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

he was free. He stood up, uncertain of his balance, watching the rat scurrying away. He did his best to massage the pain from his aching arm, and then he stole across the classroom towards the door, aware of the noise of battle ever louder.

The door was unlocked. He stepped into the corridor beyond, alert for the sound of movement, the murmur of voices, but the thunder of exploding shells masked everything. He moved quickly from room to room, beginning to realise that these people had gone. The Chain Dogs had shipped out. Was the airfield at Gumrak still operational? Had they forced their way onto a departing flight? Were they even now droning westward over the steppe? Thinking about the bodies they’d left behind?

Nehmann ventured outside. He could see Schultz lying in the snow. He approached him carefully. He’d heard rumours of bodies booby-trapped with a live grenade. Take care, he told himself. Now is no time to die.

He was standing over Schultz, swamped with a fathomless grief, staring down at the big face cushioned by the snow. Then, very slowly, he realised that something was wrong. The snow had melted around his nose and mouth. He was breathing. He was still alive. Schultz opened one eye. Not dead at all, but asleep.

‘They play games with us, these fuckers.’ Schultz was chained to an iron ring embedded in a huge block of concrete.

‘They’ve gone, Willi. It’s just us.’

Nehmann was looking at the chain, at the ring, at the block of concrete. The grunts of effort at dawn, he thought, as the Chain Dogs wrestled this thing into the snow. And then the two shots, so terrifyingly final. A game, indeed.

The lock, this time, surrendered to the point of Schultz’s hunting knife. Nehmann hauled him to his feet, asked him if he was OK.

‘I’m starving,’ Schultz grunted. ‘There has to be something to eat.’

There wasn’t. Not in the wreckage of the kitchen. Not in any of the cupboards littered around the school. Not in the big room the Chain Dogs seemed to have used as a dormitory. Then Nehmann found himself in the little cubbyhole that must have belonged to Kalb. The smell of the man still lingered in the cold air. A camp bed occupied most of the available space and there was a wardrobe wedged into the corner beside it. The wardrobe was locked but Nehmann prised it open with the knife.

Inside, he found an SS-issue kitbag. He pulled it out. It was much heavier than he’d expected, and he could hear the clunk-clunk of objects inside. He emptied it on the camp bed, staring down at tins and tins of US Army-issue spam, of beans in tomato sauce, and at tube after tube of menthol pastilles. Kalb, too, had been packed and ready to go.

*

Nehmann and Schultz slowly made their way back to the bus depot, their bellies full of spam. They shuffled along like the two old men they’d become, ignoring everything on the way, the frozen bodies, the smashed-up vehicles, the occasional face peering out of this ruin or that, even the roar of the approaching juggernaut that was the Soviet Army.

The bus depot was empty. There were no signs of Schultz’s tiny Abwehr staff. Schultz rubbed his face and used his hunting knife to prise open another tin of spam while Nehmann fetched snow from outside.

Schultz hoped his men would get through OK.

‘Get through where?’

‘Fuck knows.’

Nehmann tried to kindle a flame from the remains of the wood but gave up the attempt. He told Schultz he wanted to pay a visit to the priest at the church.

‘Now?’

‘Yes. You’ve got something better to do?’

Schultz shook his head. He’d finish the spam first, but why not?

‘What’s that in your hand?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’ Nehmann folded the sheets of paper into the pocket of his greatcoat, and then nodded at the tin of spam.

‘Do I get any of that?’ he asked.

*

They set out for the church. It was mid-afternoon by now and the battle seemed to have paused. Nothing stirred in the ruined landscape. Even the crows had given up.

Nehmann found the old priest sweeping the tiles in front of the altar. Watching him from the emptiness of the nave, it seemed a crazy gesture, readying an empty church for a non-existent congregation, and Nehmann remembered the lines from Goebbels’ editorial in Das Reich that had lodged in his memory. Above his head, he could see sky through the gaps in the roof.

In the limitless fields of the east yellow corn is waving, enough and more than enough to feed our people and the whole of Europe. Work will once more be a pleasure and it will be marked by a joy in life which will find expression in brilliant parties and contemplative peace.

‘Brilliant parties and contemplative peace,’ he told Schultz. ‘Remember all that shit?’

The priest had put down the broom and was on his knees at the altar rail, praying. At the sound of a voice, he half turned. Nehmann was shocked by how much weight he’d lost. A bag of holy bones, he thought.

The priest limped very slowly down the aisle. His breath clouded on the freezing air and his beard, Nehmann noticed, had turned the colour of fresh snow. No longer grey, but white.

Nehmann dug in his pocket and gave the priest three sheets of paper. The priest studied them one by one, his head nodding as a finger moved from line to line.

‘You want me to play this?’

‘Yes please, father.’

‘You’ll help with the bellows? Nothing works any more.’

‘My friend will.’

The priest slowly led the way up a flight of wooden steps to the organ loft, explained what Schultz had to do, and then settled himself at the keyboard. Nehmann heard the sigh of the bellows as Schultz began to pump. Then came the opening chords of the music Nehmann remembered so well. He could see the priest from the nave, a hollowed-out figure, a stick of a man clad entirely in black, plucking at