The tracks were congested; we spent hours waiting on sidings, following unfathomable rules of priority set by mysterious, distant authorities. Sometimes I forced myself to go out and breathe in the biting air and stretch my legs: beyond the train there was nothing, a vast white expanse, empty, swept by the wind, cleansed of all life. Under my feet, the snow, hard and dry, cracked like a crust; the wind, when I faced it, chapped my cheeks; so I turned my back to it and looked at the steppe, the train with its windows white with frost, the rare other men propelled outside like me by their boredom or their diarrhea. Insane desires seized hold of me: to lie down on the snow, rolled in a ball in my coat, and to stay there when the train left, hidden already under a fine white layer, a cocoon that I imagined as soft, warm, tender as the womb from which I had one day been so cruelly expelled. These surges of melancholia frightened me; when I managed to regain control of myself, I wondered where this could be coming from. It wasn’t a habit of mine. Fear, maybe, I finally said to myself. Fine, fear, but fear of what, then? Death was something I thought I had tamed within me, and not just since the massacres of the Ukraine, but for a long time already. Yet perhaps that was just an illusion, a curtain drawn by my mind over the low animal instinct that was still there, lurking? That was possible, of course. But maybe it was also the idea of being surrounded: of heading alive into this vast open-air prison, as into an exile with no return. I had wanted to serve, I had carried out, for my nation and my people and in the name of this service, difficult and terrible things that went against my grain; and now I was to be exiled from myself and from the common life, sent to join those already dead, the abandoned ones. Hoth’s offensive? Stalingrad wasn’t Demyansk, and even before November 19 we were already at the end of our tether, out of breath and out of strength, we had reached the farthest limits; we, who had been so powerful, who thought we were just getting started. Stalin, that cunning Ossete, had used the tactics of his Scythian ancestors on us: the endless retreat, always farther into the interior, the little game, as Herodotus called it, the infernal pursuit; playing, using the emptiness. When the Persians gave the first signs of exhaustion and dejection, the Scythians imagined a way to give them some more courage and thus to make them drink their cup of sorrow to the dregs. They willingly sacrificed some herds that they let wander about in full visibility and that the Persians eagerly fell upon. Thus they regained a little optimism. Darius fell several times into this trap, but finally found himself driven to famine. It was then (writes Herodotus) that the Scythians sent Darius their mysterious message in the form of an offering: a bird, a rat, a frog, and five arrows. But, for us, no offering, no message: death, destruction, and the end of hope. Is it possible that I thought about all this at the time? Didn’t such ideas come to me later on, when the end was approaching, or even later, when it was already all over? Possible, but it is also possible that I already was thinking like that between Salsk and Kotelnikovo, for the proofs were there, you just had to open your eyes to see them, and my sadness had perhaps already begun to open my eyes. It’s hard to say, like a dream that leaves only vague, sour traces in the morning, like the cryptic drawings that, in the manner of a child, I traced with my fingernail in the frost on the train’s windows.
In Kotelnikovo, the staging area for Hoth’s offensive, they were unloading another train before ours, so we had to wait a long time to disembark. It was a little country station made of worn brick, with a few platforms of bad cement laid between the tracks; on either side, the cars, stamped with the German emblem, bore Czech, French, Belgian, Danish, Norwegian markings: to gather materiel as well as men, they were scouring the farthest reaches of Europe now. I stood leaning on the open door of my car, smoking and watching the confused commotion of the station. There were German soldiers of all kinds there, Russian Polizei or Ukrainians wearing armbands with swastikas and carrying old rifles, Hiwis with hollow features, peasants red with cold come to sell or exchange a few meager marinated vegetables or a scrawny chicken. The Germans wore coats or furs; the Russians, padded jackets, most of them in rags, from which tufts of straw or pieces of newspaper escaped; and this motley crowd was talking, heckling, jostling each other at the level of my boots, in huge jerky waves. Just beneath me, two big, sad soldiers were holding each other by the arm; a little farther down, a haggard, dirty Russian, trembling and wearing only a thin cloth jacket, was stumbling along the platform with an accordion in his hands: he approached some groups of soldiers or Polizei, who sent him away with a rough word or a shove, or at best turned their backs to him. When he came up to me I took a small bill out of my pocket and held it out to him. I thought he would go on his way, but he stayed there and asked me, in a mixture of Russian and bad German: “What would you like? Popular, traditional, or Cossack?” I didn’t understand what he was talking about and shrugged my shoulders: “It’s up to you.” He looked at me for an instant and struck up a Cossack song that I knew from having heard it often in the Ukraine, the one whose refrain goes so gaily Oy ty Galia, Galia molodaya… and which relates the atrocious story of a girl carried off by the Cossacks, tied by her long blond tresses to a pine tree, and burned alive. And it was magnificent. The man sang, his face raised up to me: his eyes, a faded blue, shone gently through the alcohol and the filth; his cheeks, beneath a scruffy reddish beard, quivered; and his bass voice, hoarse from coarse tobacco and drink, rose clear and pure and firm and he sang verse after verse, as if he would never stop. Beneath his fingers the keys of his accordion clicked. On the platform, the agitation had stopped, the people were watching and listening, a little surprised, even the ones who a few minutes before had treated him harshly, overcome by the simple and incongruous beauty of the song. From the other side, three fat peasant women were coming in single file, like three plump geese on a village path, with a large white triangle raised in front of their faces, a knitted wool shawl. The accordionist was blocking their path and they flowed around him the way a sea eddy skirts round a rock, while he pivoted slightly in the other direction without interrupting his song, then they continued along the train and the crowd shuffled and listened to the musician; behind me, in the corridor, some soldiers had come out of their compartments to listen to him. It seemed never to end, after each verse he attacked another one, and no one wanted it to end. Finally it did end, and without even waiting to be offered more money he continued on his way to the next car, and below my boots the people dispersed or resumed their activities or their waiting.
Finally our turn came to get out. On the platform, Feldgendarmen were examining documents and steering the men to various assembly points. They sent me to an office in the station where an exhausted clerk looked at me vacantly: “Stalingrad? I have no idea. Here is for the Hoth army.”—“They told me to come here and that I’d be transferred to one of the aerodromes.”—“The aerodromes are on the other side of the Don. Go see at HQ.” Another Feldgendarm got me into a truck headed for the AOK. There, I finally found a somewhat better informed operations officer: “Flights for Stalingrad leave from Tatsinskaya. But usually the officers who have to join the Sixth Army go there from Novocherkassk, where the HQ of Army Group Don is located. We have a liaison with Tatsinskaya every three days, maybe. I don’t understand why they sent you here. But we’ll try to find you something.” He set me up in a barrack room with a number of double beds. He reappeared a few hours later. “It’s all set. Tatsinskaya is sending you a Storch. Come along.” A driver ferried me outside the village to a makeshift runway in the snow. I waited some more in a hut heated by a stove, drinking ersatz coffee with a few noncoms from the Luftwaffe. The idea of an airlift to Stalingrad depressed them profoundly: “We’re losing five to ten planes a day, and in Stalingrad, apparently, they’re dying of hunger. If General Hoth doesn’t manage to break through, they’re fucked.”—“If I were you,” another one genially added, “I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to join them.”—“Couldn’t you get a little lost?” the first one joked. Then the little Fieseler Storch landed, skidding. The pilot didn’t even bother to cut the engine; he did a U-turn at the end of the runway and got into position for departure. One of the men from the Luftwaffe helped me carry my kit. “At least you’ll be dressed warmly,” he shouted out over the throb of the propeller. I hoisted myself up and settled in behind the pilot. “Thank you for coming!” I shouted to him.—“It’s nothing,” he answered, shouting to be heard. “We’re used to being taxi drivers.” He took off before I had even managed to buckle myself in, and veered off to the north. Night was falling but the sky was clear and for the first time I saw the earth from the skies. A flat, white, uniform surface extended to the horizon; here and there a track pathetically cut across the expanse, perfectly straight. The balki looked like long grooves of shadow nestled beneath the dying light that skimmed across the steppe. Where the tracks joined, remains of villages appeared, already half swallowed up, the roofless houses full of snow. Then came the Don, an enormous white snake curved in the whiteness of the steppe, made visible by its blue-tinted shores and the shadow of the hills overlooking the right bank. The sun, in the distance, was setting on the horizon like a swollen red ball, but the red gave no color to anything; the snow remained white and blue. After taking off, the Storch flew straight ahead, quite low, calmly, like a peaceable bumblebee; suddenly it veered left and went into a dive and beneath me there were rows of big transport planes on all sides, then already the wheels were touching down and the Storch was bouncing over the hard snow and taxiing over to pull up at the rear of the aerodrome. The pilot cut the engine and showed me a long, low building: “It’s over there. They’re waiting for you.” I thanked him and walked quickly with my kit to a door lit by a hanging lightbulb. On the runway, a Junker was coming in for a heavy landing. With nightfall the temperature was falling fast; the cold struck me in the face like a slap and burned my lungs. Inside, a noncom invited me to put down my kit; he led me to an operations room buzzing like a hive. An Oberleutnant from the Luftwaffe greeted me and checked my papers. “Unfortunately,” he said finally, “the flights for tonight are already full. I can put you on a morning flight. There’s another passenger waiting too.”—“You fly at night?” He looked surprised: “Of course. Why not?” I shook my head. He led me with my things to a dormitory set up in another building: “Try to sleep,” he said as he left. The dormitory was empty, but another kit lay on a bed. “That’s the officer who’s flying with you,” the Spiess who was accompanying me said. “He must be at the mess. Would you care to have something to eat, Herr Hauptsturmführer?” I followed him to another room, with some tables and benches lit by a yellowish lightbulb, where some pilots and ground personnel were eating and talking in low voices. Hohenegg was sitting alone at the end of a table; he let out a guffaw when he saw me: “My dear Hauptsturmführer! What kind of foolishness has brought you here?” I blushed with happiness, and went to get a dish of thick pea soup, some bread, and a cup of ersatz before sitting down opposite him. “It’s not your failed duel to which I owe the pleasure of your company, is it?” he asked again with his cheerful, pleasant voice, “I wouldn’t forgive myself.”—“Why do you say that?” He looked at once embarrassed and amused: “I have to confess that I was the one who denounced your plan.”—“You!” I didn’t know if I should burst out in a fit of rage or laughter. Hohenegg looked like a kid caught in the act. “Yes. First of all, let me tell you that it really was an idiotic idea, misplaced German romanticism. And also, remember, they wanted to ambush us. I had no intention of going and getting myself massacred with you.”—“Doctor, you are a man of little faith. Together, we could have foiled their stratagem.” I briefly explained my problems with Bierkamp, Prill, and Turek. “You shouldn’t complain,” he concluded. “I’m sure it will be a very interesting experience.”—“That’s what my Oberführer pointed out to me. But I’m not convinced.”—“That’s because you still lack philosophy. I thought you were made of sterner stuff.”—“Maybe I’ve changed. And you, Doctor? What brought you here?”—“A medical bureaucrat in Germany decided we should take advantage of the occasion to study the effects of malnutrition on our soldiers. AOK 6 thought it wasn’t necessary, but the OKH insisted. So they asked me to conduct this fascinating study. I confess that despite the circumstances it does excite my curiosity.” I pointed my spoon at his round belly: “Let’s hope you won’t become a subject of study yourself.”—“Hauptsturmführer, you are becoming rude. Wait till you’re my age to laugh. And how is our young linguist friend?” I looked at him calmly: “He is dead.” His face darkened: “Ah. I’m very sorry.”—“So am I.” I finished my soup and drank the tea. It was vile and bitter, but it quenched one’s thirst. I lit a cigarette. “I miss your Riesling, Doctor,” I said, smiling.—“I still have a bottle of Cognac,” he replied. “But let’s keep it. We’ll drink it together in the Kessel.”—“Doctor, never say: Tomorrow I shall do this or that, without adding: God willing.” He shook his head: “You missed your calling, Hauptsturmführer. Let’s go to bed.”