The Meister family, barely affected by shortages, were mightily impressed by Nazi beneficence and when, on Christmas Day, the High Command announced: ‘The German air force refrained from attacks yesterday and last night and no enemy planes entered German territory,’ Karl recalled reading about the Christmas Day truce in the trenches in the previous war and wondering why the soldiers who had shaken hands had returned to the business of killing each other.
But the talk among Hamburg’s leading Nazis gathered around the Meister’s log fire on Christmas Eve was about victory not truces. The conquest of the British, out-of-touch with reality on their offshore island, the establishment of a Thousand Year Reich.
Words shone like medals. Coloured candles spluttered on a tall tree, presents sprawled beneath it. The chiming night was a pre-victory celebration.
Hovering on the limits of the conversation, Meister heard whispers about Russia but paid little attention to them; nor, he admitted to himself waiting for the melted snow to boil, had he questioned any of the fireside boasts that evening. And he doubted whether the young German lying outside the pickling plant, feet shiny purple, face gnawed by rats, would have questioned them.
Even now bold claims were in circulation. Gruppe Hoth was storming towards Stalingrad; any day now it would link up with the Sixth Army. But the words had lost their shine. If Paulus was to meet Hoth where was his ammunition, fuel, food?
Goering who had once promised the children of dead Luftwaffe pilots a thousand Reichsmarks a day had also promised the Sixth Army 500 tons of supplies a day. But the sky had changed hands: the Stuka was no longer in command. And the Luftwaffe had been forced to deploy He-III bombers to augment Ju-52s flying supplies into Pitomnik and Gumrak airfields. Since the Russian encirclement they had to fly long distances; they were sabotaged by cold, blinded by blizzards, shot out of the skies by Soviet fighters. And when they did make it to the beleaguered airfields, they often brought useless cargoes. Rumour had it that on one occasion a Ju-52 had delivered two million French letters.
Five hundred tons a day?
Ask the troops dying of typhus or tetanus where their medicine was.
Ask the mortally wounded laid out in the cold to die outside an overcrowded hospital where the morphine was.
Ask the frost-bitten soldiers wearing wooden-soled boots stuffed with straw, blankets over their shoulders, where the winter clothes were.
Ask the cooks who had stewed the last dogs and cats, where the food was.
Ask the gunners rationed to thirty rounds a day where the bullets were.
Meister took the white cap that he had never been able to deliver from his pocket. Ask the parents of the boy and the girl on the scaffold where their children were.
***
‘Is it nearly ready?’ Meister stood up and stared at the Spam, juices spurting painfully in his mouth.
‘Patience. You learn that waiting for the tumblers of a safe to answer you.’ Carefully Lanz tipped boiling water into the jar containing the tea. ‘We’ve got empty stomachs and if we don’t wash the meat down it will bounce like hard shit on a drum.’
Meister continued to stare at the loaf of pink meat. He closed his eyes: it was a plum pudding. He smelled burning tallow from the Christmas tree candles. He smelled perfume. He opened his eyes as Lanz hurled himself at him, knocking him through the flimsy wooden door, pulling him down onto the snow.
The explosion outraged his ears. Pushed the wooden walls of the plant into the shape of a barrel, then burst them open. Timber fell across Meister’s body, the blast wrapped itself round him making him breathless, disfigured. Glass jars, still intact, still loaded with cucumbers, fell in the snow.
The quiet afterwards was intense.
Lanz, rolling clear, whispered: ‘A grenade. I saw it coming through the window while your mind was in your stomach.’
Meister tried to speak but his voice had been squeezed from his throat. Lanz, pistol in hand, wriggled, belly close to the snow, to a low concrete wall around a water pump. He turned his head once, gesturing to Meister to stay where he was.
Meister watched, trying to swallow the pain in his throat. His camouflage jacket was ripped and there was blood on his hand but he didn’t think he was badly hurt.
Somewhere on the other side of the shattered plant the Russians would be waiting in case there was any movement in the wreckage. A civilian storm group, probably.
A squall of snow swept across the steppe, pellets like shot. They stung Meister’s face. He saw Lanz aim his pistol.
Three shots. A scream so young that Meister was prepared for what he saw. The grenadier was about fourteen. His hair had been cropped and there were traces of acne amid the fuzz on his cheeks. His eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the snow-filled sky, and on his brow there was a suggestion of puzzlement.
***
December 23. Paulus, sitting at a desk in an office below the control tower at Gumrak airfield, looked even greyer than he had at Golubinskaya; the greyness had spread from the streaks in his dark hair to the skin of his solemn face. Nevertheless he smiled at Meister who had been summoned from the south-west of The Cauldron by the officer with the bloodshot eyes.
‘So neither you nor I has won.’ The twitch beneath one eye now reached for his cheek. And he hadn’t shaved; perhaps he was growing a beard.
The change in Paulus made Meister speculate how much he had altered since he had been pictured in Signal, dark and crisp, smiling for the photographer. The sensitivity that Elzbeth had once remarked upon must have been taken from him by Stalingrad.
‘With respect, Herr General, neither of us has lost yet.’
On the tarmac outside ground-crew were unloading a trimotored Ju-52 that had made it from a distant airfield. What had it been carrying? Dutch caps?
Paulus’s smile pushed some of the greyness from his face. ‘You’re right, you’re teaching me a lesson. The Luftwaffe will drop adequate supplies, Hoth will break through the Russian lines, I will break out of The Cauldron.’
Paulus stood up. He was huge. He gazed through the window at the bullet-pocked Ju-52. He was said to have idolised Hitler. Did he still?
The ground-crew worked slowly, like drunks concentrating. The aircraft and the tarmac and the shattered building beyond were sharp with cold this snowless day.
Paulus picked up a teletype from a tray and handed it to Meister who was standing at ease on the other side of the desk. ‘Read that and tell me what you think.’
Meister read the signature first, GOEBBELS, then the text. UNDERSTAND SOVIET SNIPER ANTONOV HAS NOT BEEN SIGHTED FOR SEVERAL WEEKS STOP SUGGEST THAT AS HE MUST BE PRESUMED DEAD WE CLAIM MEISTER SHOT HIM STOP THIS WOULD BE JUST THE SORT OF STIMULUS THE SIXTH ARMY AND THE GERMAN PEOPLE NEED STOP LET ME HAVE YOUR COMMENTS …
It’s words that win wars, not bullets.
‘Well?’
‘I don’t think Antonov is dead.’
‘Then why hasn’t he tried to kill you?’
‘Wounded, perhaps, Herr General?’
‘Then we would look very foolish if we claimed you had shot him and the Soviet newspapers showed photographs of him very much alive.’
‘Exactly, Herr General.’
‘Not, of course, that the German people would ever get to hear that he was still alive’.
‘But the Sixth Army would,’ Meister ventured.
‘I doubt very much whether the Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment is particularly concerned about the Sixth Army.’
Normally cynicism no longer shocked Meister: from a general, from Paulus, it did.
Paulus lit another of his interminable cigarettes and inhaled deeply. Meister imagined smoke issuing from his mouth, nostrils and ears. His lungs were surely black by now.
Paulus said: ‘What do you personally think of Herr Goebbels’ suggestion?’
‘I think it’s immoral, Herr General.’
‘So do I. I’m glad you said that: it took courage. I’m sure the Führer would
have approved.’
Was Paulus bolstering his own resolve with some purpose in mind? The possibility excited Meister. He admired the big, arrogant general who was said to eat the same miserable rations as his men.
Paulus tore up the teletype and sat down on a swivel chair, occupied it, while the nerve beneath his eye performed a jig.
‘Christmas in Stalingrad,’ he remarked. ‘Hardly a festive prospect. Do you realise that one of these days historians are going to debate why General Friedrich von Paulus decided to spend Yuletide in The Cauldron?’
Meister, flattered that Paulus was confiding in him, now more than ever suspecting an ulterior motive, said he supposed they would.
‘Well first of all,’ Paulus said, lighting another cigarette, ‘they will have to remember that the Führer ordered me not to abandon the Stalingrad pocket. If I disobeyed Hitler then there is no reason why my officers shouldn’t disobey me, no reason why the troops shouldn’t disobey their officers.’
Another Ju-52 fell out of the bleak sky, found the runway, hopped along it, then leaned to one side digging a wing into the frozen mud. As it settled an ambulance and a fire tender sped across the airfield.
Paulus took little heed: a crash landing was nothing new. ‘The historians,’ he said, ‘will also have to ask themselves whether, if I had ignored Hitler, I would have had the strength to break out. The food to sustain a long march, the amunition to feed the guns, the gasoline to fuel the mobile columns.’ He lowered his head, knowing the answers.
‘There is another consideration,’ he said after a while, abandoning the historians. ‘By holding out in Stalingrad I am tying down enemy forces which could be attacking our positions elsewhere. I am giving other German commanders breathing space, time to consolidate.’
Consolidate, Meister had learned, usually meant retreat. He said: ‘May I ask a question, Herr General?’
‘Of course.’
‘If the Führer gave the order to break out would you do so, bearing in mind your second reason for staying put – lack of supplies.’
‘We Germans are a disciplined nation which is another way of saying we are obedient.’
An orderly brought coffee. It tasted of walnuts.
‘Yes,’ Paulus went on, ‘we would try to break out and our soldiers would fight heroically. But here in Stalingrad even greater calls are going to be made on their courage because there will be no rewards, no glory.’
‘If Gruppe Hoth gets through could we escape through their bridgehead?’
‘Escape? I think you mean break out.’ Paulus prodded the pyramid of cigarette ends in the ash-tray with one finger. ‘I thought at one stage that Hoth might make it, just as I thought that Goering would send adequate provisions. No longer. Hoth is only twenty-five miles or so away but his men are exhausted. The Russian Sixth Mechanised Corps is attacking him, Rotmistrov’s Seventh Tank Corps are moving in …’ Paulus prodded the cigarette butts once more; the pyramid collapsed.
‘Couldn’t we go out to meet Gruppe Hoth?’ We, the general and I, joint Sixth Army strategists!
‘On foot? On horseback? Do you know the most important commodity that Junkers,’ pointing at the crippled aircraft, ‘has brought?’ And when, although he guessed, Meister shook his head: ‘The fuel in its tanks. Napoleon once said, “An army marches on its stomach.” But not tanks, armoured cars, trucks …’ Paulus swallowed the dregs of his coffee. ‘It has been hinted that I might be offered an important post in the OKW, if I break out. I’m afraid someone else is going to get that job.’
The orderly returned to remove the cups. Outside the ground crew were crawling over the stricken Junkers, ants feeding off a winged insect. One slipped on a frozen puddle and lay still for a few seconds before climbing laboriously to his feet. Meister felt suddenly cold; he swayed.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, Herr General.’ He bit the inside of his lip. Blood flowed, the cold leaked from his skull. He blamed the heat of the room after the frost. And hunger.
‘You may sit down if you wish.’
‘I’m all right,’ Meister said.
‘Then I’ll stand up.’ Paulus stood at the window. Staring across the steppe to Germany, Meister thought. ‘You’re probably wondering why a general is confiding in a private. Well, I have a very good reason: you are the only person now who can give my men – more than a quarter of a million of them – any sort of victory. So you see, I think you should know our exact position.’
Meister stared uncomprehendingly at Paulus.
‘A Christmas victory,’ Paulus said softly. ‘That’s what we need. Before I have to cut the rations again.’ He picked up a typewritten sheet of paper and read from it. ‘Seven ounces of horsemeat including bones; two-and-a-half ounces of bread; two-fifths of an ounce of fats; two-fifths of an ounce of sugar and one cigarette. Just one.’ He stared at the cigarette smoking in his hand. ‘I will eat the same as the men but I can’t do without my drug.’
Meister said: ‘Excuse me, Herr General, but I don’t understand.’
Paulus said: ‘Antonov has re-crossed the river.’
He produced a map; an inglorious substitute for the arrow-slashed cartography that had once adorned his desk, little more than a sketch of the Russian positions huddled along the banks of the Volga inside the city and the German dispositions opposite them.
Paulus said: ‘To think we came all that way,’ removing one hand from the map and signposting Byelorussia, the Ukraine, the Kalmyk steppe, with it, ‘but we couldn’t take those last few metres.’
Meister waited.
Paulus said: ‘The Volga froze completely on December 16 converting the Soviet positions inside the city into a front line rather than a beleaguered outpost. Supplies and reinforcements are reaching them by sled and lorry. Antonov crossed on December 19 and has taken up a position somewhere there.’ Paulus prodded a cross on No Man’s Land.
‘May I ask how you know this, Herr General?’
Misha?
‘That needn’t concern you. But I will tell you this: there was no great secrecy involved. It was almost as if the Russians wanted us to know he had returned. Almost as if Antonov wanted you to know.’
‘And you want me to go after him again?’
Paulus said: ‘I want him dead by midnight on the twenty-fourth. A Christmas present for the Sixth Army.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Volga was peace. A broad white aisle leading to an altar of harmony. Only four days earlier it had been war. A wound running with the pus of battle. Then overnight, the ice-floes had knitted and the healing snow had fallen.
The truck taking Antonov and Razin, both in winter white, back to the west bank travelled swiftly along an ice road marked with stakes. Occasionally it skidded but the driver, a teenager with a dangerous face, laughed; it could skid all the way to Astrakhan as far as he was concerned.
Ahead lay the stumps of Stalingrad, white and gentle now. Snow fell hesitantly.
‘How many Stalingrads can you see?’ Razin asked massaging his arm.
The double vision had stayed with Antonov for a long time and hadn’t really focussed satisfactorily when he had been discharged from the hospital but the doctors had been so sceptical that in the end he had told them what they wanted to hear.
‘Only one,’ he told Razin.
His eyesight was accurate most of the time; it was only when he concentrated that it multiplied.
The driver, steering with one hand, said: ‘I hear you’re going after the Fritz again.’ The truck uprooted a stake. ‘How are you going to find him?’
‘He’ll probably find me.’
The driver wound down his window and flicked a cigarettebutt through it. Cold swarmed into the cabin. Antonov pulled the hood over the thick blond stubble growing from his shaven scalp.
‘Then he has the advantage?’
‘Not necessarily. Not if I’ve got a good vantage point.’
‘How do you know he’ll be there?’
‘I don’t. But he’ll be somewhere in the pocket if he hasn’t been killed.’
If Meister found him he hoped it wouldn’t be Misha’s doing.
‘Make sure you get him,’ the driver said. ‘Before Christmas. We need a shot in the arm now that all the death and glory boys are outside Stalingrad. What did we do? Just hung on while the vermin threw everything they’d got at us, that’s all. We retreated, they’re advancing. We were gallant defenders, they’re fucking heroes. Yes,’ the driver said, swinging the truck into a ponderous skid to avoid an oncoming sledge, ‘you get him, I’ll be the first to shake your hand.’
‘Christmas?’ Razin said. ‘What’s this talk about Christmas? It’s a heathen festival. Be patient, wait until the New Year. Celebrate his victory,’ clumping Antonov on the shoulder, ‘with Grandfather Frost and the Snow Maiden.’
‘Christmas is Christmas,’ the driver said. ‘You know that. By God the zakuski we used to have at home at Christmas. Caviar, black and red, smoked salmon, pirozhki … and firewater, vats of it.’ He pursed his lips and blew as though he were exhaling flames.
‘And the food in Stalingrad now?’ Razin asked.
‘Not bad compared with the shit we were eating. Meat, fish, potatoes. The cooks position their stews so that the wind takes the smell into the Fritz lines. You can hear their stomachs rumbling a kilometre away. And yet they still fight as if their bellies were full of bullets.’
‘You haven’t eaten,’ Razin announced, ‘until you’ve tasted manti. Dumplings filled with spiced meat and onions. Now that’s food. A Kirghiz dish,’ he informed them.
Antonov said: ‘So the little nurse from Frunze is a good cook as well?’
‘As well as what? As a matter of fact, when all this is over we’re going to get married.’
‘Congratulations. Will she mind being married to a soldier?’
‘My time’s almost up. When we’ve chased the vermin back to Berlin I’m going to become a civilian again. And study law again,’ he said almost shyly. Antonov noticed that the ragged ends of his moustache had been trimmed.
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