A Man Without Breath

I rose early and made my way to the mess. Breakfast was always the best meal of the day at Krasny Bor. There was coffee – real coffee, Von Kluge wouldn’t have tolerated anything less – cheese, rye-wheat and whole-grain breads, salted butter, cinnamon rolls, coffee cake, and naturally plenty of wurst. Life was very different for enlisted men, of course, and nobody at group HQ asked too many questions about what they had for breakfast; nobody asked too many questions about the wurst either, and it was generally held that it was horsemeat, but there were also tins of real Lowensenf from Dusseldorf on the table to make your sausage taste more like the kind of real pork sausage you ate at home. The schnapps decanter was always left conspicuously on the table for those who liked to start the day with nothing more than an extra brick in the wall. Generally speaking, I went for everything – including the schnapps – as I had little time for lunch and even less time for the coffee and apple cake that would magically appear in the mess at around four o’clock. Some German officers actually managed to put on weight while they were in Smolensk; unlike the people of Smolensk, of course – not to mention our POWs: there was no chance of any of them putting on weight.

In spite of my late night I was up before any of the international commission had arrived in the mess. So was the field marshal, and as soon as he saw me, Von Kluge came to my table, kicked a chair out impatiently, and sat down. His granite-grey face was a study of snarling fury, like a gargoyle on an old German church.

‘I understand from Colonel Ahrens that it was you who thought fit to batter my man Dyakov over the head with a truncheon last night,’ he said through clenched yellow teeth. It was clear he would have bitten me if he had not been an officer and a gentleman.

‘Sir, with respect, he was drunk and he was shooting at people,’ I said.

‘Rubbish. I might have understood your actions, Gunther, if he’d been on a tram, or in a crowded building. But no – he was in the middle of a fucking forest. At night. I should have thought everyone with a brain in his head would have realized he was well out of harm’s way. It seems to me that the only people he was in danger of shooting were a few thousand of your beloved dead Polacks.’

Suddenly they were my dead Polacks.

‘That’s not how it seemed at the time, sir. General von Tresckow asked me to assist his adjutant and-’

‘Was anyone injured? No, of course they weren’t. But like some stupid, heavy-handed Berlin goon, you had to crack his skull. Probably enjoyed it, too. That’s the reputation of the Berlin police, isn’t it? Crack skulls, ask questions later? You should have left him alone to sleep it off. You should have waited until the morning. By now he’d have been quite manageable instead of fucking insensible.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘I just had a call from the hospital. He’s still unconscious. And there’s a lump on his head that’s the size of your fucking brain.’

Von Kluge leaned forward and extended a long thin forefinger toward the centre of my face. There was a slight smell of alcohol on his breath and I wondered if he’d already had a nip from the schnapps decanter. I knew that as soon as he was gone I was going to have one myself – there are better starts to a man’s day than being chewed out by an irate field marshal.

‘I tell you this, my blue-eyed Nazi friend. You had better fucking pray that my man recovers. If Alok Dyakov dies, I’ll court-martial you and then I’ll tie a rope under your ear myself. D’you hear? I’ll hang you for murder. Just like I hanged those two bastards from the Third Panzer Grenadiers. And don’t think I can’t. You’re a long way from the protection of the RSHA and the so-called Ministry of Enlightenment now. I run the show down here in Smolensk, not Goebbels or anyone else. I’m in command here.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Arse.’

He stood up abruptly, knocking over the chair he had been sitting on, turned, kicked it out of his way and stomped out of the mess leaving me in need of some clean underwear. I’d suffered a verbal barrage before, only none quite as public or perhaps as threatening, and Von Kluge was right about one thing: I was a long way from the relative safety of Berlin. A German field marshal – especially one whose loyalty had been expensively bought by Hitler – could do more or less what he liked with a whole army at his back.