Last Flight to Stalingrad

by Graham Hurley

  Nehmann said he didn’t care, which wasn’t strictly true. The weather was getting worse. Day after day, Nehmann awoke to freezing fog and plunging temperatures and seven kinds of grey masking the view from the bus station, but wherever he and Grimberger went, whatever the reason for their journey, he was still thinking about Kirile. He knew that looking for someone gone missing in the city of the lost was absurd, surreal, a non-starter. People were muffled against the cold, their heads down, only their eyes visible. Kirile would be wearing the same ragbag of German and Soviet clothing as everyone else. How would he recognise him? Where would he start?

  It didn’t matter. Paying a visit to the front line was dangerous, and Grimberger was visibly unhappy about the prospect, but Nehmann insisted he needed to talk to infantrymen in the very eye of the storm and so they made their way towards the sullen hump of the Mamaev Kurgan, taking advantage of the ruined buildings and mountains of debris, following the black telephone lines that snaked ever onwards.

  The trenches here were mere scrapes, minor adjustments to the chaos of the battlescape, fought over, died for, abandoned and retaken within the same half-hour. The Russians were barely twenty metres away, equally exposed, but somehow they seemed to have the upper hand.

  A Wehrmacht staff sergeant with a weeping infection in one eye talked of Stukas dropping bombs barely metres away, of the incessant rain of Soviet mortars, of a local sniper who could pick your teeth from a thousand metres, of taunting melodies from a Russian harmonica in the darkness, of close-quarters fighting with knives, sharpened spades, bare hands, anything. Worst, he said, were the Siberians. They were born hunters. They stole into your little world from fucking nowhere. This was the Rattenkrieg, he said. The War of the Rats. The dead of night was a phrase he never wanted to hear again.

  Nehmann nodded, said he understood, peeled off a glove to scribble a note or two, and then – as if the thought had just occurred to him – enquired whether anyone had come across a young Russian with perfect German, name of Kirile. The staff sergeant, who was a difficult man to fool, stared at Nehmann.

  ‘You’ve come here to ask me a question like that?’ He was incredulous. ‘You’re risking your life for a fucking deserter?’

  The answer was yes, as Grimberger was the first to point out once they were back in the safety of the bus depot, and after that there were no more expeditions to the front line. But it didn’t matter because Nehmann’s mood had darkened. There were no more attempts to make the turd that was Stalingrad smell sweet, no more bids to confect amusing stories, fictitious or otherwise, about the small print of this sorry enterprise. On the contrary, Nehmann began to brood.

  One evening, in a snow-dusted dugout near the airfield as homely as the conditions would permit, he had a long conversation with an artillery man from Bielefeld. Smoke from a homemade stove curled through the frost-stiffened tarpaulin. The walls were lined with hessian and there was a wonderful smell of horse rissoles and cakes baked on mess-tin lids.

  A couple of weeks ago, said the artilleryman, his battery had been deployed to target a Soviet stockpile of artillery shells. The shells were shipped across the river at night. Women carried them eight at a time, in groundsheets, for six kilometres and then went back for more, night after night, six kilometres, twelve kilometres, eighteen kilometres. This was what the intelligence told us, the artilleryman said, and it turned out they were right. We knew where the target was. We had the coordinates. We were told to wait for days and days until the women had built a decent pile and then came the order to fire.

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘The biggest bang you ever saw. A huge explosion. Our Leutnant thought he was up for a medal. Maybe even a Ritterkreuz. Me? I could have wept for those women, for all that effort, all that pain, all that fear. The killing in this city never takes time off. Have you noticed that?’

  The killing in this city never takes time off.

  Nehmann made a note of the phrase. It was as close to the truth as anything he’d heard. Death was a physical presence: conscientious, reliable, scrupulous, even-handed. It came for you without warning, and it ignored any objection you might have. People said that bullets never hit brave men but Nehmann had seen enough now to know that this was bollocks. Death was everywhere, first cousin to the weather, and Stalingrad had become the Schicksalsstadt, the City of Fate.

  A couple of days later, with still no word on Kirile, Nehmann picked up the November edition of Das Reich, the magazine Goebbels used to explore his changing thoughts about the war. The key to his thinking was always the editorial and that afternoon, with time to kill, Nehmann settled down to read it. Goebbels, he quickly realised, was keen to make a distinction between Stimmung, meaning ‘mood’, and Haltung, meaning ‘bearing’. The first, he said, was frivolous, a plaything, an indulgence, of no consequence, while Haltung was something weightier and altogether more seemly. With the right Haltung, the nation could do anything, share any burden, survive any trial. Haltung might one day be the only path to victory, which meant that the days when Stimmung mattered were well and truly over.

  Nehmann sat back, remembering the afternoon when Hitler returned to Berlin after his triumph in France. The flowers along the Wilhelmstrasse. The crowds desperate for a glimpse of their Führer. The swelling roar of acclamation as the cavalcade approached from the Anhalter station. And Hedvika’s arse moving sweetly beneath him. Stimmung, he thought. Another world.

  *

  That night he declined Grimberger’s offer of a cigar and a glass or two of vodka and worked hard on a piece about their visit to the front line. For once, he let the facts speak for themselves, no embellishments, no easy punchlines, not a single opportunity for the reader to arrive at anything but the obvious conclusion: that battle was an experience beyond most people’s imagination and that this one was probably lost.

  The draft complete, he wound a fresh sheet of paper into the Abwehr typewriter and then showed the results to Schultz. He took his time to read it. Lately, he’d had to find a pair of glasses from somewhere, a tiny detail that told Nehmann a great deal about this war. Not even a stayer like Schultz could survive undamaged.

  ‘It’s the best thing you’ve done here.’ Schultz looked up. ‘Goebbels will wipe his arse with it.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ Nehmann nodded at the Luftpost pouch readied on the desk. ‘I’ll try and get it out tomorrow.’

  It went next day. The following week, mid-December, the river froze over completely and a machine-gunner returning from the front line reported that the Soviets were broadcasting announcements day and night for the benefit of the listening Germans. One of you will die every seven seconds on the Eastern Front, a voice would say. We’ll be pleased to maintain this service as long as you’re here. Propaganda like this, accompanied by a loudly ticking clock, naturally prompted an instant response – volleys of mortar shells to silence the loudspeakers – but supplies of the shells, said the machine-gunner, were fast running out. Shit music, too, unless you liked the tango.

  Nehmann was impressed by the story but it seemed to have made little impact on the machine-gunner. In the relative warmth of the bus depot, he took his helmet off. He’d wrapped a Russian foot bandage around the bareness of his shaven scalp and when Nehmann offered his compliments on the choice of insulation, the machine-gunner showed him his gloves. They were crudely made, an odd piebald colour, but apparently effective.

  ‘We had a dog called Fritz.’ The machine-gunner grinned. ‘I got to skin it.’

  That night, by radio, Schultz received word from the Promi. Goebbels had read Nehmann’s piece about life in the front line and wanted more of the same. Not only that, but he also needed Nehmann back in Berlin in time for Christmas.

  ‘I was wrong about Goebbels,’ Schultz said. ‘All credit to you, my friend, but this means we’re definitely fucked.’

  Nehmann stared at him. Schultz never apologised. Neither was he ever wrong.

  *

  Next morning, Nehmann a
nd Grimberger set out once again for the airfield at Pitomnik to enquire about the possibilities of Nehmann getting a flight out to Berlin. By now, Soviet fighters and anti-aircraft guns dug in around the edges of the Kessel were making life tough for Richthofen’s fleet of Tante-Jus. According to Schultz, who’d seen the Abwehr’s figures, Sixth Army would need 300 flights a day to keep fighting yet barely a trickle of the big tri-motors made it safely into the city.

  A small city of bunkers and tents had sprung up at the edge of the airfield. In the biggest of the tents, Nehmann found the Luftwaffe Leutnant in charge of compiling passenger lists. A general field hospital had been established nearby and the Leutnant was trying to calculate how many badly wounded men could be loaded onto the return flight. Nehmann had already seen these evacuation candidates outside, each man secured to a stretcher, some of them groggy from too much morphine. Was his claim to a place on a Tante-Ju really more urgent than theirs? He wasn’t at all sure.

  The Leutnant, whom he knew, made a note of his request. Christmas was coming and pressure on the ever-fewer flights out was intense. Nehmann would be wise to have a bag packed ready in case a place on the plane was suddenly free.

  ‘Here—’ He opened a drawer and slipped out a copy of a newspaper. ‘This came in yesterday. Congratulations. Much better than that usual shit you send them.’

  Nehmann was looking at a copy of Völkischer Beobachter, the Party’s daily paper. Millions of copies were sold all over the Reich. His front-line piece was on page three and a quick scan suggested that Goebbels hadn’t changed a word.

  ‘There’s someone else you might like to talk to,’ the Leutnant said. ‘His name’s Dr Gigensohen. He arrived from Tatsinskaya yesterday and as far as I know he’s still over in the field hospital at Gumrak.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He’s a pathologist. He deals with the dead, not the living so he’s spoiled for choice here.’ He shrugged, returning to his passenger list. ‘See what you think, eh?’

  Nehmann and Grimberger departed with the copy of the newspaper. The field hospital was half an hour tramp away through the rutted snow. Beyond the airfield, a horse had been hit by a Soviet shell. Its head was hanging by threads of frozen flesh, and shrapnel from the explosion had scored a neat excision the length of its belly. The coils of viscera inside gleamed purple and yellow in the thin winter sunshine and Nehmann tried hard not to imagine the smell when spring finally arrived, and the city’s countless bodies began to thaw.

  The pathologist occupied a wood-lined bunker just metres from the hospital. An iron stove took the edge off the intense cold but sitting at the desk, he was still wearing gloves as he made notes from a pad at his elbow.

  Nehmann introduced himself. It turned out that Gigensohen, too, had read the front-line report in the Beobachter.

  ‘An outbreak of realism,’ he said drily. ‘More than welcome.’

  Nehmann asked him what he made of what he’d seen so far.

  ‘Remarkable,’ he said. ‘I’m here to cut up bodies. That’s not as easy as it may seem. You wear gloves, of course, but they’re made of rubber and the rubber’s as frozen as everything else. I’m managing a couple of autopsies a day at the moment but under normal circumstances I could double that figure.’

  ‘You’re trying to work out who killed these people?’ Nehmann was confused. ‘Might the Russians have anything to do with it?’

  ‘Of course they have. It’s a battle. People get shot. They die. But these folk…’ he nodded down at the pad ‘…are different. There are no wounds that I can see.’

  ‘So, what killed them?’

  ‘Hunger. And stress. And lack of sleep. And, dare I hazard a guess, despair. These people have starved to death. If you want a headline, there it is. Give a man five hundred calories a day and you open his door to all kinds of nastiness. Hepatitis? Dysentery? All you need is a vector, a means of transmission, and as it happens lice are perfect. If this goes on much longer, we’ll be looking at typhoid and typhus, too. In the end we’re just flesh and blood. This kind of fighting feasts on us.’

  Feasts on us.

  Nehmann stayed at the doctor’s side for nearly an hour while Grimberger stood guard beside a pile of frozen bodies stacked outside. The pathologist was only too happy to share his findings and his fears with a journalist who reputedly had the ear of the Minister of Propaganda, and they parted on the best of terms. When Nehmann mentioned that he might be back in Berlin in time for Christmas, Gigensohen wished him well.

  ‘I dare say you’ll be pleased to see the back of all this.’ The pathologist gestured around. ‘You’ve been here long?’

  ‘Long enough,’ Nehmann said. ‘Everyone here has a job to do. I suspect that can make a difference.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I watch. And listen. That can be hard, believe me. I’m not religious, far from it, but God never designed us for something like this.’

  *

  The thought stayed with him for the rest of the day. That evening, alone for once, he made his way back to the church where hundreds of cheerful drunks had celebrated the Russian Revolution. The wing of the Soviet fighter had been removed from the body of the church and now, propped up outside, it gleamed in the light of the moon. Nehmann paused for a moment, looking at the outline of the Red Star. These people are winning, he thought. As maybe they should.

  Inside the building, candles flickered at the far end of the nave, casting the long shadow of a kneeling figure onto the folds of cloth draped over the table that served as an altar.

  Nehmann approached, aware of tiny shards of broken glass beneath his feet, and phrases from the liturgy buried deep in his childhood began to surface for the first time in his adult life. The Body and Blood of Christ Jesus, he thought.

  Nehmann paused, just metres away from the figure bent in prayer. At last, he stirred. It was the priest. He’d been at the party, a watchful presence behind the dense tangle of greying beard, happy to welcome laughter to the house of God. Nehmann had heard that he occasionally played the organ on days when he could make the bellows work properly, mainly Bach toccatas.

  ‘You’re here for me?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘You want to pray?’

  ‘I want to take communion.’

  ‘I see.’ The priest struggled to his feet. He was in his fifties at least, much older than Nehmann had imagined. His face was clouded with a frown. He seemed to be considering Nehmann’s request. ‘That may be difficult,’ he said at last. ‘We have very little wine, and what’s left is frozen.’

  Nehmann shrugged. He said he was happy to do without the wine.

  ‘No wine?’ The frown had deepened.

  ‘No wine,’ Nehmann confirmed. ‘We’ll just pretend.’

  ‘Pretend?’ The ghost of a smile. ‘And assume that God won’t notice?’

  In the end, they prayed together. The priest made no mention of the battle, of the injured, of the dead. To Nehmann, mumbling ‘Amen’ when each prayer came to an end, the war might never have happened. They might have been in some city or other, surrounded by the blessings of peace, praying for the usual list of propositions: good health, humility, wellbeing. After a final recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, the priest made the sign of the Cross and indicated that their conversation was over.

  Nehmann thanked him and turned to leave. Then the priest called him back. He looked weary, almost resigned.

  ‘We had visitors last night,’ he said. ‘You might like to take a look at the vestry.’

  Nehmann nodded. Once again, he was heading down the nave.

  ‘There’s another way down,’ the priest called. ‘You needn’t go outside.’

  He collected a candle from the altar and gave it to Nehmann. Then he led the way to a door half hidden behind a brick pillar and gestured at the wooden steps that led into the darkness.

  ‘God be with you,’ he murmured.

  Nehmann thanked him. The candle was dripping hot wax onto his
hand and he paused on the first step to adjust it. Then he began to make his way down, following the spill of light on the rough brickwork, step after careful step. At the bottom, his boots found a solid floor. Another door, he thought. He pushed it open, holding out the candle, wondering whether he should have gone back to the bus depot to collect Grimberger. Then his eyes found the body on the floor.

  He knew at once it was Kirile. The same thin wrists. The same falling-apart boots with different coloured laces. But where his face had once been was a criss-cross of deep wounds, the features smashed, the eyeballs empty, shattered teeth between pulped gums. Nehmann’s hand began to shake. The flame wavered, spilling onto the floor beside the wreckage of Kirile’s face. The spade looked new. Frozen blood, a deep ochre, had crusted on the gleaming blade and there was more of it on the wooden shaft and on the worn floorboards around Kirile’s head.

  Nehmann knelt briefly. The flesh of Kirile’s hands was icy. He brought one hand to his lips and kissed it. Then he left.

  30

  TATSINSKAYA AIRFIELD, 23 DECEMBER 1942

  Nehmann flew out of Stalingrad on a stormy morning, two days before Christmas, trying hard not to think of Kirile’s ruined face. The Ju-52 was overweight on take-off, packed with walking wounded from the field hospital at Gumrak, and the airframe groaned as the aircraft hit a final rut before getting itself airborne. The pathologist, Dr Gigensohen, was also on board, his work among the city’s many dead complete. He and Nehmann were at the rear of the plane, squashed against a bulkhead.

  The weather, thankfully, made any interceptions from Soviet fighters unlikely. One of the Junkers’ engines quickly developed a fault and the pilot was unable to nurse the aircraft into clean air above the turbulence. As a result the Tante-Ju was at the mercy of the storm, tossed around by the violence of the gusting wind. Many of the men, already white-faced from the pain of their injuries, began to be sick and by the time the pilot managed to slam the aircraft onto the airfield at Tatsinskaya, the metal floor of the fuselage was pooled with blood and vomit. For once, Nehmann was glad when ground crew wrestled the door open and let in the icy air. The heavy sweetness of the fug inside the aircraft had become unbearable. After Kirile, he thought, comes this. Life can’t possibly get worse.