War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (64 page)

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.

By early afternoon, Nikki had walked six kilometers past the grain silos. The growing concentration of men kicking aimlessly through the powder and tanks with snowy faces told him he was nearing the southern frontier of the Sixth Army’s hedgehog formation. Some of the men strung barbed wire. Others knifed through the weather on their way to a tent or a trench, or just to keep moving, Nikki could not tell.

Doom, he thought. It thickens with the snow, it darkens with the hours. It grows on these men’s faces like beards.

He approached a group gathered around an oil drum holding a wood fire.

“Is there a lot of action here?” he asked.

A soldier looked straight into the fire.

“What do you mean by ‘action’? Fighting?”

“Yes.”

“Sure, there’s plenty of action. We fight the cold, the lice, the shits, hunger, each other.”

The man looked south across the open, glistening land where Russians were massed behind the veil of wind-driven snow.

“And yeah, we fight them when they want. Where you from?”

Nikki nodded his head behind him, to the north.

“Downtown,” he said.

“Oh, fuck. You’ve seen it. What are you doing here?”

“Walking.”

The soldier’s smile lifted the blond stubble on his cheeks. “Yeah.”

Nikki took off his mittens to hold his hands close to the jumping flames in the barrel.

“Have the Reds taken many prisoners?”

“You mean,” the soldier said, “do the Reds take prisoners?”

Nikki nodded.

“Yeah. Sometimes. Sometimes not. Depends on how mad they are that day. Usually they’re pretty mad. You can hear them going crazy, screaming and shooting at prisoners, guys who’ve dropped their guns and put their hands in the air. The Rumanians west of here are getting hammered. It’s nasty. I saw it, and I ran back here and I’m staying here. I’d rather starve, thank you. Fucking Russians. It isn’t right.”

“They’ve got a reason to be mad,” Nikki said.

The man spat into the fire. It hissed quickly and was gone.

Nikki reached under his parka to his inside pocket for the envelope containing his orders. The papers were stamped
Intelligence.
Nikki remained assigned to Lieutenant Ostarhild’s unit of gatherers and listeners. He was cleared to go anywhere on the battlefield unescorted. He put his mittens on and clutched the envelope. He wanted the papers ready now.

Nikki turned from the fire to look south to the Russian lines. The cold slapped his cheeks. He pulled the canvas muffler over his mouth and nose. He spoke to the man beside him through the wrapping. The cloth caught his breath and warmed his lips.

“I’m a dairy farmer,” he called through the freezing wind and the crackling of the fire. “From Westphalia.”

Nikki walked into the whirling white.

* * * *

EPILOGUE

ON THE AFTERNOON OF JANUARY
8, 1943,
THE RUSSIAN
forces manning the Cauldron around Stalingrad paused in their liquidation of the encircled Sixth Army to await the results of a surrender offer tendered by the Russian command to the commander of the German forces, General Friedrich von Paulus. The terms of surrender were generous, accompanied by a promise from Stalin to annihilate the Sixth Army if it continued to resist. The next day, the offer was refused and the battle resumed.