The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

  THE BLAMELESS DEAD

  GARY HAYNES

  © Gary Haynes 2019

  Gary Haynes has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2019 by Endeavour Quill Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  GENESIS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  PART TWO

  REVELATION

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  87

  88

  89

  90

  91

  92

  93

  94

  95

  96

  97

  98

  99

  100

  101

  102

  103

  104

  105

  106

  107

  108

  ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.’

  George Santayana

  Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

  ‘At this hour

  Lie at my mercy all mine enemies.’

  William Shakespeare

  The Tempest

  PART ONE

  GENESIS

  1

  Berlin, late April, 1945.

  Pavel Romasko crouched down beside a scorched wall, the floor covered with charred beams and shattered concrete. He gritted his teeth and inched towards a shell hole by his head. The stench was almost overpowering. He’d first smelled it a minute ago, even before he’d entered the abandoned building. He winced, feeling queasy. He guessed it was coming from the adjacent street.

  Craning forward, he listened for a familiar sound: the whining gears and diesel engine of a Tiger tank, the click-click of the iron-heeled boots worn by the Waffen-SS. The sound of potential death. But the immediate area was quiet. There was only the faint discharge of Soviet howitzers, and a muffled burst of machine-gun fire from somewhere to the north. Pursing his lips, he whistled — just loud enough for his assault squad to hear from what was left of the adjoining room.

  He forced himself to stand up and edged past a jagged girder, dangling from the half caved-in ceiling. He shuffled towards the open doorway. Warily, he stepped out. The stink enveloped him and he almost gagged. He knew now that the sewers had collapsed, that scores of corpses lay rotting among the debris.

  But he’d smelled a hint of something else too, despite the carnage. Just briefly. It had had a fragrant element, reminding him of a regular childhood experience, a memory that reverberated like the chimes of a prayer bell inside his head. For a few moments, he pictured the old Orthodox church that had dominated his remote Russian village. The bearded priest was swinging the elaborate incense-burner, suspended from gold-plated chains. It had been the same odour. Hadn’t it? He blinked, shook his head. He couldn’t make sense of that.

  He decided, with an odd lack of enthusiasm, that he’d imagined it. The effects of the war played tricks of the mind, of the senses. Looking over his shoulder, he counted all seven of his men as they emerged from the remnants of the four-storey civic office building.

  A few muddied documents were scattered on the ground, stamped with the official Nazi Party eagle, its head turned to the left, and an emblem he failed to recognize, but which looked to him like a decorative wheel, with a geometrical design of squares at its centre. Even a blackened flag had survived the bomb damage. Hanging beneath a crumbling windowsill, the swastika flapped against the bullet-ridden façade, the movement both panicky and defiant, Pavel thought.

  His men were conscripts. A few still wore their padded khaki jackets and mustard-yellow blouses. Most, their green field tunics and forage caps. All the clothing was lice-ridden and smeared with soft ash. Months of exposure to frozen winds had darkened their skins and narrowed their eyes. They’d been engaged in hazardous reconnaissance missions. They’d slept rough and had existed on a diet of raw husks and dried horsemeat. Haggard and weary now, he reckoned they’d aged well beyond their years.

  And me, he thought.

  He was twenty-three but looked a decade older. His yellow teeth ached, and when it was damp, he limped, an old calf wound from the Battle of Stalingrad. He’d been fighting in the Great Patriotic War since the beginning, almost four years before. Pavel was a regular Red Army man, a full sergeant, despite his youth. One of the few Soviet soldiers that had survived the initial German onslaught. He told himself he was lucky, but he was plagued by fretful nightmares. The savage conflict had destroyed his secret faith in God.

  He pulled off his favoured ushanka, a fur cap, and scratched his shaven head. Sinking to his knees, he lit a cigarette made from rolled newspaper and discarded butts. He watched the others pull down their earflaps or blow on their hands. The cold was sharp and brutal, like flint. He inhaled and passed the improvised cigarette up to the next man, shielding it from the wind with his cupped hand.

  ‘It doesn’t help,’ he said. He knew nothing could curb the smell.

  Fetching a map from inside his jacket, he began calculating their position as best he could. The street was broad and crater-filled and stretched for a hundred yards or more to the north and south before bending out of sight.

  Must have been a main thoroughfare once, he thought, doing his best to locate it.

  The battle had left it a wasteland, with smouldering tyres and pools of burning oil. They’d come upon it by chance, following a rout of their infantry platoon, a sustained counter-offensive by at least a hundred men of the Berlin garrison. Pavel had led the squad under a baroque archway and down a cobbled side street. When he’d been sure it was safe, they’d veered off into the office building. At least ten comrades had fallen. He could still hear their pitiable screams in his head. But he knew the slaughter was almost at an end.

  It began to rain. Big grainy drops that exploded on the bare skin of his hands and forehead. Putting on his steel, dome-shaped helmet, he glanced up. Clumps of black smoke hung low in the slate-grey sky, almost shrouding it. He grasped his PPSh-41, a Shpagin submachine gun; he reckoned he had about half of its seve
nty-one cartridges left. It was the most reliable small-arms weapon of the war. Even the Wehrmacht Heer, the German Army, coveted them. It never jammed. Not even at minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit in the winter of 1942–43. A winter that at the time had never seemed to end.

  Straining to get up, he held his back. He was exhausted. ‘Put your helmets on. Ukrainian, on point.’

  The Ukrainian was a sinewy man with outsized ears. He half stumbled forward, using his bolt-action rifle as a crutch. He spat, wiped his mouth, and mumbled something to himself. He had a miserable look on his drawn, mud-streaked face.

  He hates being on point, Pavel thought. They all hate being on point.

  Moving with short, cautious steps, they kept close to an ancient wall that was stone-built and encrusted with dead lichen. It afforded some cover, but they were about three feet above the true level of the street. Tons of rubble had built up where the pavements had been; broken chunks of flagstones, twisted iron bars and heaps of crumbled bricks. The buildings that remained were hollow and smirched, teetering in this dismal place.

  A shot rang out and a bullet skimmed the wall with a sharp crack, creating a billow of dust and careering fragments. He heard a comrade groan in pain. His men sank down, aiming their weapons in an awkward, random fashion. No one had pointed out the direction of the muzzle flash.

  ‘Fucking ricochet,’ another said.

  Pavel scrambled forward. The injured man was twenty-seven, a hog farmer from a small town near Minsk, with five children. He was slumped against the wall, panting. He’d dropped his Mosin-Nagant carbine and was grasping his arm. Blood poured out in rivulets between his fingers. The round had penetrated his bicep. Picking up the carbine, Pavel led him down the short slope of rubble. At the bottom, there was a tangle of metal, covered with serrated stone slabs from a broken lintel.

  His men followed close behind. They’d hunkered down, fearful of a further shot. Reaching the make-do shelter, they flung themselves prostrate behind it. Pavel pulled out a field bandage and used it as a tourniquet to stem the blood flow. The farmer bared his teeth like an excited chimpanzee. His men were nervous. He knew what they were thinking: If the shot had come from a sniper, they were in a precarious position.

  Pavel scanned the handful of vantage points with his army-issue binoculars, looking for the unknown shooter. But he could only make out smashed eaves and protruding joists, caressed by grey smoke. There was little chance of spotting the passage of a shadow, or a sudden glint of metal, the usual giveaways. He shivered. Blasts from unseen German flak guns, firing, he guessed, at Soviet tanks, had erupted close by. The sound was jarring. He felt uneasy. He thought about moving back down the street, towards the burned-out Wehrmacht half-track, but no further shots had been fired.

  It’s no sniper, he thought. Not a squad either. Just a lone infantryman. He’ll keep his head down and wait for a better opportunity, he decided. That, or he’d already fled.

  He checked at street level with his binoculars. Nothing moved, except the huge rats, scampering over the dead he’d smelled. Many of the corpses were bloated, others black-green like serpentine stone, a sign of putrefaction. Some still looked almost fresh. Old men. Mothers. Children. He knew they’d been killed by shrapnel and dislodged masonry, as well as indiscriminate fire from both sides.

  ‘Go on now,’ he said.

  A couple of minutes later, they came to the end of the wall. He glanced at his wristwatch, decided there were several hours of daylight left. The street still looked deserted. He knew the civilians were huddled in their cellars, or in one of the cramped, underground shelters, where even the adults had to urinate where they stood. He didn’t blame them. The city was an earthly Hell, full of chaotic fires and toxic fumes. He’d been told that the British and Americans had carpet-bombed it for months. Then, on the twentieth of April, the ongoing Soviet artillery and rocket barrage had started. Hitler’s birthday, his captain had said. Pavel had gotten red-eyed drunk that night.

  A filthy hand patted him on the shoulder before pointing south in front of his head. He held up his binoculars. A platoon of Waffen-SS was approaching from less than seventy yards down the street. About thirty men, he estimated, with a smattering of heavy machine guns and mortars. They moved in single file, parts of their grey-green uniforms whitened by dust. Weaving in and out of the mounds, they resembled a colossal and hoary snake.

  He reckoned they hadn’t seen them, but he needed to make a snap judgment. He wasn’t afraid of the Waffen-SS. He’d killed scores of their ilk in the conflict, sometimes with nothing more than his short-handled shovel, his entrenching tool. But he knew a firefight would be suicidal. He looked around. There was only one option.

  He pushed the Kid towards an open doorway some thirty yards to the right. ‘Go,’ he said.

  Pavel called him ‘the Kid’ because he was nineteen. He’d fought alongside him since Stalingrad, just over two years before. He watched him as he ran, the German greatcoat he allowed him to wear looking massive on his wasted frame. It had fitted the Kid when he’d first worn it, but he’d lost a stone and a half in two months. Dysentery. Many suffered from it. Mercifully, his infection hadn’t been virulent and he’d all but recovered.

  The doorway was the access point to a bunker. It was set back from the street in what was left of a concrete island amid a grassed square. The grass was black and pitted by firebombs. The iron railings that had surrounded it were piled on the ground, mangled and covered in severed bricks and clumps of mud. It looked as if the perimeter had been evacuated some time ago.

  ‘We going in, sergeant?’ the farmer said.

  Pavel heard him wince in pain, although he tried to disguise the sound with an exaggerated grunt.

  The bunker seemed to be empty. It offered sanctuary — for a time at least.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  But knowing the bunker could be a nest of fascists, he felt a spasm in his stomach.

  2

  Pavel used his binoculars to watch the Kid sprint over the collapsed entry gates. He nodded to himself when he registered the young eyes scouring the chosen route for a trip wire, or signs of a landmine, as he’d taught him to do. The Kid stumbled. But after manoeuvring around hillocks of mud and fetid pools of unknowable depth, he reached the bunker’s opening. It had taken him nine seconds.

  The others waited for the all-clear: arms held sideways at shoulder level and flapped. Seeing it, they followed the Kid’s path towards the ruptured steel doors, felled by mortar shells, at the front of the bunker. They couldn’t be seen by the Waffen-SS platoon now, and Pavel felt sure they’d make it.

  There was a Volkswagen Kübelwagen, a bucket-seat car, on the remains of the driveway that linked the bunker to the street. The tyres were flayed, the bodywork peppered with holes such that it resembled a giant slab of Swiss cheese. Pavel guessed it had been strafed earlier in the day, probably by an Ilyushin Il-2, a Soviet ground-attack aircraft known as the flying tank. Running past the vehicle, he noticed that the occupants, a couple of Luftwaffe officers, had been hit by hundreds of rounds. They had no faces left.

  His men kneeled, or bent over, catching their breath after reaching the bunker’s reinforced doorway. Pavel untied the sodden tourniquet from the farmer’s injured arm. He took a fresh field bandage from his canvas backpack and secured it tightly around the bloodied upper limb. The farmer nodded in appreciation.

  The doorway was about twenty feet square. The floor was wet in parts, with a mixture of blood and rainwater. The walls, as thick as the armour on their T-34 tanks, had had large chunks blown out of them. At the rear, a concrete stairwell dropped into blackness.

  It smelled of paraffin, an underlying rankness, and what Pavel considered was a whiff of incense too. He did his best to ignore it.

  ‘Move down now,’ he said. He watched his men turn around and face the stairwell. They began to shuffle forward. ‘Wait for me at the bottom.’

  ‘We should hang them when it’s over,’ the Muscovite said, as he d
escended the first couple of steps. ‘Every fucking one. Or let the NKVD loose on them,’ he went on, referring to the brutal Soviet secret police.

  He was a squat man, with a broad face. Eyes like black diamonds.

  ‘Even the young ones?’ said Doc. He had a fragile-looking frame and shrew-like features. His hair was always a little too long and he scrubbed his fingernails vigorously every morning. ‘They’re victims too.’

  The Muscovite snorted, spat on the ground. ‘They’ll just grow.’

  ‘You’re a cretin.’ Doc shook his head.

  ‘What you think, sergeant?’ the Kid said.

  ‘Get your arse down those steps.’

  Doc was an educated man, Pavel knew, a teacher of classical music. He thought the war must have been even worse for a man like him. What he’d said was right too.

  He squatted down just inside the sheltered doorway, covering the retreat of his men to a safe distance down the dark staircase. He’d check the bunker was clear. If it was, they’d rest for the night. He rubbed the stubble on his face with his thumb and forefinger, adjusted the strap of his steel helmet, and surveyed the skeleton of a Gothic church to his right. The blown-out windows looked to him like empty eye sockets. He’d seen too many of those. He was seeing them now, even when they weren’t there, he thought.

  Below it, a middle-aged man in a crumpled brown suit had been strung up from a lamppost, a wooden sign attached to string around his neck. A fate that seemed common for Berliners. He’d seen their grotesque bodies hanging from grey-coloured trees, from protruding iron bars. Even from the roofs of crashed trucks. Traitors. Deserters. The innocent. Murdered by the Feldgendarmerie, the German military police, and packs of their own people. The fanatical, even now, Pavel thought. The man reminded him of an effigy.

  He’d not heard any commotion after his men had started down the concrete steps. The nearby flak guns and tank fire seemed to have ceased too. There was still just the faint rumble of Soviet artillery, the odd crackle of small-arms fire in the distance.

  Now he saw them, about forty yards away, as they came around the old wall. He raised his binoculars. But the platoon of Waffen-SS crossed the street and disappeared into one of the many alleyways that led into it. Putting his binoculars into their pouch, he decided to wait for another five minutes. Just to be sure.