by Jana Petken
He lodged a long, sturdy branch into the ground and packed snow around it. When it stood erect, only a couple of centimetres from the wall, he hung Jürgen’s coat on it. The top of the coat rested a few centimetres above his head and was jammed between the wall and the thick branch, and in his scrunched-up position, its bulk shrouded him completely.
Despite the gales, Jürgen’s headscarf and hats were still in place. He removed his neck scarf, however, to wear it like a mask, tying it in a knot at the back of his head. He then pulled the edge of the coat a couple of centimetres away from the wall, lest he not be able to breathe later because of the weight of snow on it. The scarf protected his face, but able to respire through it, he instantly felt the air hitting him through the tiny gap he’d made. Finally, he pulled one of the woollen hat rims over his eyes. He wasn’t going to end up like Jürgen without an eyelid.
He couldn’t feel his toes. They no longer seemed to belong to him; it was strange losing sensation in parts of one’s body. He couldn’t feel his genitals either. He was probably going to lose his prick. He’d seen some unforgettable sights; a man screaming when he lost one of his bollocks, another giggling hysterically when he scratched his ear and the blackened lobe fell off. His name had been Kurt, like the Vogels’ driver, Kurt – he missed his Kurt. He’d always been a good listener, better than Max or Paul – and as for poor earless Kurt; a Russian guard had shot him in the head to shut him up.
Wilmot had given in to the idea of having to piss himself where he lay; not that he was pissing much lately. He’d not had one all day, despite his damned bladder being full of icy water. Before long, he’d feel uncomfortable, but it wasn’t the first time he’d sheltered like this, and he was used to cramped muscles. On the upside, he felt warmer, and he was beginning to believe he might survive this after all.
The noise was deafening: violent winds and creaking, snapping tree branches. He supposed that as the snow piled up on top of him, the noises would fade, but that comfort forced him to think again about being in danger of suffocation. Determined to maintain the flow of air, he ran his finger down the length of the narrow gap between the wall and edge of the coat and flicked the snow away. “You’ll breathe Willie … you will … as long as you keep your air tunnel clear, you’ll be all right.”
He was desperate for sleep but terrified that if he dozed off, he might never wake up. What of Haupt, was he all right? Guilt struck Wilmot, but only for a moment. The last time he’d seen his captain, he’d been more like a rabid dog than a soldier – not a sight he’d get out of his head in a hurry. He’d tried – begged Haupt to bring the animal to the clearing with them, but Haupt wasn’t having any of it, couldn’t seem to grasp that another hour without food wouldn’t kill them, but the blizzard would.
He muttered under the coat, “You’re a stupid bugger, Haupt.” He’d behaved like a bloody savage, ripping the wolf’s flesh from its bones through the hole in the fur he’d made with his teeth, and filling his mouth with fur and blood and flesh without so much as a grimace. He was probably dead now, his mouth stuffed with paws.
Wilmot was heartened; he felt warmer, he really did. Again, he cleared the snow away from the narrow gap directly in front of his mouth and nose. Then he removed one of his mittens and fully extended his middle finger into the frigid air. He sneered then screamed, “Fuck you, Mother Russia!”
******
The thought of suffocating had kept Wilmot from falling asleep. Every time he’d closed his eyes and begun to drift off, he’d caught himself and repeatedly shifted snow away from his tiny window. He was in excruciating pain. Unable to move for fear of dislodging the snow and blocking his life-giving air tunnel, he remained in his cramped position, moving only his mouth to curse God and the Third Reich. He had no idea how long he’d been there, but he thought that the worst of the storm might have passed.
After drifting off for the umpteenth time, he felt a sudden rumbling on the surface. He panicked as the full weight of the coat collapsed on him and snow bled into his shelter. He tried to scream, a pointless act, but an instinctual one from a man who thought he was dying. He opened his mouth and inhaled, sucking in powdery snow that blocked his throat. He pissed himself, something he hadn’t done since first getting into his shelter. The hot urine warming his thighs was almost pleasant. Then without warning, a glimmer of white sky appeared along with Haupt’s face peering down at him.
“Good God, Willie, you’re alive. Jesus … I thought I’d lost you.” Haupt gripped Wilmot’s hands and pulled him out of his snowy grave.
Wilmot spat the snow from his mouth and gasped for air, wheezing loudly as he inhaled. He stretched his back, bent at the middle, then flexed his arms and legs. He couldn’t believe they were still attached and working. It took a while, but eventually he pulled the scarf off his nose and mouth and croaked, “How are you alive? How are we alive?”
“I’m alive because I’m a clever sod. You, I don’t know. I thought you were a goner. I saw the mound of snow and got ready to uncover a dead body. You’re a lucky man, Willie Vogel.”
“I might say the same about you. I left you in a blizzard gnawing at wolfy like a bloody caveman. I thought you’d lost your mind.”
“I think I did for a while. It was disgusting, but that wolf probably saved my life. I felt heat running through my body, the likes of which I haven’t felt for weeks. I threw up most of what I’d eaten, mind you, but it brought me to my senses.”
Haupt glared again at Wilmot. “I was furious when I saw you’d stripped Jürgen of his clothes. You could have shared something with me before you ran off.”
“I would have, but I was scared you were going to take a bite out of me,” Willie retorted, but then smiled. “How did you shelter from the gale?”
“When I finished eating, I pulled poor Jürgen over my legs, then I lay on my side against the tree and covered the rest of me with the wolf’s body. I managed to get my hands and arms inside the wolf’s belly through the hole in its coat – I broke a tooth eating that thing, but nuzzling my face into its fur was marvellous, despite the stench.”
Wilmot grimaced at the thought of Haupt’s nose being that close to the wolf’s innards. “You survived. That’s all that matters.”
“No thanks to you,” Haupt spat back.
Wilmot looked at the piles of snow surrounding him and then sheepishly at Haupt. “We can debate who was right and who was wrong another time, but I do want to say thank you for pulling me out of there. You’re one tough bastard. I suppose you had to be in the Einsatzgruppen … you know, killing all those dangerous Jews and what-not.”
Haupt was sitting on the snow beside Wilmot, studying him with red-rimmed eyes. But at the mention of his former job, they narrowed to angry slits. “Get up, Vogel. We need to make a move. You won’t have noticed our surroundings yet, but we’re no longer in the forest. We’re going to be out in the open from now on.”
Wilmot vowed to himself never to mention the SS death squads again, as he stood to take in the landscape before him. The air was clear, and the sky boasted some blue patches. The snow had stopped falling for the moment, allowing him to see hundreds of metres of plains before him.
“Not a tree or house in sight,” he muttered.
“That could be good news or bad news,” Haupt said. “The bad news is that we don’t know where we are, but the good news is I’ve left you half a wolf. What do you say we gather some kindling? You were in the Hitler Youth, Willie. You can light a fire with stones and whatever, can’t you? Let’s cook us a wolf stew.”
Willie’s morbid thoughts of what lay ahead dissolved with the thought of eating cooked meat. They’d not even attempted to light a fire before for fear of being spotted by enemy soldiers, bears, or wolf packs. “I can try. I suppose I could use dry fur and pine cones for kindling and sticks for friction – whether I’ll have the strength to make it is another matter – I’m knackered, Haupt.” Then he thought about their dead friend and dismissed his self-pity.
“We should bury Jürgen first.”
“We’ll cover him in snow. That’s all we can do.”
Wilmot stood, stretched his muscles again, and looked around him. “I agree. We need to eat and move forward. I’m more determined than ever. Not many people survive these forests, but we did. We beat them, Haupt. And we’re going to make it to the Finns, even if our cocks fall off on the way.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight.
During the next few days, Wilmot and Haupt managed to maintain a decent pace. Each night, they constructed a crude snow cave and used each other’s body heat for warmth when the temperatures were at their lowest. Helped by the flat terrain and plentiful snow, the shelters had become sturdier, and for the first time in months, they managed to sleep more than an hour at a time.
Along the way, they’d eaten most of the wolf’s flesh and disposed of its bones. The meat had remained fresh because of the freezing conditions, although the cuts were not as good as they’d been when there was more flesh to dig into. Wilmot had also speared a couple of lemmings that he’d found when he dug into the snow in what must have been a rest burrow. Both Wilmot and the lemmings were surprised, but Wilmot’s speedy reactions had caught two, and he’d eventually managed to light a fire to cook them.
The bad news for the men, however, was that they only had enough wolf meat left for one final meal, and in this flat, almost treeless expanse, they’d not found any berries or mushrooms to bolster their diet. Still, as Haupt had reminded Wilmot that morning, the beast had taken Jürgen’s life, but it had given them theirs. The boy was a hero in his mind, and they wouldn’t let him down by dying.
They had eaten every piece of skin, flesh and organs apart from the bitter gall bladder, and had even gnawed on paws and ears, leaving nothing of the wolf but dry bones. Their attempt at skinning the animal had been easier than they’d imagined, but because of Haupt’s initial ravaging, no piece had been whole enough to make a decent shawl or head covering. Nonetheless, the men had not discarded even the smallest fragment of fur, instead, they’d used them to cover their most delicate parts and had instantly felt the benefit, especially on and around their backsides and genitalia.
Wilmot was in higher spirits than he had been before the wolf attack. It was depressing to consider what might happen in the days to come so he and Haupt had made a pact to only discuss the present and past. Straight after the blizzard, they’d experienced an eerie stillness, but they were now moving into lighter snowfalls and a friendlier landscape. Two nights earlier, they’d also made a breakthrough regarding their route when they’d spotted the North Star in a clear night sky. They were getting closer every day, a little nearer to salvation, or equally, to a Russian bullet.
Five days after losing Jürgen to the wolf or the cold – they’d never determined which had killed him – the men came across a dilapidated wooden house close to a coppice of trees. It was the first house they’d seen since the day they’d got on the prisoner train. Wilmot was excited, desperate to get under any semblance of a roof, but Haupt elected to err on the side of caution before approaching the structure.
“We’ll watch it for a while, just in case it’s still being used,” Haupt insisted.
“Does it look lived-in to you?” Willie asked, his voice laced with sarcasm.
“It’s still standing, isn’t it?” Haupt grumbled, as he lay on his stomach. “Get down here, Willie. That’s an order.”
Willie flinched but did as he was told. Since the day of their escape, Haupt had never once pulled rank or given an order; on the contrary, he’d seemed happy to follow rather than lead.
“Can we get up now?” Willie asked after a few minutes. “I’m freezing like a bloody statue here – come on, Haupt, no one is in there.”
Haupt nodded, got cautiously to his feet, and did a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree scan of the area. Then the two men ploughed through the snow towards the house.
Inside, they saw that the single-storey building wasn’t as derelict as they’d first thought. Two rooms at the back of it were intact, as was the kitchen with a door leading to the back garden. In the bedroom, one window still had half of its glass intact. Against the back wall was an iron-framed bedstead with a torn straw-filled mattress on it.
“I feel as though I’m in heaven!” Willie shouted to Haupt, who was in another room.
“Come and see this!” Haupt yelled back.
Willie stood beside Haupt and gazed in awe at a Russian bomber lying on its side only thirty or so metres from the house. But an even more glorious sight was the barbed wire entanglements strewn across the fields behind the downed aircraft.
“If this plane was shot down by the Finns, we must be getting close to the Mannerheim Line,” Wilmot said. “Those entanglements are purely defensive. I think we should try to cut our way through them. That’s the border with Finland, Haupt.”
“Wait a minute, Willie. Before you do summersaults, we’ve got to assume that if it were that easy to cut through the barbed wire, the Russians would have already done it. The whole area’s probably one big minefield, and we’re more likely to bump into a Russian unit than a Finnish one. Back in Leningrad, there was talk of us eventually coming at the Russians from both sides. The idea was simple, on paper. The Finns would hold their position north of the line and we’d sweep through Leningrad and hem the Russkies in at the southern edge – what if we actually did it?”
Willie, still staring at the aeroplane, sniggered. “Don’t make me laugh. We couldn’t even take Leningrad, never mind surge north to the Russian-Finnish front lines. Come to think of it, you and I have got further than the German army ever did.”
Haupt rubbed his chin, his eyes peeled on the vista outside. “The questions now are, how far are we from Leningrad and where are the two armies positioned today?”
“They’re easy. Should we take our chances with this potential minefield or find another route?”
Wilmot frowned. It was a miracle that they’d not once come across Russian units on their journey, nor seen many dead bodies, destroyed and discarded heavy weaponry, or tanks. “I don’t think the Russians have advanced this far up the Isthmus. We took the perfect route without even trying.”
Haupt ran his fingers through his scraggly black beard. He and Wilmot looked like brothers with the same dark, curly hair reaching their collars and half their faces concealed with beards that were well past their chins. Only their eyes differed in colour and shape, Wilmot’s being the darker of the two.
As though he hadn’t heard Wilmot, Haupt continued, “A Finnish officer was present at a staff meeting I attended with General von Leeb…”
“You met the general?”
“Yes, many times, but I’ll tell you about him another day. The Finnish officer had a map of their defensive lines, and they were discussed at length. The Karelian Isthmus is about a hundred and twenty kilometres wide. The Mannerheim line runs from the coast of the Gulf of Finland in the west, through Summa to the Vuoksi River and ends at Taipale in the east, and that’s supposed to be … I should say, reportedly, hundreds of kilometres long…”
“Is that why the Finns weren’t participating in the Leningrad siege?” Willie scowled. “I thought they were useless buggers, and to be honest, I didn’t see the point in having them on our side…”
“You see, that’s the problem with the lower ranks, Willie. You lot never see the point of anything because you’re not privy to classified information or the bigger picture, which in this case involves the Finns. You’ve no idea how much planning goes into every single advance, have you?”
Haupt shoved his hands in his pockets and continued to stare outside. “What you don’t know is that the Finnish Army halted its offensive thirty kilometres from the centre of Leningrad and then besieged the city by cutting its northern supply routes. They had no hope of advancing on Russian forces ten times their size. Their goal was to hold out long enough for us to help them, not the other way around.”
Willie, yearning for
the bed in the other room, asked, “So, what now?”
Haupt looked around the empty room. “Search the house for a map, plans, anything you see with writing on it.”
After a thorough search that yielded nothing but dirt and a couple of tin cups and plates, Willie went outside to fill the cups with snow. At first, the noises from within the coppice were faint and muffled: a twig snapped, shuffling feet, a horse snorted, and skis scraped icy patches. Wilmot tensed, dropped to the ground and scanned the trees – nothing – until the noises, unlike any he’d heard in weeks, grew louder.
He eyed the door, willing himself to get off his knees and make a run for it. His breath rasped the back of his throat, but as he started to rise his legs gave way.
He held his breath, still on the ground, unable to get to his feet. The sounds, now directly behind him, were clearer: skis swooshing across the snow, rifles clicking, horses’ hooves crunching the icy ground, and footsteps approaching left him in no doubt that he’d been spotted. He scrambled to his knees, raised his arms in the air and stared at the door of the cabin, praying that Haupt wouldn’t suddenly appear and get shot.
Any second, a bullet is going to hit me in the back of the head. Strange, Wilmot thought, he’d rather get a bullet than be captured again by the Russians.
Willie stared at the front door. It opened, and instead of Haupt a man wearing white bed linen as camouflage snow gear appeared. A rifle was slung over his shoulder, and most of his face was concealed by a balaclava. He stepped outside, then Haupt, grinning from ear to ear, appeared beside him in the doorway.
Wilmot, his mind still frozen in fear, remained on his knees.
