The Company of Strangers Read Online Free PDF Page B

got you on the run.’ Voss shook his head. He didn’t even have to think. He dragged the chair with the chessboard to him, made his father’s move and then his own, which he scribbled on to a note and put in an envelope to post in the morning.
    At 10.00 a.m. 19th November the first conference of the day got underway with a discussion over an enlarged map of Stalingrad and its immediate vicinity. No attempt hadbeen made to alter the map to show the true state of the city. All it indicated was neatly packaged sectors, red for Russian, grey for German, like peacetime postal districts.
    At 10.30 a.m. the teleprinters shunted into life and the phones started ringing. General Zeitzler was called from the room, to return minutes later with the announcement that a Russian offensive had started at 05.20 a.m. He showed how a Russian tank force had broken through the Romanian sectors and was now heading south-east towards the river Don, and that activity had broken out along the whole front to hold German forces in their positions. A panzer corps had been sent to engage the advancing Russians. Everything was in hand. Voss made the necessary alterations to the map. They went back to the Stalingrad situation leaving Zeitzler fingering the small flag of the panzer corps and rasping a hand over his sandpaper chin.
    By lunchtime the next day news reached Rastenburg of a second large Russian offensive starting south of Stalingrad, with such huge numbers of tanks and infantry it was inconceivable that they’d had no intelligence.
    The Stalingrad map was rolled and stacked.
    It was clear that full encirclement of the Sixth Army was the Russian intention. Voss felt sick and empty as Zeitzler dragged him and his inexhaustible memory around wherever he went. Voss stood over Zeitzler’s telephone conversations to the Führer, vomiting information which the Army Chief of Staff would use in a desperate bid to impress on Hitler the dire circumstances and the need to allow the Sixth Army to retreat. The Führer paced the great hall of the Berghof swearing at Slavs and hammering tables into submission.
    Sunday, 22nd November was Totensonntag , the day of remembrance for the dead, and after a subdued servicethey heard that the two Russian forces were about to meet and that encirclement was a foregone conclusion. The Führer left the Berghof for Leipzig to fly on to Rastenburg.
    As Voss began the monumental task of drafting orders for the phased withdrawal of the Sixth Army the Führer stopped his train en route to Leipzig and called Zeitzler expressly to forbid any retreat.
    Zeitzler sent Voss back to his room and, to take his mind off the disaster, Voss pored over the chess game. In doing so he suddenly saw his error, or rather, he perceived his father’s strength of position. He searched for the letter he’d scribbled days ago and found that one of the orderlies had posted it for him. He took out another sheet of paper and wrote one word on it. Resigned.
    The Führer arrived in Rastenburg on 23rd November and after the initial shock of the Russian success nerves steadied. In the days and weeks that followed the disaster, Voss witnessed the transformation of the Rastenburg HQ. It ceased to be a military installation and became instead the stuff of legend. Men would arrive, tear off their cloaks and capes and perform miracles in front of their glassyeyed leader. Vast and powerfully armoured divisions, miraculously supplied, would appear and drive up from the south to relieve the stricken army. When, as in some bizarre game of three-card monte, this force failed to materialize, another maestro would whisk away a silken sheet and show fleets of aircraft supplying and resupplying until, brought back up to full strength, the Sixth Army would take Stalingrad, break the Russian encirclement and assume their position in Germanic legend. Everything became possible. Rastenburg became a circus where the greatest illusionists of the time came to perform.
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