Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (novels to read .txt) 📕

of this godforsaken steppe had just become a work of art.

‘Magic.’ Nehmann was looking at the slicer. ‘Patent that thing and you’re right, you’ll make a fortune.’

‘I know. Something decent has to come out of this fucking war and I think I may have found it. Here’s to my slicer… prosit.’

They drank a toast. And then, at Messner’s insistence, another.

‘To survival,’ he said. ‘And the blessings of sliced egg.’

Messner wanted to know about Stalingrad and Nehmann did his best to do the ruined city justice. They’d both seen the kind of chaos that an army could bring to any location – hundreds of thousands of men all bent on destruction – but Stalingrad, said Nehmann, was in a league of its own. The Heinkels and the Stukas had levelled whole areas of the city, returning day after day to add a top dressing of incendiary bombs, while tanks and artillery, in the hands of craftsmen like Wilhelm Knaus, were finishing the job. Add the blessings of an early autumn, nights so cold you wouldn’t believe, and you were left with the makings of a gigantic tomb.

‘You live underground,’ Nehmann said. ‘You rarely see daylight because out there someone or something might kill you. The Russians have a word for it. Rasputitsa.I learned it from a Russian prisoner. The time of no roads. The time of shit and slush. The time of nothing. That’s Stalingrad. Rasputitsa.You’ve seen it from the air. That’s bad enough. For real, it’s even worse. We’ve been looking for a proper fight for a while. I’m afraid this is it.’

Messner wanted to know about Schultz. They’d finished the ham and eggs and were working their way through the rest of the vodka.

‘He’s my guardian angel.’ Nehmann pulled the greatcoat more tightly around him. ‘He keeps me safe.’

‘From who?’

Nehmann sat back. The SS truck, he knew from Helmut, had been parked only metres away from this tent. Messner must have known about it. He was Richthofen’s eyes and ears on the airfield. He knew everything.

‘There’s an SS man called Kalb,’ he said carefully. ‘A Standartenführer.’

‘I know Kalb.’

‘You do?’

‘Ja.’

‘And?’

‘He’s a monster. A sadist. The SS breed them. I dare say he’s a credit to that fucking uniform. We should have nothing to do with those people, nothing at all. No one loves you if you invade, if you steal their country, but the SS will be the end of us. One day the world will take a good look at what they’re up to and blame us. All of us.’

‘So what are they up to?’

‘You mean here? On this airfield?’

‘Yes.’

Messner looked briefly troubled. He toyed with his mug a moment, circling the rim with a single finger, then tossed the vodka down in a single gulp before reaching for the bottle.

‘He’s gone now,’ he said at last.

‘I know. He’s in Stalingrad. Schultz told me. You know about Kyiv? What happened in that ravine?’

‘No.’ Messner shook his head.

Nehmann described the killings at Babi Yar. More than thirty thousand Jews marched out of the city and despatched in a matter of days.

‘Open the window and Schultz says you could hear the gunfire in the hotel where he was working. Single shots. Machine guns. Thirty thousand bodies.’

‘And that was Kalb’s doing?’

‘He was part of it, yes.’

Messner’s head sank. He seemed to be brooding. Then he was on his feet and Nehmann watched him walk unsteadily across to his camp bed. Two blankets, carefully folded, lay at the foot of the bed. Messner lifted the toe of the thin mattress, revealing a service-issue envelope.

He returned to the table and gave it to Nehmann.

‘Twice daily after meals,’ he muttered. ‘These people are out of their cages now and we need to remind ourselves what they can do.’

There were a handful of photos in the envelope. Nehmann slid them out onto the table. The first showed what had once been a child’s face. The fleshy part of her nose had been crudely removed, probably with a bayonet, and the bone beneath was clearly visible. One eye socket was empty while a still-glistening orb hung on a tendril of white nerve tissue from the other. Her face, otherwise unmarked, made the image even more grotesque. Beautiful lips, still intact. And just a hint of perfect teeth.

Nehmann swallowed hard. Disgust was far too small a word. Anger was much closer. He looked at the next shot, and then the next, until he’d seen them all. Some faces were pulped beyond recognition, the work of a man with a rifle butt, and on another he could trace the imprint of a heavy boot. Finally, he pushed the photos away and sat back.

‘Kalb?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘You know that?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘He told me. This stuff was part of his job, he said, part of his duty. No one in his position was there to make life pretty.’

Messner explained the plan to drop these mutilated corpses in the Volga upstream from the city, and what had happened when Kalb’s demand for an aircraft reached Richthofen. The story, grim as it was, made Nehmann laugh.

‘No parachute?’

‘None. Word will get back to Berlin, of course. The Generaloberst made a fool of Kalb. That will be treason in their eyes. I dare say Himmler will have a shooting squad up his sleeve. Maybe he’ll bring one out here. Let’s hope so, eh? Then we can teach these bastards a lesson.’

Nehmann wanted to know about the cameraman from the Propaganda Company.

‘You mean Helmut?’ Messner asked.

‘Yes. He took those photos, and that made him a brave man. Schultz told me they cost him his life.’

Messner nodded. He said he’d done his best for Helmut, argued his case in front of Kalb, but the SS had already put a search team into the darkroom and found the prints.

‘They knew he’d been sniffing around the truck. They went through everything and found these. Next day they arrested him and put him on the plane. They had the evidence. They’d done their job. That’s the kind of people they are. Funny that,