by Jana Petken
When the Russians eventually moved on to Jürgen, he followed Wilmot’s example of rising quickly, but he had tears running down his face.
They haven’t killed me yet, Wilmot thought as he moved forward to the universal command of a rifle butt in his back. He was still alive and could run. He was a fast runner; at least, he had been in school. His eyes darted left, right, and finally in front of him, searching for an escape route, but Russian soldiers were making a perimeter and training rifles on the corralled, outnumbered prisoners. Running would be suicide.
The two German platoons were completely cut off from the main force. Would their commanders even order another attack today? Wilmot wondered. No. They were probably ashamed of their poor strategies and huddling in this snowstorm, licking their paws and worrying about getting hammered in yet another defeat.
The prisoners with Wilmot and Jürgen trudged past the row of burning houses and then on to where about fifty Germans were gathered. Wilmot smacked the side of his head, trying to get some brain cells working, but nothing made sense. In the space of twenty-four hours, the Russians had pushed the Germans back. The Germans had retaliated, pushing the Russians into retreat. The line had been broken a second time with the Germans appearing to hold it, but within hours, the Russians had taken it back. It was all so bloody senseless. All this death for a few metres of ground, a row of trenches, and some wooden houses: back and forth, day after day, with bodies piling up and no significant advances made. And now he was either going to die like the Russian civilians who’d been forced to dig their own graves a month earlier or the Jews in that Baltic town who were killed for sport in a pogrom. What the hell was it all about? It seemed to him that this had nothing to do with giving Germans more living space and was all a game of annihilation, a race to inflict the most atrocious suffering on the enemy. Russians – Germans – Hitler – Stalin? Those two were a couple of bloody sadists!
******
That evening, Wilmot saw the full extent of the recent Russian campaigns. After walking for more hours and kilometres than he could count, he and his fellow captives joined hundreds more German prisoners who were being corralled on the tracks of a disused railway station. Jürgen, the teenage German who’d earlier trudged beside Wilmot, was gasping for breath.
“How long have you been here … as a prisoner?” Jürgen addressed a half-starved soldier.
“Two weeks. They just keep bringing more of you in … every day they bring more … every day. I think they’re leaving us here to freeze to death.”
Wilmot had no water and neither did anyone else as far as he could see. Hundreds, maybe a thousand men were gathered on the tracks. They looked ravenous, gaunt and grey faced, exhausted and dehydrated, with white crusted lips and bodies that shook with the cold and failing organs. Some were lying with their legs across other men’s bodies because of the lack of space. They were sharing coats, hugging each other like lovers to keep warm. The stench of piss and shite was so strong, men were covering their mouths with scarves. And their moaning and mumbled pleas for help, although deafening at times, were being ignored by the Russian guards.
“Is this it?” Wilmot aired his thoughts. “Is this where we die, like this?” He slumped to the ground and covered his face with his hands, his eyes stinging. He didn’t have enough water in his body for tears to form, much less fall down his dirty cheeks. He sniffed, embarrassed, but refused to look at the Russians, or the indignities thrust upon his countrymen. Instead, he curled into a ball, shielded his face with his arms and let the sobs wrack his freezing body. If he’d had a gun, he’d have shot himself then and there. He’d been through one devastating concentration camp before; he wouldn’t survive a Russian-made one. He wanted it to end. Everything.
Despite the noise and discomfort, Wilmot managed to doze off for a few minutes until the shrill of multiple whistles startled him. He was as stiff as frosty grass and struggled to stand when ordered. His hand was stinging, but he was too afraid to look at the damage or remove the bandage; it was the only one he had. The hand was going to turn green and he’d lose it altogether unless he got treatment. He laughed at himself. Here he was worried about his hand when he should be concerned about not getting his head blown off. What were the Russians waiting for?
“Jürgen, what’s going on?” Wilmot whispered.
“They’re moving us … don’t know … don’t care where we’re going. It has to be better than this place.”
The German soldiers were paraded through Leningrad in lines stretching the width of the avenue, in full view of the civilian population who were crowding the pavements. The city’s destruction was much more extensive than Wilmot had been led to believe. Every building was damaged, and the streets were littered with rubble.
The snow, coming down like pillow stuffing, was not settling on the well-trodden ground; a graveyard with dead bodies rotting where they lay. Wilmot’s eyes grew round like saucers: a corpse with parts of its torso, arms and legs sliced off, had evidently been cannibalised with a butcher’s knife. He wondered what human flesh might taste like, then gagged in disgust at his own thoughts.
Shops and houses were windowless. Front doors had been blown off and replaced with cardboard sheets, and the people looked just as starved and desperate as the German prisoners. Germany was obliterating not just the city, but the people in it, yet they still hadn’t managed to occupy it.
Wilmot kept his head erect and his eyes focused on the shoulders of the man in front of him, as he was pelted by stones, spat on, and cursed in the common language of hatred.
He squealed when a jagged rock hit him just above the ear, and salty blood flowed onto his cheek and into his mouth. Stunned by the vitriol, he glanced in the direction from whence the rock had been thrown and saw a middle-aged woman pushing her way through the crowd, spitting and cursing at the bedraggled soldiers.
“Nazi scum! Nazi brutes! Fascist Nazis!” Nazi, Nazi, over and over until it sounded like a choir singing. Wilmot’s eyes filled again. Where were they marching to? What was going to happen to them?
Chapter Seven
Florent Duguay
Paris, France
November 1941
The three men climbed the hill to the railway tracks. Duguay, leading the midnight attack, wormed his way to the top of the rise then raised a fist to halt the two behind him.
To his left, two German soldiers ambled down the line with their backs to him. To his right, two armed civilian guards stood watch on either side of the railway line. Duguay’s lips curled; they were in position.
Without taking his eyes off the German soldiers, Duguay pried a small torch from his pocket, switched it on, and then flashed twice at the two civilians; in reply, he got a raised hand.
“Our men are ready,” Duguay whispered over his shoulder “Remember, you two, no guns unless you muck up.”
Claude and Pierre ran, heads down, along the side of the hill just below its crest. The Germans were still sauntering along the tracks deep in conversation, their backs to the Frenchmen. Claude halted, nodded to Pierre, then both men pounced on the soldiers from behind, plunging their knives deep into the unsuspecting Germans’ necks. The soldiers slumped to the ground, carotid blood fountaining across the railway tracks, and, as they gurgled their last, Claude relieved them of their rifles.
Duguay saw Claude’s raised arm and smiled with satisfaction. He’d noticed a six-man German patrol a kilometre from their position and had worried that gunfire would alert them, had the attack not gone to plan. The hardest part was over; his men had made it look easy.
He strode to the centre of the tracks and greeted Jean and Adrien, the two Frenchmen who had been seconded by the Germans to guard the area. “It’s almost too easy when they use Resistance fighters to guard their train tracks. When will they ever learn?” he chuckled, shaking their hands.
“You’re late, Florent,” said Jean, a short, stocky little man with a tonsured pate.
“We came across a patrol
not far from here,” Duguay responded, gesturing to the woods from whence they’d come. “They were going in the opposite direction, but we had to wait until we were certain they wouldn’t double back.”
Duguay rummaged through his rucksack for the required materials. He took out a block of explosif plastique, put it in a napkin and handed it to Jean. “Hold this. Be careful, Jean. I don’t know how stable it is.”
“It smells like nuts,” said Jean, sniffing it.
“Almonds, to be exact.”
“Is this enough to do the job?”
“It’s probably too much.” Duguay took out another lump and turned it in his hand. “This won’t just derail the train, it will blow the tanks and heavy weaponry to smithereens.”
“If it’s as good as they say it is,” said Jean, looking sceptically at the green lump.
Claude and Pierre returned to Duguay once they had rolled the dead German soldiers to the bottom of the hill. They’d left the bodies concealed in bushes but had also taken their side pistols and knives.
“Waste not, want not,” Claude said, putting the pistols and knives in their rucksacks. “How long until the train comes, Florent?”
“About ten minutes by my calculations.”
Duguay ordered Jean, Adrien, and Pierre, who’d arrived with Claude, to descend to the bottom of the hill. The treeline to their left would be their cover. As soon as they saw Duguay and Claude running down the hill after igniting the fuses, they were to retreat further into the woods and wait. Duguay, although confident, wasn’t sure how large the blast would be or how much damage it would cause.
After setting the thick, green, plasticine-like devices on two different spots on the tracks, Duguay inserted fuse wires and then backed away until the two metre wires were taut. Timing was everything. He’d estimated by the length of the wires how long it would take for the explosives to ignite from the moment they lit the fuses to the spark reaching the detonation points. His hope was that the blasts would occur about two seconds after the driver’s carriage had passed the hot spot. He wanted the brunt of the explosion to hit the carriages carrying the tanks, heavy weaponry, and soldiers, sparing the driver and stokers at the front of the train; he never wanted to kill Frenchmen or women during their missions. The Germans murdered enough innocent people, and the British heavy-handed airstrikes caused horrific collateral damage.
Claude and Duguay lay once more on their bellies just below the tracks, their heads raised slightly so they could peep over the crest of the hill. Both held the ends of the fuse wires in one hand and their Zippo lighters in the other. Duguay also had a box of matches in his pocket just in case the unthinkable happened and the lighters didn’t work.
Duguay stared long and hard down the length of the empty tracks until they were shrouded in darkness. This was the first time he had used explosif plastique for an operation, and he was unnerved by its mysteries. He had acquired the sophisticated materials from Romek via Darek. Romek, worried about being captured, had passed on the location of an abandoned hut in the forest close to the toy factory. According to the Pole, a weapons cache lay hidden under the floorboards; a gift from Romek to Duguay in the event of Romek’s group being overrun by the Germans. After Romek’s premonition had come to pass, and he and his thirty-odd fighters had been imprisoned, Darek had offered to take Duguay to the hut. Duguay had refused the generous gesture. “You were Romek’s man, and the Gestapo are probably looking for you, too. You’re a liability,” he’d told the Pole. Two nights later, he had sent his own men to the abandoned hut, and they had successfully retrieved the weapons and materials. They had got the explosives just in time for this operation.
The sound of the steam train chugging down the track reached them just before the two men saw its lights. Duguay had calculated its speed beforehand based on previous surveillance of carriages carrying similar loads, but he’d been reminding himself all day that this attack was against no ordinary train. It was, according to his spies at the train depot, unlike anything the Resistance had seen so far; a mobile iron fortress hauling Panzerkampfwagen III, the lethal Tiger Tanks, anti-tank rocket launchers, crates of MG-34 Machine Guns, and thousands of small arms.
The two lumps of green plasticine began to tremble as the tracks vibrated with the oncoming train. One explosif plastique would probably be enough to do the job, Duguay thought again, but two lumps would impress upon the Germans that the Resistance not only had the means, but also the sophisticated weaponry to do real damage.
“If this stuff is as effective as I’ve been led to believe, I’ll have wasted a full lump of it,” Duguay mused aloud to Claude.
“And if it’s not, you’ll be glad you used two instead of one.
“I suppose – right, this is it. As soon as you light that fuse, get down the hill and behind the treeline. Don’t wait for me.”
At Duguay’s nod, they each lit the ends of the wires, watching the sparks snake up their lengths for only a couple of seconds before they both ran for their lives.
From the bottom of the hill, Duguay saw the train coming closer – one hundred metres, then fifty. Mesmerised, he watched for a second longer until a massive explosion of metal and wood erupted into towering flames as the front of the train passed the spot where the explosif had been placed.
From inside the coppice, the men held their breaths as a scene from hell unfolded. Four carriages seemed to rise off the ground before toppling over, one after the other, onto their sides then rolling down the hill. Tanks, rocket launchers, and the soldiers who’d been on the roofs guarding the train were smashed to a smouldering pulp in the flying rubble. The night sky blazed red, while the cacophony of exploding ammunition battered the men’s eardrums and the smell of cordite and burning flesh assaulted them. The ground shook beneath their feet, and as the destruction spread in what was like a surreal, slow-motion film, Duguay felt the exhilaration of victory rippling through him like raw power in his mind. This was but a miniscule win over a gargantuan enemy, but he felt as though he had single-handedly won the war.
The German soldiers who had been in the back carriage had been spared the devastation at the front. They appeared through the curtain of smoke, many injured, stumbling in the darkness, some rolling like boulders down the hillside. Men stood frozen to the spot as the thick grey smoke and white-hot flames still shooting skywards from the mangled train blocked their escape routes. They were defeated, devastated.
Duguay joined his fighters and grinned. “Those soldiers will eventually come after us when they regroup. Get to the van as fast as you can. We can bask in glory when we get back to the farm.”
The din of destruction receded only slightly as they ran through the trees. Further explosions, presumably caused by more ammunition igniting, shook the bare tree branches. Even as he fled, Duguay maintained his grin. The damage had been even greater than he’d anticipated and would be more crushing to German morale than he’d dared hope.
There would be reprisals.
Out of breath, Duguay waited for his four men to catch up before stepping cautiously out of the treeline and onto the narrow lane where Claude’s Post Office van had been parked. They were one kilometre from their mission objective, and the men were jubilant.
Claude slid open the van’s side door, and had his hand on the driver’s door handle as the first shots rang out from further down the lane.
Adrien was killed instantly by a shot to the head. Pierre had been getting into the van when he was shot in the leg. He fell backwards onto his back, howling in agony beside Duguay and Jean. “Get him in the van!” yelled Duguay, as he stepped in front of the injured Pierre.
Crouched at the rear end of the vehicle, Duguay saw a group of German soldiers running towards them; the patrol they’d spotted on their way to the railway tracks. They were about fifty metres from the van and had obviously been just as surprised to see the Resistance fighters as Duguay and his men had been to see the patrol.
Chaos ensued, with both sides firing
haphazardly at each other from exposed positions. The Germans fired their rifles as they ran. One of their number was hit and dropped like a stone, then Jean hit another. The Germans were unprotected, and with no reasonable chance of advancing further without being shot at, they went to ground.
Duguay gave Claude cover fire while he jumped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. The injured Pierre was already in the back and had been joined by Jean after Duguay had told him to go. Standing flush against the side of the van, Duguay was unable to move backwards or forwards. Trapped by German fire, he dug into his breast pocket and took out his weapon of last resort. He pulled the pin and lobbed his grenade as far as he could. In the ensuing explosion, he hauled himself into the passenger seat beside Claude.
“Go! Go!” he shrieked.
“That was far too close,” Claude yelled, the tyres screeching as he lead-footed the pedal.
Duguay suddenly became aware of blood running down his sleeve. “Merde. I’ve been hit – bastards nicked me.” He turned his head as far as he could and called over his shoulder, “How is Pierre?”
“I’ll live,” Pierre croaked.
Twenty minutes later, they arrived at the farmhouse. Two men carried Pierre to a downstairs bedroom while Duguay headed to the kitchen. There, he went for the brandy, glugging it straight from the bottle before stripping off his sodden jacket and pouring some into his wound.
“Stay here. I’ll get the doctor to look at you both,” said Claude, heading for the door.
“We’ve scored a victory tonight,” Duguay said, wincing. “Tell the doctor to see to Pierre first. He can take the bullet out of my shoulder when he’s finished.”
Chapter Eight
Max Vogel
Paris, France
November 1941
The Lizzie landed on a grass airstrip just south of Dieppe. The pilot did a one hundred and eighty-degree turn, stopped, but didn’t cut the engine while Max and the crates were unloaded. Then, the hatch was closed and within a couple of minutes it took to the sky again.
