Parachute flares lit up the road in the far distance. On the ground there was a red glow, interspersed with flashes of bright yellow. The dull thud of bombs drowned out the sound of their engine. Ahead, the road descended into a valley bottom, where they could see a village burning. Just in front of it was a fork in the road. Breuer and the captain stepped out of the car. An almost completely burned-out car stood a few metres away on the verge. Parts of the engine were still glowing red-hot, while small flames flickered along the charred skeleton of the bodywork. Beside the vehicle lay the body of the driver, burned to a cinder. Its teeth and glazed eyeballs shone out ghastly white against the shrunken skin of the face. Its black, shrivelled arms were stretched up to heaven. A group of Russian POWs loitered around the scene of the conflagration, holding their mess tins over the guttering flames. One of them had propped his foot on the chest of the dead man. They were chatting and laughing, pleased to have found this little oasis of warmth.
Breuer consulted the map.
‘Unold marked the right fork here as the one to take,’ he said. ‘No question that’s the better road, but it does loop a long way down to the south. Who knows if it’s even passable still? I reckon we should see what the road to the left’s like first! It’s far shorter by the look of it. Maybe it’ll be wide enough for troop columns to drive down it.’
Captain Endrigkeit signalled his assent. ‘Don’t give a damn either way,’ he muttered indistinctly.
The road soon turned out to be very bad. It was narrow and criss-crossed with deep tracks worn by previous vehicles, between which their little car lurched about uncontrollably. If that wasn’t bad enough, a series of hairpins presently came into view, winding steeply down to a gorge covered in dense undergrowth. This clearly wasn’t a viable route. Breuer was all for turning around.
‘Wait a minute!’ said Captain Endrigkeit suddenly. His keen hunter’s eye had spotted something.
‘There’s someone up ahead! Maybe he can put us right.’ He clambered out of the car. Breuer looked on impassively as the captain, his hands in the pockets of his sheepskin, went up to the figure in a white camouflage suit who was standing in the middle of the road about thirty metres ahead. All of a sudden, he gave a start. The man had made a movement of some kind and Captain Endrigkeit had fallen backwards to the ground. In the same instant, gunfire erupted from the bushes by the side of the road, and a bullet pierced the canvas roof of the car. In a flash, Lakosch snatched a hand grenade from the rifle rack and jumped out of the vehicle. He pulled the pin and hurled the grenade into the bushes. There was a loud detonation, followed by a burst of flame and thick smoke. A couple of white-clad figures disappeared into the darkness of the gorge. Breuer, who by this time had got over his initial paralysing shock, loosed off a couple of rounds from his machine-pistol at them as they fled. On the road up ahead, two figures were locked together in a deadly embrace, writhing around in the snow and grunting and groaning with exertion. Endrigkeit had managed to grab his adversary by the legs and bring him down and was now wrestling desperately with the man’s right hand, which clutched a revolver. The man was hell-bent on fighting to the death, and had already fired off two shots. Lakosch bounded up to them in long strides. He looked around for a weapon, before remembering the bayonet on his belt under his greatcoat. The image of Harras tearing him off a strip that time for not carrying it flashed across his mind. He whipped out the blade and plunged it into the back of the man in white, who in the meantime had fired another shot. Lakosch’s gorge rose as he felt the cold steel meet some bony resistance and then drive deep into soft tissue. The Russian’s grip on Endrigkeit loosened, his heavy frame jerked spasmodically, then his body went limp and gave no further signs of life. Panting heavily, Captain Endrigkeit got to his feet. He looked in a bad way. His snowy-white sheepskin jacket hung in tatters, his face was bruised and his moustache had been tugged in all directions like a twig broom. There was a fresh bloodstain on his left sleeve.
‘Hell’s bells!’ he gasped, still out of breath. ‘I thought I was a goner there. Cheeky fucker!’
He pulled out his brightly patterned handkerchief and wiped the dirt off his face. ‘Lakosch – Karl… thanks so much, mate!’ he exclaimed, slapping the little driver so heartily on the shoulder with his big, meaty hand that he almost fell over. ‘If it weren’t for you, I’d be pushing up daisies… I won’t forget that in a hurry, lad! If you ever need anything, now or when the war’s over, don’t you dare go asking anyone else – you come straight to old Endrigkeit, understood?’
‘Yes, sir, Captain!’ answered Lakosch, cautiously shaking the huge paw that Endrigkeit proffered him; he still couldn’t rid himself of the queasy feeling in his throat.
Breuer, who meanwhile had scouted round the immediate vicinity, joined them once more.
‘There are some ski tracks back there,’ he said. ‘Must have been a Russian patrol on snowshoes. Four or five men at most. If there’d been more of them, they wouldn’t have tried ambushing us like that. They obviously thought they could polish us off no problem in our little jalopy out here in the middle of nowhere!’
They frisked the dead man, who was lying in a pool of blood. Beneath his winter camouflage suit, he was wearing a normal ochre-brown Russian army shirt. He had no papers on him.
‘Well then, Lakosch,’ said the first lieutenant a while later, after they’d tentatively investigated the other road and, having found it free of Russians and even quite busy with Wehrmacht traffic, were now on their way back to base again, ‘but for you, we’d all have been in a hell of a fix today. I’m sure you know that Iron Crosses for men on the divisional staff have to be run by the High Command for approval, and how reluctant the chief of staff is to do that – but this time I’ll get you an Iron Cross if it’s the last thing I do!’
Endless columns of troops march through the night, heading for the Don, whose crossing points are being kept open against attacks from advancing rapid-deployment units of the Red Army by elements of the Sixteenth and Twenty-Fourth Panzer divisions. The Eleventh Corps, meanwhile, on High Command’s orders, on Hitler’s orders, withdraws towards Stalingrad. Retreating to the east – an utter absurdity!
Draped with blankets and tarpaulins, exhausted figures slowly make their way, shuffling and stumbling on painfully blistered feet, along the furrows worn by tyres in the snowy road. Pushed to the limits of their endurance by two summers of relentless ‘lightning warfare’, and in between an icy winter without pause or rest, shackled to a grinding treadmill from which only death or serious maiming could free them, with no hope of being relieved and only very infrequent spells of leave, they finally found themselves dug into foxholes here on the Don, hoping for a period of trench warfare in which to catch their breath – a prospect that seemed almost as alluring as home leave.
Yesterday, they’d been busy shoring up their fortified winter positions, with the enemy already threatening their flanks and rear. They were told to pay no attention to the sounds of battle they could clearly hear – it meant nothing and would all quickly calm down again. And then all of a sudden, the word was: ‘Quick! Abandon your positions!’ And they’d had to hastily quit the little patch of threatened homeland that they’d created on the banks of the Don and were determined to defend. Driven out into the hostile night, into the unknown! Out there, there was no farmhouse, no bunker, not even a bale of straw behind which they could take refuge. That kind of thing undermines morale and discipline.
Gradually, rumours begin to percolate through the half-asleep columns of marching men.