David Downing - Potsdam Station

'You were screaming,' Varennikov told him.

'I know,' Russell said. The sense of being yanked back into the present was almost physical. 'I was back in France, in the First War,' he explained reluctantly.

'The trenches,' Varennikov said carefully in English. 'I have read about them. It must have been terrible.'

'It was,' Russell agreed tersely, eager to change the subject and allow the dream to fade. He asked Varennikov what his parents had done in the First War, and got himself dressed as the Russian told the story of his father's capture in the Brusilov offensive, and his three years of imprisonment in Hungary. The man had come home a communist, and discovered, much to his astonishment, that his country's government had undergone a similar transformation.

Before getting to sleep the previous night Russell had decided that there was no choice but simply to turn up at the Alex. He would walk in, wearing his Reichsbahn uniform, and say he had an appointment with Kriminalinspektor Kuzorra. Or that he was an old friend. Or something. There was hardly likely to be anyone around who'd recognise him from three-year-old wanted posters. The only real risk was strolling down firing ranges that used to be streets.

Leissner had no objections, and didn't even ask where Russell was going. He supplied the usual military bulletin – the Red Army had entered Weissensee and Treptow Park to the north-east and south-east, and had reached the northern S-Bahn defence line and Hohenzollernkanal. They were across the Teltowkanal in the south-west, and advancing into Dahlem. The ring around the city was almost complete.

'Where do you get your information from?' Russell asked, purely out of curiosity.

'The military authorities still use trains to move weapons and ammunition to the front,' Leissner explained. 'So they have to tell us where it is.'

Which made some sort of sense, Russell thought, always assuming the overriding insanity of continued resistance. Halfway down a street on the other side of Anhalter Station he came across a message that expressed his own feelings with great simplicity. On the last remaining wall of a gutted house someone had painted the word 'Nein' in letters two metres high.

Most of the streets in the city centre were like obstacle courses, and it took him over an hour to reach the river. Travel on the surface resembled a long drawn-out game of Russian roulette, but these were odds that he had to accept – if he waited underground for a break in the shelling he might be there until doomsday. The streets were literally plastered with the flesh of those whose luck had run out, but his continued to hold, at least until he reached the Spree.

He had chosen the Waisenbrucke as the least likely bridge to be guarded, but there was a checkpoint at the western end. It was manned by regular military police, and there seemed a good chance that the Reichsbahn uniform would limit any expression of official disapproval to simple refusal. He decided to risk it, and was amply rewarded – once he told them he was on his way to police headquarters they simply waved him across.

It took him only ten minutes to discover the reason for their benevo-lence. There were SS-manned checkpoints on all the exits from Alexanderplatz, and these were in the business of gathering volunteers. Spotted before he had the chance to gracefully withdraw, Russell reluctantly presented himself for inspection. His claim of urgent business with the police was answered with the gift of a spade and a finger pointing him down Neue Konig Strasse. An incipient protest died in his throat as he caught sight of the corpse a few metres away. There was a bullet hole in the forehead, and the Russians weren't that close.

He got a glimpse of a battered but still-standing 'Alex' as he crossed the square, but that was all. He spent the morning digging gun emplacements in gardens off Neue Konig Strasse, the afternoon helping to build a barricade with two trams and several cart-loads of rubble. Apart from a few careless strays like himself, the workforce was made up of Hitlerjugend and Volkssturm, the former painfully enthusiastic, the latter replete with sullen misery. They were reinforced in the afternoon by a posse of Russian women prisoners, all wearing pretty headscarves, all barefoot. It rained most of the time, drenching everyone but the SS supervisors, who strode around holding umbrellas. Their uniforms were astonishingly immaculate, their boots the only shiny footwear left in Berlin, but there was a brittleness in their voices, the hysterical stillness of a trapped animal in their eyes. They were living on borrowed time, and they knew it.

Late in the afternoon a sad-looking horse slowly clip-clopped into view with a mobile canteen in tow. Even the Russian women were given tin cups of soup and a chunk of bread, and Russell noticed one of them surreptitiously feeding the horse. He had no idea what the soup was made of, but it tasted wonderful.

The canteen moved on, and everyone went back to work. An hour or so later, their task completed, Russell's team stood around awaiting instructions. But the senior SS officers had vanished, and their subordinates seemed uncertain of what came next. Without the noise of their own labours to mask them, the sounds of battle seemed appreciably closer. The machine-gun fire was no more than a kilometre away, the boom of tank cannons maybe even closer.

'They'll be giving us rifles soon,' one of Russell's fellow-strays remarked. He looked about sixty-five, and far from pleased at the prospect of battle.

'That would be good news,' an even older man told him. 'Most likely they'll put us with the Volkssturm and tell us to use their guns once they've been killed.'

As it began to grow dark, Russell gave serious consideration to walking away. But how far would he get? There were still SS in sight, and no doubt others around the next corner. The corpse by the checkpoint was still vivid in his memory. But waiting for the Red Army with a bunch of rocket-bearing children and a handful of geriatrics armed with First War rifles seemed no less life-threatening. When the light was gone, he told himself. Then he would make a run for it.

It was almost gone when an argument broke out further down the street between SS and army officers. 'I'm off,' one of Russel 's fellow-workers muttered. He stepped out of the emplacement they had dug that morning, and strode calmly off in the direction of the nearest street corner.

No one seemed to notice him, and within seconds the darkness had swallowed him up.

Russell followed his example. No shouts pursued him either, and soon he was jogging down an empty side street towards Prenzlauer Strasse. This was barricaded in the direction of the river, so he continued north-westward, searching for an unguarded route back into the Old Town. Several adjacent houses were burning in one such street, a crowd of people apparently watching. He joined it surreptitiously, and realised that an effort was underway to rescue people trapped in an upper storey. Curiosity kept him watching for a few moments, until he realised he was being stupid. He slipped on down the street, and eventually recognised the silhouette of the elevated S-Bahn. He was just heading under the bridge when he had the idea of climbing up – he still had to get over the river and there wouldn't be a checkpoint on a railway crossing.

He followed the viaduct until he found a maintenance stairway, managed to scramble over the gate, and laboriously hauled himself up to the tracks. He was two or three hundred metres east of Borse Station. Feeling every one of his forty-five years, he began walking westwards between the two tracks.

It was an eerie experience. Berlin was spread out all around him, a dark field in which a thousand fires seemed to be burning. As Leissner had said, the Soviet encirclement was almost complete – only a small arc to the west seemed free of intermittent explosions and tracer ribbons.