Last Flight to Stalingrad

by Graham Hurley

  Another man, a machine-gunner from Koln, called them ‘the little partisans’. They lurked out of sight, he said, in the deepest seams of the warmest part of your clothing and then laid ambush to you when you were least expecting it. In reality, none of these men said anything of the sort, largely because Nehmann had invented them. The stories themselves were true but their authors had a deep mistrust of being quoted and only one, a slightly crazed former brewer from the Black Forest, was prepared to see his name in print. He had, he said, come up with a fool-proof antidote to the curse of the louse. ‘Read them anything by Goebbels,’ he told Nehmann, ‘and they’ll all die laughing.’

  ‘You’ll get the man killed.’ Schultz thought it was funny. ‘He survives a couple of months out here and then gets shot in Berlin for insubordination. How’s that for bad luck?’

  ‘I’ll change it,’ Nehmann promised. ‘Instead, he’ll read them last night’s orders.’

  ‘That’s worse. You think any of Paulus’s people have a sense of humour? They’ll shoot the poor bastard here.’

  The story was flown out next morning in one of the special Promi envelopes marked Dringend. Urgent mail like this was still guaranteed to arrive in Berlin within thirty-six hours. While he awaited a reply, with battle yet to recommence in earnest, Nehmann did a piece on a trench dog whose admirers swore could tell the difference in engine note between Luftwaffe aircraft and the Soviet planes that were beginning to appear over the city in some numbers. The men in the trench had acquired the dog over a thousand kilometres ago, west of Kyiv, and it had been with them ever since. They fed it on a diet of viscera scraped from the bellies of dead cattle and horses and its keeper called it ‘Wulf’. To Nehmann, who loathed dogs of any kind, it appeared to sleep most of the time, but when he insisted on a demonstration, the keeper managed a very credible impersonation of one of the Soviet Yakovlevs. The dog was on its feet within seconds, barking and barking, drawing a fusillade of oaths from a Kamerad trying to snatch an hour’s sleep before turning out for sentry duty.

  Nehmann took the story back to the bus depot where Schultz, as it happened, was interrogating a Soviet pilot who spoke German and who’d crash-landed after an attack on the airfield at Pitomnik. Nehmann, amused by the coincidence, settled on a wooden box beside Schultz and introduced himself in fluent Russian.

  ‘I’m here for you to tell me stories,’ he said. ‘The truer and the dirtier the better.’

  ‘You mean secrets?’ The pilot, a youthful looking maths graduate from Moscow, wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘Stories,’ Nehmann insisted. ‘They’re not the same thing.’

  The pilot was confused. Schultz did his best to help him out. Herr Nehmann, he said, was a journalist. He was also a comedian. His job was to make people either laugh or cry. Make life simple for him. Tell him something funny.

  The pilot seemed to get the point. He turned back to Nehmann.

  ‘You want to know about one of our aircraft?’ he said. ‘You want me to tell you about the Polikarpov? It’s a biplane, two wings, very simple. We make it from wood and canvas. It’s an old woman, very slow, and at night we switch the engine off and glide over your trenches, your front trenches, and drop bombs.’

  Nehmann nodded. He’d heard of these shapes that came ghosting in from Soviet lines. They were flown by female pilots and some of these women had become trench legends because they sang to the men below before dropping their bombs.

  ‘Nochnyer ved’ma,’ Nehmann said. ‘Night witches.’

  ‘Da.’ The pilot was grinning.

  ‘And the plane? You’ve got a story about the plane?’

  ‘Da. We pilots call them kerosinka. And you know why? Because they catch fire in no time at all.’

  Kerosinka. Nehmann wrote it down. A kerosene lamp.

  ‘You liked being a pilot? Going home every night? Getting a good night’s sleep?’

  The pilot nodded. Sometimes it was fine. Other times it wasn’t. The food, he admitted, was better than the men in the front line got and you weren’t shelled and bombed all the time, but the planes weren’t looked after properly, especially the engines, and you lived in dread for the moment when the propeller stopped and you looked down from the cockpit and the Volga was more than a glide away.

  ‘That’s what happened today?’

  ‘No. I got shot down. That was my fault.’ He looked at the blood still caked on his hands. ‘You know what we pilots say? Here? In Stalingrad?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘We say that our life is like a child’s shirt. Short and covered with shit.’

  Schultz had been doing his best to follow the interview, now it was in Russian. This bit he appeared to understand. He checked with Nehmann and then rocked with laughter before giving the pilot a pat on the shoulder.

  ‘Any more stories like that,’ he said, ‘and we might have to give you something to drink.’

  *

  Nehmann despatched this story, too, but over the days to come he heard nothing from the Promi. When he caught the familiar beat of the Tante-Jus landing at Pitomnik, he occasionally wondered whether one of the envelopes in the Luftpost bag might have his name on, but nothing turned up, neither from Goebbels nor Maria. By late October, both sides had re-engaged, and the battle was as fierce as ever and, as the days slipped past, Nehmann recognised the way this city, this experience, closed around you, making everything else so remote that it became meaningless.

  By now, he was translating regularly for Schultz in prisoner interrogations, especially when the captives were officers, and he began to detect a pattern in their guarded accounts of life on the Soviet front line. They called the political officers Commissars. These were the party fanatics who’d dedicated their lives to the Bolshevik cause and their task was to root out the slightest hint of deviance from the Communist line. By and large the officers agreed that the Commissars were a pain in the arse and completely unnecessary because the very presence of the Germans on Soviet soil was enough to persuade most Russians to fight to the death, but one of the consequences of the battle was an outbreak of genuine equality between the men and their officers. They faced the same risks, ate the same shit food, suffered together, laughed together, and all this in a world where rank seemed to matter less and less. The key word was tovarisch. Comrade? Yes. But mate, first.

  ‘The Commissars hate it,’ one officer said. ‘They think standing by your fellow soldiers is some kind of conspiracy. Share a cigarette with some Tatar animal from fuck knows where? That’s grounds for arrest. And why? Because the Commissars haven’t been through it, not the way we have, day after day, night after night. The Tatars are the best fighters we have. They’re like the night witches. They get the harmonica out and sing at night before they crawl into your trenches and slit a throat or two. Be honest. Germans are terrified of them. How do I know? Because we are, too.’

  More notes. More stories. Then, in early November, Nehmann – via Schultz – got wind of a dinner party to be held in the church the Feldgendarmerie had made their base. The thickness of the church’s walls was as close to a guarantee of safety as the remains of the city could guarantee and Schultz had heard rumours of foal’s liver dumplings with boiled potatoes. As the Abwehr’s senior officer in Stalingrad, he proposed to acquire an invitation and thought that Nehmann should come, too. The dinner, he said, was being held to celebrate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Toasts would naturally be drunk to the death of Stalin and the defeat of Ivans everywhere.

  That same day, Nehmann at last got a letter from Berlin. Expecting a missive from the Promi passing judgement on the reports he’d so far submitted, he found himself reading a letter from Maria. The news, she said, wasn’t good. She’d come back to Berlin from a concert tour in Franconia to find everything in Guram’s apartment torn apart: mattresses and chairs sliced open, floorboards lifted, cupboards emptied. Worse still, the piano had been attacked with a sledgehammer, the top stove in, the keyboard splintered.

  Natu
rally, she’d made contact with Goebbels who’d promised to send an aide to see for himself. Maria had slept that night on a nest of blankets and torn sheets in a corner of the bedroom and the aide had arrived the following morning, making a brief tour of the apartment, stepping from room to room, shaking his head in disapproval. Berlin, he told her, was in the middle of an epidemic of burglaries, evidence that morale in the city was beginning to sink. He promised to find her somewhere else to stay but her concert bookings had mysteriously come to an end and she’d heard nothing from either the aide or Goebbels since.

  In the meantime, she’d moved in with her father in a tiny room at the back of the bookshop and she was glad to report that life was sweet again. He really liked you, she wrote at the end of the letter. Which makes two of us. In a brief postscript, she told him not to worry about anything because she’d taken care of it. Potsdam, she added, was a trip she knew they’d never forget.

  Anything? Taken care of it? Nehmann thought hard about the postscript. They’d never been to Potsdam, not once, but he knew this had to be code as well. Maria was clever. She’d fled Warsaw and she’d survived. She knew that letters to and from certain correspondents were routinely screened by a special department at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse because he’d told her so, and she must have suspected that Nehmann’s name, and maybe her own, would be on that list.

  Nehmann took a hard look at the envelope. The postmark was smudged, possibly on purpose, but he thought he could make out the figure 10 which would indicate it had been posted in October. Now, it was already 6 November. He held the envelope up to the light, looking for evidence that it might have been opened, but he knew they routinely used steam to loosen the glue and had special techniques to reseal the flap without leaving any trace.

  Schultz was curious. He wanted to know who Nehmann had upset in Berlin. Nehmann wouldn’t tell him. I’d need a really big sheet of paper, he said, and I know you’re easily bored. Schultz laughed and checked his watch. The dinner was tonight. Half past seven, he said. Death to the Ivans.

  In the early evening they made their way to the church on foot, hugging the shadows, moving carefully from one ruined building to another, following the tracks of others in the crusted snow. It was cloudless, very little wind, and a huge yellow moon was rising in the east. Overhead, a million stars.

  At the corner of a street, Schultz paused to get his bearings. Lately, civic-minded troops had taken to making signposts out of the leg bones of dead horses, the flesh stripped off, the knee joint immobilised with a nail. The top of the bone, where it hinged into the animal’s pelvis, had been split to make room for thin wedges of wood daubed with directions. Tonight’s sign read ‘Pozhaluysta’.

  ‘It’s Russian,’ Nehmann said. ‘It means “you’re welcome”.’

  The church lay at the bottom of the street. Nehmann recognised the remains of the orthodox onion dome, silhouetted in the moonlight. There was very little activity on the front line and in the silence he could hear a door opening and closing as shadowy figures made their way inside. Tonight, according to veterans who’d been with the campaign since last summer, the entire Soviet Army retired for the night to get blind drunk, often literally if they’d run out of vodka and had to rely on industrial alcohol. It would, of course, have been the perfect moment to mount a crushing attack but Nehmann drew some comfort from the fact that Sixth Army, on this of all nights, also preferred to party rather than kill.

  They were at the church now. Schultz led the way inside. Nehmann had been expecting something a little select, even decorous. A menu and wine list had circulated earlier in the day. The meal was to begin with fish from upriver, where the Panzers had broken through. The fish had been slaughtered with a volley of grenades tossed into the water mixed with little parcels of high explosive and would be served with a medley of wayside weeds. The fish came with chilled Chablis, and alongside the foal’s liver dumplings and prime cuts of steppe pony, guests would be offered a choice of burgundies. That, at least, may have been the intention.

  Alas, no. The moment Nehmann stepped into the church he sensed they were in for a rough evening. The nave had been cleared of pews, making space for the long silver wing of an aircraft. The wing was propped upside down on three wooden trestles. The large red star suggested it must have come from a downed Soviet fighter and now it served as a table, littered with bottles and the odd glass. Everywhere there were candles: propped in jars, in cups, even on battered Orthodox bibles.

  The rest of the nave was a swirl of bodies, most of them wearing oddments of clothing and equipment lifted from Russian prisoners or perhaps the Soviet dead that littered the front line. Men affecting shawls and bonnets under their helmets. Men sporting gaudy ochre stars scissored from canvas and soaked in animal blood. Men dressed as wayside hags, clad in rags, ash rubbed into their faces. Men offering themselves as campaign wives, their lips daubed in something scarlet and sticky, arm in arm with fellow grotesques, already insensible.

  The last time Nehmann had seen anything like this was in a Tbilisi bar on New Year’s Eve when he was barely out of his teens. On that occasion he’d abandoned himself to the mercies of three women, all of them older, who’d led him up a narrow flight of stairs to an attic room at the very top of the building and taken their turn to fuck him. Watching two men waltzing drunkenly to the lilt of a mouth organ, he could still hear their laughter. The ugliest of them had stayed with him all night. One day, she promised, you’ll thank us for what we’ve done. And, in a way, she was right.

  In the far corner of the church, under the watchful eye of an orthodox priest, a fire was burning on the tiled floor. From a huge iron frying pan came the warm, yeasty smell of fresh griddle cakes, flour, milk and a little salt. Despite the fire, and the sheer mass of people, the temperature was dropping by the minute and every shouted conversation was wreathed in white as warm breath clouded in the freezing air.

  ‘Here—’

  Schultz had brought one of the bottles of wine Nehmann had lifted from the remains of Guram’s cellar. He dug out the cork with a hunting knife and passed it across. Nehmann had never drunk red wine so cold but it didn’t matter. He could smell madness in this place, and he knew it was no time to be sober.

  Within minutes, more bodies were pressing in through the door. One of them, with a touching faith in his own immediate future, was dressed as Santa Claus, his cheeks and chin sprouting clumps of glued-on upholstery stuffing, a red bobble cap on his head. Another sported a pair of horns he’d acquired from somewhere while other newcomers wore crude paper masks with big Stalin moustaches and an extra large hole for a mouth. The hole had to accommodate any size of bottle or glass. Vodka passed from hand to hand, pursued by roars of laughter.

  Then, from nowhere, came the keening of a violin and the bedlam paused. This wasn’t a gipsy fiddle, far from it. The notes were long, beautifully held, plangent, mournful, and Nehmann recognised the opening bars of ‘Das Wolgalied’, the Song of the Volga, the anthem adopted by Sixth Army as the nights got ever colder and the river began to freeze.

  Es steht ein Soldat am Wolgastrand

  Hält Wache für sein Vaterland…

  Some of the men were linking arms now, swaying left and right, while others picked up the melody.

  There stands a soldier on the Volga’s shore

  Standing the watch for his Fatherland.

  Nehmann stole a look at Schultz. He’d never met anyone less sentimental in his life, but in the candlelight he swore he could see the gleam of a tear on one battered cheek.

  Motionless, the steppes lie dormant…

  Abruptly, the music stopped. Nehmann looked round, feeling a blast of even colder air. The church door was open again and from the shadows emerged four figures. Their greatcoats and peaked hats offered not the slightest concession to the evening’s theme but what turned them into figures from a nightmare were the four identical balaclava woollen face masks, black, holes cut for eyes and lips. The crowd seemed to melt in front of them
. They stood in a loose semi-circle, eyeing the pageant, unmoved and unmoving. Then one of them, the biggest, seemed to respond to a signal from another and he gestured the violinist towards him. The crowd parted, making way. The violinist looked at first confused, then rueful, then frightened.

  Schultz beckoned Nehmann closer.

  ‘SS,’ he murmured.

  Nehmann, drunk, was looking at the one who seemed in charge. He was maybe five metres away. His eyes were flicking left and right. Then he gestured to the musician. That violin of yours. Give it to me.

  The violinist was uncertain. He tried smiling. He tried backing away. Then the biggest of the SS men took a step towards him and seized the instrument, handing it to his boss. His boss studied it a moment, plucked a single string, let it fall to the floor. The violinist muttered an oath and bent to retrieve it but two of the SS men had closed on him, pinioning his arms, making room for the boss.

  For the first time, Nehmann caught the gleam of silver in the mouth of the balaclava. Messner had told him about the silver tooth. Kalb, he thought. Kalb from Tatsinskaya. Kalb with the truck. Kalb the keeper of the bodies.

  Kalb was still gazing at the violin. Then he took a half-step forward and stamped on the body of the instrument with his boot. Nehmann heard the wood splintering, and a gasp from the violinist. Then came the pipe of another instrument, a flute this time, a penny whistle. The fourth SS man was playing the Badenweiler, the Führer’s favourite march. Kalb had picked up the rhythm, stamping with the same foot that had just destroyed the violin, gesturing to everyone else to join in. No one moved. No one said a word. They were staring at men in the balaclavas. They showed neither fear nor respect, only curiosity. The SS were the real grotesques. These were creatures from another planet. They came from deepest space. They belonged in the coldest, darkest place imaginable. There wasn’t an ounce of music in their bones and everyone knew it.