Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (simple ebook reader .TXT) 📗

The front door was unlocked. He stepped inside, aware at once of the earthy scents of men living together at close quarters. A modest sitting area had room for two armchairs, a folding table and a home-made banquette that ran the length of one wall. Logs were piled in a fireplace. Beneath the single window was an upended wooden box full of books and, when Messner explored further, he found more books tidied neatly in the corner of one of the two bedrooms. There was room here for at least four men, more if you were happy to sleep on the bare wooden floor, and he was about to return to the living room when his gaze was drawn to a line of photographs on the windowsill.

There were four in all, one very faded, the other three more recent. The latter were family shots, one of them taken beside the swing he’d just seen. The swing appeared to be working. A little girl sat on the wooden seat, her legs out straight, her tiny hands gripping the ropes. She wore a twist of ribbon in her hair and she had a big grin for the camera. Behind her stood a tallish figure in a rumpled jacket and dark trousers, and there were other children playing in the background.

Messner picked up the photo and stared at the two faces. Father and daughter, he thought, caught at a moment of brilliant sunshine before the clouds gathered and countless German armies had fallen on the Motherland. Another photo featured the same little girl. This time, she was sitting on what Messner assumed was her mother’s lap. Half close his eyes, and Messner fancied he could see a family resemblance in the upward tilt of the two faces. The little girl had a napkin tucked beneath her chin and her mother was offering a spoonful of what looked like soup. The same wide-eyed innocence. The same dimpled smile. The photo had been taken next door: Messner recognised the logs in the fireplace, and he stared at the image for a long moment, trying to imagine what might have happened to these people.

He’d noticed a radio in the living room. Even here, adrift in the ocean that was the steppe, word would have come of what awaited communities such as these. The rumble of heavy artillery in the west. Strange foreign shapes in the sky overhead. Then uniformed figures trudging east as the first ragged formations of Soviet troops fell back before the German onslaught. But what then? Where would a family like this go?Would they take their chances with the retreating Russians? Frightened young men who at least spoke the same language? Or would they stand fast, determined to somehow protect their little flock of pupils?

Hours later, mid-evening, he wanted to put these questions to the first of the property’s temporary tenants to return. His face and his name were already familiar from the last of the day’s meetings. Renke. A man, thank God, with the manners and the intelligence to conduct a half-decent conversation. At that afternoon’s conference he’d won over more impatient colleagues with a quiet recitation of the facts. Like Klaus, he had the advantage of age on his side.

Messner refused the offer of a glass of vodka. Even with a fresh weld on the Storch’s undercarriage, he said he needed his wits about him for tomorrow’s flight. Renke shot him a look, then shrugged and settled in one of the two armchairs. As the senior supply officer, he’d spent the last two months feeding Sixth Army’s insatiable appetite. They’d naturally foraged for local food wherever they could, but the Soviets had become expert at what he drily called ‘sustenance denial’. Field after field of crops had been burned to the ground. Wells had been poisoned, livestock slaughtered, butchered and hauled east. In all too many respects, he said, this war was two thousand years old: primitive, vicious, implacable, no quarter offered or taken. The victories in the west had been easy. This campaign, after a promising start, was anything but.

‘The Ivans have two cards to play,’ he said. ‘One is geography. There’s too much of this bloody country. It just goes on and on. It never stops. You set another trap, and then another, and you pat yourself on the back but after you’ve counted the first forty thousand prisoners you give up because there’s just too many of them. Yet the next day, waiting over the horizon, there are more, and more, and more, and you realise you haven’t even made a start. These people breed like rabbits. No wonder they call it Mother Russia.’

‘Some of us think Paulus could move a little faster,’ Messner said stiffly.

‘Paulus is unusual. I admit it.’

‘In what respect?’

‘He cares about his men. He hates to waste them.’

Messner was tempted to argue, to somehow pretend that Richthofen was in the room with them, mercilessly applying the lash. Movement is the essence of conquest. Strike hard and strike often. But there was something in Renke’s face, a weary acceptance that he probably faced an eternity of days like these, trying to marry an ever-diminishing trickle of supplies to the demands of tens of thousands of hungry men.

Back home the public’s image of the Wehrmacht was shaped by photos and newsreel footage from the front line: the murderous shriek of a diving Stuka, Panzer tanks pushing aside curtains of enemy fire, endless lines of enemy prisoners stumbling into captivity. But how many people ever thought – even for a moment – about the unsung heroes in the rear? Officers like Renke who somehow managed to keep the wheels of the killing machine grinding?

Messner wondered about putting some of these thoughts into words but decided that he had nothing to add. Renke lived in the world of figures. He spoke the cold language of supply and demand. All too literally, he measured the success of his personal war in kilos and litres.