A thousand suns

He pulled on his cigarette; his gaunt unshaven cheeks drew in. Max was twenty-nine but sometimes, when he saw his face reflected, he saw beneath the pallid, grey skin a dead man trying to get out.

They had been going for fifteen hours. Progress had been painfully slow, as the truck had to pick its way through many rubble-strewn and cratered roads. He was horrified at the amount of devastation that had been wrought on Germany since he had last visited home. It had seemed that virtually every town or village they had passed through had taken some degree of bomb damage. Much of this destruction he guessed was accidental, Allied bombing runs that had drifted off target. But then he had heard that had been happening less in recent months. The carpet bombings had suddenly become very accurate. There was a rumour running around that the bombers were using multiple radio signals from England to pinpoint their positions. The ability to navigate from visual reference points was no longer a necessity. And so the waves of bombers were coming under the cover of night and dropping their bombs from altitudes well above the effective range of their flak.

If they’d had a system as accurate as that of the Allies back in the summer of 1940, the British airfields would have been pulverised into submission in a matter of weeks. Instead, navigating by sight only, they had simply pulverised many an empty field and marsh and suffered appalling losses at the hands of those lethal Spitfires for their troubles.

One of Max’s commanders had once told him that this was a war of technology and the side with the best would win. It was that simple. War would never again be a measure of the will or courage or resolve of a people, but a measure of the efficiency of their men in lab coats.

‘And if that is to be the future of war, Max,’ he’d continued, his eloquence lubricated by a bottle of vodka, ‘then how can a victory ever again be seen as something to be proud of? To be on the winning side after a battle, a man used to be able to say he won because he was smarter, braver, better than the other side on the day. Not any more. From now on those men that win their battles will have nothing to take pride in, merely that they’ve been given the better tools for the job.’

Major Lemmel that had been, he was a man who had cared passionately about things, and desperately wanted to survive the war. Max guessed by now God had tracked him down and finished him off.

The truck rumbled through a small town where the main street of shops was marked only by the hollow outlines of their eviscerated foundations. Several dozen corpses caked in plaster and dust were lined up at the side of the road awaiting collection and burial. They were bloated and distorted, scorched skin like tanned leather — taut, inflated by the gases of decay within. He had seen so many bodies like these in the ruins of Russia. Swollen corpses fit to burst, poking from the plaster and rubble of the world about them. That was the terrain that Max had grown used to over the last two years… rubble and charred flesh, charcoal and meat. He had seen grand-scale devastation from close up on the ground, where the smells and visceral detail had once upon a time turned his stomach inside out, and he’d seen it from afar, from the air.

He had seen Stalingrad. Mile upon square mile of complete, total, devastation. As if God himself had reached down from heaven and tried to vigorously scrub the land clean of this city. It had been truly chilling to witness for himself how much destruction they had brought to bear on this one place… how much raw destructive power mankind could summon at will. Too much power.

Our capacity to destroy has exceeded our capacity to create.

Max shook his head. When this was over, mankind would need to find another way, other than war, to resolve its petty disputes… or mankind would end up totally destroying itself — turning the world into one relentless Stalingrad.

Of that he was certain.

As the truck rumbled past the bodies, he watched two old men collecting the corpses in their cart, and they passed by a large ditch where the dead had been stacked like sardines in a tin, head to toe.

That’s what a defeated country looks like. A landscape of shattered ruins, dust, debris… and carcasses stacked like timber.

Pieter passed him a tin mug of steaming potato soup. ‘Here you are.’

‘Thanks.’

He sat beside Max and stared miserably out at the passing landscape of rubble. ‘It’s all over now, isn’t it?’

‘Soon. Weeks, maybe days.’

Pieter lowered his voice. ‘Days would be better than weeks.’