by Jana Petken
In the spring of last year, Finland and Germany came to an understanding that Finland would assist Germany in any war against the Soviet Union,” von Kühn began. “Because of those discussions, eighty-thousand German troops crossed from Norway into Finland at Petsamo – here. Now, although most of our troops are in northern Finland in the Lapland area, we also have units concentrated on the Finnish side of the Mannerheim Line. These units, along with the Finnish forces, were instrumental in holding back the Russian Army’s most recent attack on the Karelian Isthmus. As successful as they were, however, German and Finnish troops are in dire need of more combat-hardened men. The Finns have so far lost about twenty-five thousand men to the Russians on the lines, hence our ongoing support – do you both understand how vital it is that you remain here?”
The Major oozed enthusiasm, seemingly unaware of his audience’s dismay. “You are both going to be based in Viipuri, but you can expect to join the front lines for reconnaissance duties when required. Look.” Von Kühn drew his finger down a black line on the map. “The 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. The area around Summa is the most heavily fortified because it has proved to be the most vulnerable to attack.”
He paused, then raised his head. “You’ll find that both Finnish and Soviet propaganda have considerably exaggerated the extent of the line’s fortifications. Don’t get me wrong, the Finnish troops did a marvellous job turning the pristine landscape around the line into a charnel house for the unprepared, underfed, and initially overwhelmed Soviet troops. They used its myth to improve national morale, and our spies are reporting that the Russians are overstating its strength as the reason for their troops’ slow progress against Finnish defences.”
The Major shrugged. “The truth is, the majority of the Mannerheim Line is nothing like the French Maginot Line or others like it, with huge bunkers and lines of dragon’s teeth. The Finns have built defensive positions using the natural terrain, like fallen trees and boulders, but with some success, I might add.”
“Are there no bunkers, sir?” asked Wilmot who was enjoying the easy conversation with the Major despite the bitter news he and Haupt were receiving in drips and drabs.
“Yes, but the bunkers along this line are mostly small and thinly spread out and they have hardly any artillery…”
“We’re not getting leave in Germany, Willie. It’s all been for nothing,” Haupt uttered, his watery eyes round.
The Major, annoyed at being interrupted in full flow, gave a sharp rebuke. “I understand this is not what you wanted to hear, Hauptmann, but as I said, we’re stretched thinly on the ground. The war is lasting longer than we anticipated, and it seems this country is short of manpower. Many of Finland’s older generation of soldiers have already been released from active service to return to farming and industry and such like, and I need all the men I can get my hands on.” He stared at Haupt, daring him to argue. “I assure you, Viipuri will be a much more comfortable base compared to the Leningrad suburbs or anywhere else in Russia.”
“Thank you, sir,” Haupt said.
“Thank you, sir,” said Wilmot, wondering if he’d live to see the day his Iron Cross got pinned on him.
Chapter Fifty-Two
A Finnish soldier with a pack reindeer struggling on slippery ice passed Wilmot, Haupt, and their German guide as they neared Viipuri’s military barracks. Two Finnish tanks marked with swastikas stood on the corner of the busy street, and next to them, a mechanic was doing something or other to a propeller-driven snowmobile. It was a bustling, albeit damaged city that had opened its gates to hundreds of Finnish refugees from the surrounding provinces.
The ground was covered in slush and snow, and Wilmot, shading his eyes with his hands in the blinding white light, peered at four separate wooden fences running parallel to each other along the length of the thoroughfare. He trudged on in his snug new boots while observing people standing within the lanes between the fencing. As he got closer to the area, he saw that they were not fences at all, but rows of wooden grave markers.
“This is a hell of a strange place to put a graveyard. Who are they for?” Wilmot asked their Schütze escort.
“They’re memorials. The people here call them the graves of the Cathedral’s heroes. The Finns recaptured the city from the Russkies in August last year, and during the battle the Finnish locals took the area surrounding the church. They maintained that the enemy wanted to destroy it, but personally, I think it’s Finnish propaganda. I was here, and I can assure you, the Russian forces didn’t seem interested in destroying the buildings. They wanted the city, not its ruins.”
The Schütze paused, then said in a softer voice, “If any army was burning places, it was the Finns themselves. They didn’t want to leave anything intact for the Russians.” He shrugged. “Ach, what does it matter? Every city needs inspirational heroes. Let the Finns believe what they want to believe.”
“This might not be as bad as we think, Haupt,” Wilmot said, eyeing a bar on the other side of the busy road. “That place is open – and look, there’s a restaurant – I’m not saying it will have food in it, but you must admit, this is the most civilised place we’ve been in for over a year.”
Haupt didn’t respond.
Wilmot asked the Schütze, “What’s your name?”
“Otto Krause. Yours?”
“I’m Willie Vogel.”
“And yours, Herr Hauptmann?” Otto shot a sideways glance at Haupt but didn’t get an answer.
Who would want to talk to Haupt today with his face like a bull dog, and him grunting and groaning every time he opened his mouth? He was distraught about not getting leave to see his wife and family, but he’d been in the army long enough to know that leave was a luxury very few soldiers got.
“What do the likes of us Germans do around here?” Wilmot asked the much-friendlier Otto.
“Not much. We play cards, drink beer when we’re off duty, go to a dance they hold on a Thursday night, and watch the football matches they put on every couple of weeks or so between us and the Finns.”
“Did you hear that, Haupt? They’ve got a dance on once a week,” but Wilmot was met with a stony, disinterested glare.
“There are some nice women here, but they’re stuck up,” Otto continued. “The Finns don’t seem to like us very much. I don’t know why, considering we’re allies and have their backs.”
“Is there still fighting in the city?”
“Not much … nothing to speak of. No, nothing since last August. I’m in awe of how these Finns tackled the Soviets. I spent time at the Mannerheim front last winter. The Soviet riflemen kept coming at us, but they were like a bunch of suicidal nitwits the way they floundered through the deep snow in sub-zero temperatures. Half of them froze to death before they even fired a shot.” He grinned. “Half might be a bit of an exaggeration, but imagine, Willie, the Finns and Germans being outnumbered ten to one and still managing to push the Soviets back.
“The Russian tanks and their crews took a hammering from us as well. We were lobbing Molotov cocktails at them, one after the other, non-stop. I don’t know what Herr Major told you, but we don’t have nearly enough weaponry on the Mannerheim, even after taking what we’ve captured from the Russkies. I suppose taking down the Russian bear is too expensive for the little Arctic fox, so they use what they have on hand.” He chuckled, “Some people call that incendiary device a poor man’s grenade, but Molly worked like a charm for us. I loved tossing those and watching the Russkies erupt in flames. Ach, well, at least we were keeping the enemy warm.”
Otto then took another quick look around to see if anyone was listening. “The Finns love a good story. The latest myth is that Soviet paratroopers are so desperate to get across our lines, they’re jumping from airplanes without parachutes, hoping that a snowbank will cushion their fall. Some Finnish soldiers believe it’s true … stupid buggers.”
The barrac
ks used by the Finnish Army in Viipuri looked more like two expensive residential buildings, with elaborate entrances and wrought-iron balconies on some of the previously privately-owned apartments.
Wilmot and Haupt separated when they reached the front of a smart burgundy-coloured building that housed officers and command offices.
“We don’t report until tomorrow. Do you want to see the sights tonight?” Wilmot asked Haupt. “We could maybe have dinner? They gave us money, and it’s been a long time since we did anything like that.”
“No, I’ll be mixing with other officers now, Schütze Vogel. You know the Wehrmacht loves its protocols. Goodbye. Have a good evening.”
Wilmot’s chin dropped as Haupt walked away. “I suppose I should have expected that. Seems he’s already forgotten everything we’ve been through together,” he mumbled to Otto.
Wilmot’s dormitory housed thirty men. Fifteen beds on opposite sides of the long room had lockers at each side, and an ablutions hall through the door at the far end. When Wilmot was shown his bunk, he realised he had nothing to put in his locker, not so much as a tin of toothpaste powder or shaving soap.
“I’ll go with you to a restaurant if you want, Willie, and I’ll tell a couple of my friends you’re coming? We want to hear your stories. You and Herr Hauptmann are famous,” Otto said.
Wilmot looked longingly at his bunk: the blankets, a pillow and the window shutters behind it keeping out the light. It was now midday, the dormitory was empty apart from two men asleep on their bunks, and Wilmot was desperate to remove his boots and free his feet. He was also physically exhausted, proving what he already knew to be true; he was still very weak and unprepared for duty.
Otto, waiting for an answer to his invitation said, “You’ll enjoy it.”
“All right, Otto. I’m going to have a sleep right now, but how about I meet you downstairs at seven o’clock this evening.”
Rough hands were dragging Wilmot along the ground. He tried to fight his assailant off but was struck on the side of his head with a pistol butt. He was going to be executed. The pile of German soldiers lay on the ground beside the train tracks and he was about to join them. Gripped by insurmountable terror, he screamed at the top of his lungs and was struck again…
“… Willie, wake up …. Willie, open your eyes!”
Wilmot’s eyes flew open. He gasped and swallowed air as if he’d been drowning. Where was he? “What is it … what’s going on?”
Otto’s ashen face looked down at Wilmot, his lower lip trembling.
“What is it?” Wilmot sat up.
“You have to come with me to the officer’s block.”
“Why?”
“It’s your Hauptmann – you’ve been ordered to come – right now, Willie.”
When he reached the officer’s building, Wilmot was escorted to the first floor by a Gestapo Kriminalinspektor. The man said nothing as they walked up the stairs, and he remained silent even as he ushered Wilmot into a sparsely-furnished room.
Wilmot was met by a stern-faced Oberarzt – the doctor, two orderlies, and a stretcher standing upright against the wall. Without words being uttered, with no body or blood to look at, Wilmot instinctively knew the reason for his presence; Haupt was in trouble. “Where is he, sir?” he asked the Oberarzt.
“Come with me.”
In the corridor, Wilmot saw a growing number of officers congregating outside the ablutions-hall. “Go back to your quarters. You will be questioned later,” the Inspektor barked at the men.
Wilmot was taken to a row of toilet stalls. He halted halfway along, looked down and saw a crimson lake beneath his boots. His mind went blank, forgetting every other person around him, as he fell to his knees in an ever-widening pool of blood surrounding his friend.
Haupt lay on the floor with his long legs inside the toilet stall and his torso in the passageway. Deep gashes ran from both wrists up the inside of his forearms to his elbows. His body was soaked in a blanket of dark blood. Some had run off him like a river to a grate in the floor. Wilmot, on his knees, shuffled closer to Haupt, saturating his new uniform trousers in blood as he slid across the tiles.
In one of Haupt’s open palms sat a single, bloodied razor blade, and in the other a picture of his wife and children.
Wilmot wept like a baby. Then he slumped with his back against the wall, stroking Haupt’s head and sobbing, “Stupid bugger … why … what did you have to do that for, Haupt … Haupt … why?”
The Inspektor pulled Wilmot to his feet. “Hold yourself together, man.” He held a bloodied note inches from Wilmot’s tearstained face. “Do you know what this means?”
Wilmot couldn’t read a word. His eyes were blurred with tears, his thoughts chasing the past then broken by the present. Haupt jumping fearlessly out of the train’s window and falling face first in the snow. His stories about his children on nights when they huddled together like lovers. The prayer he’d said at Jürgen’s pathetic burial site where his semi-naked body lay bare to the elements because they couldn’t dig a hole. His shame when he’d opened-up about his time in the SS Einsatzgruppen death squads – and his bloodied face as he ate raw wolf like a ravenous caveman.
A strange thought popped uninvited into Wilmot’s mind. Haupt could have hung himself or put a bullet in his head, but instead he’d drained his body of blood. Had he wanted to make a statement; an apology for the innocent blood he’d spilled? Or was slitting his wrists an act of rage against Viipuri’s German Command? Wipe away my blood. This is your fault. All this blood. Haupt’s face turning grey – blue lips – eyes with misty pupils staring at nothing…
“Answer me, Schütze Vogel – what does it mean – the note?”
Wilmot shook his head and looked at the stained piece of paper:
No medal. My men.
“Well? Does that note explain to you why Hauptmann Albrecht might have taken his own life?”
Wilmot stared at the words, and another memory surfaced. One night in the forest, Haupt had wept and prayed for forgiveness for leaving the men behind on the train. He had cursed himself for cowardice and for deserting the soldiers in his charge. In the darkness, he had aired the self-disgust he’d previously hidden so well – was that dereliction of duty? If it had been in Haupt’s mind, was it enough to make him commit suicide? Or was it the disappointment at not being able to go home that had tipped him over the edge? Probably the latter.
Wilmot studied Haupt’s clean shaven, peaceful face, as he searched for answers. Nothing came to him but his own growing anger and disgust, but to appease the Inspektor, he said, “I’m betting it was because of the guilt he felt for leaving our fellow prisoners on the train. As I told Herr Major this morning, we tried to convince them to come with us, but in a wagon carrying almost ninety men, only a handful, including Haupt and I, were willing to jump out of the window. And of that handful, I think some were shot in the back as they ran, two we never met up with in the forest, and one died. Or, you know what, maybe he hated himself for being in the Nazi death squads that roamed the Baltics and Russia executing Jewish men, women and children.”
“Are you saying that Hauptmann Albrecht committed suicide because he escaped, and his men didn’t? Is that why his note says no medal?” the Inspektor asked, ignoring Wilmot’s mention of Haupt’s job as a Jew killer.
Wilmot’s eyes welled up as his loss became evermore real. “Haupt was a deeply private man who rarely complained about the freezing cold, or our starvation. He made jokes when we were at our lowest ebb and ate a wolf when its body was still warm. He didn’t talk much about himself apart from his desire to go home. How am I supposed to know why he ended his life?”
“You will do your duty and think harder,” the Kriminalinspektor snapped.
Wilmot, angry, in part on Haupt’s behalf, faced the cold-blooded men looking for clinical answers when he had none to give. The Inspektor and everyone standing around him were ignorant pigs.
“Do my duty? Look at me … look at me!
Do I look like a soldier who’s fit for battle or for any other sort of duty? I can’t walk half a kilometre without having to lie down afterwards. I have nightmares about my days in captivity that are so real I think I’m still living them. Sometimes, I can’t even think straight enough to put one foot in front of another. I was tortured in body and mind and starved to the point where I dreamt of eating my fellow prisoners!”
Wilmot’s temper, kept in check for so long under the Russian yoke, exploded out of him now. “Every minute of every day, I thought I was going to be sliced open. Do you know the Russians have a game? It’s called … who shall we kill today? Do you know what’s it’s like to think you’re going to be next to get a bullet in the head, or your throat slashed for the Russians’ amusement? Or how much effort it took just to stay alive in the freezing cold? Or what it feels like to watch a comrade fall dead at your feet, and other men walking over the body as though he were a bump in the road? No, you don’t. You know fuck all!”
Wilmot’s heart was breaking. He covered his face with his trembling hands, soaked with Haupt’s blood, and sobbed, “Hauptmann Albrecht needed his wife’s loving arms and a few days of good food and his own bed, that’s all he wanted … the dream that kept him alive … all he needed to get back on his feet. But he didn’t get it, did he? No. He got another front line because you lot don’t give a shit about anything or anyone apart from your beloved Führer and his vision for the world. You’re a disgrace, leaving him lying here like a piece of meat, asking for reasons so you can complete your paperwork. He’s worth ten of you – all of you!”
He staggered, swaying with exhaustion in the now silent ablutions hall. Outside in the corridor, curious officers murmured amongst themselves. Wilmot went to the door and let loose again. “This is what you get for fighting for the Fatherland. This is all the thanks you can hope to receive!”
