The young captain laughed. Sonderführer Fröhlich, meanwhile, turned to his right-hand neighbour to celebrate the news.
‘See, Padre, what did I say? The big attack on England’s coming! How strong must we be if Hitler can afford to withdraw a whole division from Stalingrad and send it to the West? You mark my words, the war’ll be over by the spring!’
Johannes Peters, the Protestant chaplain to the division, smiled indulgently; his peaceable demeanour was at variance with the Iron Cross First Class that adorned his chest.
‘The opposite could just as well be the case, Herr Fröhlich. Perhaps Hitler’s been forced to withdraw the division to try to counter the threat of a Second Front.’ The Sonderführer reached for the cigars and, without responding, shrouded himself in a thick cloud of smoke. He was mightily put out.
At the far end of the table, the general was busy expounding his views on the situation.
‘Naturally, one of the first things I did was ask for a full report on the current state of the division,’ he said, his watery eyes surveying the faces of those around him. ‘And it’s clear to me that we need to rest and regroup. I spoke to Keitel about it before I left and he’s in complete agreement. And we’ll get it too, you’ll see! It’s just scandalous that we’re being held up here by the hysteria of these bloody Romanian horse thieves. They should be grateful that we’re granting them the honour of making a sacrifice for the freedom of Europe in the first place. But these people know nothing about heroism or ideals. Well, I just hope that after the Final Victory, the Führer will have a thorough clear-out among his so-called Axis allies.’
The gathering broke up early. The general wanted some time alone with his senior officers.
The two officers made their way back through the darkness, past the dilapidated cemetery to the open fields. A fresh northeasterly wind was blowing and a light frost had dried up the wet paths. Now and then a star appeared through the broken clouds. Snatches of a familiar song drifted over from the distant village:
‘What do you think about the situation here, Breuer?’ Captain Engelhard suddenly asked. Breuer, taken aback, stopped in his tracks. The captain sounded alarmed.
‘Captain, do you seriously think we have anything to worry about here?’ he replied.
The captain said nothing for a while. ‘You know,’ he announced finally, ‘I sometimes have my doubts whether things will turn out well here. You can’t talk to Unold about such things; he gets really tetchy. And the less said about our new general, the better. I just don’t understand the army’s personnel office any more. And then there’s the Corps – I don’t want to say anything bad about Heinz, but I do wonder if he’s the right man for the job…’
‘At least he’s got an old hand in Colonel Fieberg as his superior.’
‘Ah yes, Fieberg, the heart and soul of the Corps! He’s a cool customer all right – an outstanding tactician. And that’s precisely why I’m finding it so hard to understand why nothing’s going right at the moment. What’s happening? No cooperation with the Romanians, no proper intelligence. And we still haven’t completed our deployment…’
All of a sudden, in the far distance, a parachute flare lit up the sky, spreading a yellowish light. Red and green tracer fire shot up from the ground, spiralling around it. After a long pause, a faint patter of gunshots reached them.
‘Then there’s the Russians,’ the captain continued. ‘I think our early successes have misled us into underestimating them. How often have we written off the Red Army, yet it’s still alive and kicking – in fact, it’s grown even stronger! The way they quickly switched over to using grenade launchers and “Stalin organs”[6] was a huge achievement. And there’s no comparison between their air force now and the way it was in 1941! There’s the evidence right now, over there… And their top brass is getting smarter by the day. Let’s not fool ourselves, Breuer, those tactical withdrawals by Timoshenko last summer were a master stroke! We hardly took any prisoners in that campaign. But you try telling anyone that! No one wants to hear it.’
Later, Breuer lay awake for a long time on his straw mattress. A welter of thoughts kept churning in his mind. If even Captain Engelhard was starting to complain, then… He eventually drifted off to sleep with the thought that the captain must have been having a bad day and seeing things in a particularly bleak light. Engelhard’s fiancée lived in Essen, which had just taken another heavy pounding by Allied bombers.
Against all expectation, the business with the film turned out well. Breuer’s polite request to a neighbouring corps yielded an offer to put the cinema van that toured their units at the other division’s disposal on a regular basis for two performances a week. And by happy coincidence, they also had the Rembrandt film that Unold had been asking for, which was released for screening on two consecutive days in Businovka.
The main body of the wooden church was transformed into a makeshift cinema, and Breuer drew up a plan for spreading the performances as fairly as possible across the individual units. Unit Ia was duly informed that it would attend the inaugural showing at the Businovka Movie Theatre on Thursday the nineteenth of November, at 17:00 hours, with the Rembrandt film as the main feature and a newsreel as the supporting programme.
Lieutenant Colonel Unold was uncharacteristically full of praise.
‘When I make a promise, I keep it. You’ll get your orderly officer, Breuer! Got anyone in mind?’
‘I was thinking of Lieutenant Wiese, sir.’
‘The platoon leader from the Information Section? Fair enough – if Mühlmann agrees to release him, I’ve no objection.’
The same day, two gaudily coloured posters, painted by the draughtsman at the mapping unit and pasted outside the regional military command and on the church door, announced the forthcoming event to the astonished inhabitants.
Lakosch had especially high hopes of the occasion, which he shared with Geibel when they were both detailed to wash the car pool vehicles.
‘The film’ll be brilliant, I’m telling you! This Rembrandt was a painter in the Middle Ages, see, and even then he was drawing aircraft and submarines and things like that. And they chopped off his head because he knew too much… Hey, don’t stand there gawping at me like that, you idiot! At least you’re in no danger of having your noggin cut off for that!’
2
Nasty Weather on the Don
The nineteenth of November dawned grey. Private Geibel tossed and turned on his bed. He was being tormented by a horrible dream. He was sitting in his shop in Chemnitz, which looked remarkably similar to the last bunker outside Stalingrad, busily sifting out dried peas from a sack and putting them into an enamel pan, and sweating all the while. Every pea he dropped into the pan made a noise like a bomb falling and exploded with a loud bang into nothing as it hit the base of the receptacle. And Geibel kept wondering why the pan wasn’t getting full, despite the sack already being half empty. Suddenly, he noticed a man standing in front of him, wearing a gold-coloured steel helmet on his head, from which tumbled a strand of black hair, and fixing him with a wide-eyed, penetrating stare. Geibel immediately recognized him as Rembrandt. ‘I’ve got aircraft and submarines,’ the stranger said menacingly, ‘but I still don’t have any herrings!’ ‘Be my guest, dear sir!’ Geibel quickly offered. ‘We’ve got some excellent pickled herrings, tender as butter.’ He pointed at a large barrel over whose rim herrings were anxiously poking their heads. ‘I’ll take the whole barrel!’ said the man with the golden helmet, dipping into the barrel with both hands. The herrings, which all of a sudden had taken on a very human appearance, screamed out in horror but the stranger crammed a vast mountain of fish into his gaping hippopotamus’ maw and devoured them. A hot stab of pain shot through Geibel. ‘That’ll be fifty-seven Reichsmarks and thirty pfennigs,’ he said sadly. ‘Are all those fish herrings?’ the stranger asked, glancing greedily around the shop. ‘All the herrings in Germany!’ Geibel replied firmly. ‘But that’s not enough for me!’ shouted Rembrandt. ‘There must be plenty more herrings in Europe!’ His face swelled to enormous proportions and distorted into a ghastly grimace. ‘You know too much!’ he said mockingly. ‘I must have your pumpkin!’ Geibel was gripped by mad fear. ‘The pumpkin’s not for sale,’ he told the stranger, trembling. ‘It’s a display item. We’ve got some others, very nice pumpkins they are too, thirty-five pfennigs a pound!’ ‘But I want this one!’ shrieked the stranger, clutching at Geibel’s throat with his long, greenish fingers. ‘Nobody must hear anything about this, get it? Not a soul!’ Geibel flailed about in desperation. He knew that it was the end for him if he lost his pumpkin. He clawed with the fingers of his left hand at the looming face’s puffy eyes, while with his right he groped to pick up the telephone receiver to call the riot squad. ‘Help!’ he yelled in sheer panic. ‘Help!!!’
6
Stalin organs – Russian BM-13