The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson

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       Chapter 4

       18th November 1942, Wolfsschanze HQ, Rastenburg, East Prussia.

      Voss wanted to remove his eyeballs and swill them in saline, see the grit sink to the bottom. The bunker was silent with the Führer away at the Berghof in Obersalzberg. Voss’s work had been finished hours ago but he remained at the situation table, chin resting on his white, piled fists, staring into the map where a rough cratering existed at a point on the Volga river. Stalingrad had been poked and prodded, jabbed and reamed until it was a dirty, paperflaked hole. As Voss looked deeper into it he began to see the blackened, snow-covered city, the cadaverous apartment buildings, the gnarled and twisted beams of shelled factories, the poxed façades, the scree-filled streets littered with stiffened, deep-frozen bodies and, alongside it, growing to midnight black in the white landscape and becoming viscous with the cold, the Volga – the line of communication from the south to the north of Russia.

      He was sitting in this position long after he could have gone to bed, contemplating the grey front line that was now stretched to the thinness of piano wire since the German Sixth Army had ballooned it over to Stalingrad, because of his brother. Julius Voss was a major in the 113th Infantry Division of the Sixth Army. This division was not one of those fighting like a pack of street dogs in the ruins of Stalingrad but was dug into the snow somewhere on the treeless steppe east of the point where the river Don had decided to turn south to the Sea of Azov.

      Julius Voss was his father’s son. A brilliant sportsman, he’d collected a silver in the epée at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He rode a horse as if it was a part of him. On his first day’s hunting at the age of sixteen he’d tracked a deer for a whole day and shot it in the eye from 300 metres. He was a perfect and outstanding army officer, loved by his men and admired by his superiors. He was intelligent and, despite his life of brilliance, there wasn’t a shred of arrogance in the man. Karl thought about him a lot. He loved him. Julius had been his protector at school, sport not being one of Karl’s strengths and, having too many brains for everybody’s comfort, life could have been hell without a brother three years older and a golden boy, too. So Karl was taking his turn to watch over his brother.

      The German position was not as strong as it might first appear. The Russians had trussed up ten divisions in and around the city in bloody and brutal street-to-street fighting since September and now, unless they could hammer home the death blow in the next month, it looked as if the rest of the German army would be condemned to spend another winter out in the open. More men would die and there would be little chance of the Sixth Army being reinforced until the spring. The situation was doomed to a four-month deep-frozen stalemate.

      The door to the situation room crashed open, cannoned off the wall and slammed shut. It opened more slowly to reveal Weber standing in the frame.

      ‘That’s better,’ he said, trying to put some lick on to his lips, clearly drunk, steaming drunk, his forehead shining, his eyes bright, his skin blubber. ‘I knew I’d find you in here, boring the maps again.’

      Weber swaggered into the room.

      ‘You can’t bore maps, Weber.’

      ‘You can. Look at them, poor bastards. Insensate with tedium. You don’t talk to them, Voss, that’s your problem.’

      ‘Piss off, Weber. You’re ten schnapps down the hole and not fit to talk to.’

      ‘And you? What are you doing? Is the brilliant, creative military mind of Captain Karl Voss going to solve the Stalingrad problem…tonight, or do we have to wait another twenty-four hours?’

      ‘I was just thinking…’

      ‘Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You were just thinking about what the Reichsminister Fritz Todt said to you before his plane crash…’

      ‘And why shouldn’t I?’

      ‘Because it’s morbid in a man of your age. You should be thinking about…about women…’ said Weber and, placing both hands on the table, he began some vigorous, graphic and improbable thrusting.

      Voss looked away. СКАЧАТЬ