Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [109]
Fuhrer headquarters also decided that the majority of Sixth Army’s draught animals should be sent over a hundred miles to the rear. This would save on the supply trains required to bring forward the huge quantities of fodder. Altogether some 150,000 horses, as well as a number of oxen and even camels, had accumulated between the Don and the Volga. Motor transport and repair units were also moved back. The reasons behind such a move were understandable from a purely logistic point of view, but it would prove a serious mistake in a crisis. The Sixth Army, especially the vast majority of its artillery and medical units, depended almost entirely on horses for their mobility.
Morale, according to a sergeant-major in the 371 st Infantry Division, ‘rises and falls with the quantity of incoming post’. Almost everyone seemed to be suffering from acute homesickness. ‘Here one must become a completely different person’, wrote a senior NCO of the 60th Motorized Infantry Division, ‘and that is not so easy. It’s exactly as if we were living in another world. When the post arrives, everybody rushes out of their “little houses” – and they just can’t be stopped. For the time being, I must stand by and watch with an indulgent smile.’
Thoughts were already turning to Christmas: the ‘most beautiful festival of the whole year’. Soldiers began to discuss presents with wives. On 3 November, one division put in its ‘requirements for musical instruments, party games, Christmas tree decorations and candles’.
Leave rosters were planned, a subject which excited more hopes and disappointments than any other. Paulus insisted that priority was given to soldiers ‘who have been in the eastern theatre without a break since June 1941’. For the lucky ones who set out on the long journey, time slipped past in a sense of unreality. Home now seemed to have the dreamlike quality of a former existence. Back among their families, men found it impossible to talk about their experiences. Many were dismayed to find how few civilians had any grasp of what was happening. Worst of all, it seemed pointlessly cruel to enlighten them, if it meant that wives would agonize all the more. The only reality now seemed to be the nightmare existence they could not escape. It was human to be tempted by ideas of desertion, but few took them seriously. The most vivid memory of their leave was saying goodbye. For many, it was the last time. They knew they were re-entering hell when they passed the sign on the main route into Stalingrad: ‘Entry to the city forbidden. Onlookers put their own lives and those of comrades in danger.’ Many found it hard to decide whether this was a joke or not.
New winter outfits started to be issued at the end of October. ‘It’s a typically German affair,’ noted one officer, ‘with reversible trousers and jacket, field-grey and white.’ But soldiers out in the waterless steppe were increasingly infested with lice. ‘For the time being there is no point in even thinking of washing. Today I killed my first batch of eight lice.’ Jokes about ‘the little partisans’ soon wore off. Some of the Russian Hiwis told their German companions of a folk remedy for getting rid of them. This consisted of burying each article of clothing under the ground with just one corner left above the soil. The lice moved there and could be burned off.
Regimental doctors began to be increasingly concerned about the general health of troops at this time. When the medical obituary of the Sixth Army was debated in Berlin by consultants late the next January, they charted a vertiginous rate of increase in the death rate from infectious diseases, dysentery, typhus, and paratyphus.* This ‘Fieberkurve’ had started to mount