A Thousand Suns

Chapter 13 Another Truck

Another truck, another journey.

At least this time he and his men had the truck to themselves, an oil heater to keep them warm and several flasks of potato soup to share between them.

Oberleutnant Max Kleinmann watched a tableau of misery pass by with a cold, impassive face. It was still a young face, but one prematurely aged by battlefield stress, fatigue and a poor diet. The eastern front hadn’t turned boys into men; it had turned them into old men. Those few that survived, that is.

It hadn’t taken him long to learn the single most valuable survival technique a soldier can learn.

To not care. To give up all hope and accept death as inevitable.

Not caring was what had saved him; because it seemed like those who desperately wanted to live, to get home to wives, sweethearts and newly born sons and daughters that they’d yet to meet, those were the ones who never made it. It was as if God, or some other omnipotent, all-seeing bastard, was hunting down, one by one, the few men left with a burning desire to struggle on and live a life beyond this squalid, barbaric hell. So Max decided he wouldn’t care one way or the other. Death could come for him at its convenience. Thus he had carried on surviving. The stupid, unkind logic of war.

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.’

Max mumbled agreement. It would be better to end it now while all three of the Allied nations could claim an equal stake on Germany, rather than let the war run on. The Russians were covering ground at a far greater pace than the Americans and British. Having lost so many of her people to the Germans over the last few years, the Russians were a little less concerned about their casualty rate in this final chapter of the war. The Americans and the British, however, seemed more cautious in the way they were finishing the war, reluctant to lose too many more men to a struggle they considered all but over.

Max looked around at Pieter and the other men, Hans and Stefan. They were all ready to walk into an American or British POW camp. All three men had fought with him on the eastern front for the last year and a half, flying JU-88s, dropping supplies to the beleaguered 6th Army — a futile endeavour that had achieved very little and cost too much in lost men and machines. For the last four months, their role had been reduced to moving their plane back from the frontline; a concerted effort to keep the few remaining bombers out of the hands of the enemy. Finally, two weeks ago, when the fuel supply had finally dried up, they’d been forced to destroy what was left of the squadron and take to the road… and that was when KG-301 had ceased to exist and became nothing more than a few hundred men scattered along the retreating column.

These boys had done their bit, flying for whatever it was they believed in, the Fatherland or the Führer. Now all they wanted to do was to find a way to survive the next few weeks until someone decided enough was enough and called a halt to the bloodbath.

‘That SS shit didn’t give you any clues what this is about?’ asked Pieter.

‘No, but if I had cigarettes to bet, I’d wager this is a regrouping exercise. Someone is attempting to pull together a counter-offensive.’

‘A counter—? With what for fuck’s sake?’

Max shrugged. ‘We know there’s nothing left to fly, but whoever’s organised this truck probably thinks 301 is still operational.’

Pieter’s face drained of colour. It was a response Max hadn’t seen from him in a long time. His co-pilot had begun to believe he was going to make it home.

‘I’m not going on any more raids. I can’t—’

Max reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, there aren’t any more planes left. There is no more Luftwaffe, there’s nothing more they can ask us to do. Whatever morons are behind this, they’ll find out soon enough, and then I suppose they’ll go and find us something pointless to do until the war ends.’

Pieter nodded.

‘Just be grateful that this particular screw-up has given us our own truck, heater and food.’

‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right, one of their better screw-ups. ’

‘Exactly.’