Last Flight to Stalingrad

by Graham Hurley

  Schultz, unprompted, had produced the spade. Nehmann took it. The blizzard seemed to have eased a little, but he could still hear the wind keening over the rough pelt of the steppe. His mouth, his nostrils, his ears, were full of snow. Kalb’s body had become a smear on the face of the earth. Only his face remained intact, frozen in surprise, or perhaps anger. Nehmann stood beside him, staring down, tallying the faces in the back of the SS truck, remembering Kirile sprawled in the vestry. Then he raised the spade high before driving it into Kalb’s face, splitting it cleanly in two. He’d never felt better in his life.

  34

  STALINGRAD, 17 JANUARY 1943

  Nehmann cooked the remains of Kalb that night, tossing the guts to the two cats. He used the remains of the wood in the bus depot, fired up the Abwehr stove, borrowed Schultz’s biggest pot, and scraped a thin layer of fat from Kalb’s thigh to grease the bottom of the pan. He sliced up the heart and liver and put them carefully to one side. The meat from Kalb’s legs would take longer to cook and, after flash-frying chunk after chunk, he added fresh snow from a drift at the back of the building. Once the snow had melted, he added generous spoonfuls of salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne, plus a selection of herbs from the supply Magda Goebbels had given him at Christmas. By the time Schultz returned to the bus depot with an armful of more wood, stamping the snow from his boots, the pot was bubbling nicely.

  Schultz peeled off his greatcoat and gave it a shake.

  ‘He smells a lot better dead than alive,’ he grunted.

  *

  Nehmann let Kalb simmer all night. He threw together a makeshift bed on the floor beside the stove and for the first time in weeks he slept like a baby. Next morning, he awoke to find Schultz inspecting the contents of the pot. The roar of battle felt very close.

  ‘More water,’ Schultz said. ‘And more pepper.’

  ‘You’ve tasted it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Mid-morning, the meat tender, Nehmann put a lid on the pot, wrapped it in a blanket, and then carried it carefully out into the snow. Schultz had told him more than enough about the field hospital at Gumrak. The pot was nearly full. There was enough, certainly, to feed at least a dozen men. It would be Nehmann’s pleasure to put SS Standartenführer Kalb to the service of the Greater Reich.

  The storm had blown itself out overnight and a weak sun threw long shadows across the virgin snow. For whatever reason, both armies appeared to be catching their breath and a silence had settled on the emptiness of the city. Under any other circumstances, thought Nehmann, it might almost have been beautiful.

  At Schultz’s suggestion, they took a longer route to the field hospital, avoiding the Feldgendarmerie HQ. Nehmann was disappointed not to be able to see Kalb’s body for one last time but the best bits of him, the useful bits, the tastiest bits, were in the pot between his feet. Wild dogs, he guessed, would be nosing at the rest of Kalb by now, tearing off frozen chunks from his face, eating his brain, lapping at the torn remains in his body cavity, starting on the bones, and in any case it was best to avoid the Chain Dogs. Kalb might be unrecognisable by now but his Russian greatcoat most definitely wasn’t.

  The field hospital announced itself with piles of bodies stacked untidily beside the rutted tracks in the snow that served as an approach road. Closer, some of the bodies, on stretchers and planks of wood this time, appeared to be alive. A flicker of movement in a man’s eyes at the sound of the Kübelwagen, a head turning as it bumped slowly past, a hand lifting in a plea for it to stop.

  The hospital itself was smaller than Nehmann had imagined. Smoke curled from a brick chimney. He smiled, glancing down the saucepan. They could warm Kalb up. Everything would be fine.

  A male orderly met them at the hanging blanket, scabbed with something brown, that did duty as a door. Under what remained of his uniform, he was skeletal. He was wearing gloves and a torn field jacket. The cuffs of the jacket glistened with fresh blood and there was more blood clotting on his trousers. His eyes were bright in the gauntness of his face.

  ‘You’re hurt?’

  ‘We’ve brought food.’ Nehmann nodded down at the pot. ‘We can warm this up?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Stew. Casserole. Call it Ragout Stalingrad.’

  ‘It’s got meat in it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Komm.’

  He led the way inside. Despite the fierce cold, the stench was overpowering, a thick, sour sweetness that reminded Nehmann at once of Kalb. Every horizontal space – beds, mattresses, wooden pallets, the floor itself – was littered with bodies, most of them bandaged. Men lying on their backs, their sightless eyes open, their chests barely rising and falling. Men lying sideways in the foetal position, their knees drawn up, their hands buried between their thighs. One of them had a hideous facial injury where a bayonet must have plunged into his cheek. A big flap of flesh was hanging down, revealing tobacco-stained teeth and the whiteness of bone beneath, and the bloodstained length of bandage barely hid half the wound.

  ‘We’ve nearly run out.’ The orderly was nodding at the bandage. ‘We’re down to half a metre a man. By lunchtime, we’ll have nothing.’

  He’d taken the pot from Nehmann. He lifted the lid, peered inside, dipped a finger, licked it.

  ‘Gut,’ he muttered, slipping off a glove and scooping up a mouthful with his bare hand. Then he put the lid back on and led the way down a corridor to a kitchen. A small pile of wood from smashed-up delivery pallets lay beside the stove. The cast-iron top of the stove glowed red-hot. The orderly put the pot on the stove and disappeared. Seconds later he was back with a battered metal spoon. He gave it to Nehmann.

  ‘Stir,’ he said.

  Nehmann and Schultz stood beside the stove while Nehmann stirred the stew, grateful for the warmth. Within minutes, the thick, brown concoction began to bubble. Schultz had been right. Kalb smelled delicious.

  The orderly returned. He wanted Nehmann to go from patient to patient, feeding each just a little of the stew. A couple of spoonfuls would be enough to keep most of them alive for an extra day or two. Any more, and their stomachs would never cope.

  ‘Komm,’ he said again. ‘We feed only those who might survive.’

  Nehmann didn’t move. He was looking at Schultz.

  ‘You want some, Willi?’ he asked. ‘Before we go?’

  Schultz took his time in answering. Finally, he shook his head. The orderly was staring at him, amazed.

  ‘No?’ he said. ‘Meat? You don’t want any? You’re really saying no?’

  ‘No.’ Schultz patted the flatness of his belly. ‘Enough.’

  Nehmann left Schultz warming his hands beside the stove. As they entered the main ward, the orderly turned to Nehmann who was carrying the pot, wrapped once again in the blanket.

  ‘Your friend is a true Christian,’ he said. ‘How many of those does this army have left?’

  ‘A man of faith.’ Nehmann was looking at the pot. ‘And a privilege to be his Kamerad.’

  They moved from bed to bed, Nehmann spooning the stew into the mess tin while the orderly coaxed each broken body into some semblance of a sitting position. Most of the men could barely chew, let alone swallow, and every one of these small acts of mercy left a great deal of Kalb on the fronts of greatcoats or tangled in a week’s growth of beard. Yet these men, tormented by the unctuous smell still wafting up from the pot, still did their best to get the stew inside them. Some darkly primitive survival urge, Nehmann thought, had prompted a belief in survival, or maybe even salvation, and here it was.

  With barely a spoonful of Kalb left, Nehmann found himself perched beside a man who looked older than the rest. He had, he said, been the sole survivor of a Panzer crew hit by a Katyusha rocket. He’d been in the hospital for nearly a week while both his legs had been amputated. The pain, he admitted, was grim but there was no infection in either wound, itself a small miracle, and he’d been promised priority on the evacuation list for the next flight out.
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br />   He swallowed the last spoonful of stew and insisted on wiping out the pot with his finger afterwards. Crudely taped to the wall above his bed was a magazine cover that Nehmann recognised. The Frauen-Warte. He pointed the photo out to the amputee: half a dozen of the Reich’s finest, bestriding the top of Mount Elbrus.

  ‘Gut, ja? Wunderbar.’ The amputee was still sucking his finger. ‘I look at it at nights when I’m lonely. You know where I come from? Berchtesgaden. I used to do that as a kid. Show me a mountain and I’d climb it.’

  Show me a mountain and I’d climb it. Nehmann nodded and reached for the man’s hand. He came from the mountains himself, he said, and he knew exactly what they meant. He wished him luck on the flight out and gave his hand a squeeze.

  The pot empty, Nehmann got to his feet to follow the orderly through the tangle of bodies. The smell in the ward was, if anything, worse and Nehmann was still wondering what it must take to work in conditions like this when he stepped back into the warmth of the kitchen. It took him a moment to realise that Schultz was no longer alone. Three other figures, all Chain Dogs, had joined him. One of them was the Leutnant, who was in the process of handcuffing Schultz. The moment he saw Nehmann he told him he was under arrest.

  ‘For what?’

  The Leutnant didn’t answer. He was staring at the empty pot.

  ‘What was in there?’

  ‘Stew.’ Nehmann shrugged. ‘For the men here.’

  ‘What sort of stew?’

  ‘Stewy stew. Ragout. Weather like this? Very sustaining.’

  There was a moment’s silence. The Leutnant sniffed the pot, studied the smear of liquid at the bottom.

  ‘Delicious.’ It was the orderly. ‘Don’t you agree?’

  Nehmann and Schultz were driven back to the half-demolished building that had served as a joint SS/Feldgendarmerie headquarters. It turned out to have been a school. The two prisoners were separated the moment they arrived, and Nehmann found himself in a biggish room flooded with afternoon sunshine. Rows of tiny desks and midget chairs occupied most of the floor space and the remains of a lesson on elementary addition was still chalked on the blackboard. There was a scatter of picture books, too, and Nehmann made himself as comfortable as he could on the floor, handcuffed to a radiator that didn’t work, listening to the roar of battle barely kilometres away. There was no glass in the windows at all. It was cold but bearable and Nehmann sat with his back to the wall, his knees drawn up, dreading the moment when the sun would dip below the window and the temperature would plunge.

  The Leutnant arrived nearly an hour later. He eyed Nehmann warily, the way you might view an animal you didn’t entirely trust, and he finally settled on a nearby desk. Nehmann had only ever been in the company of this man when Kalb had been present. He’d never talked to him, never had a chance to form any kind of opinion. He didn’t even know his name.

  ‘Mikhail Magalashvili.’ Nehmann extended his free hand.

  ‘You’re Georgian?’ The Leutnant seemed surprised.

  ‘Yes. From Svengati. Ever been there?’ Nehmann gestured up at the window. ‘This kind of weather but with mountains.’

  ‘You have papers? ID?’

  Nehmann nodded.

  ‘Put them on the floor. Let me see them.’

  All Nehmann had was his Promi pass. He put it on the floor. The Leutnant got off the desk and picked it up, never taking his eyes off Nehmann. He inspected the pass at arm’s length.

  ‘Werner Nehmann?’

  ‘That’s me, as well.’

  ‘You work for Goebbels?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘As a Georgian?’

  ‘As a journalist.’

  The news seemed to give the Leutnant pause for thought. He was back on the desk now, the Promi card put carefully to one side.

  ‘Standartenführer Kalb,’ he said. ‘You were taking him to Gumrak. What happened?’

  ‘He died. In the car.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘We stopped, obviously. We tried to revive him. When that didn’t work, we left him in the snow. It seemed the kindest thing to do.’

  ‘Kind?’

  ‘We had to get back. You know the bus depot. You’ve been there. It’s quite a way. We had very little fuel. The least weight on board, the better. That’s what we thought. That’s why we left him.’ Nehmann forced a smile, knowing how lame the explanation must sound.

  The Leutnant had produced a pad. He scribbled himself a note and got to his feet.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, and then left the room.

  Wait? Bizarre.

  Nehmann knew about the Feldgendarmerie. They had a reputation for taking matters into their own hands. They rarely bothered themselves overmuch about evidence. Normally, the word of their senior officer was enough to earn a man a bullet. In this place, Nehmann suspected that the senior officer had probably been Kalb but now he was dead. Not just dead but hacked into pieces and left for the dogs. Something like that would never go unpunished, not even here, where sudden death had turned the world on its head. The Leutnant would have them both shot, himself and Schultz, of that Nehmann was certain. The only question of any interest was when.

  The Leutnant was back within minutes, his arms full. When Nehmann saw the spade, and the canvas bucket, and the bag of spices and herbs from Magda Goebbels, his heart lurched. This man is behaving like a proper detective, he told himself. Thousands are still dying by the day and yet here he is, back in the world of evidence and probably motive, trying to establish a sequence of events. Absurd.

  He was showing Nehmann the spade. His gloved finger was pointing at clots of something brown on the wooden haft.

  ‘Blood, ja? You agree?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘We found it in your Kübelwagen. On the back seat.’

  ‘Ja?’

  ‘Ja. And this?’ He picked up the bucket. ‘You want to look inside?’ Nehmann shook his head. ‘You don’t? You don’t want to take a look? Have a sniff, maybe? That bucket belonged here, in this place, and now we find it in that shitty bus depot of yours. And these?’ His hand settled briefly on the bag of spices. ‘What are these for?’

  ‘Cooking, I imagine.’

  ‘Of course. Cooking. Making food taste sweeter, nicer. So what happened, Herr Nehmann, Herr whoever you are? What happened to Standartenführer Kalb? Don’t take me for a fool. Just tell me the truth.’

  ‘You think that matters?’

  ‘What, Herr Nehmann?’

  ‘The truth. Here. In Stalingrad. You think the truth matters in a place like this?’

  ‘Of course. The truth always matters, wherever you are.’ He was frowning now. ‘What could possibly matter more?’

  The question brought a smile to Nehmann’s face. This man was full of disgust, he could tell, but he was unsettled as well because he seemed to have worked out exactly what had happened, and his conclusions disturbed him deeply.

  Nehmann looked at his free hand, flexed his fingers, then glanced up.

  ‘You’re right, Herr Leutnant. I killed him. I killed Kalb and then I chopped him into pieces and put him in the pot. Not all of him, just enough to make a difference to those men in the hospital. You might say I put the bastard to some use. You want to know why?’

  ‘Tell me,’ the Leutnant said stiffly. ‘If you think it makes any difference.’

  Nehmann took a deep breath. After a confession like that, he knew he was a dead man, but he welcomed this one chance of putting a question of his own.

  ‘You were at Tatsinskaya, Herr Leutnant. You saw the bodies in the back of that SS truck? You know what Kalb had planned for them?’

  ‘Ja, of course. This is war. Certain measures might be necessary.’

  ‘Might be?’

  ‘Are.’

  ‘You saw the state of those bodies? What Kalb had done to them? Had done to them? Maybe that was your work? Your colleagues? Was that what happened?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘So, who did it? Who mutila
ted those people?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘But it is, Herr Leutnant, because I’m curious, because I’m a journalist, and because I’m proud to ask questions on behalf of the Volk.’

  ‘The Volk? The people?’ The Leutnant didn’t bother to hide his contempt. ‘They were terrorists, those scum at the airfield. They were a threat to the Reich. We have the complete support of the people in everything we do.’

  ‘They were ordinary. They were local. They were mothers, fathers, daughters, little girls. One of them was a headmaster. He belonged in a room like this. Yet you shot him. And then smashed his face to pieces.’

  ‘Not me. I didn’t do that.’

  ‘Who, then? Who did it?’

  The Leutnant wouldn’t say. The thunder of yet another artillery barrage rolled across the whiteness outside, giant footsteps coming ever closer, making the earth itself tremble. Clouds of tiny birds exploded from the remains of a nearby tree and Nehmann realised that it had been many hours since he’d last caught the growl of a landing aircraft.

  ‘The Russians are all over us,’ he said softly. ‘You think another couple of deaths will stop them?’

  ‘What you did to the Standartenführer was wrong. It was worse than wrong.’

  ‘Killing the bastard?’

  ‘Cooking him. Eating him.’

  ‘And I die for that?’

  ‘Of course. Death is what a cannibal deserves. Even in this city.’

  Death is what a cannibal deserves. Nehmann studied him for a long moment.

  ‘Are you a religious man, Herr Leutnant? Do you go to church? Do you pray to your God?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you take communion?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The body and blood of Christ?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because it sustains you?’

  ‘Because it makes me a better person.’

  ‘Then think of poor Kalb. And think of the men in that tomb of a hospital. He’s kept them alive. And that was my doing.’

  ‘You’re telling me it was an act of redemption? Killing Kalb?’ The Leutnant was staring at Nehmann.