I finally set myself to my task in a more structured and rigorous way. On Christmas morning, a violent blizzard put an end to hopes of a special supply delivery; at the same time, the Russians launched an attack on the northeast sector and also on the factories, taking a few kilometers of territory back from us and killing more than twelve hundred of our men. The Croats, I saw from a report, had been violently hit, and Oberfeldwebel Nišíc was on the list of the killed. Carpe diem! I hoped he at least had had time to smoke his cigarette. I digested reports and wrote other ones. Christmas didn’t seem to affect the men’s morale too much: most of them, according to the reports or letters opened by the censors, had kept intact their faith in the Führer and in victory; nevertheless, every day we were executing deserters or men guilty of self-mutilation. Some of the divisions shot their condemned men themselves; others handed them over to us; the executions took place in a courtyard behind the Gestapostelle. They also handed over to us civilians caught looting by the Feldgendarmen, or suspected of passing messages to the Russians. A few days after Christmas, I passed two dirty, snot-nosed kids in a hallway; the Ukrainians were taking them away to shoot them after an interrogation: the kids had polished the boots of our officers at various HQ and mentally took down details; at night, they slipped through a sewer to go inform the Soviets. On one of them, they had found a Russian medal hidden: he claimed he had been decorated, but it may simply have been stolen or taken from a dead man. They must have been about twelve or thirteen, but they looked under ten, and while Zumpe, who was going to command the firing squad, was explaining the matter to me, they both stared at me with large eyes, as if I were going to save them. That made me enraged: What do you want from me? I wanted to shout at them. You’re going to die, so what? I too am probably going to die here, everyone here is going to die. That’s the deal. I took a few minutes to calm down; later on, Zumpe told me that they had wept but had also cried out: “Long live Stalin!” and “Urra pobieda!” before they were shot. “Is that supposed to be an edifying story?” I rapped out at him; he left a little crestfallen.

I began to meet some of my own so-called informers, who were brought to me by Ivan or another Ukrainian, or who came on their own. These women and men were in a lamentable state, foul-smelling, covered with filth and lice; lice I had already, but the smell of these people made me nauseated. They seemed to me more like beggars than agents: the information they gave me was invariably useless or unverifiable; in exchange, I had to give them an onion or a frozen potato, which I kept for this purpose in a safe, a veritable slush fund in local currency. I had no idea how to treat the contradictory rumors they reported to me; if I had transmitted them to the Abwehr, they would have laughed at us; I ended up creating a file entitled Miscellaneous information, unconfirmed, which I passed on every other day to Möritz.

Information about the supply problems, which affected morale, particularly interested me. Everyone knew, without speaking about it, that the Soviet prisoners in our Stalag, whom we had virtually stopped feeding for some time, had sunk into cannibalism. “It’s their true nature that’s being revealed,” Thomas had snapped at me when I tried to discuss it with him. It was understood, though, that the German Landser, when in distress, would keep his dignity. So the shock caused by a report on a case of cannibalism in a German company posted at the western edge of the Kessel was all the keener in high places. The circumstances made the affair particularly atrocious. When famine made them resolve on this course, the soldiers in the company, still concerned with the Weltanschauung, had debated the following point: Should they eat a Russian or a German? The ideological problem posed was about the legitimacy of eating a Slav, a Bolshevik Untermensch. Couldn’t that sort of meat corrupt their German stomachs? But eating a dead comrade would be dishonorable; even if they couldn’t bury them anymore, they still had respect for those who had fallen for the Vaterland. Finally they agreed to eat one of their Hiwis, an entirely reasonable compromise, given the terms of the debate. They killed him and an Obergefreiter, a former butcher from Mannheim, proceeded to dismember him. The surviving Hiwis panicked: three of them were killed trying to desert, but another managed to reach the regiment’s HQ, where he had told the story to an officer. No one had believed him; after an investigation, they had been forced to face the facts, since the company hadn’t been able to dispose of the victim’s remains, and they had found his entire rib cage and some of the bits deemed unsuitable for consumption. The soldiers, when they were arrested, had confessed everything; the meat, according to them, tasted like pork, and was every bit as good as horse. They had discreetly shot the butcher and four ringleaders, then hushed up the affair, but it had created a stir in the various headquarters. Möritz asked me to write a general report on the nutritional situation of the troops since the Kessel had been sealed off; he had the numbers from the AOK 6, but suspected them of being mostly theoretical. I thought of going to see Hohenegg.

This time, I prepared my expedition a little better. I had already gone out with Thomas, to visit some division Ic/AOs; after my Croatian escapade, Möritz had ordered me, if I wanted to go out alone, to fill out an itinerary first. I made a phone call to Pitomnik, to the office of Generalstabsarzt Dr. Renoldi, the chief medical officer of AOK 6, where I was told that Hohenegg was based in the main campaign hospital in Gumrak; there I was told that he was traveling around within the Kessel, to make observations; I finally located him in Rakotino, a stanitsa in the southern part of the pocket, in the sector of the 376th Division. I then had to call the different HQs to organize liaisons. The trip would take half a day, and I would definitely have to spend the night either in Rakotino itself, or in Gumrak; but Möritz agreed to the expedition. There were still a few days left before the New Year; it had been twenty-five below zero since Christmas, and I decided to get out my shuba, despite the risk that lice would nest in it. I was already covered with them in any case—my vigilant hunt through the seams every night didn’t do any good: my belly, my armpits, the inside of my legs were red with bites, and I couldn’t stop myself from scratching till I drew blood. I was also suffering from diarrhea, probably because of the bad water and irregular food, a mixture, depending on the day, of tinned ham or French pâté and Wassersuppe with horse. At HQ it was all right, the officers’ latrines were revolting but at least accessible, but on the move it could soon become problematic.

I went without Ivan: I didn’t need him in the Kessel; anyway, seats in the liaison vehicles were strictly limited. The first car brought me to Gumrak, another to Pitomnik; there I had to wait several hours for a liaison to Rakotino. It wasn’t snowing, but the sky remained a milky, somber gray, and the planes, which were now taking off from Salsk, arrived irregularly. On the runway an even more horrible chaos reigned than the week before; there was a stampede for each plane, wounded men fell and were crushed by the others, the Feldgendarmen had to fire volleys in the air to force the horde of desperate men to fall back. I exchanged a few words with a Heinkel 111 pilot who had gotten out of his plane to smoke; he was livid, and watched the scene with a bewildered look, murmuring: “It’s not possible, it’s not possible…. You know,” he finally said to me before he walked off, “every night, when I get back to Salsk alive, I cry like a child.” This simple sentence made my head swim; turning my back on the pilot and the desperate mob, I started sobbing: the tears froze on my face, I wept for my childhood, for a time when snow was a pleasure that knew no end, when a city was a wonderful space to live in, and when a forest was not yet a convenient place to kill people. Behind me, the wounded howled like men possessed, mad dogs, almost drowning out the throb of the engines with their cries. At least this Heinkel took off smoothly; that wasn’t the case for the next Junker. Some shells were beginning to fall again, they must have botched the refueling, or maybe one of the engines was defective, because of the cold: a few seconds after the wheels had left the ground, the left engine stalled; the aircraft, which hadn’t worked up enough speed yet, lurched to the side; the pilot tried to straighten it, but the plane was already too unbalanced and suddenly it toppled onto one wing and crashed a few hundred meters beyond the runway, in a giant ball of fire that lit up the steppe for an instant. I had taken refuge in a bunker because of the shelling but still saw everything, again my eyes filled with tears, but I managed to control myself. Finally they came to get me for the liaison, but not before an artillery shell had fallen on one of the tents of wounded near the runway, sending limbs and scraps of flesh flying over the whole unloading area. Since I was nearby, I had to help clear away the bloody debris, to look for survivors; as I caught myself studying the entrails spilled out of the belly of a young soldier on the reddened snow, to find traces of my past or signs of my future in them, I told myself that everything here was indeed taking on the look of an agonizing farce. I remained shaken, I smoked cigarette after cigarette, despite my limited supply, and every fifteen minutes had to run to the latrines to let out a thin stream of liquid shit; ten minutes after the car started, I had to make it stop to rush behind a snowdrift; my coat got in my way and I soiled it. I tried to clean it with some snow, but managed only to freeze my fingers; back in the car, I huddled against the door and closed my eyes to try to forget it all. I shuffled through the images of my past as through a worn pack of cards, trying to find one that could come to life before me for a few minutes: but they fled, dissolved, or remained dead. Even the image of my sister, my last recourse, seemed like a wooden figure. Only the presence of the other officers kept me from weeping again.