Faced with this irrefutable soldierly logic that made no sense at all, the colonel blanched. Impossible? He could feel the ground swaying beneath his feet. He tried just one more tentative approach, but already knew it would all be to no avail.
‘Should we hesitate to do the right thing,’ he said weakly, ‘just because—?’
‘How do I know if it’s the right thing?’ Paulus broke in. ‘Can I second-guess what’s being planned at the Führer’s HQ? Do I know what preparations I might be stymieing? No, I cannot and will not disobey my orders!’
The colonel took the slender hand that was extended to him, tired and limp, and bowed without a word. He couldn’t understand the C-in-C. All he needed to do was… It all seemed so straightforward to him, so laughably straightforward, just as every load seems light to the person who isn’t having to carry it on his own shoulders. The colonel departed, leaving the commander alone. He propped his chin in his hands. He was tired, immeasurably tired. The last two months had weighed down heavily upon him. During peacetime, he had headed an intelligence division. That had been his last operational command. Then, in quick succession, he had been appointed chief of staff of the Sixteenth Panzer Corps, of Army Groups Command and of the Sixth Army under the strong and inflexible Field Marshal von Reichenau, before becoming deputy chief of the German Army General Staff. Always a second in command, always in the shadow of someone stronger… And then he was given command of the Sixth Army. And found himself at Stalingrad – he, who had never learned to stand on his own two feet! And so he let himself be carried along, and looked on meekly while his own chief of staff was promoted over his head.
What was now being asked of him was an act of salvation, an open revolt against Hitler. That called for either great courage or great cowardice. Paulus possessed neither. He was neither a hero nor a scoundrel, perhaps in the end not even a soldier. All he was was weak, weak like other men: too weak to bear the burden of responsibility that a merciless fate had heaped upon him. Under this crushing weight, he dragged himself on day by day, and closed his eyes. And he also no doubt convinced himself that it wasn’t he who was carrying this weight but that terrible man in Berlin who issued the orders. He clung to these orders, they were the stick on which he supported himself, and they saved him from having to take action on his own initiative, a prospect he frankly dreaded. So he shut his eyes, failed to notice how his flaccid weakness turned to cruel harshness all around him, refused to see how this corrosive weakness condemned hundreds of thousands to a senseless death, and did not realize that his duty did not lie in the place where he sought it.
And so he became guilty, guilty before his peers.
Breuer had crawled over onto the pallet bed beside the groaning wounded man. As the new day dawned, loud voices roused him from a deep sleep. He sat up. Grey light penetrated the dirty glass of the windowpane. He cast an eye over the man next to him. During the night, his hands had stopped moving and his stertorous breathing had ceased. Glassy eyes stared past a pointed, waxen nose. The captain was already up and about. He was listening with a bleary face to the agitated report of his sentries. ‘They’ve been marching the whole night… and there’s still some arriving now! All from the Forty-Fourth!’
Breuer went outside with the captain. The Russian artillery was still firing. Cautiously they picked their way out onto the road that ran close by the bunkers. Larger and smaller groups of men were trudging along it, tired and apathetic, and seemingly oblivious to the shell bursts landing slap in the middle of the road and tearing great craters in its surface. There were no vehicles in evidence. The men were carrying only small arms; a few had machine guns, while others were dragging sleds laden with wounded comrades. A lone anti-tank gun trundled by, pulled by a team of soldiers. The captain asked the men where they’d come from. Nobody replied. Eventually a small column of men came into view; they looked fresher than the rest. Their leader, a lieutenant, gave the captain all the answers he was seeking.
‘We’re from the Forty-Fourth. We’re the Bicycle Squadron!’
‘Where are you headed?’
The lieutenant shrugged his shoulders.
‘Somewhere or other… I’ve no idea. Most likely all the way to Stalingrad – into the city.’
‘Right, but what about the front?’
‘The front? There’s no one else following on behind us. We’re the rearguard!’
The procession moved on to the east. Its route was lined with dead and wounded, to whom no one paid any attention. A few stragglers brought up the rear, then emptiness and silence closed in once more. The captain’s face had turned pale.
‘Fuck it all!’ he muttered. ‘This fucking shit!’
Breuer thought this an opportune moment to go and search out his men who had decamped the night before with Captain Fackelmann.
Fackelmann had indeed discovered a line of bunkers at the head of the gorge that ran perpendicularly ahead of the main front and which, after about eight hundred metres, joined a larger crossing gully. They were occupied by pioneers from a bridge-building unit, who were in a state of considerable uproar. After some initial difficulties, Fackelmann was able to find enough space for half of his men. The rest, along with troops from the pioneer battalion, took up front-line positions in hastily dug snow holes along the lip of the gorge. These men were relieved every two hours, so that everyone managed to get at least a couple of hours’ shut-eye that night.
The commander of the pioneer battalion, a major in the reserves, was a dignified gent with grey hair and distinguished features (Fackelmann learned later that he was a professor at a technical college). He received the captain with a mixture of relief and indignation.
‘Just look at my battalion!’ he groused, polishing his gold-rimmed spectacles. ‘We were six companies at one time… almost a thousand men. And all of them experienced specialists, excellent and irreplaceable men worth their weight in gold. And now look what they’ve done to us! At the beginning of January we were deployed as infantry for the first time. All my old crew fighting as infantrymen! Seventeen of them froze to death in the first night alone. And when we got back to our base – I only managed to bring half of them back – all our trucks and equipment had been blown to pieces by bombs. Our priceless kit and our special vehicles – all gone! My adjutant, an architect from Vienna, an Austrian with a really sunny disposition, well, he couldn’t take it any more and shot himself.’
The old man wiped his eyes with a trembling hand.
‘And now we’re here, and we’ve been detailed to dig defences… just eighty of us. That’s all I have left. All the rest are either dispersed, or dead, wounded, starved or frozen to death or have been drafted into other units… And the day before yesterday this first lieutenant appears, some lah-di-dah little jackass, you know the type, I’m sure. Tells us the front has been breached! And that we’ve got to hold this position to the last man! Of course, he promptly clears off himself. And we’re left sitting here, seeing nothing, hearing nothing and not knowing our right hand from our left. No doctor, no telephone, no food… but all the same, we’re supposed to hold our position! To the last man! I ask you, what kind of madness is that? Is there any rhyme or reason to it? Is that any way to treat people? Oh, that devil, that bloody devil!’
Fackelmann got to hear this last exclamation from the old man many times, without ever knowing who he meant by it.
The night passed peacefully. From first light, though, mortars began landing in the gorge. Every now and then, a burst of machine-gun fire, from some distance away, whistled over their heads. Later that morning, Fackelmann went in search of the lieutenant colonel of the Pioneer Corps, who was reputed to be encamped with the rest of his unit around the corner in the larger gully. He was met by a wizened figure with a malevolent expression and short, bandy legs. His stature had earned him the nickname ‘radish-dragger’ among his men (‘if you stuck a radish in his arse, the top’d drag along the ground’). He greeted Fackelmann in his comfortable bunker in the foulest of moods.