by Roy Jacobsen
Markus got through to Hoth, who was licking his wounds, as he phrased it, after having defended the railway station in Kotelnikovo for days on end against sporadic Russian attacks launched at the panzer division which was beginning to arrive from France, the 6th Panzer Division, it was called, poetic irony, a little brother of the Sixth Army it had come to rescue from the cauldron. The enemy had attacked while they were unloading, but had been firmly repulsed, “a whole cavalry division had been annihilated”, as Hoth put it. After that they had been able to concentrate on the new tanks, to their delight, and set to work painting them white; in the next few days – hopefully before the 3rd – they might have as many as 160 Panzer IIs, IIIs and IVs, newly fitted out in Brittany, and also a score of Tigers, the technical wonder that according to Hitler would turn the tide on the battlefield once and for all.
A little later Jakob Spitz came with a letter Manstein had written to Hitler, which had to be sent off at once. And Markus saw to his relief that the Feldmarschall didn’t mince his words with the Führer:
“The army has to be brought out of the cauldron,” he stated. “They can’t survive on the open Steppes through the winter. Above all, it is impossible to continue to concentrate and tie up resources in such a restricted area while the enemy has free rein over the whole 500-kilometre-long front, the Upper Don, from Voronezh to Kalatch, which is not only too long but also too fragile. On top of that, the most critical section is held by the Romanian, Hungarian and Italian divisions, troops which are in a worse state and less motivated than our own. We have to be operational again!”
Incidentally, the previous day the General had delivered the following sermon to Markus about the concept of “mobility”:
“Keeping the Fourth Panzers and Paulus’ Sixth in the Stalingrad sector for months is contrary to our basic idea of warfare. Guderian’s tank philosophy is based on speed, flexibility and élan …We can win a quick war against a superior force so long as we keep moving, but not a slow, static one. An army grinding to a halt not only means it cannot conquer new territory, it means that it loses its identity. And you, Hebel, no doubt know what the consequences are.”
Yes, indeed, Markus did know what the consequences were, and he would probably have preferred these well-turned phrases to be dispatched to the Führer rather than the more formal ones that were hammered out by the teleprinter. Nevertheless, he happily sent the dispatch off, without the slightest doubt that Hitler would at last come to his senses and order an orchestrated breakout by return, the salvation of the Sixth Army!
Not until several hours later could he take upon himself the burden of also considering the downsides of the letter; Manstein not only painted a dismal picture of the prospects of the German troops surviving the winter, but also insisted that if the two army groups – the “Don” and its neighbour “A” in the Caucasus – didn’t coordinate their operations and were not given full freedom of movement then a huge pincer movement from the right across the Upper Don by the Russians, towards Rostov by the Sea of Azov, could cut off the whole of the south-eastern front and make a Stalingrad of all that, too.
It was the first time Markus had seen this clear connection between the fate of the isolated city and the rest of the south-eastern front, it presented both dangers and opportunities, gigantic opportunities, whoever thought he knew what was going on in Stalingrad could think again, no-one knew, least of all a writer who got his hands on it, with his propensity for elaboration and variation, or a relative, with his vivid imagination, unquenchable sorrow and an immense feeling of guilt.
Now Hitler had not only ordered Paulus to dig in for the winter but, while he was at it, renamed his front-line “Festung Stalingrad”, the Stalingrad fortress, and in addition proclaimed this event across all the Reich’s radio stations, which in practice meant throughout the whole world! A new eternity had begun. With untold possibilities.
6
Markus had only had a few minutes’ sleep the night before if we discount all his mental lapses, and we do that without trepidation as they did not provide him with any real rest – on the contrary; there was no opportunity to catch up the following day, either; the head of the supplies committee in the cauldron, Generalmajor Pickert, sent a message with the following wording: “Terrible weather over Pitomnik. Visibility no more than eighty metres. Some Heinkel 111s have arrived, an incredible achievement. I salute them all…”
But at around eleven o’clock in the evening Markus was sitting with the cartographer Jakob Spitz over a cup of tea preparing for a few hours’ sleep, shaking with terror almost, at what his dreams might do to him, when Kuntnagel ran in with the first tangible reaction to his call.
“The white dog: Alethe’s dream? Radio Volga,” Markus read and felt his heart give a leap; he waved the paper distractedly and intoned in a low, confused and desperate voice:
“It’s him! He’s alive! And he’s heard my call!”
It meant nothing that his son might have sent this without knowing the call came from him. Nevertheless the gravity of the situation hit him, what was the next step, because there was no strategy for how this “conversation” should proceed, or in what language other than the purely telepathic, and how on earth could they open a channel and at the same time ensure that the receiver did not reveal its existence? Not to mention: was his son – who had been at odds with Markus on every question concerning life and death and decency since he left home in the summer of 1939 – was he at all interested in subjecting himself to a missionary offensive from these quarters when he was in such dire straits?
Markus had already (partly) explained this problem to Jakob, but the cartographer had hung back as usual with the same wisdom that Markus himself had employed in order to survive during his years on the Eastern Front – keep a low profile, make sure you don’t know too much and above all ensure that nobody expects anything special from you, no bright ideas, be tougher than most, keep a cool head when others are losing theirs!
He asked to see Stahlberg, but was frostily informed that he was busy with more pressing matters – it had been a black, demoralising day in the Caucasus, and the tank reinforcements meant for Hoth from there were stuck in the mud; there was a railway in the area and Stahlberg was organising transportation by train. While Busse was nowhere to be found and Manstein had probably allowed himself a few hours’ sleep?
Not much later, however, General Schulz’s battered Junker emerged from the cloud cover, after his recce in the cauldron, and both Manstein and Busse were summoned. The General Staff locked themselves in the map room and Markus was not present at this meeting, but later he was given a superficial briefing by Busse: it transpired that Schulz assessed the Sixth Army’s chances if they “waited” as relatively encouraging. He had the impression that Paulus might be exaggerating the losses and underestimating his own strength, but thought that this might be due to a lack of overview rather than panic or deliberate distortion.
Markus was surprised that a top general of Paulus’ calibre should have a poorer overview of his army than the visiting – though admittedly very astute – Schulz could glean in less than twenty-four hours. But he, Markus, was too distracted by thoughts of his son, both the fact that he was alive and that it was impossible to talk to him! He needed advice with regard to the “white dog”.
Busse was in a hurry, however, and as he was leaving mentioned only that Schulz had brought back with him about twenty wounded from the cauldron and that Markus might find it interesting to talk to one of them, a Leutnant Weber, who had apparently been one of Paulus’ assistants.
Markus ran out onto the airstrip, was told that the wounded had been sent to the town hall, which had been converted into a field hospital, and got one of the Cossack drivers, Jaromil, to drive him a kilometre or so through the blacked-out village. Minutes later he was met by a very obdurate reaction on the part of the duty surgeon. Leutnant Weber had severe wounds to both legs, caused by an air attack on the Gumrak airfield west of Stalingrad more
than a week ago, the poor wretch had gangrene and it had been necessary to amputate, he was feverish, had been dosed up with morphine and was unable to engage in conversation.
Markus said with set jaw that he had orders from Manstein himself to debrief the Leutnant – immediately. However, it transpired that the surgeon was Manstein’s personal doctor and only happened to be here in the town hall to lend a helping hand in his time off.
“If it’s a problem,” he added sternly,” I can talk to Manstein myself…”
“I have to speak to him,” Markus said, stamping the floor like a child.
“He can’t speak, I’m telling you!”
“Let me see for myself!”
The surgeon was barely thirty, strong and broad-shouldered like a well-trained soldier, spoke in a refined Berlin dialect while his square face retained an enviable calm. Nevertheless, Markus thought he detected a bristling earnestness beneath his mild exterior, a flicker of emotion, a touch of fear, if nothing else.
“I’m asking you again,” he said fervently, “on my knees. I have to talk to him.”
The surgeon drew a deep breath and deliberated.
“Let me tell you something, Leutnant,” he said. “Rats have been at him.”
“Rats?”
“He was lying in the ruins of a cellar with four comrades from the 21st – behind the Russian lines. He watched the others freeze to death one by one because they didn’t dare to cry for help; he’s got frostbite on his back and arms, and rats have left their teeth marks in his wounds.”
Markus had sat down. “I can arrange it so that you can speak to one of the others,” the surgeon went on in the same business-like tone. “But they will probably only be able to tell you the same thing: that they can’t take any more and that if Manstein doesn’t get them out soon then we’re facing one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of war. It’s personal, I suppose – is it something personal?”
He had adopted a more conciliatory expression, and Markus gave a weak nod, almost as if he were acknowledging guilt.
“Yes,” he said. “My son’s there.”
“Then you have my deepest sympathy. There’s still not much I can do, but come over here with me…”
He led Markus up a staircase and into a dimly lit meeting room where Stalin still scowled from the shadows, with a bayonet hole through his left eye. Along a line of blacked-out windows stood four wide canvas beds with gleaming white linen. An elderly Cossack woman, a volunteer, was sitting on what looked like a milking stool at the side of the bed furthest away and was dressing a wound, the stump of a leg Markus discovered as he approached. The face on the pillow was lifeless, pale, ageless, with black liver spot-like patches around the eyes, a sculpture which time had long abandoned. Markus asked the old woman in Russian whether she had talked to him. She slowly shook her head and continued her bandaging.
“I don’t know why,” Markus mumbled, addressing the surgeon. “I just had to see it with my own eyes. I have to see everything with my own eyes…”
He turned and left. The doctor called after him that he would let him know when the Leutnant regained consciousness, and Markus muttered an inaudible thank you, rushed down the stairs and began to berate Jaromil, who instead of waiting ready in the car had got involved in a game of cards with his friends in the hospital duty room. Once in the car, the man ignored him, even when Markus showered him with a stream of unreasonable accusations, concerning the spirits the Cossacks smuggled into the quarters. Did the fellow have any conception of what was going on out here?!
Jaromil shrugged his shoulders and drove on through the drifting snow, unperturbed.
“I’ve got four children,” he said after Markus had quietened down. “I know nothing.”
“No, you certainly don’t,” Markus said crossly. “One of mine is in Stalingrad.”
“Haven’t you got any more?”
“What do you mean by that?”
Jaromil shrugged again, and Markus had the impression he was trying to point to more logical paternal feelings than the hysteria he himself had no doubt demonstrated, for example, by saying that so long as the major part of one’s offspring are alive then there is nothing to complain about, at least there is no reason to have a breakdown.
“I’d like you to promise me one thing,” Markus said. “That the day this place is evacuated you will come to me so that I can tell you how many kids I have …By the way, can you get me some apples?”
“What?”
“You’ve got an orchard. It’s you who supplies H.Q. with apples, isn’t it?”
Jaromil thought for a minute, then gave an evasive smile.
“I can ask around,” he said slowly. “If you’re really interested.”
“Yes,” Markus said, “I’d like some apples, a few kilos…”
7
Markus was torn from a dramatic, fireworks-like sleep and felt a ray of sunlight on his retinas, God had opened His eye, that was exactly how he had once planned to regain his sight, now it was happening again, it was summer over the land, a gentle, tender haze, the grace of peace, and Markus thought – quite clearly in fact – that if he’d had faith in an accountable and just God he would have been able to point out to Manstein that his first military tour de force in this war – the “Sichelschnitt”, the sickle cut, which brought France to its knees in a single month in 1940 – had also hit his forests with full force, Markus’ own forests, the Ardennes, and for that reason would haunt the General till the Day of Reckoning in the form of the worst conscience in Europe, and that it was this vengeful yet just force which was now approaching from all the corners of the earth on Russian caterpillar treads. But Markus did not believe in a just God – he thought, also quite clearly, strangely enough – he had a confused, indecisive, unreliable and well-meaning force on his right shoulder, a dove with a falcon’s eye, a poppy with iron wings, a medal of snow, like the two streams which flow into one behind his house at home in Clervaux and double both his strength and the pleasure his children derive from making a waterwheel, which spins and spins through three seasons and is locked by ice in the fourth – what? In the distance came the sound of explosions from a lone Russian plane, of course, a Russian loner who drops his bomb load where it suits him before returning to the other side of the Volga’s flat embankments, or maybe it is Fatty Beber sitting on the bunk opposite him and bumbling his way through some contorted prayer.
“What’s the time?” Markus said, jumping up.
“Eight,” Beber said in surprise, alert now. “German time.”
“Has something happened?”
“Nah …not really…”
It was only now that Markus realised that the fat man was not immersed in his own thoughts but was holding an open letter in his hand, obviously from Germany. Beber was a few years younger than him, but seemed ten years older. In a happier world he would have been a melancholic gardener, a gullible village teacher or a well-girthed butcher. Now he was fully there and doing what he always did at such hours, rubbing his hand to and fro across his broad, pasty face as if to erase his features or perhaps only in a secret hope of avoiding looking at the man he was talking to.
“Letter from home?” Markus said to make conversation, and began to do his ablutions.
“Yes.”
Beber was silent again.
“Which you want to show me? You usually let Kuntnagel read them.”
Markus knew about this arrangement. Beber had a wife at home in a village in Pomerania and she wrote to him all the time and often at great length about how well things were going for their two sons who were stationed in France and Holland. But during the autumn Beber had begun to suspect she was pulling the wool over his eyes to spare him, since there didn’t appear to be any problems with anything at all any longer, although she had been a real whiner all the time he had known her; Kuntnagel had had to assure him that of course what she had written was true, about their sons and herself and all the banal, idyllic life they had
the opportunity to lead back home.
“I don’t trust him anymore,” the big man said gravely. “I trust you more.”
Markus laughed mirthlessly and started to dress.
“Why’s that?”
“You know more. You know what’s going to happen.”
“We’ll see.”
He read out a lengthy childish account about seven or eight hens and a pig, about how she had preserved “tons” of cherries and pears for winter, about how an elderly neighbour was going to do the slaughtering for her and “Hans was doing well in Scheveningen, it was so quiet there by the sea”, she hadn’t heard from Johann for a while, although in the previous letter she had said everything was fine and they all sent their best wishes.
“Well, what are you worried about?” Markus said, annoyed. “You’re sitting comfortably in an office, your sons are equally comfortable and your wife’s got enough food. Could things be any better?”
Beber nodded thoughtfully, but at length managed to explain that he didn’t like the sentence “it was so quiet there by the sea” – it was completely irrelevant and didn’t seem to fit in with the ill-tempered and unpoetic disposition of hers, it was as if she hadn’t written it herself, and not only that, this was the first he’d heard about the youngest son being in Scheveningen.
“Have we got anything there?” he asked. “He’s in the military police.”
“I don’t know. But hold the letter up to the light, read it again, every word, and learn it off by heart.”
Beber looked at him sceptically and shook his head, but did what he said.
“Well?” Beber asked after a couple of minutes.
“What did it say?”
“Damned if I know – it said the same as what you read, didn’t it?”
“Nothing else?”
“No …I don’t think so.”
“Don’t think?”
“No, there’s nothing else.”
“Have you any way of finding out any more?”