Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'Christ,' he said. 'We're never going to find our way home.'

He had an excellent point. Staring out of a gap in the planks on the side of our cattle truck at the endless Russian steppes, it was the sheer size of the country that defeated you. Sometimes it was so big and unchanging it seemed the train wasn't moving at all, and the only way to make sure that we weren't standing still was to watch the moving track through the hole in the floor that served as our latrine.

'How did that bastard Hitler ever think we could conquer a country as big as this?' said someone. 'You might as well try to invade the ocean.'

Once, in the distance, we saw another train travelling west in the opposite direction, and there was not one of who didn't wish we were on it. Anywhere west seemed better than anywhere east.

Another man said: 'Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the sacred heights of Troy. Many cities of men he saw and learned their ways, many places he endured, heartsick on the open sea, struggling to save his life and bring his comrades home.'

He paused for a moment and then, for the benefit of those who'd never done the classics, said, 'Homer's Odyssey.'

To which someone else said, 'I only hope that Penelope is behaving herself.'

The journey took two whole days and nights before, finally, we disembarked beside a wide, steel-grey river, at which point the classics scholar, whose name was Sajer, began to cross himself religiously.

'What is it?' asked Metelmann. 'What's wrong?'

'I recognise this place,' said Sajer. 'I remember thanking God I'd never see it again.'

'God likes his little jokes,' I said.

'So what is this place?' demanded Metelmann.

'This is the Volga,' said Sajer. 'And if I'm right, we're not far south of Stalingrad.'

'Stalingrad.' We all repeated the name with quiet horror.

'I was one of the last to get out before the Sixth Army was encircled,' explained Sajer. 'And now I'm back. What a fucking nightmare.'

From the train we marched to a larger camp that was mostly SS, although not all of them German: there were French, Belgian and Dutch SS. But the senior German officer was a Wehrmacht colonel named Mrugowski, who welcomed us to a barrack with proper bunk beds and real mattresses, and told us that we were in Krasno-Armeesk, between Astrakhan and Stalingrad.

'Where have you come from?' he asked.

'A camp called Usman, near Voronezh,' I said.

'Ah yes,' he said. 'The one with the church steeple.'

I nodded.

'This place is better,' he said. 'The work is hard but the Ivans are relatively fair. Relative to Usman, that is. Where were you captured?'

We exchanged news and, like all the other Germans at KA, the colonel was anxious to hear something about his brother, who was a doctor with the Waffen SS, but no one could tell him anything.

It was the height of the summer on the steppe and, with little or no shade, the work – excavating a canal between the Don and the Volga rivers – was hard and hot. But, for a while at least, my situation was almost tolerable. Here there were Russians working, too – saklutshonnis convicted of a political crime which, more often than not, was hardly a crime at all, or at least none that any German – not even the Gestapo – would have recognised. And from these prisoners I began to perfect my knowledge of the Russian language.

The site itself was an enormous trench covered with duckboards and walkways and rickety wooden bridges; and from dawn until dusk it was filled with hundreds of men wielding picks and shovels, or pushing crudely made wheelbarrows – a regular Potsdamer Platz of pleni traffic – and policed by stone- faced 'Blues', which was what we called the MVD guards with their gimnasterka tunics, portupeya belts, and blue shoulder- boards. The work was not without hazard. Now and then the sides of the canal would collapse in upon someone and we would all dig frantically to save his life. This happened almost every week and, to our surprise and shame – for these were not the inferior people that the Nazis had told us of – it was usually the Russian convicts who were quickest to help. One such man was Ivan Yefremovich Pospelov, who became the nearest thing I had to a friend at KA, and who thought he was well off, although his forehead, which was dented like a felt hat, told a different story from the one he told me:

'What matters most, Herr Bernhard, is that we are alive, and in that we are indeed fortunate. For, right now, at this very moment, somewhere in Russia, someone is meeting his undeserved end at the hands of the MVD. Even as we speak a poor Russian is being led to the edge of a pit and thinking his last thoughts about home and family before the pistol fires and a bullet is the last thing to travel through his mind. So who cares if the work is hard and the food is poor? We have the sun and the air in our lungs and this moment of companionship that can't be taken away from us, my friend. And one day, when we're free again, think how much more it will mean to you and me just to be able to go and buy a newspaper and some cigarettes. And other men will envy us that we live with such fortitude in the face of what only appear to be the travails of life.

'You know what makes me laugh most of all? To think that ever I complained in a restaurant. Can you imagine it? To send something back to a kitchen because it was not properly cooked. Or to reprimand a barman for serving warm beer. I tell you I'd be glad to have that warm beer now. That's happiness right there, in the acceptance of that warm beer and remembering how it's enough in life to have that and not the taste of brackish water on cracked lips. This is the meaning of life, my friend. To know when you are well off and to hate or envy no man.'

But there was one man at KA who it was hard not to hate, or envy. Among the Blues were several political officers, politruks, who had the job of turning German fascists into good antifascists. From time to time these politruks would order us into the mess to hear a speech about Western imperialism, the evils of capitalism, and what a great job Comrade Stalin was doing to save the world from another war. Of course, the politruks didn't speak German and not all of us spoke Russian, and the translation was usually handled by the most unpopular German in the camp, Wolfgang Gebhardt.

Gebhardt was one of two anti-fascist agents at KA He was a former SS corporal, from Paderborn, a professional footballer who once had played for SV 07 Neuhaus. After being captured at Stalingrad, in February 1943, Gebhardt claimed to have been converted to the cause of communism, and as a result he received special treatment: his own quarters, better clothing and footwear, better food, cigarettes and vodka. There was another anti-fa agent called Kittel, but Gebhardt was by far the more unpopular of the two, which probably explains why some time during the autumn of 1945, he was murdered. Early one morning he was found dead in his hut, stabbed to death. The Ivans were very exercised about it, as converts to Bolshevism were, despite the material benefits of becoming a Red, rather thin on the ground. An MVD major from the Stalingrad Oblast came down to KA to inspect the body, after which he met with the Senior German Officer and, by all accounts, a shouting match ensued. Following this I was surprised to find myself summoned to see Colonel Mrugowski. We sat on his bed behind a curtain that was one of the few small privileges allowed to him as SGO.

'Thanks for coming, Gunther,' he said. 'You know about Gebhardt, I suppose.'

'Yes. I heard the cathedral bells ringing.'

'I'm afraid it's not the good news that everyone might imagine.'

'He didn't leave any cigarettes?'

'I've just had some MVD major in here shouting his head off. Making me into a snail about it.'