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

night, by radio, Schultz received word from the Promi. Goebbels had read Nehmann’s piece about life in the front line and wanted more of the same. Not only that, but he also needed Nehmann back in Berlin in time for Christmas.

‘I was wrong about Goebbels,’ Schultz said. ‘All credit to you, my friend, but this means we’re definitely fucked.’

Nehmann stared at him. Schultz never apologised. Neither was he ever wrong.

*

Next morning, Nehmann and Grimberger set out once again for the airfield at Pitomnik to enquire about the possibilities of Nehmann getting a flight out to Berlin. By now, Soviet fighters and anti-aircraft guns dug in around the edges of the Kessel were making life tough for Richthofen’s fleet of Tante-Jus. According to Schultz, who’d seen the Abwehr’s figures, Sixth Army would need 300 flights a day to keep fighting yet barely a trickle of the big tri-motors made it safely into the city.

A small city of bunkers and tents had sprung up at the edge of the airfield. In the biggest of the tents, Nehmann found the Luftwaffe Leutnant in charge of compiling passenger lists. A general field hospital had been established nearby and the Leutnant was trying to calculate how many badly wounded men could be loaded onto the return flight. Nehmann had already seen these evacuation candidates outside, each man secured to a stretcher, some of them groggy from too much morphine. Was his claim to a place on a Tante-Ju really more urgent than theirs? He wasn’t at all sure.

The Leutnant,whom he knew, made a note of his request. Christmas was coming and pressure on the ever-fewer flights out was intense. Nehmann would be wise to have a bag packed ready in case a place on the plane was suddenly free.

‘Here—’ He opened a drawer and slipped out a copy of a newspaper. ‘This came in yesterday. Congratulations. Much better than that usual shit you send them.’

Nehmann was looking at a copy of Völkischer Beobachter,the Party’s daily paper. Millions of copies were sold all over the Reich. His front-line piece was on page three and a quick scan suggested that Goebbels hadn’t changed a word.

‘There’s someone else you might like to talk to,’ the Leutnant said. ‘His name’s Dr Gigensohen. He arrived from Tatsinskaya yesterday and as far as I know he’s still over in the field hospital at Gumrak.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s a pathologist. He deals with the dead, not the living so he’s spoiled for choice here.’ He shrugged, returning to his passenger list. ‘See what you think, eh?’

Nehmann and Grimberger departed with the copy of the newspaper. The field hospital was half an hour tramp away through the rutted snow. Beyond the airfield, a horse had been hit by a Soviet shell. Its head was hanging by threads of frozen flesh, and shrapnel from the explosion had scored a neat excision the length of its belly. The coils of viscera inside gleamed purple and yellow in the thin winter sunshine and Nehmann tried hard not to imagine the smell when spring finally arrived, and the city’s countless bodies began to thaw.

The pathologist occupied a wood-lined bunker just metres from the hospital. An iron stove took the edge off the intense cold but sitting at the desk, he was still wearing gloves as he made notes from a pad at his elbow.

Nehmann introduced himself. It turned out that Gigensohen, too, had read the front-line report in the Beobachter.

‘An outbreak of realism,’ he said drily. ‘More than welcome.’

Nehmann asked him what he made of what he’d seen so far.

‘Remarkable,’ he said. ‘I’m here to cut up bodies. That’s not as easy as it may seem. You wear gloves, of course, but they’re made of rubber and the rubber’s as frozen as everything else. I’m managing a couple of autopsies a day at the moment but under normal circumstances I could double that figure.’

‘You’re trying to work out who killed these people?’ Nehmann was confused. ‘Might the Russians have anything to do with it?’

‘Of course they have. It’s a battle. People get shot. They die. But these folk…’ he nodded down at the pad ‘…are different. There are no wounds that I can see.’

‘So, what killed them?’

‘Hunger. And stress. And lack of sleep. And, dare I hazard a guess, despair. These people have starved to death. If you want a headline, there it is. Give a man five hundred calories a day and you open his door to all kinds of nastiness. Hepatitis? Dysentery? All you need is a vector, a means of transmission, and as it happens lice are perfect. If this goes on much longer, we’ll be looking at typhoid and typhus, too. In the end we’re just flesh and blood. This kind of fighting feasts on us.’

Feasts on us.

Nehmann stayed at the doctor’s side for nearly an hour while Grimberger stood guard beside a pile of frozen bodies stacked outside. The pathologist was only too happy to share his findings and his fears with a journalist who reputedly had the ear of the Minister of Propaganda, and they parted on the best of terms. When Nehmann mentioned that he might be back in Berlin in time for Christmas, Gigensohen wished him well.

‘I dare say you’ll be pleased to see the back of all this.’ The pathologist gestured around. ‘You’ve been here long?’

‘Long enough,’ Nehmann said. ‘Everyone here has a job to do. I suspect that can make a difference.’

‘And you?’

‘I watch. And listen. That can be hard, believe me. I’m not religious, far from it, but God never designed us for something like this.’

*

The thought stayed with him for the rest of the day. That evening, alone for once, he made his way back to the church where hundreds of cheerful drunks had celebrated the Russian Revolution. The wing of the Soviet fighter had been removed from the body of the church and now, propped up outside, it gleamed in the light of the moon. Nehmann paused for a moment, looking at the outline