right,’ he was finally instructed, ‘fair enough: your role in the operation is complete. The Fourteenth Corps, which was due to occupy that sector, is now in place. It will take over the task of building the defensive line.’
The task of building the defensive line! Recalling this phrase, Siebel chuckled grimly to himself as he gathered up his things at the bunker.
‘What’s going on, then?’ asked the lieutenant colonel uneasily.
‘We’re shipping out, back to our unit.’
‘What about me, then? What are my orders?’
‘You? You’re free to do as you please. Maybe you can even look for your artillery columns. You’d better start right here in the gorge, though! It’s crammed full of vehicles. Some of your lot are bound to be among them.’
The lieutenant colonel jumped up.
‘That’s outrageous! Simply turfing an officer out on the street like this, quite outrageous… I’ll file a formal complaint! I’ll go straight to High Command with this!’
He flung his slippers and washing kit into his suitcase and threw on his fur coat.
‘With this fantastic level of organization,’ he grumbled, ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we lost the war. But at least in this case there’s no doubt who’s to blame. The top brass, that’s who, this bloody idiotic top brass!’
Breuer sat down at the table and laid his head on his arms. The impressions of this day, the dreadful, pitiable scenes of the German army in retreat and the chaotic scenes back at the railway crossing, all this had shaken his mental equilibrium to the core. He would have liked nothing better than to just crawl away somewhere and hide, and not to hear or see anything any more. Couldn’t this old man just shut his trap for once? He shot the lieutenant colonel a furious glance – and suddenly he remembered where he knew this face from. The pince-nez, the centre parting, the little moustache – and that expression…
‘So,’ said the lieutenant colonel in parting, ‘I hope I’ll eventually see you all in my machine-gun company!’
Gripped by an insane fury, Breuer leaped up and launched himself at the lieutenant colonel. ‘Who’s to blame?’ he screamed. ‘The top brass? No, I’ll tell you who’s really to blame. You are – yes, you! You and all your bloody kind! With all your jingoism and the warmongering you use to poison children’s minds – all your fine talk of steel helmets and swagger sticks and the red-white-and-black flag and “Let’s March to Victory Over France”. You are to blame, you and no one else – Mister Schoolmaster Strackwitz!’
He’d grabbed the lieutenant colonel by the lapels of his fur coat and was shaking him like a bundle of straw. The old officer’s eyes were bulging out of their sockets, and beads of sweat were forming on his brow. He thought he’d been transported to a madhouse and began to doubt his own sanity. With a sudden strength born of desperation, he wrenched himself free of Breuer’s grip, snatched up his suitcase and ran out. Only when he was safely outside did he pull out his pay-book to check for himself whether he wasn’t actually the schoolteacher Strackwitz, instead of the same old Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Sauer from Breslau, a Great War veteran drafted back into military service in 1936, and before that a successful travelling salesman dealing in vacuum cleaners.
The engine made a deep growling sound, and even the rattling of the doors and the bodywork sounded more muffled than usual. The intense cold of this night seemed even to have altered the structure of metal. Breuer sat jammed in a corner of the car. His teeth were chattering and not just from the appalling cold. The dreadful images of disorganization floated before his eyes. He thought back to his conversations with Wiese. ‘He was right,’ he said to himself, ‘we’re losing the war. Right here at Stalingrad. What will become of Germany? Of our homeland?’
The car came to a halt with screeching brakes. The railway crossing at Gumrak was blocked by a tangle of vehicles. The night was lit by the glow of flames. Major Siebel got out and directed the four-wheel-drive Horch limousine next to them through the snow. When, with some difficulty, they finally made it to the open road to Stalingradski, the major announced quietly: ‘So, this is my wedding night—’
Breuer turned his head.
‘How come?’ he said in a tired voice.
‘First thing this morning I dispatched a telegram,’ the major replied, ‘from High Command to Gleiwitz, addressed to my fiancée… proposing long-distance marriage by proxy. At first they didn’t want to send it, told me the telegraph lines were too busy. But Paulus himself sanctioned it. Said he could understand my position. And this evening the adjutant told me that a message had come through. It’s from my fiancée, confirming that she’s willing to go ahead.’
When the two officers arrived at the CO’s bunker to send a reply, Captain Engelhard was already sitting there, reading in the light of an oil lamp. He sat up and, casting a cautious look into the corner of the bunker, put his finger to his lips. Unold lay on a camp bed there, under a blanket. His eyes were closed and his gaunt, white head stood out against the darkness. He wasn’t moving, but it was hard to tell if he was asleep. Next to him, on a crate, lay his gun. The major pulled a bottle of cognac from the depths of his greatcoat, and Engelhard placed two glasses and a china beaker on the table. Siebel poured. He slapped the captain on the shoulder.
‘You’ll laugh yourself sick at this, man, but I’m getting married!’ he said. ‘So let’s drink to my wedding night!’ He emptied his glass in one and then started telling Engelhard quietly about the events of the past two days. The captain listened with an earnest and calm look on his face. Now and then he glanced into the corner, to see if Unold was listening to their conversation, but everything remained quiet there.
‘Yeah,’ Engelhard said when he’d finished, ‘looks like it’s the end. All over and done with, I reckon. All that remains is for us to quit the scene with as much decency as we possibly can.’
‘Decency?’ Siebel scoffed. ‘There’s no decency here! The gentlemen from High Command should crawl out from their holes some time! Paulus ought to go out onto the streets just for once and see if what’s happening there warrants the name of a decent death! He thinks he’s still got soldiers he can lead, and who can build defensive lines? He really ought to get out more! There’s never been anything like it in the whole of history!’