‘Is that all that my generals have to tell me, then?’
It was indeed. The generals had come out in opposition to Hitler, tentatively for sure, but unanimously all the same. Hitler, the all-powerful, had been deposed. A new, stronger force had overcome all feelings of dependency and now held sway over the room, where a heavy atmosphere prevailed, like someone had poured lead into the space – the force of circumstances. Suddenly, Göring sprang to his feet. He stood there, a monstrous mountain of flesh with the gold-bordered Grand Cross of the Iron Cross dangling from the collar of his buttoned-up white dress jacket.
‘My Führer!’ he barked, his puffy, jowly face turning puce. ‘My Führer, there is no such thing as “impossible” for us! We’ll build… in fact, Willy Messerschmitt is already building giant gliders and powered transport aircraft! Milch, this is your department! You’re building us giant planes, you’ll show what we can do! At night… we’ll fly huge air convoys in to Stalingrad by moonlight! We’ll… my Führer, I can guarantee that the Sixth Army will be resupplied!’
It’s late at night. Sergeant Major Harras is back in the company CO’s bunker again, playing Skat. The Arse has just declared a ‘Grand’ with all four jacks in his hand. Suddenly, footsteps are heard clumping down the ladder and the door is thrown open. The sentry stands in the doorway.
‘Lieutenant, sir! Come quickly! Something’s not right out here!
And with that he disappears again.
‘I don’t get it,’ mutters the Arse. ‘It’s all quiet out there. I propose we carry on with the game after I’ve seen what’s up!’
He puts down his cards and, with an irritated sigh, hitches up the belt of his grey-brown corduroy trousers, drapes his fur coat round his shoulders, clambers out of the bunker and climbs to the top of the railway embankment. Sergeant Major Harras follows him. The night is bitterly cold. The stars are shining in the pitch-black sky, and low on the horizon is the reddish disc of the waxing moon. The front is quiet, uncannily quiet. Only the sound of transport planes coming and going fills the frost-tingling air.
‘There’s nothing going on. Quiet as the grave.’ says the first lieutenant, and turns to leave.
At that moment, over on the enemy front line, a flare goes up. The bright point of light pirouettes up into the darkness and bursts into a cascade of individual red stars, which for a second or two bathe the landscape in the dull red light of a photographer’s darkroom before falling slowly to earth and fizzling out, one after the other.
‘That’s one of our flares, though,’ says Harras in astonishment. ‘Since when have the Russians been using those?’
‘Dunno,’ replies the Arse, who’s bored and thinking of his game of Skat. ‘Some new trick of theirs, no doubt.’
Then a searchlight is switched on over at the enemy lines. Slowly, it arcs in a semicircle across the snowy expanse. For an instant, the light tries to pick out the two men standing on the embankment, who quickly throw themselves to the ground. But everything remains quiet. Harras hesitates… Then the whole performance begins anew. He’s seen something like this before from his bunker overlooking the aerodrome at Pitomnik! A sudden hot flush of shock passes through him. Ignoring all protocol, he grabs his commanding officer’s arm and shakes him violently.
‘Lieutenant, sir – they want to… they’re trying to get our planes! They’re trying to dupe them so they crash-land over there!’
‘God damn it!’ exclaims the first lieutenant. ‘You’re right, man! We’ve got to… that is, what can we do?’
‘Fire into the air!’
‘Don’t be stupid! They won’t hear it up there. And we can’t get the artillery to do that…’
‘How about some flares of our own?’
‘Do you know what signals the air force uses? Well, then! What do you want to fire off?’
In the meantime, the drone of approaching aircraft has grown louder. One of the planes is circling, steadily losing height. The searchlight goes on again over there. This time it stays still, casting a broad cone of light over the snow. The lieutenant fires his pistol into the air, a futile gesture. Somewhere, a machine gun starts rattling away. All to no avail! The plane roars low over the heads of the two men, a huge dark shape, heading for the wide beam of light. And then it touches down, bounces a couple of times along the ground and rolls to a stop. It comes to a halt a few hundred metres in front of the railway embankment. A handful of white-clad figures emerge from the darkness and run towards the plane. The machine gun opens up again.
‘Hold your fire!’ bellows the Arse. ‘You’ll hit your own men!’
Several men clamber out of the aircraft, and are surrounded by the others. It all happens very calmly. Suddenly, the spotlight goes out. Soon after, a Russian artillery barrage forces the men on the embankment to retreat to their bunker.
The daily-worsening food situation began to sap the men’s morale. Despite the fact that the transport planes, even in the face of heavy losses, kept flying whenever the weather permitted, barely a quarter of the three hundred tons of vital supplies required made it into the Cauldron each day. Latterly, the horse carcasses lying by the sides of the roads had started to stand out blood-red from the snowdrifts, like predators had been gnawing at them. In actual fact, roving bands of Romanian soldiers or Russian auxiliary volunteers, crazed with hunger, had been eating them. All the stray dogs and cats that had once roamed around the camp gradually vanished; Lakosch didn’t let the portly Senta – whose belly grew larger by the day, attracting hungry looks – out of his sight for even a moment. He was ashamed of himself for having grown so foolishly fond of the dog, and for sharing his thin broth, which wasn’t remotely filling, with it, and for spending hours trying to find it a bone to gnaw on.
When Lakosch was alone, he’d often say to himself: ‘Right, that’s it! I’m going to get rid of that mutt!’ But when he gazed into the animal’s brown eyes, so full of grateful trust in him, his heart would melt; he’d stroke the dog’s ugly head, pat its brown flanks and tell himself and Senta: ‘That’s right, old girl, we’re going to stick together! Who else have we got, after all? Yes, yes, don’t you worry now! You can’t help it that you got mixed up in all this war business! None of this is your fault, that’s for sure!’
The divisional Staff HQ had been particularly hard hit by the general lack of food supplies, since it didn’t have any reserve stocks. First, it was one loaf of bread for six men… then one loaf between fourteen – and then twenty… a hundred grams of bread per man, a single slice as their daily ration. Add to that thirty grams of potted meat and every lunchtime, sometimes evenings too, a thin, watery soup with a bit of buckwheat semolina thrown in.
‘Christ Almighty!’ said Geibel, ‘I’d never have thought a person could live on so little.’
Secretly he speculated with horror on what would become of his business if this kind of subsistence food should ever become the norm in Germany. Up to now, his meaty face had lost little of its healthy vigour. But almost every night he dreamed he got into terrible arguments with his wife, who used force to stop him from devouring the entire stock of their delicatessen.
Sonderführer Fröhlich had become a dab hand at dividing the daily loaf among the men. Every morning witnessed a solemn ceremony, with all the occupants of the bunker looking on with rapt attention as he closed his left eye and, sighting with his right down the blade of the carefully sharpened knife, began to cut off slices with the precision of a surgeon wielding a scalpel. At the end of the process, Geibel would hold the results of Fröhlich’s artistry in his hand and marvel at what he saw. ‘Truly amazing, Sonderführer, five complete slices! I can’t manage that even with a piece of Edam.’