A Man Without Breath

I put my hand on a long shovel that was attached to the Tatra’s bonnet. The little cars were no good in mud or on snow and frequently you had to dig them out or shovel gravel under the wheels: there was probably a sack of it behind the back seat.

‘But if I am lying to you, colonel, you have my permission to bang me on the head with this and have your men bury me in the woods. On the other hand, you might think I’ve already said enough to bury me yourself.’

‘Fair enough, captain.’ Colonel Ahrens smiled and then took out a little cigarette case. He offered one to me and to his lieutenant. ‘I appreciate your candour.’

We puffed them into life until it was almost impossible to distinguish smoke from our hot breath in freezing cold air.

‘Now then,’ I said. ‘You mentioned something about being billeted with you? If I didn’t need it to go back to Berlin, I could cheerfully hope that I never again saw a Junkers 52.’

‘Of course,’ said Ahrens. ‘You must be exhausted.’

We climbed into the Tatra. A corporal named Rose was at the wheel, and we were soon bowling along quite a decent road.

‘You’ll be staying with us in the castle,’ said Ahrens. ‘That’s Dnieper Castle, which is along the main road to Vitebsk. Nearly all of Army Group Centre, the Air Force Corps, the Gestapo and my lot are located west of Smolensk, in and around a place called Krasny Bor. The General Staff is headquartered in a nearby health resort which is as good as it gets around here, but we’re not badly off at the castle in signals. Are we, Rex?’

‘No sir. We’re well set, I think.’

‘There’s a cinema and a sauna – there’s even a rifle range. Grub’s pretty good, you’ll be glad to hear. Most of us – at least the officers anyway – we don’t actually go into Smolensk itself very much at all.’ Ahrens waved at some onion-dome spires on the horizon to our left. ‘But it’s not a bad place, to be honest. Rather historic, really. There are more churches hereabouts than you could polish the floor with. Rex is your man for that sort of thing, aren’t you lieutenant?’

‘Yes sir,’ said Rex. ‘There’s a fine cathedral, captain. The Assumption. I do recommend you see that while you’re here. That is, if you’re not too busy. By rights it shouldn’t be there at all: during the siege of Smolensk at the start of the seventeenth century, the defenders of the city locked themselves in the crypt where there was an ammunition depot and blew it and themselves up to prevent it from falling into Polish hands. History repeats itself, of course. The local NKVD used to keep some of its own personnel and domestic case files in the crypt of the Assumption Cathedral – to protect them against the Luftwaffe – and when it became clear that the city was about to be captured by us they tried to blow them up, like they did in Kiev, at the city’s Duma building. Only the explosives didn’t go off.’

‘I knew there was a reason it wasn’t on my itinerary.’

‘Oh, the cathedral is quite safe,’ said Rex. ‘Most of the explosive has been removed, but our engineers think there are still lots of hidden bombs in the crypt. One of our men had his face blown off when he opened a filing cabinet down there. So it’s just the crypt that remains out of bounds to visitors. Most of the material is of limited military intelligence value, and probably out of date by now, so the more time that passes the less important it seems to risk looking at it.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, it’s really a very impressive building. Napoleon certainly thought so.’

‘I had no idea he got this far,’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ said Rex. ‘He really was the Hitler of-’ he stopped, mid-sentence.

‘The Hitler of his day,’ I said, smiling at the nervous lieutenant. ‘Yes, I can see how that comparison works very well for us all.’

‘We’re not used to visitors, as you can see,’ said Ahrens. ‘On the whole we keep ourselves to ourselves. For no other reason other than secrecy. Well, you’d expect tight security with a signals regiment. We have a map room that indicates the disposition of all our troops from which our future military intentions are plain; and of course all of the group’s communications come through us. It goes without saying that this room and the actual telephone room are barred to ordinary access, but we do have lots of Ivans working at the castle – four Hiwis who are permanently on site and some female personnel who come in every day from Smolensk to cook and skivvy for us. But every German unit has Ivans working for them in Smolensk.’

‘How many of you are there?’

‘Three officers including myself and about twenty non-commissioned officers and men,’ said Ahrens.

‘And how long have you been here?’

‘Me personally? Since the end of November 1941. If I remember rightly, on thirtieth November.’

‘What about partisans? Get any trouble from them?’

‘None to speak of. At least not close to Smolensk. But we have had air attacks.’

‘Really? The pilot on the plane said this was too far east for the Ivan air force.’