‘Fine – as you wish,’ says the Arse. ‘I’m putting you in charge of the squad, then. I can spare you four men. And make sure you get the job done!’
The operation gets underway that same night. Overcast skies shroud the scene in total darkness. The men are carrying hand grenades, machine-pistols and an explosive charge with a time fuse. They are wearing white camouflage suits, with their faces, weapons and equipment all whitewashed, too. After only a few metres, the uniform grey of the landscape has swallowed them up. Crawling, separated from one another by some distance, they inch their way forward. Sergeant Major Harras is at the head, while a few metres behind him is the man with the explosives. The front is quiet. Every so often some yellowish flares are sent up over the enemy lines, forcing the men to lie motionless, face-down in the snow. In these enforced pauses, they can clearly make out their target, which looms ever larger out of the snow. Crawling along like this is tiring. Snow gets into their boots and their sleeves; their hands are cramped and the coarse steppe grass scratches their faces; hoar frost forms around their mouths and noses from their hot exhalations. Suddenly, a machine gun opens up somewhere in front of them and to the right, and is answered by another further to the left. The burst of fire buzzes over their heads. They’ve been spotted! Damn it – what now? An uninterrupted cascade of flares suddenly goes up, bathing the open expanse of ground in glaring brightness. And then, from the dark curtain of the enemy lines, come three or four brief flashes in quick succession, and shells burble over, tearing up the ground with an ear-splitting boom. Chunks of frozen earth, big as children’s heads, fly through the air. They’ve no shortage of ammunition over there, that’s for sure! They can afford to bombard a party of five men with artillery! A second salvo drones towards them, landing almost plumb in the area where the demolition squad is lying prone. Someone behind Harras screams. The piercing, drawn-out shriek drowns out the sound of the shells exploding, and chills the others to the bone. Harras has pressed his face into the snow and clasped his hands to his ears. His back is heaving and sinking with wild gasps of breath, and he is trembling in the last fibres of his being. Escape! Enough! Make it stop… somehow… is his only thought. But he cannot move a muscle. His supine body is racked by a terrible shaking that lifts it momentarily from the ground. Then Harras takes a violent blow to the head, and everything goes black.
After several hours, two men from the demolition squad make it back to their own lines. They are dropping from exhaustion and completely unresponsive. The dreadful screaming of the wounded man slowly ebbs to an increasingly intermittent whimpering groan, which lasts for the rest of the night and the whole of the following day. As darkness falls once more, stretcher-bearers manage to make it to the man. But after many arduous hours spent getting him back to their own lines, he is found to be dead. The bodies of Sergeant Major Harras and Private Seliger, formerly a mess orderly at divisional HQ, are not found.
During this period, Lakosch found another opportunity to improve the food situation. Admittedly, however, this time the enterprise did not pass off without repercussions for him in many regards. Lieutenant Colonel Unold had insisted that a new bunker be built for himself and the commander. Grumbling, the starving troops of the divisional staff set about the backbreaking task of digging – work they thought was utterly pointless. They only made very slow progress in the hard, frozen ground; sometimes they even had to resort to explosives. It was highly doubtful whether the building would be finished before Christmas. One day, Lakosch was assigned to a work party that was ordered to fetch timber for building and window glass from Stalingrad. Gearbox damage to their lorry forced them to spend an uncomfortable few days in the bomb- and artillery-ravaged city. While the others holed up in the deep cellar of a derelict house, Lakosch roamed around the ruins. On his travels, he ran across an NCO he knew from before, who had an interesting tale to tell. Food? They had some top-notch stuff to eat in their unit, claimed the NCO. There was a half-sunken barge full of flour and grain frozen fast into the Volga, which they’d been helping themselves to for a while. This wasn’t a simple task, though. It was in direct contravention of a ban imposed by the division, and because the Russians kept the barge under constant fire, a few men had already bought it. Also, there was an ongoing feud with the neighbouring division, in whose sector the barge was located. The lily-livered bastards didn’t have the guts to raid the barge themselves, Lakosch’s friend told him, but they were determined no one else should get at the spoils either. ‘Anyhow, we’re going out there again tonight,’ concluded the NCO. ‘It’s my turn again. I’ve got some good lads in my group, too. If we pull it off, that’s a fortnight’s supply of white bread in the bag!’
Lakosch was raring to go. He could see all kinds of possibilities for such provisions.
‘Hey, count me in!’ he said. ‘If anything goes wrong, just say I was someone from the other division, and you had nothing to do with me!’
After a protracted spell of bargaining, the NCO eventually agreed, given that he and Lakosch were old mates. But the undertaking proved more tricky than they’d anticipated. To reach the barge, you had to traverse about three hundred metres of ground, crawling on your stomach and picking your way over ice floes and around holes in the ice. The Russians soon spotted that something was afoot, and before they knew it the raiding party had come under heavy mortar fire. The cracking river ice swayed and shuddered like in an earthquake. One of the men was hit, and lay there whimpering in pain. But eventually the rest made it to the barge, which had been peppered with bomb splinters and machine-gun rounds. It took all the effort they could muster to work their way back with their haul of grain and their wounded comrade. When Lakosch finally collapsed in a bunker, drenched in sweat despite the intense cold, he was the proud owner of a sack of wheat flour and a can of syrup.
But a nasty shock lay in store for him when he got back to divisional HQ. Senta was nowhere to be seen! Geibel, in whose care Lakosch had entrusted the dog on pain of death, was a gibbering wreck. He’d searched high and low and asked everyone he met, but all to no avail. In a fit of rage, Lakosch punched the big private hard in the face; conscious that it was all his fault, Geibel forebore to retaliate. He accompanied Geibel around the camp searching tirelessly for the dog, rooting around in other units’ bunkers under all sorts of pretences – but all in vain! Senta had vanished for good.
With the addition of saccharin, a pinch of bicarbonate of soda and some of the syrup, plus all the coffee grounds he could lay his hands on, Herbert used the fine white flour to bake wonderful cookies in the mess tin. Geibel, with his usual penchant for trying to brighten up his life with illusions, went so far as to compare them to macaroons. Another time, Herbert appeared beaming from ear to ear and clutching three round loaves of bread, which a Russian woman from one of the houses below the camp had baked for him in return for a portion of the white flour. For two days they dined sumptuously on this bread, spread liberally with the contents of Lakosch’s pilfered can. The ‘syrup’ turned out to be an engineering lubricant, based on benzine or petroleum. They all contracted terrible diarrhoea, which not only used up the two rolls of toilet paper they’d been issued with but also expended the few extra calories they’d eaten. Their raging hunger also thwarted the good intentions they’d had of saving some of the flour for Christmas.