by Roy Jacobsen
Paulus’ headquarters were in an underground bunker not more than a few hundred metres from the airfield, the only place Markus visited to have any heating at all. Eismann was received by the General himself, who gave an earnest, aristocratic and professorial impression, he was lean but punctilious in his lankiness, meticulously dressed with gleaming boots, face intense and drawn, a tic in his left cheek and, to top it off, restless, haunted eyes.
His Chief of Staff, General Schmidt, was shorter and fatter and seemed calmer, presumably bolstered by the fragile privilege of being next in command, absolved of the ultimate responsibility.
The officers disappeared into Paulus’ private rooms while Markus was left more or less to his own devices. He asked the A.D.C. where his son might be, and had to suffer a few minutes of agonising suspense because the man didn’t know anyone there by that name. But he was put in touch with an adjutant who nodded mutely and led him out again, a few hundred metres through an ashen mound of ruins and down into a cellar where his son – right at the back of what must have been a makeshift hospital ward – was sleeping on a camp bed, buried in tattered blankets with a tuft of hair sticking out from under his leather helmet.
Markus claims that he immediately recognised him and that the reaction to seeing him will be etched on his face until his dying day, like the expressions on certain icons, though these are rare on Catholic images of saints. And he says he asked the adjutant to go back to the H.Q. while he slumped down on a concrete block to compose himself, though he was in fact feverishly examining the boy for injuries without being aware of it, when he suddenly realised that he couldn’t wake him, however long he had been asleep, in other words there was a risk he would return without having spoken a word to his son, and in a moment of weariness he also realised that maybe this was best for both of them; after all, he had no tangible goal with this visit, no purpose, no agenda – his emotions had sent him on a blind mission.
“The Feldmarschall had no more reason to send me there than Dante had to send Virgil to Inferno. He needed an eyewitness, or a surrogate, unless, that is, he wanted to give me the chance to try out my foolish sabotage idea, a means I thought I had found to cut the Gordian knot, just like the one that revealed itself to William of Orange when he was making his way along the dykes at Leiden, an idea Manstein must have known I was obsessed with, and wanted to let me see how stupid or impractical it was. Or perhaps his motive was to give me the chance to get my boy out. But if so, that would have meant desertion and death for both of us, unless Peter was wounded, and of course I had already thought of shooting him in the foot when I took my service pistol before leaving Novocherkassk. In short the Feldmarschall must have left these decisions to me since he obviously couldn’t make them himself, and I couldn’t bear this freedom, no more than the dictates of reason, I don’t even remember the first words we exchanged, but I must have mumbled ‘my boy’ or ‘Petrus’, which I used to call him sometimes, at least I remember he said, and I think these were his first words: ‘Is Manstein coming?’
“I noticed that the air down there was bad and I remember thinking that sand and gravel must have been blocking the air vent, if there had ever been one, and I said: ‘Manstein? Yes, of course he is. Eismann’s here with his Donnerschlag plan, so you’ll soon be out, don’t worry. Hünersdorff is ready and waiting by the Myshkova…’ (He wasn’t of course! He was still battling it out at Verkhne Kumsky!)
“‘Is he…?”
“He spoke with such pleading gravity that I had no option but to deceive him, give him false hope, and I felt a sense of relief at doing so, it came naturally to me, this is what I have always done, he was my son; I realise of course that here I was fulfilling the dream of millions of terrified parents sitting at home biting their nails in fear and crying and begging the Lord on their knees to be allowed, just for one moment, to be present at the front to see their loved ones breathing …And he didn’t even ask if the order had been given, he took it for granted it had been. ‘Eismann’s here with his Donnerschlag plan’: what else could this mean to a militarily naive person like my son Peter? I didn’t have the heart to elicit his views on the Sixth Army, its chances of regrouping and breaking out, and I doubt if he could have told me much anyway, even though of course he could have given me the official version, and at this juncture I discovered something else – I am digressing, I know, but I discovered that a curious stockpiling was going on in the cauldron, not with the aim of mustering strength for a breakout but in order to celebrate Christmas! Can you believe that? I couldn’t. They were looking forward to Christmas, this was the most depressing defeatism, on a par with Paulus’ bottles of champagne. Peter also showed me his own little stock, half a bottle of vodka, half a loaf, which fortunately was frozen, some horse meat, which was frozen too, some sugar, and now I gave him what I had brought along, but he didn’t want it, he just flashed an apologetic and an accusatory smile and said it would have to be registered with the quartermaster and shared out in the usual fashion (one lousy rucksack’s worth!) and even though I obviously could point to the lack of logic in his thinking – he was already doing his own illicit hoarding – I was so incensed by this ‘Christmas cheer’ that I couldn’t bring myself to rebuke him for that, either.”
19
Markus also noticed that there was something “inconsistent” about his son: one moment he was in a cheery mood and would laugh inappropriately; the next he was a dutiful, self-assured soldier, bursting with the same idiotic military fervour that had so depressed his father in Strasbourg, only to slump into a dour earnestness, which was very much in line with Manstein’s teachings on mobility, armies had to keep on the move, it was being stationary that was the ruin of them, the boy said, as long as they kept moving they could deal with most of what the enemy threw at them, but Jesus Christ, now they were capturing a ruin one day and having to relinquish it the next, the fronts were chaotic and the trenches shallow, snipers, hand grenades, mines, flamethrowers and then those abominable Katyushas, which were now positioned on the west bank of the Volga and made the universe shudder with their sixteen 130-millimetre rockets launched in one single salvo, but the night bombing was still the worst, the Russians had started doing this right back in September in order to operate unmolested by the Messerschmitts – those humming “sewing machines” which crossed the Volga and suddenly went quiet as the pilots switched off the engines and glided silently over the final kilometres, the sole lull in the clamour of the battlefield, the fraught moments of prayers and rosaries, until sharp ears picked up the sudden swish of wings and your brain told you it was too late. Paulus had asked on innumerable occasions for air support at night too, and Markus himself had passed on several of these appeals to Fiebig and Richthofen, but the answer was always the same – the pilots were overworked, the strongest of them were airborne for more than twelve hours a day while for the rest of the time they were bent over operational charts swotting up on positions, eating or catching an hour’s nap.
“At one point I couldn’t restrain myself,” Markus says. “I think it was when he asked after his sisters that I had to mention – as casually as possible – that I could wound him and get him out, it was to show him that I was willing to do anything for him, but he just sneered with affected pride that he would never let down his comrades. ‘What’s more,’ he added, ‘You have never been much of a man, Father, you’re more like a professor, while I take after Grandad.’ This was a somewhat starry-eyed insinuation on his part, stemming as it did from our previous ‘hero’, my father, who at the beginning of the century emigrated to Belgium, got married there and lived a secluded life on his father-in-law’s land in the Ardennes until – when the war broke out in 1914 – he was struck by a bolt of patriotic lightning and abandoned his potato fields to meet his death in the trenches, almost three years before Peter was born.
“‘Grandad fled the clutches of Moltke and Bismarck,’ he said, and he said it again when I visited him in Strasbourg ages ago, ‘but he
came back when the Vaterland called!’
“And then Peter had this twitch in his face which was a carbon copy of the tic I had seen in Paulus’ left cheek, it really irritated me, as there were no neuroses in the German medical vocabulary, just ‘cowardice’, which of course was punished by death. And I don’t know how to interpret my reactions to the fact that there was something touchingly saint-like about him, he moved about as if surrounded by a divine aura, invulnerable – for example he would show me the bunker of a priest who acted as a doctor in the 16th Panzer Division, and he took me there on a starved army gelding. We set off to the sounds of the thunder of shells and Stuka sirens ringing in our ears at a steady trot to an underground bunker with the regulation three feet of earth and rubble over a thick layer of girders where, of all things, there was an undamaged piano on which the division’s commanding officer, Generalleutnant Angern was his name, as far as I remember, performed Bach, Handel, Mozart whenever the opportunity arose, to the soldiers’ wails of gratitude.
“Here I exchanged a few words with a major in the 297th Infantry Division and enquired about any Hiwis he might know, as if I wanted to help Yadviga and her only son in compensation for my failed mission. But the Major didn’t know any Cossacks by the name of Kamenin and was only interested in saying how proud the 297th were at having kept the underground field hospital – which they had built during the autumn – and all its equipment intact; now all he was worried about was that they might not be able to take it with them when they broke out, whereafter he told me that he intended to go and see the Madonna that a certain Dr Kurt Reuber was painting in a bunker a little further east – a great artist, this Reuber, his Madonna gave the soldiers strength and courage; even the ones who broke down at the sight of her would later rise up again as if newborn, now it was only a question of time, further south they were listening night and day for Hoth’s rocket-launchers, in the breaks between the shelling, and when the Major heard I was there with Eismann to reach an agreement with Paulus he was beside himself with joy. I scribbled down a few Russian words on a scrap of paper and gave it to him. And as we rode back I saw it, I saw that a calm pallor had settled over Peter’s features, his tic had gone.
“Of course it did occur to me that Peter took me there to avoid talking to me, so we wouldn’t revert to our usual disagreements, and it is this – as you no doubt understand, Robert – which I remember best, that his tic disappeared. Carl von Clausewitz said that ‘war is the mother of all things’, but what he had in mind was state building, constitutions, demarcation of borders and that kind of thing, while my attention, however, is directed towards the little man and the invisible lines within ourselves which we never cross but which move like waving, swaying ribbons, first we’re on one side, then we’re on the other, we keep our word and keep our peace, but the borders move and the words are changed, the interpreters die and our reason fails us, it’s almost like sitting down at a piano when all hell breaks loose.”
20
When Markus and his son returned to Gumrak, Eismann was still with Paulus. Markus was offered a seat next to the stove in the tent, but he declined and instead stood outside watching the planes land and take off in the drifting snow, beside his son, although they didn’t exchange a word (as far as he remembers, at any rate); the ground crews had lit fires in sawn-off fuel barrels and were directing the warm smoke around plane engines through thick, tattered fire hoses; ammunition, weapons, oil barrels, mail and food were unloaded, the wounded were carried out of the enormous tent and put on board the planes…
But when the Head of Intelligence eventually appeared there was yet another delay, one of the pilots had severely damaged his hands on the freezing cold propeller, and Eismann spent another half an hour with Paulus while Markus sought refuge in a ruined cellar in order to avoid the stench from the P.O.W. camp he had seen next to the airstrip, where several hundred Russian prisoners lived and died like cannibals in the open air. And after taking leave of his son – with a hug Peter didn’t reciprocate – he barely noticed the ashen face of Eismann as he emerged from the meeting with Paulus’ General Staff, and nor did he take any notice of the Oberst’s silence on the flight back, which included a stopover in Morosovsk to offload the wounded and tank up. They didn’t arrive at Novocherkassk until well into the night.
Eismann went straight to the headquarters while Markus went for de-lousing, wrote a report and called in on Kuntnagel, who was sitting by the controls in the radio room and tore off his headphones as soon as he saw him:
“Hünersdorff has captured Verkhne Kumsky!” he screamed. “Manstein has transferred what’s left of the Romanian Third Army to Chir. Now it all depends on Vatutin and how long it will take him to cross the ‘Don Bend’ if that’s the route he takes…”
“I know,” Markus said with sudden conviction. “We might well lose the war, but we’ll never lose this battle.”
Kuntnagel looked at him quizzically.
“Good news from the cauldron?”
“It couldn’t have been better. Under the present circumstances,” he added. “How’s the 16th Motorised doing? How can we get them out of Elista?”
“It’s too early to…”
Kuntnagel broke off with a gloomy shake of the head and Markus hurried out again, went to the mess and got something to eat.
“But on the way back – it was getting on for two in the morning – I bumped into Yadviga. She was sitting on her stool beside the small windbreak staring into the same fire. Beside her was the pony, chewing as always. She had taken off her mittens and placed them like two foetuses next to the flames, her palms and face bathed in the tea-coloured light, her eyes like mica in a clear stream, and I would say I regained my senses by thinking the simple thought that I was either seeing things or else I had dreamt her death; both possibilities demanded further investigation, cold and sober, so I went over and said hello, again respectfully in both Russian and German:
“‘Good evening, Yadviga,’ I said, but she started in fright, and I thought it odd that she had not heard my steps, that eternal crunch in the snow, and only then did I notice how cold it was, I hadn’t felt it in the cauldron, my feet were frozen stiff in my tight boots, the night pressed against my face like cold iron and prevented me from breathing, but her eyes smiled and I asked her what it was that made her so cheerful.
“‘My son is alive!’ she said with the same childlike joy I had felt during the ride from Angern’s bunker when I discovered that Peter’s tic had gone – Did I tell you, Robert, by the way that my horse collapsed halfway there and we had to shoot it? Peter did it. Strangely enough, the shot drowned the din of battle for a second, all went quiet like when the host at a banquet taps a wine glass with a knife and silences conversation. I walked next to Peter for the last bit, holding the bridle as I used to do when he rode around in the woods at Beaufort on Sundays in his youth. We got hold of a cart in Gumrak and fetched the carcass – have you tasted horsemeat? It’s not bad at all.
“‘How do you know he’s alive?’ I asked. And she told me – reluctantly as always – that one of the Cossacks had been into the cauldron and spoken to him.
“‘It’s cold now,’ her son had said. ‘But it’s a good cold. For people like me.’
“From those words she had realised it was him, because he loved winter, the ice and the silence. And at that moment Jaromil slipped out of the shadows and walked up as if he wanted to kill two birds with one stone: to protect Yadviga and to get in my good books.
“‘Was it the same man,’ I asked him, ‘who went into the cauldron six days ago?’
“But before he could reply I saw she had a sack beside her, I grabbed it without a second thought and emptied it, twenty, thirty apples, frozen solid, bounced around on the compacted snow like billiard balls, and the pony snaffled one before Yadviga could get a hand on it, its yellow teeth chomping into the crystalline apple flesh, and I started laughing.
“‘Sorry,’ I said, brightly, ‘so sorry.’ And o
f course I helped her to pick them all up. ‘Take her home now, Jaromil,’ I said, ‘and make sure she gets to bed. You can manage that, surely?’
“But he had already gone again. He knew when to come and when to go, but I never learned that trick. I could only grope in the dark…”
21
Then everything is silent.
But he woke up once again and everything was just as silent. The din of battle from the cauldron was still there, but only as a scar on his soul. It was bright daylight, a fresh layer of blinding snow spread out in all directions like the frozen waves on a sea, and no tracks of any kind. The radio room was empty; death reigned in the H.Q. But Markus slowly came to and raised the blackout blinds, it was like a flash going off, voices from the General Staff, the tramping of boots, doors slamming and planes on the runway arriving and departing.
Beber came loping up with a cup of coffee and three frozen apples which he claimed he had found outside in the snow, and placed them on the windowsill above the stove. Markus stared enthralled at the gelatinous icy water streaming down the red-flecked peel and collecting to form a black halo on the wood. Then it was gone.
When he went into the H.Q. he found out why Eismann’s face had been an ashen grey on the return trip from the cauldron: the Oberst had repeatedly explained to Paulus that it wasn’t possible to supply them from the air – the Sixth Army had to get out – or die. Paulus, his A.D.C. and Chief Quartermaster had also realised this, that they had reached the end of the road, and beyond! But then the Chief of Staff, Generalmajor Schmidt, repeated with a sneer that a breakout “at present” was impossible, it would be a “catastrophe” and the certain death of all their 250,000 men. “The Sixth Army will hold its position until Easter. You’ll just have to make a better job of supplying us.”