Last Flight to Stalingrad

by Graham Hurley

  ‘Can you hear me, Kirile?’

  ‘Da.’ Yes.

  ‘You want all this to stop?’

  ‘Da.’

  ‘Then make it up.’

  ‘What?’ The word seemed to catch in his throat.

  ‘Make it up. Invent it.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t understand.’

  ‘There are hidden armies. Armies beyond the river. No one knows about them. Only Stalin. And Chuikov. And a handful of others. Including you.’

  ‘How? How do I know?’

  ‘You saw a message. Messages, plural. You have a friend. The friend loves you, wants you.’

  ‘Wants me?’

  ‘Invent, Kirile. It’s your life here, your life at stake. Go out there, into the darkness, and it’s over. You don’t need me to tell you that. You’ll be dead within the hour. And they might play games with you first. No mercy, isn’t that the phrase? Think about it. Then think about your friend.’

  ‘I can’t. I have no friend like that.’

  ‘Let’s give him a name, Kirile. Think of a name. Any name. Your favourite name. Go on. Do it.’

  ‘Sergei.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Handsome.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Big Schwanz. Big hands. Big everything.’

  ‘And he loves you, ja?’

  ‘Da.’

  ‘Wants you, ja?’

  ‘Da.’

  ‘How badly?’

  ‘Very badly. Very, very badly. But he’s kind, too. And he says he loves me.’

  ‘What does he do? This Sergei?’

  ‘He works at headquarters. He knows everything about everything.’

  ‘Good. Excellent. Because he needs to impress you, doesn’t he? He needs you to believe that he’s big and important. Not just the Schwanz. But the secrets he knows.’

  ‘Da.’ The boy gulped, nodded. ‘And it’s worked.’

  ‘You’ve been with him.’

  ‘Many times.’

  ‘And he’s told you about the armies? Stalin’s armies? The armies no one else knows about?’

  ‘Da.’

  ‘Waiting.’

  ‘Da.’

  ‘To push the fucking Germans all the way back to Berlin.’ Nehmann paused. ‘Yes? You can remember all that?’

  The boy nodded, said nothing, then Nehmann’s fingers were loosening the knot in the blindfold, pulling it off, revealing a wilderness of puddles and the shell of the church beyond.

  Kirile stared at it for a long moment, then buried his head in Nehmann’s shoulder, wracked by sobs.

  Schultz was standing in front of the lorry, his face a blur through the rain on the windscreen. Then, abruptly, he was climbing back into the cab.

  A single glance at the pair of them was all he needed.

  ‘Alles gut?’ he queried.

  ‘Da.’ Nehmann nodded. ‘What else did you expect?’

  24

  TATSINSKAYA AIRFIELD, 27 SEPTEMBER 1942

  Nehmann was en route back to Tatsinskaya a full week later in the hands of a taciturn Luftwaffe pilot who’d once flown the Bf-109 and had no time for the big old Tante-Ju. In the back of the aircraft were a dozen badly wounded infantrymen judged to be worth the expense of the journey west. They all occupied stretchers and most of them, thanks to hefty doses of morphine, were unconscious. After refuelling at Tatsinskaya, the aircraft would be flying further west to the comforts of a big field hospital.

  Also, in the very back of the plane, were a number of mail sacks full of letters home. Nehmann sat among them. The seal on one of the sacks had failed and he stole a look at a number of the letters, curious to take the pulse of Paulus’s struggling army. Most of these missives did their best to soften the realities Nehmann had seen for himself. The Russians were getting weaker by the day. The food was OK, and the weather could be better, but everyone agreed that the Führer was right to be pushing so hard to knock the Ivans out of the war.

  To a man, these correspondents were looking forward to a Christmas back home around a roaring log fire and a plump goose on the table. Only one hinted that things might be bleaker than they seemed. ‘The snow has gone for the time being,’ he’d written, ‘and yesterday I saw a woman drinking from a puddle in the road. These people know how to live on nothing. One day, if this lasts longer than we think, we might be as primitive as them.’

  Nehmann sat back among the mail sacks. He’d written letters himself, all of them to Maria, mainly at night when he had a little privacy and the time to marshal his thoughts. These, in part, were love letters but they were something else, as well, maybe just as important. He needed to have someone else in his life, someone who didn’t know Stalingrad first-hand. He needed to be able to visualise Maria, to be close to her, to explain exactly how he felt about this shitty war, and this godforsaken city. Men in battle knew how to get by, understood the lies they had to tell themselves, developed a real talent for turning pain into sardonic laughter. That’s how men like Schultz got through. That’s what produced these letters of comfort to loved ones back home. The undeceived, he thought, tell the best lies.

  Nehmann refolded the last of the letters, slipped it back into its envelope and returned it to the open sack of mail. Then he lay back against the bulging canvas, his eyes closing. This was why writing to Maria was so important, he told himself. She has to understand what’s really happening. She has to know.

  *

  Nehmann had brought two bottles of vodka and a cooked ham back to Tatsinskaya, all three items a present from a grateful Schultz. The Abwehr man had been delighted with the boy’s information and although it lacked real detail it certainly confirmed Schultz’s darker fears. Stalin was reacting exactly the way he’d anticipated. Time to open yet another bottle. Nehmann, of course, knew this was a fiction but was glad about the vodka and the ham. Tell people what they want to hear, he thought. And then fill your belly.

  Messner was waiting at the airfield, alerted about the Ju’s imminent arrival. Nehmann pumped his hand, knowing at once that the bond sealed by the flight to Stalingrad was still there. Messner even risked a joke.

  ‘That plane we went out on? The damage was worse than I thought. I just made it back.’ He gestured towards the distant carcase of a Ju-52. ‘They’ve stripped it of everything useful and left the rest for our children to visit after the war. My daddy flew an aeroplane without engines, they’ll tell each other. Just imagine that.’

  Nehmann gave him the ham and a bottle of vodka. Messner was impressed.

  ‘Tonight, we’ll eat like kings.’ He was weighing the ham in his hand. ‘My place or yours?’

  Nehmann crossed the airfield to his tent. The other two beds were now occupied, one by a movie cameraman from the Propaganda Company, the other by an aircraft engineer, but he didn’t care. Tomorrow, thanks again to Schultz, he had a seat on another Tante-Ju, first to Kyiv, and then to Berlin. Goebbels had been in touch again, this time in person. The Führer was planning a major speech in the Sportpalast and the Minister needed a full briefing before the text was finalised. This came as some surprise to Nehmann but was also a relief. Maybe Schultz had been kidding him about Kalb’s murderous intentions. Maybe he was safer in Stalingrad than he’d thought.

  The flight to Kyiv was leaving at dawn. Nehmann gathered his few possessions, shared a glass or two of the vodka with his new companions, and then recrossed the airfield to the spotless tent that Messner called home. It was freezing again, a bank of clouds massing in the east, heavy with snow, and in late afternoon the light was already draining from the sky.

  Messner had news about the next day’s flight. A Wachmeister from one of the Luftwaffe’s anti-aircraft regiments had been on the airfield for several days. His name was Knaus and he’d become the toast of his comrades in Stalingrad after destroying no less than twenty-one enemy tanks.

  ‘You’ve met him?’ Nehmann asked.

  ‘I have. Twice. He’s an ordinary little man, nothing much to
say for himself. Hard to believe, really. The Generaloberst has recommended him for the Ritterkreuz and they’re flying him back to Berlin for the presentation. You’ll meet him tomorrow on the plane. I gather your people want you to talk to him.’

  Nehmann nodded. It was Richthofen who’d first used the powerful 88mm anti-aircraft guns in quite a different role at ground level. These monsters could bring down an enemy bomber flying at seven thousand metres, packing a knockout punch that would equally tear through the thin armour of a Soviet T-34. Nehmann had seen a battery of them at the airfield at Pitomnik, their raised barrels black against the greyness of the sky. If Knaus was as modest as Messner seemed to think, the story would be a gift for the Promi’s publicity machine. Wilhelm Knaus, the little man from nowhere, the name on the nation’s lips, our hero on the Volga, yet another legend in the making.

  Messner had found an old card table from somewhere and set it up in the middle of the tent. A square of torn sheet served as a tablecloth. Two unmatched plates, a glass and a mug, both brimming with vodka, and a metal mess tin containing three eggs he’d evidently just boiled. He tested the eggs with his fingertips, then blew on them.

  ‘Hot,’ he said.

  He’d already carved thin slices off the ham. Now he arranged them in an artful fan on the plates while Nehmann took the eggs outside. The snow was already lying on the freezing turf and Nehmann tipped the eggs into the beginnings of a drift on the windward side of the tent. Minutes later he was back inside the tent, the eggs shelled.

  ‘Perfect.’ Messner looked genuinely delighted. ‘Is this some kind of Stalingrad trick?’

  ‘Svengati. Whatever you learn as a kid never leaves you. We kept chickens. Winters especially, we lived on eggs.’

  When Nehmann said he was cold, Messner nodded at a neatly folded pile of garments in the corner of the tent. It was nearly dark now, and the hissing lamp threw long shadows as Nehmann picked out something to keep him warm. The sight of the little Georgian in Messner’s service greatcoat brought a smile to his face. As did the leather gloves.

  ‘A tent within a tent,’ he laughed, reaching for the eggs.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘This?’ Messner held it up. The smile was, if anything, even wider and there was a faintly manic gleam in his eye. ‘This is going to make my fortune.’

  It looked like some kind of device. There was an egg-shaped indentation in the base and a hinged metal frame on top. The frame was strung with tight strands of wire that gleamed in the flickering light from the paraffin lamp.

  ‘It’s my own design. It came to me in the middle of the night. I had one of the engineers in the maintenance bay knock it up for me. Watch.’

  He selected one of the eggs and put it on the base. Then, in a single movement, he closed the frame over the egg and Nehmann watched, fascinated, as the strands of wire carved through the outer white, and then through the yolk, and the egg fell neatly apart. Seven slices, all perfect. Nehmann counted them again, just to make sure.

  ‘That’s magic.’ He didn’t quite believe it. ‘Do it again.’

  Messner was happy to oblige. First another egg, then the third. Messner arranged the little discs of egg on the plates, framing the slices of ham. A meal in the middle of this godforsaken steppe had just become a work of art.

  ‘Magic.’ Nehmann was looking at the slicer. ‘Patent that thing and you’re right, you’ll make a fortune.’

  ‘I know. Something decent has to come out of this fucking war and I think I may have found it. Here’s to my slicer… prosit.’

  They drank a toast. And then, at Messner’s insistence, another.

  ‘To survival,’ he said. ‘And the blessings of sliced egg.’

  Messner wanted to know about Stalingrad and Nehmann did his best to do the ruined city justice. They’d both seen the kind of chaos that an army could bring to any location – hundreds of thousands of men all bent on destruction – but Stalingrad, said Nehmann, was in a league of its own. The Heinkels and the Stukas had levelled whole areas of the city, returning day after day to add a top dressing of incendiary bombs, while tanks and artillery, in the hands of craftsmen like Wilhelm Knaus, were finishing the job. Add the blessings of an early autumn, nights so cold you wouldn’t believe, and you were left with the makings of a gigantic tomb.

  ‘You live underground,’ Nehmann said. ‘You rarely see daylight because out there someone or something might kill you. The Russians have a word for it. Rasputitsa. I learned it from a Russian prisoner. The time of no roads. The time of shit and slush. The time of nothing. That’s Stalingrad. Rasputitsa. You’ve seen it from the air. That’s bad enough. For real, it’s even worse. We’ve been looking for a proper fight for a while. I’m afraid this is it.’

  Messner wanted to know about Schultz. They’d finished the ham and eggs and were working their way through the rest of the vodka.

  ‘He’s my guardian angel.’ Nehmann pulled the greatcoat more tightly around him. ‘He keeps me safe.’

  ‘From who?’

  Nehmann sat back. The SS truck, he knew from Helmut, had been parked only metres away from this tent. Messner must have known about it. He was Richthofen’s eyes and ears on the airfield. He knew everything.

  ‘There’s an SS man called Kalb,’ he said carefully. ‘A Standartenführer.’

  ‘I know Kalb.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s a monster. A sadist. The SS breed them. I dare say he’s a credit to that fucking uniform. We should have nothing to do with those people, nothing at all. No one loves you if you invade, if you steal their country, but the SS will be the end of us. One day the world will take a good look at what they’re up to and blame us. All of us.’

  ‘So what are they up to?’

  ‘You mean here? On this airfield?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Messner looked briefly troubled. He toyed with his mug a moment, circling the rim with a single finger, then tossed the vodka down in a single gulp before reaching for the bottle.

  ‘He’s gone now,’ he said at last.

  ‘I know. He’s in Stalingrad. Schultz told me. You know about Kyiv? What happened in that ravine?’

  ‘No.’ Messner shook his head.

  Nehmann described the killings at Babi Yar. More than thirty thousand Jews marched out of the city and despatched in a matter of days.

  ‘Open the window and Schultz says you could hear the gunfire in the hotel where he was working. Single shots. Machine guns. Thirty thousand bodies.’

  ‘And that was Kalb’s doing?’

  ‘He was part of it, yes.’

  Messner’s head sank. He seemed to be brooding. Then he was on his feet and Nehmann watched him walk unsteadily across to his camp bed. Two blankets, carefully folded, lay at the foot of the bed. Messner lifted the toe of the thin mattress, revealing a service-issue envelope.

  He returned to the table and gave it to Nehmann.

  ‘Twice daily after meals,’ he muttered. ‘These people are out of their cages now and we need to remind ourselves what they can do.’

  There were a handful of photos in the envelope. Nehmann slid them out onto the table. The first showed what had once been a child’s face. The fleshy part of her nose had been crudely removed, probably with a bayonet, and the bone beneath was clearly visible. One eye socket was empty while a still-glistening orb hung on a tendril of white nerve tissue from the other. Her face, otherwise unmarked, made the image even more grotesque. Beautiful lips, still intact. And just a hint of perfect teeth.

  Nehmann swallowed hard. Disgust was far too small a word. Anger was much closer. He looked at the next shot, and then the next, until he’d seen them all. Some faces were pulped beyond recognition, the work of a man with a rifle butt, and on another he could trace the imprint of a heavy boot. Finally, he pushed the photos away and sat back.

  ‘Kalb?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know that?
’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He told me. This stuff was part of his job, he said, part of his duty. No one in his position was there to make life pretty.’

  Messner explained the plan to drop these mutilated corpses in the Volga upstream from the city, and what had happened when Kalb’s demand for an aircraft reached Richthofen. The story, grim as it was, made Nehmann laugh.

  ‘No parachute?’

  ‘None. Word will get back to Berlin, of course. The Generaloberst made a fool of Kalb. That will be treason in their eyes. I dare say Himmler will have a shooting squad up his sleeve. Maybe he’ll bring one out here. Let’s hope so, eh? Then we can teach these bastards a lesson.’

  Nehmann wanted to know about the cameraman from the Propaganda Company.

  ‘You mean Helmut?’ Messner asked.

  ‘Yes. He took those photos, and that made him a brave man. Schultz told me they cost him his life.’

  Messner nodded. He said he’d done his best for Helmut, argued his case in front of Kalb, but the SS had already put a search team into the darkroom and found the prints.

  ‘They knew he’d been sniffing around the truck. They went through everything and found these. Next day they arrested him and put him on the plane. They had the evidence. They’d done their job. That’s the kind of people they are. Funny that, the two things going together. I never realised you could be meticulous and evil at the same time. A credit to the Reich, eh? We Germans break new ground every day. Maybe that’s a thought for your boss, Nehmann. I wish you luck, Kamerad.’ He nodded at the table. ‘And by all means show him one of these.’

  ‘But how do you come to have them?’

  ‘They were a little present. From Kalb. Just a selection. And you know something else? He was proud of what he’d done. Can you imagine that?’

  *

  Nehmann left the photos with Messner and returned to his own tent, tramping across a fresh blanket of snow on the airfield. The newcomers were both asleep, oblivious to the cold. Nehmann, still wearing Messner’s greatcoat, slipped under his single blanket, doing his best to ignore the chorus of snores. He had a repertoire of tricks to get to sleep but tonight none of them seemed to work. However hard he tried, the faces from Helmut’s photos returned to haunt him.