Two years later, when Karl joined the Motor Corps, he had had the most almighty bust-up with his mother. This haggard woman, who had become withdrawn and a bit batty after his father’s death, flew into a rage the like of which he’d never seen. She called him a ‘class traitor’ and screamed at him that he’d betrayed his dead father. Angrily, he’d left the house, never to return. Since then, he regularly wrote his mother short, awkward letters full of embarrassed expressions of love, and sent her money every month, even from the Eastern Front. He never got a reply. It was the cross he had to bear. If he hadn’t had Erna back at home, and their little dark-haired tearaway, things would have been really unbearable…
Lakosch pricked up his ears. From somewhere behind him came the sound of gunfire. Suddenly, lights came on in the village, and a hubbub of noise and voices drifted over. A motorbike dispatch rider roared up.
‘Sound the alarm!’ he called from a distance. ‘There are Russian tanks in the village!’
Lakosch bounded along the line of tents, rousing everybody.
‘General alarm!’ he yelled through the flaps. ‘General alarm!’
All around, sleepy figures began to emerge and make their way at the double to the assembly point in front of the chief of staff’s bunker. First Lieutenant Breuer, a machine-pistol hanging round his neck and his eyes still bleary from sleep, Sonderführer Fröhlich, Herbert and Geibel were all on the move too. The area in front of the bunker was a wild melee of vehicles, tanks and people gesticulating and shouting. Sergeant Major Harras was trying and failing to impose some sort of order on the chaos. Unold, bare-headed and with tousled hair, was flitting around the assembled crowd.
‘Where’s Kallweit?’ he yelled ‘Kallweit!’ His voice rose to an uncontrolled shriek.
‘Here!’ answered a basso profundo voice.
‘Right, Kallweit, get going immediately! I hear Russian tanks have broken through in the southern sector!’
Major Kallweit rumbled off with his squadron of three tanks. After a quarter of an hour of nervous waiting, he returned.
‘Nothing!’ he reported ‘Must have been Elsan gen!’[1]
‘For Christ’s sake!’ shouted Unold, on the verge of tears. ‘I’m at my wits’ end! Three more days of this and you’ll be carting me off to the loony bin!’
After the false alarm, no one felt like going back to bed. A group of officers gathered in the spacious bunker that a signals unit had vacated for the staff. They stood or sat around in the dim candlelight in the hope of learning something new about the situation. Lieutenant Colonel Unold had a bottle of cognac in front of him, which he was drinking in long draughts. It calmed him down visibly, though shudders of abating agitation passed across his pallid face from time to time.
‘Well,’ he said, rubbing his forehead, ‘what’s to be said about the situation? You can see for yourselves. Come on, have a slug of this!’ Immediately, the mood in the bunker lightened.
‘At least the general left a case for us.’
Major Kallweit sat at the table, his legs splayed. He held his glass of cognac up to the light and inspected it.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘I heard all sorts of rumours out in the field. What’s up with the general exactly?’
‘He’s done a bunk!’
‘What!?’
‘Yes, cleared off! Just like that – took the Horch limo with him, plus half the contents of the officers’ mess!’ There was a murmur of alarmed voices.
‘How can he have just done a bunk like that?’ asked a flustered young officer. ‘That’s… that’s nothing short of desertion!’
Captain Engelhard shot him a look that warned him to watch his tongue. Unold’s disrespectful utterance had embarrassed him.
‘The general is suffering from nervous exhaustion,’ he said in carefully measured tones. ‘He urgently needed a rest cure at a sanatorium near Vienna. The army granted him leave to quit the front immediately.’
‘That explains a lot, then!’ Breuer, who had been leaning against the back wall, suddenly blurted out. He proceeded to tell them about his encounter with the general at the food depot.
‘And get this,’ Unold chipped in, ‘he wanted me to give him a truck to carry all the stuff he was taking with him. At least he came to the right person!’
‘Disgraceful!’ exclaimed Captain Siebel. ‘To just up and vanish in a situation like this. Makes you ashamed to be a German officer!’
‘Who knows whether he’ll even make it?’ someone called out.
‘Oh, his sort always gets through,’ grumbled Captain Endrigkeit.
‘Are you talking about me, by any chance?’ came a voice from the bunker entrance. Everyone gave a start and swung round to stare at a white-clad figure standing in the doorway. Unold had leaped up. ‘My God! Colonel Lunitz!’ he said in an almost toneless voice. ‘Is it really you? We’d almost put up a war hero’s monument to you on Hill 218 in our thoughts!’
Colonel Lunitz knocked the snow off his winter camouflage, pushed the white hood back off his grizzled, weather-beaten head and came into the room.
‘Your celebrations were a bit premature, old chap!’ he said glumly. ‘Anyhow, I don’t mean to interrupt your little party here for long,’ he continued, casting a glance over the table strewn with bottles and glasses. ‘I just wanted to drop in and say hello. As far as your monument is concerned, Unold, be my guest and go ahead and build it. I didn’t manage to bring much back with me. About twenty men and a couple of artillery pieces… When we’d fired our last shell, they rode us down and cut us to ribbons.’
A deathly silence, pregnant with unspoken questions.
‘OK, then,’ said the colonel through clenched teeth, a reply that spoke volumes. ‘OK, then,’ he repeated, this time with a hint of false jollity, ‘then I’ll just get my head down for a couple of hours. You’ve almost drunk all the wine anyhow. Night, all!’
Lunitz trudged out. Opening the door to let him out, Breuer was seized by the sense of an oppressive weight bearing down, the kind of feeling one gets before a thunderstorm. It wasn’t just the demise of the flak battery, or the increasingly obvious disintegration of the division, it was also this strange evening with wine and conversation, the shameful desertion of their commanding officer, the scornful insubordination that had burst forth from Unold, quite uncharacteristically, and Engelhard’s phony insistence on propriety. What was going on? All at once, the clear, firmly entrenched world of soldiering, disempowering but also somehow reassuring, which up to now had allowed him to move as if in a daze through the countries of Europe, unthinkingly losing himself in the here and now, took on new, more terrifying contours. Was it this single failure that was shaking at hitherto firmly locked doors? For several moments, Breuer felt like he was standing on volcanic ground, whose deceptive solidity might give way without warning to reveal the fiery abyss beneath.
‘So how long is this glorious withdrawal supposed to last?’ said Captain Siebel, who was finding the silence unbearable. ‘Surely something’s got to happen sooner or later!’ As he spoke, he fiddled nervously with his false arm, which never worked properly.
1
The German word