‘Unold should be coming with us!’
‘Yeah, that’s right. Where is he? Surely we’re worth at least a final pep talk, aren’t we?’
But there was no sign of Unold. Instead, Captain Fackelmann prowled round the band of grumbling troops like a watchdog.
‘Gentlemen, please!’ He raised his hands beseechingly. ‘The lieutenant colonel has no intention of flying out. He has a new assignment from High Command. He’s incredibly busy right now. He… he sends you all his very best. He’s very proud of you – the last soldiers who will uphold the honour of our division.’
Small groups of unknown, scruffy foot soldiers came sniffing around the division’s vehicles, which were parked up there, for the most part unscathed, and were now to be abandoned for ever. Like hyenas, they circled in a wide arc around the doomed little task force. They could scent unoccupied bunkers and booty. Fackelmann mopped his brow and looked imploringly at Breuer, who at that moment appeared with Fröhlich, Nasarov and the two Hiwis. But the first lieutenant seemed unwilling to get embroiled in anything that called for leadership. The fact that the three Russians were armed and so were clearly determined to fight alongside the Germans helped defuse the atmosphere.
The countryside was shrouded in dank fog. By the time the three lorries drove on to the broad expanse of the former Russian airfield at Gumrak, it was almost dark. They passed a line of wrecked aircraft and burning vehicles. Red and yellow flares were shooting into the sky and from somewhere high up above the drifting banks of fog came the rumble of unseen aircraft. From time to time a plane would suddenly roar down, large and heavy, into the scene of confusion below and taxi to a halt on the runway. Shouts and whistles rang out, interspersed with the thud of artillery shells landing. Disgorged from the trucks, the band of soldiers stood around aimlessly by the entrance to a bunker, into which Captain Fackelmann had disappeared with an officer from an anti-aircraft battery. They had stopped moaning and cursing by now. The sixty men awaited their fate silently and dutifully. After a while Fackelmann reappeared and the detachment marched off into the damp night. The captain came up to Breuer.
‘Unold was in there,’ he said, sotto voce. ‘He’s assigned to Colonel Fuchs, who’s been given charge of defending the airfield. But not a word to our men about it! Really brilliant that he couldn’t even bring himself to say a few words to our lot.’
‘What’s our mission precisely?’ asked Breuer.
‘Securing the eastern perimeter of the airfield.’
‘Hmm—.’ The column was tramping along a muddy track in single file through high banks of snow. There was a light snowfall. A cluster of whitewashed vehicles loomed up out of the fog and, alongside them, the domed roofs of a cluster of earth bunkers. They stumbled on over duckboards and strings of barbed wire. Their guide stopped outside a bunker entrance. They had reached their destination. Muffled gramophone music drifted up from underground. Fackelmann and Breuer went in. In the smoky room, a captain got up as they entered; his jacket was unbuttoned. He sized up the newcomers somewhat disparagingly, his bovine eyes bulging from beneath a low forehead.
‘So, you’re the reinforcements we were promised. How many of you? Fifty-six men and three officers? Okay, let’s see where we can accommodate you.’
A quick discussion with a thickset corporal yielded the intelligence that twenty-five men at most could be shoehorned into the few available bunkers.
‘Well,’ the captain told Fackelmann, ‘up front, about eight hundred metres over there in the gorge, there’s supposed to be a pioneer corps. They must have some free bunkers there, for their transport section and so on. Most of them cleared off yesterday like frightened rabbits; you’ll be bound to find some space there.’
He cast an eye around his own bunker.
‘And one of you gents could doss down here if you fancy it, too.’
Captain Fackelmann, who couldn’t square his romantic conception of life at the front, still untainted despite his experiences, with the conditions on the ground here, chanced a few hesitant questions about the lie of the land and the enemy positions. The young captain jovially clapped Fackelmann, who was at least fifteen years his senior, on the shoulder.
‘Oh, no need to worry about that now! You can do a bit of poking around first thing tomorrow morning. We’re just a kind of holding position here, for all eventualities, you know. The front line’s up ahead of us, and the entire Forty-Fourth is dug in there. Apart from the odd spot of artillery fire, we’ve got it pretty cushy here – isn’t that right, Wilhelm?’
He winked at the corporal, stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and stretched contentedly. Captain Fackelmann decided to throw his lot in with the bulk of his men. He asked Breuer to stay put with the Number 1 platoon and to give the platoon leader – a corporal named Klucke from the quartermaster’s section, who was a bland pen-pusher – some support. Breuer nodded absent-mindedly. He was worn out by the day’s exertions. The breakout plan would have to wait. For the time being, the key thing was to gather his strength, physical and mental. Slowly he peeled off his overcoat and slumped down on the stool that the captain pushed over to him. The captain then reached for a plump smoked sausage, cut off a fat slice four fingers thick and handed it to Breuer.
‘First off, have something to eat! You must be famished!’
He shoved a hunk of bread and a knife towards Breuer and poured out some yellowish liquid from a half-empty bottle into a couple of long-stemmed tin goblets. Meanwhile, the corporal had wound up the blue Morocco-leather-covered chest gramophone and put on another record. The tinny sound of a shrill woman’s voice emerged, singing a cheesy hit from the Twenties to a ragtime accompaniment which, God alone knew how, had found its way here:
Breuer bit hungrily into the sausage.
‘So where did this come from?’ he asked. ‘It’s great!’
The captain chuckled smugly. ‘It’s literally manna from heaven round here, dear boy! The air crews chuck the stuff out when they can’t make it in to land. A whole crate of this stuff almost dropped on our heads early this morning. We picked up twenty-six salamis!’
‘Don’t you have to hand over things like that?’
‘Who to?’ asked the captain, blinking in astonishment. ‘Those morons over at the base, so they can eat it all? Since yesterday morning, when we took up position here, they haven’t sent us out a single crumb of food. All we need now is to start handing this stuff over! If they want some, they can come out with us and collect it!’
He raised his goblet and toasted with Breuer. The liquid turned out to be a sweet orange liqueur.
‘Did this fall from the sky too, then?’
‘Nah! We’ve got other sources for that. Tell you what, if you ever need a silk shirt or some pyjamas or a pair of boots or a new officer’s cap, just tip us the wink. We’ve got the lot here!’
He stretched his legs, resplendent in a pair of top boots, in expansive fashion, slapped his chest a couple of times and addressed the corporal again, chortling as he did so.
‘That was a hoot yesterday, wasn’t it, eh, Wilhelm? The way they all legged it, those idiots from the Pay Corps. Dear me, we laughed like drains! They skedaddled like a troop of monkeys when they heard the main front was going to run through here. That’s their vehicles they left behind out there – well, when we took a gander inside ’em, we were gobsmacked, let me tell you! The stuff they’d salted away! This old gramophone, for instance. It’s not without its risks, mind. The Ivans can just see the tops of the lorries poking out above the hill, so now and then they toss over a shell. They caught old Franz back there this morning while he was digging out a bottle of red wine.’