by Steven Conte
* * *
The village of Malevka, or what was left of it – the retreating Soviets had burned it to the ground – lay on a rise a few hundred metres behind the front lines, in range of the enemy’s artillery and mortars but safe from small-arms fire. To the right was a pine forest, and it was here Bauer was directed when at a guard post he asked the way to the divisional dressing station. The road in was rough but serviceable, enclosed on either side by drifts of snow and pines that were densely canopied but branchless lower down, making the forest a dim, vastly pillared cathedral. Here and there shells had punched gaps through the branches, though in comparison to other battlefields they had passed through, the damage here was slight, the defenders of Tula and its inhabitants having no doubt come off worse in an artillery duel that had gone on now for a month. Even so, between the trees Bauer spotted log-cabin bunkers, widely dispersed to minimise the damage of direct hits on command posts, barracks and divisional stores.
The dressing station occupied what appeared to be the only surviving original building in the forest, a barn that stood beside the burned ruins of a farmhouse. Demchak and Winkel parked the lorries in the space between the buildings and all four men got out. Bauer scrutinised the barn. It was waist-deep in snow but on the sheltered side bore the scorch marks of a failed attempt to set it on fire. A red cross flag hung above a pair of timber doors big enough for a tractor or a cart. Set into the right-hand door was a man-sized hatch.
‘Not quite the standard we’ve become used to,’ Bauer said.
‘We’ve had worse,’ Winkel said, but halfheartedly, his mood morose after Molineux’s bedding of Daria Grigorievna. Bauer had tried that morning to console him but failed, though the wound was still fresh, he reflected. With time it would presumably heal.
The barn was gloomy inside, an effect worsened by vertical slits of daylight in the walls. Behind them the door swung shut with a bang; Bauer heard himself greeted by name, and at the furthest end of the barn, in the glow of a pair of paraffin lamps, he recognised Erich Pilcz, the lieutenant he had come to replace. Pilcz was putting stitches in the scalp of a patient who was seated on a chair. ‘Come in, Captain, come in,’ Pilcz called. ‘Make yourselves at home. My hands are full, as you can see.’
‘I can’t see anything much,’ Bauer said, edging further into the barn. ‘Where’s your operating lamp?’
‘Ah, our lamp. Yes, it is rather gloomy in here.’
Pilcz had two of his men with him, one assisting, the other trying to spirit away some pages that looked like a letter. Against the back wall a wounded man was sitting on a bench while another lay on a stretcher on the earthen floor, loosely covered by a blanket, his boots exposed.
‘The lamp never arrived,’ Pilcz said.
‘But you’ve been here three weeks!’ Bauer said.
‘That long?’
Bauer stopped in front of him. Pilcz was young, still in his twenties, a delicately built young man wearing so many clothes that he looked rotund. His black hair was parted exactly like the Führer’s, but there the resemblance ended, since by temperament he was sunny and eager to please. Possibly too garrulous at times, but no more than Molineux was, and he had proven his worth as a surgeon.
‘You could have ordered another,’ Bauer said.
‘Well, yes, I meant to. I certainly did. But then we were busy, as you know. And I suppose I got used to making do with less light.’
With satisfaction Bauer noticed his own men deploying either side of him to attend to the wounded.
‘You could have mentioned it over the radio this morning,’ he said. ‘We would’ve brought one with us.’
‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t think of it.’
‘Well, it can’t be helped now.’
‘Sir, am I in trouble? Is that why Metz wants to see me?’
‘Lieutenant, you have a patient to attend to.’
Pilcz peered down and seemed startled to find himself holding a needle. ‘Of course, of course.’
‘We’ll talk later, in private.’
‘Yes, sir, but first, your black eye – did the lieutenant colonel do that to you?’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, Lieutenant. Just get on with it, will you.’
Pilcz did as he was told, and Bauer gazed about the barn. The lieutenant’s operating table was a sled that had been raised on wooden blocks. It looked precarious. Come to that, it was uncomfortably crammed into a corner, which, given the size of the barn, was mystifying. More seriously, there appeared to be no screen between it and the reception area, suggesting that men waiting for treatment had been obliged to watch others going under the knife. Finally, there was the general disorder of the place, something to be expected during a battle or in its immediate aftermath, but not two days later. And at no time was it admissible to leave dirty bandages touching an instruments tray. Clearly Pilcz was not himself; yet even more disturbing in a way was the negligence of his men, implying there was a wider collapse in morale.
‘Mind if I check on those two?’ Bauer said, gesturing at the wounded men.
‘Go ahead, be my guest,’ Pilcz said, airily waving the needle.
The man on the ground was unconscious. ‘Where’s he wounded?’ Bauer asked Winkel, only to be answered by the unoccupied man, a sergeant, who sounded keen to make amends. ‘In the calf, sir.’
‘What sort of wound is it?’
The sergeant admitted he wasn’t sure.
‘Let’s see then, shall we,’ Bauer said, kneeling down. Pilcz’s sergeant fetched scissors and cut away the wounded man’s trouser leg, revealing a shotgun wound to the calf. Fortunately neither bone was damaged, and there were clearly delineated entry and exit wounds. Both, however, were already blackening with frostbite, suggesting that the wounded man had lain for some time in the snow.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ Pilcz said, ‘would you mind giving me a hand?’ Bauer stood up and went over to him; Pilcz passed him the needle. ‘Much obliged,’ he said with a winning smile, then before Bauer could answer turned and left the barn. Bauer finished stitching the patient’s scalp then got to work on the others. An hour later Pilcz had still not returned.
* * *
It was dark by the time Bauer finished treating Pilcz’s patients and was able to go looking for him. According to his men, the lieutenant no longer dossed down at the dressing station but instead shared a bunker with some fellow officers. Pilcz’s sergeant showed him the way, for which Bauer was grateful, as the sky was clear but moonless and the starlight too weak to penetrate the trees. The night air was incomprehensibly cold. A first deep breath through his nose set his septum stinging, a lingering, eye-watering pain. He blinked and tears crystallised in his lashes.
Luckily the bunker wasn’t far, and in a few minutes Bauer was standing at its half-sunken door. He thanked his guide and went inside, swapping the icy purity outside for the foetid warmth of men living crammed together half underground. There were about a dozen or so, most of them seated around a trestle table at the centre of a long and shallow room, its ceiling not much higher than a tallish man. Log walls, the wood still encrusted in bark. Bedding and kit bags at the rear. A diminutive cast-iron stove to one side, and around it several men in their underwear plucking lice from the lining of their uniforms. About half of those present glanced up as he entered; he wiped snow off his boots and shut the door. Some of the men he didn’t know, others he knew by sight, and there were a few he knew by name, including, yes, Pilcz, who immediately sprang up, greeted him cheerily and began a round of introductions.
‘You’ve come at the right time!’ he brayed when the introductions were over. ‘Dinner’s almost served.’ He wasn’t normally so frenzied, and Bauer resolved not to reprimand him for abandoning the barn.
Dinner was a beef stew simmering on the stove, its fragrance reconciling him to the stink of unwashed socks, cigarette smoke, unclean armpits and feet. He hadn’t realised how hungry he was. Someone made space for him at the table and he sat down on an empty ammunitio
n case, his back to the stove. To his left sat Pilcz, incessantly talking; to his right a captain from the neighbouring Grossdeutschland division who was as taciturn as Pilcz was loud and whose name Bauer had already forgotten.
The stew arrived, and though Pilcz kept talking Bauer fell silent with most of the others. The stew was good, very good. No doubt the beef had come from a local farm. Bauer thought of Katerina and her staff and how they would find enough to eat now that the Reich Commissariat was requisitioning food.
One by one the men around the table finished their meals and began lighting cigarettes. They had just survived a major battle and looked spent, not only physically but mentally. Their hands were chafed, their faces reddened and cracked. Bauer coughed. Even for a smoker like himself the atmosphere in the bunker was insufferable. The nearby stove was baking his back, while his hands and feet were cold.
To his right the captain whose name he had forgotten finished eating, pushed aside his mess tin and surreptitiously scratched an armpit. Bauer turned to him and, under cover of Pilcz’s chatter, quietly asked him if the lice were very bad. The captain gave him a guarded look. ‘No worse than you’d expect.’
‘I want to know what I’m in for,’ Bauer said, ‘and to work out whether to build a delousing sauna.’
‘Rather than waiting until we take Tula?’ the captain asked, his accent Prussian and distinctly privileged. He looked to be about thirty-five years old but was so careworn and weary that it was hard to know for sure.
Bauer hesitated. ‘I had assumed we’d be wintering here.’
‘Based on what?’
Bauer gestured around them, at the ceiling and the walls. ‘This. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble.’
‘Someone wanted not to die of exposure. We will of course be taking Tula any day now. Moscow shortly after that.’
The irony was unmistakable. No Nazi, then. Or at least not the ardent, brainwashed type. At his neck an Iron Cross. A wound badge on his breast.
‘You’re quartered with your division?’ Bauer asked.
‘About two kilometres away. This is just a visit.’
‘I’ve forgotten your name,’ Bauer admitted, proffering his hand. ‘Paul Bauer.’
They shook hands. ‘Gerd von Rauschenberg.’
‘Where were you wounded?’ Bauer asked, nodding at the badge.
‘Geographically?’
‘I meant anatomically, but why not: tell me where you were.’
‘Poland. In the arse. Thanks be to God nothing serious. A flesh wound, on the second day of the war. Chronologically speaking. You weren’t my surgeon by any chance?’ he asked, drawing back and squinting in a mock effort of recall. ‘I was face down the whole time, you see.’
‘No, not one of mine. I didn’t start until France.’
‘Ah,’ said von Rauschenberg. ‘I suppose it’s for the best. And what about your wound?’ he asked, pointing to Bauer’s black eye. ‘I must say I don’t think of you surgeons as brawlers.’
Bauer was about to answer when on his left Pilcz seized him by the arm. ‘You’re going to need boots, sir, proper boots, and we’ve just the thing.’
‘Oh?’
‘There, by the stove. Soviet issue, felt-lined.’
Bauer turned around and saw three pairs of boots lined up beside the stove, their leather damp, their openings stuffed with what looked like brown fabric but which he recognised an instant later as human flesh, six legs sawn off at the shins, tibias and fibulas sprouting as if attempting to regrow.
‘No thank you,’ he said, and turned back to the table.
‘Don’t be too hasty, sir. It won’t be long till they’re thawed.’
‘I said no thanks.’
‘But, sir, they’re splendid boots, I assure you, and God knows you’re going to need them.’ He seemed not mocking but genuinely concerned.
Von Rauschenberg said, ‘Surely you’re not squeamish, Captain. How many legs have you amputated? Scores, I imagine.’
‘It’s not squeamishness.’
‘What then?’
‘Anger, to be frank. Where are our own winter boots? It’s like something from War and Peace,’ he said, gesturing behind him, ‘the retreat from Moscow.’
‘Though of course in our case we are advancing on Moscow,’ von Rauschenberg said, ‘and that makes all the difference.’
‘Sir, you’ll see,’ Pilcz said, ‘felt-lined boots are essential here. It’s practical, not unpatriotic. You’ll see. Spend a day at that dressing station and you’ll see.’
The conversation shifted to the merits of fur versus wool, but before Bauer could join it Pilcz was back on the topic of why he was being transferred to Yasnaya Polyana. Had he done something wrong? No, Bauer explained, it wasn’t a disciplinary matter. At least not in your case, he thought.
‘Then why?’ Pilcz asked.
‘I don’t know. I’m just following orders, but if I had to guess I would say that Metz wants us to experience every aspect of the battalion’s work.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ Pilcz said, his tongue probing about his teeth as if searching for trapped shreds of food. ‘I’m not sure I’m up to it. At any rate, not with the lieutenant colonel breathing down my neck.’
‘Try to regard it as an opportunity,’ Bauer said, grimly amused to find himself consoling Pilcz for the neat reversal of their fortunes. ‘The lieutenant colonel can seem a bit harsh but he’s an excellent surgeon. You’ll learn a lot.’
Pilcz bared his teeth in a show of mock fright that was nonetheless disturbing.
‘Oh, come on,’ Bauer said, ‘think how you’ll benefit later, after the war. You’ll have more experience than a civilian surgeon accrues in a lifetime.’
Pilcz looked away, his expression despairing. ‘I don’t know, sir. I just don’t know.’ Again he began searching his teeth with his tongue, though as far as Bauer could tell his teeth were pristine. Or were his own teeth clogged, he wondered, and driving Pilcz to distraction? Surreptitiously he tongued his own teeth in search of detritus, felt nothing and with a conscious effort forced himself to stop. That way madness lay.
‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘You need more experience, that’s all, and the lieutenant colonel is ensuring you get it. And don’t forget the comforts. Living conditions are much easier at Yasnaya Polyana.’
‘I suppose,’ Pilcz said, then shook his head. ‘I just don’t know.’
Clearly he wasn’t quite right in the head. The proper thing to do would be to radio Metz and explain the situation, but why should he bother? Let Metz sort it out. It was his decision; let him cope with the consequences. ‘I should be getting back to the men,’ he said.
‘You won’t stay here, sir?’ Pilcz asked. ‘Believe me, it’s warmer. You should. You really should. I can send for your kit.’
‘No thank you, Lieutenant,’ he said, and pushed the ammunition case away from the table. ‘I’ll stay at the dressing station, at least at first.’
‘I should go too,’ said von Rauschenberg, also rising.
Bauer thanked his fellow officers for their hospitality and again noticed their muted mood. The usual camaraderie of mealtimes had been mostly missing. Apart from Pilcz, nobody had bothered to say goodbye.
‘They’re tired,’ von Rauschenberg said when Bauer mentioned this outside. ‘All of us are.’ He stamped his feet in the snow. ‘Fuck, it’s cold,’ he went on, his accent adding polish to the phrase. His officer’s cap had had its wire stiffener removed, giving its wearer a kind of louche, crumpled glamour.
‘I’m going that way,’ Bauer said, pointing. ‘What about you?’
‘The opposite,’ said von Rauschenberg. ‘We’re dug in at Malevka.’
‘Then I’ll say goodbye.’
In the far distance he could hear rifle fire; somewhat closer a burst from a heavy machine gun.
‘Before you go, though,’ said von Rauschenberg, ‘let me ask you something. You mentioned War and Peace. Have you read it?’
�
��Once, as a youth. But I’m re-reading it now, and so it’s on my mind.’
‘I read it in my twenties. Stupendous. Superb. I will again one day, if I get a chance.’
‘You can borrow my copy when I’m finished,’ Bauer offered, then wished he hadn’t.
Von Rauschenberg shook his head. ‘No, you keep it. We’re sure to be redeployed, or our units will, or one of us will get killed, and then you’ll never get it back.’
‘If I get killed I won’t need it back.’
‘Very well, but your relatives might want it as a keepsake. Are you married?’
‘No,’ he answered, feeling too cold to elaborate.
‘Lucky you.’
‘You think?’
‘No one at home waiting for you, extracting promises from you to stay alive.’
‘Yes, I can see that might be difficult. Though for every married soldier who wishes he was single there must be at least ten bachelors yearning for a wife.’