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

the cold but their eyes. They’d kneel over the still-steaming entrails, hacking at the body, stealing away at the half-crouch, a foreleg or a haunch on each shoulder. At moments like these, Nehmann longed for a camera. This strange hiatus, this moment of frozen calm, had an almost biblical quality and in the long evenings he tried to do justice to it with words on paper.

Schultz read his work from time to time, puzzled by the intended readership.

‘You’re going to waste this stuff on Goebbels? You think that piece of shit will know what you’re trying to say?’

The answer, of course, was yes. Like it or not, the Minister of Propaganda was deeply cultured. He understood the impact of an arresting image or a well-turned phrase, but Schultz was right, as well, because the Reich had turned its collective back on the developing catastrophe in the east and didn’t want to be bothered with truths either large or small.

‘I’d be wasting their precious time,’ Nehmann admitted. ‘I’m here to write fiction.’

Next morning, after soundings around a tepid bowl of wheat and corn syrup porridge, Nehmann wrote a seven-hundred-word despatch about lice. He wanted, he said, to let the nation into one of Sixth Army’s more closely guarded secrets. Its real enemies weren’t the Ivans at all. It wasn’t even the cold, which was starting to make life a little difficult. It was lice, those tiny little presents from the devil.

Like the men themselves, lice loathed the weather. Lie in the snow all day, hunting for targets, and they’d never bother you. Come back in from the cold, with your reddened hands and your chattering teeth, and they’d wake up at once and make themselves known. In the words of a Feldwebel from Essen, they were like the Russians. Kill one, and ten more appear.

Another man, a machine-gunner from Koln, called them ‘the little partisans’. They lurked out of sight, he said, in the deepest seams of the warmest part of your clothing and then laid ambush to you when you were least expecting it. In reality, none of these men said anything of the sort, largely because Nehmann had invented them. The stories themselves were true but their authors had a deep mistrust of being quoted and only one, a slightly crazed former brewer from the Black Forest, was prepared to see his name in print. He had, he said, come up with a fool-proof antidote to the curse of the louse. ‘Read them anything by Goebbels,’ he told Nehmann, ‘and they’ll all die laughing.’

‘You’ll get the man killed.’ Schultz thought it was funny. ‘He survives a couple of months out here and then gets shot in Berlin for insubordination. How’s that for bad luck?’

‘I’ll change it,’ Nehmann promised. ‘Instead, he’ll read them last night’s orders.’

‘That’s worse. You think any of Paulus’s people have a sense of humour? They’ll shoot the poor bastard here.’

The story was flown out next morning in one of the special Promi envelopes marked Dringend.Urgent mail like this was still guaranteed to arrive in Berlin within thirty-six hours. While he awaited a reply, with battle yet to recommence in earnest, Nehmann did a piece on a trench dog whose admirers swore could tell the difference in engine note between Luftwaffe aircraft and the Soviet planes that were beginning to appear over the city in some numbers. The men in the trench had acquired the dog over a thousand kilometres ago, west of Kyiv, and it had been with them ever since. They fed it on a diet of viscera scraped from the bellies of dead cattle and horses and its keeper called it ‘Wulf’. To Nehmann, who loathed dogs of any kind, it appeared to sleep most of the time, but when he insisted on a demonstration, the keeper managed a very credible impersonation of one of the Soviet Yakovlevs. The dog was on its feet within seconds, barking and barking, drawing a fusillade of oaths from a Kamerad trying to snatch an hour’s sleep before turning out for sentry duty.

Nehmann took the story back to the bus depot where Schultz, as it happened, was interrogating a Soviet pilot who spoke German and who’d crash-landed after an attack on the airfield at Pitomnik. Nehmann, amused by the coincidence, settled on a wooden box beside Schultz and introduced himself in fluent Russian.

‘I’m here for you to tell me stories,’ he said. ‘The truer and the dirtier the better.’

‘You mean secrets?’ The pilot, a youthful looking maths graduate from Moscow, wouldn’t hear of it.

‘Stories,’ Nehmann insisted. ‘They’re not the same thing.’

The pilot was confused. Schultz did his best to help him out. Herr Nehmann, he said, was a journalist. He was also a comedian. His job was to make people either laugh or cry. Make life simple for him. Tell him something funny.

The pilot seemed to get the point. He turned back to Nehmann.

‘You want to know about one of our aircraft?’ he said. ‘You want me to tell you about the Polikarpov? It’s a biplane, two wings, very simple. We make it from wood and canvas. It’s an old woman, very slow, and at night we switch the engine off and glide over your trenches, your front trenches, and drop bombs.’

Nehmann nodded. He’d heard of these shapes that came ghosting in from Soviet lines. They were flown by female pilots and some of these women had become trench legends because they sang to the men below before dropping their bombs.

‘Nochnyer ved’ma,’Nehmann said. ‘Night witches.’

‘Da.’ The pilot was grinning.

‘And the plane? You’ve got a story about the plane?’

‘Da.We pilots call them kerosinka.And you know why? Because they catch fire in no time at all.’

Kerosinka.Nehmann wrote it down. A kerosene lamp.

‘You liked being a pilot? Going home every night? Getting a good night’s sleep?’

The pilot nodded. Sometimes it was fine. Other times it wasn’t. The food, he admitted, was better than the men in the front line got and you weren’t shelled and bombed all the time, but the