War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01]

by David Robbins

  It was common knowledge that the Sixth Army was too weak and short on supplies to force a breach in the enemy forces. The breakthrough would have to come from outside. The rescue mission had fallen to the brilliant Manstein, hero of the July siege at Sevastopol. For the month since the circle had closed around them, rumors flew among the men. “Hitler hasn’t forgotten us,” they agreed, gripping each other by the shoulders, holding on to one another as if to keep themselves from floating off the planet. “Hitler’s sent Manstein to come and get us out.”

  On December 12, twelve days earlier, those hopes became a reality when Manstein struck. The field marshal led thirteen divisions out of Kotelnikovo, striking furiously at the Russians in a narrow salient out of the southwest. After ten days of hard charging, hacking at the Reds in repeated lightning attacks like an ax against a tree, one of the panzer divisions, the Fourth under General Hermann “Papa” Hoth, pushed to within forty kilometers of the Sixth Army’s perimeter.

  “I watched them coming,” the soldier said. “Every night, we’d look south. We could see the flashes getting brighter, you know; we could hear the fighting when the wind was right. We’d jump up and shout, ‘Give it to them, Papa! Come and get us!’ We knew they were coming. We knew it.”

  The engineer turned full toward Nikki, to be certain to impart all of his story with the pain behind it. His eyes narrowed, projecting the images into Nikki’s eyes.

  “Last night the lights started fading. We just stood there in the dark, with our hands out, you know, like children. And then the lights were gone. Manstein had turned around. We got quick orders to pull back. The Russians were coming our way. That’s when our truck got hit.”

  He patted the lathe. “So here I am. That about settles it, I think.”

  Nikki studied the engineer’s hand on the machine. He could sense the connection there, an old, true one. This man had loved his machines. They’d put his feet on the ground, walked him into manhood with their screeching and sparking. The same was done for me in the fields by Father’s cows. I was raised among them, understanding their ways, nature’s habits. Now it was all near an end.

  The engineer’s gentle strokes on the lathe were like a man touching his own tombstone. Without looking up, the soldier said, “I think I’d like to be alone, Corporal.”

  Nikki nodded. He wanted to pat the man on the shoulder. He reached out but did not touch him. He walked away.

  The sound of a single rifle shot beat Nikki to the doorway. He did not want to turn back to look but he could not overcome his sense of his own fate, an urge to watch and remember what was happening here in the last days of the Sixth Army in the Cauldron. Others, he knew, would ask someday about the sorrow of these men. Nikki would tell them.

  He would tell them about the quiet machinist lying beside the lathe from Boblingen in an empty shop room, facedown in a spreading scarlet bloom of despair. And the gaunt men in the next room with bellies full of dog. These were men who did not get up from their places on the floor to see what had happened to the quiet fellow who’d shared their Christmas Eve meal or even inquire about him when Nikki sat back down in their circle.

  Nikki spent that night in the Barricades factory. He did not go again into the shop where the engineer lay dead. Let the room be his shrine, Nikki thought. Let him lie there in peace near his lathe. It’s a better place than any I could drag him to.

  The conversation around the lantern was hushed and strained, as if coming from under a great weight. The men talked of their homes, their civilian jobs, their women and children. One spoke to the group in a voice almost too hushed to hear and described himself as though he were already dead. He wondered how his family would fare with him gone forever. His wife and three boys would go to live with his mother, who’d make sure the boys learned some manners and read some books. His wife was a good woman, a hard worker, but coarse, a country girl. This sent each man into a reverie of his own over the fates of his kin after his death in Stalingrad.

  In the hallway, the two guards waited for their hour-long shifts to end. Nikki said he did not have his rifle with him but would take a turn on guard. One of the men thanked him and handed over his Mauser.

  Nikki walked to the hall carrying the weapon. He’d not held a gun in more than a month, not since he’d carried Thorvald’s. The heft in his hand, heavy with purpose, brought images bursting out of his fingers and arm. Gripping the rifle, he felt he’d grasped again a link in an endless, evil chain, a succession of guns, swords, knives, arrows, spears, clubs—weapons extending backward and forward into time. He saw bodies scattered everywhere, ten billion bodies lying across time, across an eternal barbed-wire fence. He held the rifle away from him. Look at this thing. Metal and wood, that’s all it is. But it’s also a door, an opening that the devil and death and all that hates man and life can march through. Amazing what this thing can do, amazing what we’ll do with it in our hands. Nikki leaned the rifle against the wall. He turned his back and walked to a window overlooking a factory courtyard.

  He stood at the window, absorbing the precious calm of this Christmas Eve. After a while, a barrage bathed the concrete walls and floor of the courtyard in shimmering red. A pop of green added its tint to the shadows in the courtyard. The two colors swirled, mingled, and were joined by amber and white flickers from overhead. In the night sky, hundreds of colored flares raced their sparkling tails into the sky to explode at their highest points.

  Nikki ran to the stairs. He climbed two stories for a better view and sprinted to a window to look over the courtyard wall.

  In a giant semicircle, spreading from the Orlovka River far in the northeast to Tsaritsa Gorge on the Volga downtown, German soldiers lobbed flares into the sky to salute the holy season. The display was awesome and beautiful, as if the giant rim of a volcano were erupting while the center remained dark. The ring of colored fire in the sky marked the outskirts of the German troops in the Kessel.

  Everything around Nikki danced; his hands, cheeks, and white tunic jittered in the flashes of color. After minutes, the lights and crackles faded and slowly, reluctantly, stopped.

  Then the silence over the city was deeper, as though when the merriment was done it had crashed and left a crater. Nikki turned from the window. Through the broken glass came the sound of men’s voices drifting on the wind.

  “O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie grün sind deine Blät ter . . .”

  The song grew, spreading around the Cauldron the way moments ago the fireworks had. Nikki sang, too.

  Inside the ring we are perishing, he thought, his voice rising with the unseen others. But up there where we send this song, beyond the clouds, touched only by the tinsel of starlight and moonlight, it is a silent, clean, good Christmas.

  * * * *

  NIKKI WOKE WITH A START IN HIS CORNER. HIS JOINTS groaned; overnight, his limberness had been sapped by the icy floor. He rose to his knees, and the chill greeted him. It was colder by far than the day before.

  He limped to a window where the men went to relieve themselves. Working the buttons on his pants, he looked east toward the Volga. Snow whipped over the landscape like salt pouring from a box. During the night a blizzard had settled over the city. The temperature outside must be deadly. Merry Christmas, Nikki thought, to the Sixth Army.

  When he was done, he walked through the room past the waking squad members. Their grumbles showed the misery of rising to another day of Stalingrad. Nikki climbed the stairs again for a look west out the window, over the courtyard toward the steppe.

  His vision was stopped by a curtain of driving snow. The wind wailed wrathfully outside. Above the moaning gusts he heard the unmistakable pounding of artillery. Cannons and katyusha rockets were raining down with the snow into the Cauldron onto German heads this Christmas morning.

  Nikki and the men busied themselves ripping up floorboards to build a fire. By late afternoon, the blizzard had slackened. Scraps of metal were arranged on the floor to make a brazier; wood was laid in it an
d lit with newspapers. The fire’s wash warmed Nikki’s hands and face while his back stung with the cold.

  From the small radio, the scratchy voice of Joseph Goebbels filled the room. Hitler’s minister of propaganda narrated the military’s Christmas show, claiming it was being broadcast from around the empire of German-held countries. The minister assured the public that all was well and strong with the Nazi armies fighting for their future.

  Goebbels’s high voice screeched from the radio like a maddened eagle. His confidence is shot thin, Nikki thought. He’s using too much force, pounding down his words like artillery, like he’s trying to kill something with his voice. He’s trying to kill fear, kill doubt. Everything everywhere is fine, he says. Everything is good for Germany. We’re winning, the world cowers from us. Don’t worry for your sons. They’re wrapped warmly in Germany’s destiny.

  The minister of propaganda chanted out a list of cities conquered by the Wehrmacht, taking his audience on a grand excursion of the Third Reich’s front lines. In each locale, the soldiers gave a brave rendition of a holiday carol to send a reassuring Christmas wish home to their loved ones.

  “And now, from Narvik,” Goebbels crooned. The men around the radio joined in while soldiers stationed north of the Arctic Circle on the Norwegian coast led them in “Good King Wenceslas.” Even singing, Nikki suspected the carolers were not really in Norway but in a professional studio in Berlin. The singing was too good, too sharp, to be a chorus of fighting men.

  “And in Tunisia,” Goebbels shouted when the song was done. Another expert male chorus rendered “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.” The men around the radio swayed, their faces flickering in the firelight. They touched shoulders while they sang. The glow reflected off the rims of their eyes and on moist trails down their cheeks. A tear welled in Nikki’s eye. He wished for the teardrop to grow. He sang while it swept down his chin. He rejoiced in the tear’s chilly damp. It was good to feel so full, to cry and sway with these men, lost as he was. The watering of his vision as he blinked gave a prism to the sparkling flames in front of him.

  “. . . stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, alles schläft, einsam wacht ...”

  Nikki sang and cried. He sensed at last the break he knew was coming, like the snap of a frayed cord. He was no longer, in his heart, a soldier of the German army.

  He was finally unbound as he sang, evicted from his duty by the lies and manipulations pouring from the radio as well as by the senselessness he’d witnessed and taken part in over the past four months. Goebbels is doing his duty, telling the German people all is calm, when the whole black truth is we’re dying here in Stalingrad, in Europe, Africa, everywhere. And soldiers and civilians around the world, they’re dying with us, doing their duty.

  Nikki let his tears flow. Enough. I’ve done my duty in Stalingrad. I’ve left behind me a warrior’s trail of bodies. It’s what was asked of me. Now it’s done.

  Duty. We Germans cling to it like it was a shawl to keep us warm. We’ll do anything in its name. How cold will we be when the shawl is ripped away, when the liars are silent at last and the duty we had to their lies dies with them? What will the believers do then? They’ll claim they didn’t know, their leaders were false to them! Better to kill duty at the first sign of a lie from your leaders; smash duty right then. Throw it off you like a snake that’s dropped on you from a tree!

  With duty gone from around your shoulders, you see all the lies clearly because duty makes you blind. Look down at duty, with a broken back now, hissing weakly up at me from the floor. I see everything revealed. Hitler. Stalin. Churchill. Mussolini. Roosevelt. Hirohito. Like the men singing on the radio, a chorus of liars. They must be liars because this war they’ve told us to wage cannot be the truth for mankind. It must be an insane lie!

  I have no duty to Germany any longer. My allegiance is only to me now, to my life, given to me by God alone. My love is only for my family. Because Hitler has abandoned me and lied to me, my contract with him is broken. I won’t kill his enemies, and I will not meet my fate under his orders. I am free.

  “. . . schlafe in himmlischer Ruh, schlafe in himmlischer Ruh.”

  The melody waltzed to a close. The men stopped swaying. Many wiped eyes on their sleeves.

  “And now,” Goebbels’s voice bellowed with pride, “from Fortress Stalingrad.”

  The men stared at each other, incredulous.

  “From here?” one said.

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “There’s no one from the radio here! When did they get here? Today in the blizzard?”

  “This is shit! Goebbels is lying!”

  “Did you hear that? Fortress Stalingrad? Damn it!”

  “Was the whole show a lie? What do you think?”

  Nikki rose from the circle of shocked soldiers. Now they know, too, he thought. Good. Men should know truths while they die.

  Nikki leaned down before he walked away from the fire. He touched the soldier nearest him on the shoulder.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

  The man looked up with wet eyes. His brow was crinkled and imploring. His mouth hung open. His features spoke to Nikki: You are on your feet. You are going somewhere. Take me with you.

  Nikki took his hand from the soldier’s shoulder. “I’m going home,” he said. Should the soldier rise and come along, Nikki would be glad of the company.

  The man gazed up at Nikki. His face, turned from the fire, was halved by shadow. He shook his head, his grief a weighty crown.

  Nikki walked to the door. Behind him, the broadcast of the Christmas carol from “Fortress Stalingrad” cracked off like an icicle.

  * * * *

  NIKKI FOUND HIS BEDROLL IN THE DARK. EXHAUSTED and cold, he laid his head on his pack. The tips of his fingers and toes ached with a white sort of pain as if crusted in ice. He wiggled them while he curled on the floor. Sleep overtook him quickly and carried him to morning on dreams of walking through a swirling mist.

  Just after dawn, a motorcycle roared by his window to the battered department store across the street where Ostarhild had kept his desk, where the haggard captain now sat. Nikki stood to see the goggled, snow-caked rider run up the steps. More news, he thought. More intelligence. More truths about what’s happening here and out on the steppe. Good. Tell them all, messenger. Get on your motorcycle and spread the word.

  Nikki had nothing to eat. He could have found a field kitchen to give him his day’s ration of two ounces of bread, one ounce of meat paste, and a third of an ounce each of butter and coffee. But he didn’t want to wait in line today. He would stay hungry to help keep him alert.

  He looked at his rifle, left leaning against the bread shelves for a month. He took in the basement walls, his backpack, his bedroll, and the lantern without fuel. These were all the protection afforded him by the German army. They were not enough.

  With his knife he cut his canvas pack into strips and swaddled his boots. He sliced the bedroll into three long pieces, wrapping one strip about his torso beneath his coat. One went around his shoulders. The last, cut again, was divided into pieces to cover his neck, ears, nose, and hands.

  He walked up the steps to the street. Snow twirled in corkscrews on the wind. The sky was locked tight in clouds. His wrappings stole the edge from the cold.

  He tucked his arms and walked west ten blocks to the No. 1 Train Station. He chose a train track, wrenched and tangled but still a steel ribbon running true to the south. He followed it.

  Nikki moved through the city. Bundled men hurried past him. No one stopped to ask where he was going. Each soldier was deeply involved with himself. Cutting through the whipping chill, they flapped their arms and leaned at the waist, ducking their heads to make themselves smaller targets for the biting cold. These men are just staying alive, Nikki thought. Everyone does it his own way. Life, no matter how many people are around you, is a private chore.

  For four hours Nikki followed the rail. Often it disappeared beneath the
snow. He kept to it by dragging his boots deeper to find the big wooden ties. Sometimes the rail curled up out of the snow like a crooked metal finger beckoning him onward.

  He walked past many landmarks, famous for the fury of the fighting around them in September and October. He recognized Tsaritsa Gorge, Railroad Station No. 2, and the bloody grain elevator. The grain silos, hard by the Volga, had been held for ten days by fifty Red defenders against three divisions. Now the elevator was blackened by fire and silenced by the heaps of dead needed to win this pinpoint on a map for Germany.

  South of the grain elevator, Nikki left the city center and entered the residential outskirts. The wooden workers’ houses and shacks here had all been trampled by tanks and artillery. Nothing was left standing, not even trees. Snow covered the landscape to form smooth white hillocks interrupted only by a board or a pipe sticking out of random drifts. The neighborhoods were gone, the residents evacuated or killed. In their place were the invaders, stumbling around, huddling in foxholes against the wind or peering over the tops of trenches.