by Jana Petken
Chapter Thirty-Six
Wilmot Vogel
Somewhere in Northern Russia
March 1942
Unbeknownst to Wilmot, Jürgen, and the Hauptmann, they had escaped the train on the last day of February and were now into the first week of March. Only four days and three nights had passed since they’d escaped out of the wagon’s window, but it felt like weeks. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion: their pace, thoughts, self-control, and conversation. They now ambled rather than strode, had difficulty with their coordination and memory, at times returning to the same spot without realising they’d been there before. They were lost and had no idea how far they had come, or if they were still going north.
They had been determined to walk each day until they dropped. The act moved them closer to their goal and the exertion kept their bodies warm. They were no longer worried about Russian soldiers or their captors on the train; their principle concern now was the time and effort it would take to reach friendly forces at the Finnish defensive positions.
Neither Wilmot nor the Hauptmann talked about how they were planning to cross the Russian lines to get to the Finns, but Jürgen had enough pessimism for all three of them. He claimed that they were going on a suicide mission and that Wilmot’s boasting about being able to read the North Star and shadows in the clouds wasn’t going to save them from the thousands of Russian troops they’d find at the Mannerheim Line. Wilmot had smacked the boy over the head, telling him not to speak again until he had something useful to say.
The men were starving, but they had managed, thus far, to survive on handfuls of berries and pine nuts found under the snow. The berries had a pleasant, sweet taste, and they also seemed to calm Wilmot’s diarrhoea. Jürgen, with his wild brown hair and the beginnings of a stubbly beard, had yelled like a delighted child when he’d found a wild winter mushroom patch. But, being an impulsive lad, he’d shoved them in his mouth, one after the other, without first nibbling on one and then waiting to check if it was poisonous. Afterwards, he’d vomited for the Fatherland, delaying the men’s progress.
At first, they’d had no knives, matches, guns, or any other type of tool that could help them hunt, kill, or cook prey. Wilmot had snapped off one of the lower branches from a pine tree, and using a sharp stone, he had whittled it down at the end to made himself a rough spear. He hadn’t been able to try it out yet, as the lemmings he’d seen had kept their distance, and he wasn’t strong enough to chase after them.
It was late in the afternoon when the men gave up on their journey for the day. Jürgen was too weak to walk another step. His muscles were failing. He was staggering like a drunk with a blood-stained scarf around his head, having injured himself that morning. Bemused as to where he was and what he was doing there, he’d started rambling on about his mother and how she’d smack him for being late home for dinner.
Wilmot crouched at the base of a tree trunk and studied his companions resting a couple of metres away. Not comfortable calling the Hauptmann by his Christian name, Max, he’d met the captain half way and now addressed him as Haupt. He was sitting against another tree, holding a semi-conscious Jürgen as a man would cradle a child. Overcome by exhaustion and incipient hypothermia, the boy was curled up with his head on Haupt’s lap.
Wilmot plopped down next to Haupt and shouted in his ear, “This wind is going to get a lot worse. There’s a blizzard on the way. Jürgen won’t make it unless we find shelter.”
“Do you see any houses? Let me know if you do … we’ll … I know, we’ll pop in for a cup of coffee.”
Wilmot observed his travel companions in silence. He was worried about having to take care of them both. Haupt seemed to be drifting off a lot and couldn’t remember Jürgen’s name half the time. All three of them were irritable, but Jürgen had gone a step too far by trying to kill himself. The silly bugger had bashed his addled skull against a tree trunk until Wilmot had dragged him away and pinned him down. The boy wanted death, craved it. “Kill me, Willie. Use my scarf to strangle me. I just want to go now,” Jürgen had begged. Wilmot, thinking of the German prisoners the Russians had murdered, and the soldiers blown up or shot in battle, had reacted badly by punching Jürgen and telling him he was a selfish bastard.
The wind was whipping Wilmot’s face. Desperate to get out of it, he tried to make Haupt see reason. “Haupt, listen to me. The forest is thinning out. There’s a clearing ahead. I can see the path to it. If I’m right, the snow will be thicker, the ground won’t have as many tree roots in it, and it’ll be softer to dig out.”
Wilmot’s eyes focused on the brightness beyond the trees. It was like a light at the end of a clichéd tunnel. “When we were at the Leningrad Line, I came across a Russian manhole with a Russkie in residence. After I’d killed him, I examined his dugout. It was about one and a half metres deep and wide enough for him to sit down with his knees at his chest. It had a roof of pine and spruce tree branches like the ones breaking off with the wind here, and it was almost warm inside.” His mouth snapped shut. It seemed like a lifetime ago, so he wouldn’t tell Haupt about the hole he’d helped Geert and Claus dig before the assault on the Russians. It had not saved his friends’ lives as intended, it had killed them. “We can outlast this blizzard, Haupt, but you’ve got to help me. We need to dig a hole and get in it before the storm hits … do you hear me? For God’s sake, wake up, Haupt … it’s coming!”
Haupt’s eyes were glazed. His mouth lifted and twitched at the corners, as though he were about to have a fit of the giggles. “Branches don’t fall off pine trees or spruces or larches willy-nilly ... I know about trees. I know every tree in Germany … look at him. Look at Jürgen. He can’t dig. And we’ve got no spades. Have you got a spade?”
“Of course, I bloody don’t. Look, if you don’t want to help, I’ll dig a hole just big enough for me.”
“You wouldn’t fucking dare, traitor…” Haupt snarled like a dog.
Wilmot lurched away. His captain had gone mad.
“Right, that’s it. I’ve had enough of you two. You can both stay here and freeze your balls off.”
Wilmot disentangled Jürgen from Haupt’s arms and dragged him closer to the tree trunk where his back was to the wind.
“I’m not taking Jürgen to the clearing. He’s got a bit of shelter from the wind here. I’ll come back for him when the dugout is ready,” Wilmot told Haupt. “Will you come with me or not?”
Haupt got to his feet and staggered towards Wilmot. “Of course, I’ll come. Can’t have you wandering off by yourself, can we?”
Less than a hundred metres from Jürgen’s tree, Haupt and Wilmot found a bright, white world of snow and sky. They peered into the swirling wall of snowflakes, their eyes unable to penetrate it, yet Haupt’s brain seemed to be rallying with the exertion.
“We’ll dig here,” he said, already on his knees.
“We can’t see a damn thing.” Willie pulled a face. “We might be facing a Russian defensive line.”
“Or we might be alone in this wilderness. We’ve not had a single sign that their forces are anywhere near here. No army is going to move in this.”
At last, Haupt was thinking straight and talking sense. Both men, intent on making some semblance of a shelter, got to work without any more complaints. Haupt was right; they didn’t have the luxury of feeling scared of what if or what might be. If they couldn’t see more than a few metres in front of their faces, neither could the Russians, even if they were in the area.
With Willie’s optimism somewhat heightened, he shouted, “This is our only hope of surviving, Haupt! Branches are falling off, which means that we’re in for a hell of a storm.”
The men began to dig like dogs, on their knees scooping out the snow with their gloved hands and arms until they hit ice-encrusted ground beneath it. They paused, looked at the ground, and then at each other.
Wilmot, undeterred, began jabbing the snow with his tree-branch spear, but to no avail. “Bugger it! Nothing sho
rt of a pickaxe will penetrate this frozen earth.”
“We’ll build up, then – a three-sided wall of snow against the direction of the wind?” Haupt suggested.
Willie panted, his breath catching in his throat. He inhaled, exhaled then inhaled again, each time deeper and stronger until he managed to hold a slow but steady breathing pattern. Although the walls were still only a couple of hundred centimetres and not high enough to shelter them from the elements, the act of constructing it gave him hope. His hands moved slower with each pile of snow he lifted, but the good news was that ice was forming almost immediately, making the structure stronger and igloo-like. Death was coming, he felt it knocking at his door, but he wouldn’t give into it until it hauled him kicking and screaming all the way to hell. He wasn’t Jürgen or Haupt. He was a Vogel.
A wolf, howling somewhere in the semi-darkness, had been following the three men since the previous night. They’d first heard it at nightfall and were convinced that it was a lone predator. It had howled for half an hour, but afterwards it had quietened, not making a sound again until two or three hours later when it repeated the pattern. Haupt had suggested that the wolf’s erratic behaviour: advance, howl, and then retreat, was a sign that it was going to give up on the idea of attacking the men. Wilmot, however, suspected that there was nothing erratic about its actions and that the animal was cleverly exploring and investigating the vulnerabilities of its victims. He did agree, however, that wolves were not prone to attacking humans when they were outnumbered.
Both men peered through the thick treeline to where they’d left Jürgen. The violent gale had grown louder, obscuring all other sounds including that of the wolf’s yowls. Haupt stopped gouging the snow and staggered to his feet. “We should go back for the boy.”
Willie wasn’t happy. “You go. I’ll keep building this up.”
“No. I can’t manage Jürgen on my own. Sod the walls. C’mon, Willie, we shouldn’t have left him alone.”
Haupt was making sense, forcing Wilmot to agree with his captain’s suggestion. Jürgen was dead weight when he passed out every five minutes. Haupt, even with stoic determination, was almost as physically weak as the lad and wouldn’t even be able to get the emaciated boy to his feet. Wilmot gestured to the fallen branches that had broken off the pine trees behind them. “Take one, just in case the wolf attacks,” he shouted to Haupt over the din.
The two men battled the elements to get back to young Jürgen. Wilmot still didn’t hear as much as a wolf’s whimper above the squealing storm, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t close by and stalking the half-dead boy sitting against a tree. Wilmot gripped his sturdy tree branch with its sword-like tip in his hand and pushed hard against the wind. He wouldn’t be beaten by a wolf, not after everything they’d been through.
Both men gasped for breath, but when they got close to the tree, they held it. A brown, scrawny wolf was gnawing at Jürgen’s leg, ripping off pieces of flesh and swallowing them whole. Startled, it looked up from its meal, first with irritation, then with outright hostility. Its yellow eyes gleamed in the dusk and held Wilmot’s stare. Blood dripped from the beast’s mouth, a stringy piece of Jürgen’s flesh hanging from its large canine teeth.
Wilmot glared back in a silent game of wills. Jürgen, his face and torso partially obscured by the animal, wasn’t making a sound or movement, not a twitch or a snivel. Wilmot, more angry than afraid, scanned his memory for everything his father had ever told him about hunting in the Grunewald Forest. Don’t stare at a wolf. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t look scared. Don’t run away. Build a fire … build a bloody fire? Of course, why didn’t he think of that? The wolf would sit around and wait until the flames were burning brightly then join the men for marshmallows! Where did people get these bloody stupid ideas?
“Back away, Wilmot,” said Haupt, already taking a step backwards.
“Sod that, Haupt. I don’t know about you, but I’m not letting this overgrown puppy take another fucking bite out of Jürgen.” Wilmot sprang into action, screaming at the top of his lungs and brandishing his tree-branch javelin in the air.
“Bastarrrrrd!” Haupt yelled, charging at the wolf.
The wolf blinked but held its ground, determined not to give up its dinner. Wilmot, taking advantage of the animal’s uncertainty, swung his weapon as one would a baseball bat and smashed the beast under its chin, snapping its neck upwards. It yelped, but then Haupt struck it across the head, leaving it bloodied and befuddled, too dazed to run off.
Wilmot released his pent-up fury as adrenaline flooded his system. “Die! Die! Die! He smashed the wolf’s head to a pulp then dropped shaking to the blood-spattered snow, stunned at the ferocity of his attack.
Haupt and Wilmot knelt on each side of Jürgen. The boy was dead. His eyes, wide as saucers, were surrounded by icy, white lashes and snow-encrusted eyebrows. Wilmot closed Jürgen’s green eyes, groaning as an eyelid dropped off like a piece of withered skin and stuck to one of his fingers.
“Jesus Christ … aw, God Almighty ... is this what’s coming for all of us,” Haupt moaned. “I should have stayed on the bloody train…ach, Jürgen.”
Wilmot, examining Jürgen’s body, had regained his calm and was focusing on what to do next. He looked at the dead skin with icy lashes stuck to his index finger and flicked it off with another soft groan.
Jürgen’s legs had been mauled from thigh to ankle. Large chunks of the left thigh were missing and probably still being digested inside the dead animal. Wilmot shivered. “The wolf went straight for Jürgen’s legs. Look at the bloody state of them.”
“Did those bites kill him? I didn’t hear him scream, did you?” Haupt said wiping his blood-splattered face with his coat sleeve.
Wilmot stood. He looked down at Jürgen’s white face, stress-free and unwrinkled like that of a child. “I don’t know, Haupt. He might have died before the wolf attacked.” He sighed with sadness. “God, I hope so, for his sake. I don’t see any signs of a struggle. He’s just sitting there where we left him with his hands on his crotch.”
Haupt was now examining the wolf, his eyes flashing with lust. “I’m going to eat it raw. It’ll save us, Willie – do you hear me? We’ll be saved.”
Wilmot, still trembling with the shock of the boy’s death, looked skywards and felt the snowflakes and wind stinging his face. Soon, the adrenaline would fade, and he’d be ravaged again by weakness and cold. He was starving and would also eat the wolf raw even if its blood ran down his chin and tasted of iron, but if they didn’t get their shelter finished, they’d die before being able to rip off the animal’s fur to get to the meat.
Wilmot began stripping Jürgen’s body. Unable to put the boy’s coat on over his own, he laid it to one side and went for the lad’s pullover under his jacket. He also removed the blood-soaked woollen scarf, hat, long john’s covered in shit stains, mittens and shoes. Unfortunately, his socks had been shredded by the wolf, and his trousers were almost destroyed and of no use to man nor beast.
As quickly as he could, Wilmot removed his own coat and jacket then pulled on Jürgen’s woollen pullover. He’d refused to put his own back on after soaking it in the latrine bucket on the train. He was all for brothers in arms and all that camaraderie stuff, but he’d drawn the line at dressing in his comrades’ collective piss.
He put his jacket back on, immediately feeling the added protection the new jumper provided underneath it. Then he covered his head with Jürgen’s scarf and knotted it under his chin as he’d seen other men do, and finally, he wrapped his own scarf around his neck.
Wilmot struggled to pull Jürgen’s mittens over his own five-finger gloves. The lad had scavenged the white mitts from a dead prisoner. The man, dressed from head to foot in white camouflage gear, had collapsed and died on one of their long hikes. His body was stripped naked within minutes, with a determined Jürgen managing to get to both mittens first. Quite a feat.
As a memory of his mother surfaced, Wilmot pulled his woollen ha
t down as far as it would go. She’d given her children the same instructions, and reasons for them, every winter, and he’d never forgotten them. “People catch colds and flu when they don’t cover their heads and feet properly. You see, body heat comes out of a person’s head, so it stands to reason it should be covered whenever you’re outdoors. Like the roof does for a house, it holds the heat in. And when you die, your soul will also come out of your head.” He’d always wondered why she’d added that, but he’d believed her. Having a scarf and two hats covering his head was bliss.
Wilmot turned his attention to Haupt. “What are you doing?” Aghast, he watched his captain biting into the wolf, his bared teeth and hands ripping its fur away. Wilmot staggered sideways as the wind almost blew him off his feet. He dropped to his knees, gripped Haupt’s shoulder, and shouted, “For God’s sake, man. Leave it! We need to finish the shelter.”
“Bugger off, Willie!” Haupt shrugged off the hand before licking the blood on his bottom lip. His eyes, like grey ice, glared at Wilmot with the same crazed look he’d worn earlier. “You dig and shovel and build walls to your heart’s content. I’m bloody famished and if you try to drag me away from my dinner, I’ll rip your throat out!”
“Haupt, we’ll prepare the shelter, get the animal in there with us, and we’ll be safe from the blizzard, then we can fill our stomachs,” Wilmot shouted again. “You know I’m right. Haupt, please see sense!”
“Get lost – go on, get away from my fucking wolf!”
Defeated, Wilmot put his head down and battled his way to the clearing, praying he’d reach the half-built shelter in time.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Armed with Jürgen’s coat, Wilmot reached the clearing. There, he set about scooping, placing and patting the snow on top of the previous layers, concentrating on building a back and side wall. He planned to huddle in the joint of both walls, which should be the most sheltered spot unless the wind changed direction and hit him on all sides. The blizzard was moving in fast and the trees were providing no discernible shelter. The snow walls were his only hope of survival, but that outcome was, at best, a long shot. Truth was, he was a nudge away from death.