by John R Burns
‘My face...my...’
‘I know.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘It can happen.’
‘I went to sleep.’
‘We’ll...’
‘I’m not going to manage...manage this...I’m too cold and I want to move. You have to move me. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here!’
His appeals were becoming louder before Franz took out his revolver.
‘I order you to stay quiet.’
‘I don’t want to.....’ the young private started screaming. No! No! Please!’ he went on before Franz shoved the nozzle up under his helmet. Fredericks tried to hit back, swinging as hard and as far round as he could as Franz pulled the trigger.
The shot was followed by a sudden burst of machine gun fire from across the street.
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Privates Rheiner,Grossmann, Steiger, Lipmant, Bron, Dietrich, Brecker were all that was left.
Franz brought them and Hauptmann briefly together to tell them what he thought they had to do about the lack of food.
‘It’s your choice but there isn’t any other. We will only manage a couple of days. We can try to break out from here but now I have no idea what’s around us.’
They listened and went back to their positions, leaving Hauptmann behind.
‘You can’t do this,’ he muttered, pulling the scarf from over his mouth.
‘You don’t have to fucking do anything. But don’t tell me what I can or can’t do,’ Franz answered, ‘what the hell else is there? You tell me lieutenant. These soldiers will be dead in the next twenty four hours no matter what the fucking Russians do. They can sit it out over there. That’s what they’re doing. They’re just waiting. So go on Hauptmann tell me your idea because you fucking can’t, so don’t start complaining, disagreeing. Just fucking make up your own mind.’
It was Franz who cut through the skin to pull Frederick’s head free. He was stripped of his equipment and clothes before Franz made the first clumsy cut into his thigh, sawing more than inch in and then starting down towards the knee. It was up to the rest of the men what they did. He only knew he was going to try to avoid starving to death.
The bloodied meat was stringy and tough but tasted sweet and he chewed it as long as he could, letting some of the meat’s moisture trickled down his parched throat.
There was no thought on it. There was only the need to survive, but he was too exhausted and in pain to consider what he was doing. Within the emptiness was still this pulse of a self that refused to accept anything.
Within a few moments he was retching up what he had attempted to swallow, trying to stifle the noise as he vomited it out.
He watched three of the privates starting with their knives on Frederick’s corpse. The other bodies were frozen solid. The young private was their only chance.
He crouched up against the wall. Around him were mounds of rubble, metal beams hanging down, snow scattered in small drifts, complicated shadows and the sense of the Russians across the street.
Occasionally he had seen them moving to the building next to the factory, quick huddled shadows darting across his vision.
He felt nauseous and dizzy, the taste of human flesh souring inside his mouth.
‘You’ll finish up doing and seeing things done you never imagined,’ the wounded sergeant back in Paris had told them.
They had travelled into the nothingness, into white on grey on white, into the vast demolition of Stalingrad. His men had become ghosts, as if they were already dead. He was dead, all of them here as frozen fragments of some other time, some different place.
‘I had...had to do it,’ were private Steiger’s shivering words as Franz, later in the night, had gone on his rounds.
‘It’s alright soldier,’ his captain had tried.
Steiger was a huge bundle of coats and scarves as he muttered, ‘No sir. No it isn’t sir. We’re not on a boat sir. We’re not out at sea.’
‘You’re on watch, so that’s what you do. If a fucking Ruskie farts you let me know.’
‘This isn’t a ship sir.’
‘Now soldier. You listen. You watch. Steiger, you understand that?’
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Later he momentarily dozed off to dream about shadows moving like birds across dark streets.
He tried to take out one of his last cigarettes, but his layers of gloves were too thick and his hands were shaking.
Hunger twisted its knots. His head pounded and he could hardly feel any part of his legs.
His grandmother was staring at him from her afternoon nap until blood started flowing out of her nostrils.
In a Polish town houses were burning. Desperately he wanted to be there, to stand in the flames, to feel their heat so it could melt the pain.
Stalingrad had been destroyed. They were snow rats fighting for what was left. He knew that the Germans were finished here and the Rumanians and Hungarians and Italians and all the rest of their feeble allies. It was another mistake.
‘I’m going out,’ he told Hauptmann as solid darkness filled the street like black concrete.
‘Manser tried, and look what happened to him. He just disappeared.’
‘I’m going out. You give me three hours.’
Hauptmann said nothing.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you?’
In Franz was a calmness beyond desperation. He had found a final self where everything was confirmed by death.
The steps were strips of ice. Crouched behind a metal barrel he looked around. The factory had holes blown in what was left of its facade. To cross the street he waited for the next round of artillery explosions. His legs did nothing he needed them to do. The movements were slow. He felt exposed, his breathing fast and painful as he reached the entrance into the building next to the factory.
In his huge gloves he held a machine gun. In its holster was his pistol. On his belt was his officer’s dagger. The helmet was strapped tight over layers of sacking. Inside his topcoat was another winter coat. Inside his boots were two numbed off feet wrapped in strips of felt. He was wearing two pairs of trousers, two pullovers, two shirts and three layers of underwear. Around his neck was wrapped a very long woollen scarf and another taken from Frederick’s corpse.
Franz was so cold and so bundled up he could hardly move. He was the army clown, an exaggerated shape that would keep falling over itself. Momentarily that was the image before he shifted down the side of the building to the back of the factory.
More of the building here was intact, more of its window shapes just discernible in the darkness as machine gun fire rattled from nearby and a huge explosion lit up the sky to the south of the city.
Fear was the sudden fuel. Shadows were the enemy. There was the vocabulary of sound that he was trying to piece together.
He thought of his soldiers across the road and Frederick’s empty eyes. The taste of the young private was still there.
In his mind were black lines crisscrossing. Suddenly it felt as though his body was rapidly swelling until it would blow up in pieces that would scatter across the snow covered rubble. From the sky came only flashes and rumbles. For once the snow had ceased. In front of him was a new mountain built of concrete that had sheer cliffs and rectangular caves.
‘You’re a secret to yourself. That’s why you pretend. The play has been written before you were born but you don’t realise it. You don’t understand your lines so you have to read them and that takes too much time and makes you confused.’
He could hear part of what a teacher had once told him in his own imagined voice.
‘Say thank you to Aunt Hildegaard Franz. Say thank you and as you do so remember to bow.’
He wanted a cigarette and thought for a moment he smelt tobacco smoke.
Any entrance into the factory it seemed had been blocked with fallen masonry.
>
Twenty five minutes he thought.
Around him were huge dark mounds, buildings like black skeletons, grey snow tracing outlines of what had once existed, the stench of rubble and explosives, the air thick with cold and the sense of this broken city being smashed into smaller pieces, of men searching to kill or survive or waiting for hunger to do it.
He huddled up against part of the factory wall trying to hear between the night attacks, the sudden skirmishes riddled with screams and shouts of panic and then the sudden silences before the next action.
Another rattle of machine gun fire sounded out. He moved in a crouch back to the corner of the factory where he could see some of the street and the outlines of shattered buildings against the light from another explosion. For a few moments he thought he could hear tank tracks moving, metal grinding over rubble.
The cold was squeezing him hard, pressing against his eyes. He could feel it piercing through all his different layers, into his muscles and bones, the pain hardening until his body felt so brittle it could snap. He was hollowed out, as though hunger had destroyed his insides. But the mind was still persistent, the automatic reaction, the one step in front of the other, the tiny plan organised for the next few seconds. He knew he had to move, to return across the street. Messages were shifting slowly between his brain and the rest of his frozen body. He momentarily imagined himself crossing that open space watched by many eyes that could see in the dark. Would the Russian sniper be able to put him in his sights through the darkness, a target, a shadowed blob clambering over the rubble? He would be a moment, just another amongst all the others lost in this city.
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He had no idea how long he had been out of the building.
‘The fucking Russians would slice your arm off for your watch. But there again it could save your life. The risk is yours,’ they had been told.
Coming up the ice covered steps he felt the difference. He knew things had changed. There was no sign of Hauptmann or the rest of his men. He carefully moved all around the shattered building but there was only Frederick’s mutilated corpse and those of the others who had been shot. His heart beat started to accelerate. His men had gone. His mind tried to calculate what this could mean and what had happened to them. He could not understand why they had not waited for him. He was their officer. They had always depended before on his commands. Now the change was this sudden isolation. Anger emerged for a few minutes followed by the relief of having no other responsibilities except to himself. All that was left was to try and survive this place. There was nothing else.
Suddenly there was a beam of light shining from across the street followed by several rifle shots. Immediately the light was extinguished. Franz waited, gripping his machine gun as hard as he could to try and keep his blood circulating. The process was repeated a few minutes later, the light trying to search out a target before more shots that whined past him further into the building, twanging off metal beams before the light went out.
At the bottom of the steps he searched for another way. There was part of a stairway left going underground. Here it was slightly warmer. There were several cellars connected by doorways cut out of the earth. He moved and stopped, moved and stopped, listening to every sound, trying to interpret what he was hearing. In him was the vaguest geography of Stalingrad. The map they had been shown was meaningless except it had somehow given him a sense of where the Volga was. Whatever happened he had to try and find his way in the opposite direction. German artillery fire helped. He knew a lot of it was aimed in preventing the Russians getting supplies across the frozen river.
‘The Volga is crucial. Their supply line is across it. If we stop that we take Stalingrad. The Volga is part of the Russian myth. All of them think they are boatmen on the river. They sing songs to it, write poetry about it.’
Franz clambered for hours over rubble, along ditches, through bombed out buildings, crossing cobbled streets and ripped up sections of tram lines. Around him the battle increased as more snow began to fall and the Siberian wind started whipping it into every space. Twice he was shot at. Once a Russian truck had almost driven over him. He had fallen and bruised his right arm and leg. Sounds and shadows shifted constantly around him. Huge explosions tore down buildings, releasing clouds of black dust that smothered everything in its path until the snow settled on top.
His mind was registering very little. He was inside a metal and stone upheaval. Survival depended more on his hearing than anything else, that and his instinct for a change in atmospheres.
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The moment was so slight. It was preceded by a tiny sound, like a stone rubbing against another. He was in a corridor underground that allowed him to hear something in front of him. Very gradually he moved, taking out his knife at the same time.
The next careful step and he could see a vague outline in front of him. Two more steps and the human shape was there against the different light from a doorway. He stopped breathing as he moved into position, jamming his left hand under the soldier’s chin so his neck was forced back and Franz cut with one deep slice, the release of gurgling blood letting him know there would be no other sounds. He held onto the man’s shoulders so he could lower him to the ground as quietly as possible.
A few moments later he knew it was a German he had killed. The smell was recognisable, the feel of the uniform.
He wiped his knife on the sleeve of the dead soldier’s coat before he pushed it back in its sheath and continued along the corridor.
When he emerged snow was still falling out of a vague daylight.
As he kept moving he again considered the disappearance of Hauptmann and the rest of his unit. He had been away no more than hour and had heard nothing from the building where they had been based. It was as though the city had sucked them into its darkness. There was no explanation.
Russian Katushkas screamed from across the Volga and mortar rounds exploded nearby. Again there was more machine gun fire and the sound of a panzer tank letting off a round in what he hoped would be the Western section. The Katushkas sounded again like screams of defiance, splitting the air as they flew to their targets.
With every new sound Franz felt he was going in the right direction. The explosions formed a pattern of noise that he could lay out like a map. The city was outlined by what he heard. He understood that there was no front, no line between the two sides. All of it was a military mess with pockets of soldiers fighting their own battles unseen, unknown by anybody else.
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The first Russians he came across were two young soldiers huddled up asleep in a corner of a underground room he was passing. He was about to go on when he noticed one of them jerk slightly. It was enough for Franz to put several rounds into them, thuds splitting the material of their winter coats followed by a sudden release of blood.
A few hours later he had climbed down into a trench dug beneath a pipeline that had been severed in different places. In a hole off to the side of the trench was a huddle of civilian corpses, the blood from their wounds having frozen immediately on their faces and uncovered hands, a group of women and old men.
At the bottom of steps leading into a basement complex was a woman’s body hanging from an iron beam. Her tongue was stuck out and her clothing had been torn in strips. Her head was swollen into a frozen blue disfigurement like a piece of badly sculptured rock. Franz looked and went on, knowing he was too exhausted to go much further. He had to rest but was worried about stopping, knowing how quickly he could submit to the cold.
Searching for somewhere secure to rest took him another hour as the snow fell heavily, muffling the battle sounds. He had come to what had once been a street crossing. Now there were huge metal beams stuck out over the broken street and severed lampposts in between the mounds of fallen masonry. He ducked down at the sudden sig
ht of soldiers scurrying across the street into another half demolished building. They were immediately followed by three German soldiers. Franz watched as they were hit by rifle fire, the three slumping onto the snow covered road.
By now he had no idea how much time being by himself had passed. He only knew that he could go no further. Whatever was left of his mental will was dissolved in the weakness of his body.
The place he found was behind a boiler where a pile of frozen rags had been stored. He levered himself between a brick wall and the frozen, rusted metal. He understood that he could only rest, that he could not allow himself to fall asleep. He understood that he had to continue planning, that somehow he had to reach the suburbs.
He pulled himself down to sit on the pile of rags that still stank of diesel, keeping his machine gun in both hands, closing his eyes but forcing himself to keep alert, to keep listening to the rumble and shudders above ground.
Every few minutes he pushed himself up to ease the tension in his muscles before resting back down, closing his eyes to try and concentrate on the map of Stalingrad he hoped the explosions were drawing for him, only confused by the noise from shells he did not recognise.
The forest momentarily appeared, went away and then returned until he could not get it out of his mind. The trees of Poland had dark figures hanging from them. It had been his worst failure, all the Jews who had escaped. He had wanted them all, but the forest had hidden some of them away. Now this city was full of iron trees, creaking and shifting. Their black branches stuck out in all directions. He wished he could climb to the highest metal tree and survey all of Stalingrad, to be high above it and watch what was developing below, to see where his route lay out onto the open steppes.
The cold again started to throb, the hunger like a million open mouths inside him. He forced away the memory of the Jews and pushed himself to stand. He felt dizzy and disorientated, black lines crossing snow falls that dropped between numerous battle sounds and then sudden silences as Stalingrad creaked and groaned like a huge ship out on the frozen sea.