The Constant Soldier

by William Ryan

  Werth nodded and left the room.

  ‘What do you think happened?’ Weber asked, but all Neumann could do was shake his head. The only thing certain was that Brandt had been wounded and that he’d somehow made his way to the hut.

  ‘The doctor is on his way,’ Beck said, coming back in. She was calmer now but she was still shaking. She wouldn’t do.

  ‘Fräulein Beck, can you fetch one of the Bible students up from the kitchen?’

  ‘Of course, Herr Obersturmführer.’

  ‘Also bring a sharp pair of scissors. And soap and warm water. We need to clean away this blood and get his helmet off.’

  Brandt stirred once again. His eyes moved behind their closed lids and then the left one opened, looking up at the light above, turning to examine Neumann.

  ‘Brandt?’

  ‘Herr Obersturmführer.’

  Brandt’s voice was little more than a croaked whisper. His other eye opened. Weber reached past him to push at Brandt’s shoulder.

  ‘Brandt, wake up.’

  Neumann pushed the mayor’s hand away, irritated. The mayor looked at him in surprise.

  ‘But we need to ask him what happened. Where the others are.’

  Weber’s voice sounded higher than usual.

  ‘Don’t touch him.’ Neumann felt anger rising up inside him. ‘Go and stand over there and keep your mouth shut.’

  ‘But—’ Weber began, before falling silent, standing to his feet and walking to the other side of the room. Neumann had to close his eyes for a moment, to calm himself.

  ‘An ambush.’ Brandt’s voice was barely audible. ‘Partisans. In the forest. To the east of the Red Farm. Near where the shoot was. The others are dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ Neumann counted them up. Peichl, the four Ukrainians, Jäger and Weiss, the Order Police Hauptmann. Was it ten Order Police? And the Volkssturm man from the village. Eighteen men. At least. ‘All of them?’

  ‘I checked the bodies.’

  ‘Peichl? Jäger?’

  ‘All of them.’

  More footsteps – Werth coming back from the telephone room.

  ‘The Order Police have heard nothing from Hauptmann Weiss or his men, Herr Obersturmführer.’

  ‘How many partisans? What kind of weapons?’

  ‘I couldn’t be sure – maybe twenty. They had machine guns. Grenades. They took the weapons and ammunition our men had.’

  ‘Which direction did they head in?’

  ‘It was in the forest, hard to tell.’

  ‘Could you point to the spot on a map?’

  ‘More or less – but it was in the trees. I could find it myself, I don’t know if I could direct someone else to find it.’

  ‘You’re sure they weren’t the British?’

  ‘The voices I heard were Polish, some Russians – I didn’t hear any speaking English.’

  Neumann relayed the information to Werth – instructing her to notify the Order Police and the Volkssturm on the dam. Half his command wiped out while he’d been sorting out papers to be burned.

  ‘Where are you hurt?’ he asked Brandt when Werth had left the room.

  More footsteps. He turned to see Beck returning with the Austrian political prisoner – towels and a basin in her arms.

  ‘I told you to bring one of the Bible students, not this one.’

  ‘This one says she has medical training, Herr Obersturmführer.’

  He turned his attention to the prisoner.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I was a medical student for three years at the University of Vienna.’

  ‘Let’s see what you learned, then.’

  The prisoner leant down beside Brandt.

  ‘It’s my ear,’ Brandt said.

  ‘It’s best to check the rest of you, just in case.’

  Her fingers had been working at Brandt’s helmet as she’d spoken and somehow, where Neumann had failed, she succeeded. It came off along with the bloody scarf and she began to clean the blood away from his face and neck, Brandt’s grimace of pain notwithstanding.

  ‘The ear isn’t too bad,’ the prisoner said, her voice softer than Neumann expected it might be. He realized he hadn’t heard her speak more than a dozen times. ‘A few stitches and it will be all right. You’ve lost some of it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m careless with body parts.’ Brandt whispered – and Neumann was surprised to see the wounded man was smiling.

  Neumann looked at his watch. He had better report the situation to the Commandant. Perhaps he would send men from the camp, if they could be spared.

  62

  AGNETA DIDN’T LOOK UP when Neumann left the room, instead she found herself searching Brandt’s eyes. He returned her gaze. She wanted to run back down to the kitchen – to change her mind. But it was too late now. When the SS woman had said it was Brandt upstairs, she’d stepped forward. There had been no time to think about it. She washed the last of the blood from Brandt’s face and neck, rinsing the towel out into the bowl. Pink soap bubbles now floated on its surface. She couldn’t have stayed down in the kitchen – it would have been impossible.

  ‘If you’re warm enough, I need to take off your tunic,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll have to help me up.’

  She gave Brandt her hand and he squeezed it as he pulled himself forward. A signal? He was lighter, more frail than she’d expected.

  ‘Is this wise? To move him?’ the mayor asked. ‘Shouldn’t we wait for the doctor?’

  ‘I’m fine, Herr Weber,’ Brandt said. ‘Just fine.’

  She peeled the jacket over his left shoulder and then down and away from his truncated arm. She found that her breath left her when her fingers brushed his stump. She remembered his arms around her. When was the last time she’d touched a man, gently, like this? Not since Vienna.

  She must show no emotion.

  The other side was more difficult, dried blood had melded the collar of the tunic to his hair but she used the warm water to separate them. There was no visible injury, apart from the ear itself.

  ‘See?’ Brandt said. ‘I told you I was fine.’

  ‘Would you like a brandy?’ Weber asked.

  ‘That would be good.’

  Weber fetched Brandt a cognac and he drank some, coughing.

  ‘We’d better take your undershirt off as well,’ Agneta said, and Brandt looked over to the auxiliary and Weber.

  ‘May I have some privacy, Herr Weber? Fräulein Beck? Just for a moment or two.’

  He inclined his head down toward his half arm, the look suggesting he was embarrassed by it.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Weber said.

  The mayor and the SS woman left them alone and Agneta noticed that the light from the fire had softened Brandt’s face, turning it almost golden.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, keeping her voice low.

  ‘The patrol was ambushed. Peichl is dead. Bobrik and three of the Ukrainians as well.’

  She pulled the undershirt over his head, careful to avoid the injured ear – underneath, he wore another cotton vest. Peichl dead? It was as though a weight had been removed from her shoulders.

  ‘You’re sure about Peichl?’

  He shrugged, looking away from her.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  He was quiet for a moment.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember me,’ he said. ‘I remember you.’

  Once again she found it difficult to breathe. Or speak.

  ‘We can’t talk like this,’ she managed.

  She was taking off his vest now. She heard his intake of breath as she pulled it over his head, the fabric rubbing against his wound.

  ‘But I remember you also,’ she said, in little more than a whisper.

  He was naked to the waist now. Scars and burn marks covered much of his chest and shoulders – aside from the rounded elbow that ended where his forearm should have begun.

  ‘I didn’t know you studied medicine,’ he said.

 
‘I didn’t,’ she answered. And allowed herself to smile.

  63

  NEUMANN WAITED FOR the Commandant to speak. He’d reported the dead, their probable location and the few details he’d had from Brandt concerning the perpetrators. But there had been no response. Neumann began to wonder if he’d been speaking to himself for the last two minutes. The phone lines were erratic these days and it wasn’t hard to lose a connection.

  ‘Four of ours, you say?’

  Neumann relaxed a little. The Commandant’s voice sounded brittle – but that might only be the quality of the line. ‘Five guards, including Peichl, Herr Commandant.’ The Commandant and he were not, Neumann suspected, on first-name terms this evening. ‘And Hauptsturmführer Jäger makes it six.’

  ‘Of course, Jäger as well,’ the Commandant agreed after a slight hesitation. ‘Six SS. What a mess. The Order Police are responsible, of course. They’re the ones that allowed the partisans to establish themselves in the hills. They’re the ones who did nothing to stop them. Now we see the consequences.’

  There was another silence. A door slammed somewhere on the Commandant’s end of the line. The evacuation must be well under way by now.

  ‘This fellow Brandt, he’s certain all of them are dead?’

  ‘He says he checked each body for a pulse. The partisans finished the wounded off.’

  ‘But he survived? I remember him. A local, isn’t he?’

  Neumann heard the suspicion in the Commandant’s voice.

  ‘Yes. The one-armed steward.’

  ‘Ah. The war hero. I take your point. He’s not likely to throw his lot in with the partisans.’

  ‘No,’ Neumann agreed after a moment’s thought. Although he wasn’t certain, now that he thought of it.

  ‘Is he able to be more specific about the location?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He says he could take us there, though.’

  There was another pause. Neumann wondered if the Commandant was wondering, as he was, about the strange symmetry of the SS being ambushed so close to the shoot at which they’d killed the prisoners.

  ‘The bodies will need to be recovered,’ the Commandant said.

  ‘I’ll organize a search party. Weber is here – he could call out the Volkssturm but there are only four SS men left here in the hut. If we could have some men from the camp or one of the sub-camps?’

  Another door slammed somewhere close to the Commandant, and Neumann could hear someone shouting orders.

  ‘Herr Commandant?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It sounds as though things are busy there.’

  ‘The Russians are advancing very fast, Neumann. Which means I can’t send any men from here or any of the sub-camps. Every one of them is needed. Decommissioning the camp takes precedence over everything else. The orders are from the highest authority.’

  ‘Decommissioning?’ Neumann asked. There were a number of things that stood out from the Commandant’s brief outlining of the situation – but that was the first one that came to mind.

  ‘The prisoners are being moved west.’

  ‘And the hut, Herr Commandant?’

  ‘Yes. It too.’ The Commandant sounded as though the hut wasn’t something he’d given much thought to up until this moment. ‘Leave nothing behind.’

  ‘Understood, Herr Commandant.’

  ‘The prisoners will have to be dealt with, of course.’ The Commandant paused, sighing. ‘I forgot. Peichl is dead, isn’t he? But there might be an alternative. How far away are you from the mining camp? Five kilometres or so?’

  ‘Less.’

  ‘They’ll be removing the prisoners from there the day after tomorrow – send the women to them along with your guards. They could use the extra men on the march and then they’ll be someone else’s responsibility. The guards and the prisoners.’

  ‘Thank you, Herr Commandant.’ Neumann felt as though the conversation were happening in another room and he was listening through a wall. ‘What about the auxiliaries?’ he managed to ask.

  ‘We need them here. I’ll send Schlosser to pick them up in the morning. There’s too much to be done – we expected the army to put up more of a fight. We need longer.’

  He wondered how long they had. He wondered if the mayor would get his chance to play at being a soldier sooner than he’d thought.

  ‘And me?’ he asked.

  ‘You could come here once the hut is dealt with, but perhaps it’s best if you make your own way to Nordhausen. I can send orders and a travel permit with Schlosser. It’s up to you.’

  ‘I . . .’ Neumann began, and then couldn’t think what else to say. The thought of going to the camp filled him with disgust. The thought of going to another camp – further to the west, filled him with the same emotion. Neumann heard more noise and shouting at the other end of the line.

  ‘I’ll send the papers with Schlosser,’ the Commandant said eventually.

  ‘What about the ambush?’

  ‘Inform the Order Police. It was their patrol. See what they say. Otherwise, recover the bodies in the morning. There’s no point in going out in a blizzard if they’re all dead.’

  64

  THE FIRST DAYS had been easy. There were no Germans to be seen – no live ones, anyway. They’d seen bodies – bloody streaks of flesh and fabric pressed into the road they travelled on, identifiable only by the scraps of grey uniform, or crumpled shapes curled along the base of a pockmarked wall. Each time they saw an enemy corpse, she thought it was a good omen. One less who might shoot back at them.

  The only fighting seemed to be happening elsewhere. The gunfire they heard was always at a distance. The roads were crowded with their own men moving forward, carts, wagons, trucks, artillery and infantry from several divisions all mixed together – an army on the move, smiling as often as not. Everyone had been expecting a hard fight – so why shouldn’t they be? And it wasn’t as though they were fooling themselves either – everyone knew they’d be fighting soon enough.

  Whenever possible, Major Raskov took to the fields. The going was quicker away from the traffic and it was perfect countryside for them – flat, but not too flat. There was plenty of cover for a good driver to manoeuvre across the open spaces. Raskov pushed them hard – and Headquarters pushed him hard in turn.

  But each time they reached their latest objective, either the fighting had moved on or it had never begun. They would have kept going, but often as not they had to wait for their fuel tenders to catch up with them – their diesel tanks empty even if their ammunition racks were still untouched.

  On the afternoon of the third day, however, they were given orders to move to a town to the north-west where the Germans were making a stand. No one knew whether there were really Germans there or not – but the battalion moved quickly all the same. The infantry clinging on to the turrets, bouncing as the tanks rolled and bumped over anything in their path.

  When they ran into a retreating German column on the way, it was as much of a surprise to them as it was to the Germans. As they came over the top of a rise Polya saw Raskov’s tank – about forty metres to their right – stop, its turret turning and then firing. Meanwhile, Lapshin was shouting.

  ‘In the dip, on the road. Fascists. Fifty metres forward then stop.’

  She pushed the tank down the slope and did as she was told, hearing the turret turning as she did so. Almost as soon as they stopped, the tank shuddered as Lapshin fired the big gun and the tank was full of the smell of cordite. Avdeyev, sitting beside her, was firing the machine gun and she still hadn’t seen them.

  ‘Forty-five degrees right. Thirty metres.’

  Again she did as she was told and now she saw them – stretched out along a country lane not more than a hundred metres ahead. There were only a few trucks – an artillery unit to judge from the guns being towed behind them. Apart from the trucks, the transport was mostly horse drawn, the flatbed wagons loaded with wounded men and equipment.

  There was no tim
e for the Germans to unlimber their cannon, no room to turn in the road and no cover even if they’d been able to. The soldiers who could scattered, but it was too late. How could they not have heard them coming?

  Did the battle last even a minute? It had been a blur – she remembered the screams as Galechka had rolled up onto one of the carts full of wounded men before it had folded flat beneath her weight. She didn’t like to think about that. Anyway, the cart had been in the way and she knew as well as anyone that they had to catch the infantry before they reached the wood on the other side of the small valley. She remembered the faces of the soldiers running towards the trees, looking over their shoulders to see how close they were behind, eyes black with fear, mouths open as they screamed – falling as the machine guns mowed them down. If they’d taken any prisoners, she hadn’t seen it.

  They lost one tank to a Panzerfaust but it didn’t burn and the crew made it out all right so no one complained. The victory was so quick and complete that they were moving on again almost immediately – although somehow Avdeyev found enough time to weigh down his wrist with three fine German watches.

  When they reached the town they’d been sent to, it was a different story. It spanned a river and the bridge was still standing, so they were ordered to attack straight away with what infantry they had. But the Germans were dug in with anti-tank guns and Panzerfausts and the first attempt cost them four tanks – two of them in flames. After that, they kept their distance and worked alongside the infantry towards the river, house by house, street, by street through the course of the night. Each company took its turn, while the others stood back in support, catching some sleep if they could – two crews on, two off.

  And just before dawn it had been their turn again and they’d broken through. Although she didn’t remember much about that either – except Major Raskov’s burnt-out tank on a crossroads, blackened bodies the size of children around it in the melting snow. And the blast when the Germans finally blew the bridge – not that it mattered as the river was fordable.

  When they reached the other side, the battalion was down to twenty-one tanks – out of thirty-two – and Lapshin was now commanding their company, which had lost four of its own eight tanks.