David Robbins - War of the Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad

The captain scratched behind his neck. He wiped his hand across sleepless, shining eyes. “What can they do?” he asked Thorvald. “What can I tell them? Snipers. It’s a goddammed sport to them.”

Thorvald paused before speaking to pay his respects to the captain’s woe.

“Let me see some of the bodies,” he said. He made his voice soothing, as though he meant it to be a poultice across Manhardt’s brow. “The corporal and I will do something about it.”

The captain stood. His body was laden with weapons; he bulged like a deadly fruit tree. Bands of bullets crossed his chest; a bayonet was strapped to his leg; grenades bunched at his waist. A Mauser pistol was jammed under his belt. He slung his submachine gun over his back.

He led Nikki and Thorvald up the steps and out of the basement into a gigantic grotto, a chamber left as a bubble in the heart of the building’s ravaged interior. The high ceiling, like a crazy cathedral, was a jumble of bent steel beams and giant concrete shards. Scattered on the ground were wounded soldiers wrapped in red-soaked bandages, some reaching out their hands, some rocking, others lying still. Moans and whispers mingled with anguished calls for the two brown-clad nurses. These women scurried among the men, talking to them in low tones, nodding when they spoke, touching the men with wet cloths.

The captain faced Nikki. His eyes seemed to say, See all this blood. For what? He said, “The bodies are out here.”

Thorvald and Nikki followed him through the bitter smells of wounds and gauze into a tunnel to the street.

Beside the charred and snowy remains of a German tank, seven bodies lay under gray-green blankets. The captain hung back while Thorvald approached the corpses. “You know your way around,” Manhardt said. He turned and was gone around the corner. As he walked off, the captain’s grenades and bullets rattled.

Thorvald knelt beside one of the bodies and peeled the blanket back from the head. Rivulets of blood had trickled from a hole in the dead boy’s forehead. The blood had pooled in the eye sockets, then dripped alongside the nose and ears to form a dark spider sitting spread out on the gray face.

Thorvald looked up at Nikki. “At Gnössen I have a doctor who comes in to teach my snipers how to read wounds. It’s a bit ghoulish, but often it’s the only trail a sniper leaves behind.” He touched the waxen face gingerly on the cheek. He said with a wan smile, “Now I wish I’d paid more attention.”

The colonel blew out a sigh. He felt around the perimeter of the hole just above the corpse’s left eye. Thorvald’s breathing came in a heavy whisper through his nose.

He slipped his hand under the boy’s head. Instantly he pulled his hand out. He grimaced.

“The back of the head’s gone.”

The colonel flipped the blanket up to cover the face and stood. His arms hung limp at his sides. He wiggled the fingers on both hands.

After a moment, the colonel knelt to uncover the second body. This head was clear and pale; he pulled the blanket down farther and found a rip in the coat, in the center of the chest. He unbuttoned the coat.

“Give me your knife.”

Nikki pulled the knife from his boot. The colonel opened the coat and cut away the buttons on the sweater and the two shirts beneath.

The fatal wound was on the boy’s hairless white breast, like a small crater on the ashen surface of the moon, below the left collarbone and near the heart. Thorvald took a pencil from his coat and inserted the tip a few millimeters into the wound. With his fingers, he worked the flesh around the hole, squeezing and kneading the muscles and skin.

Without a word or a glance to Nikki, he examined the next four bodies in the same manner. Two more had head wounds; in both cases, Thorvald reached under the head to find that the Russian bullet had blasted out the back of the skull. The other two bore chest wounds. Thorvald inserted his pencil into each of these and wriggled it while working the swollen flesh around the hole.

Nikki stood back, fascinated more by Thorvald’s sleuthing than the wrenching tedium of death.

After ten minutes, Thorvald stood over the last of the seven shrouded corpses. He swept back its blanket. Nikki asked, “What have you found, Colonel?”

“Nothing yet.”

Nikki looked at the body. He expected to see another perforated skull with a neat black hole stitched in the cheek or forehead with black blood dribbling down like seasoned lava. If not, then a simple rip in the uniform over the heart.

This body showed no marker of death. The head was unscathed. Thorvald stripped away the shirt. No wound spoiled the chest.

Thorvald yanked back the blanket to expose the full corpse. He sliced the uniform away; the stiff flesh was stained a dusky reddish purple in the shoulder blades, buttocks, calves and heels, where the blood had settled.

With his foot, Thorvald rolled the naked cadaver over. No holes appeared in the back. He raised his hands in frustration, then lifted the corpse again with his boot to turn it face up.

The dead soldier rocked and Nikki glimpsed a spot darker than the boy’s hair just behind the right ear. It might have been a mole or a clump of dirt.

He pointed. “Look at the neck. Behind the ear.”

Thorvald trailed his fingers through the short brown hair, down the nape, and under the ear. He leaned down to peer closer at the dot in the back of the skull.

“It’s an exit wound. Look here around the cavity. There’s no bruising, no abrasion ring.”

The bullet had come out behind the boy’s ear. Its jacket had not flattened on impact to take the rear of the head with it when it left, the way it was supposed to do.

But where did the bullet enter?

Thorvald used the knife to pry open the mouth. The body’s lips were clamped tight from rigor mortis. With some twisting of the blade between the teeth, the frozen jaw muscles gave way.

Nikki leaned over Thorvald’s shoulder to look at the face. The mouth, wide open now, seemed out of balance with the repose of the shut eyes and the still, hard body. The mouth appeared defiant, screaming even as the rest of the body was resolved to its end.

Thorvald prodded with his pencil. He motioned to Nikki. “Look here.”

He pointed at a chip in the left front tooth.

Laying the pencil under the broken place on the tooth, he slid the point into the throat, into a hole at the back of the wind pipe. He let go of the pencil. It stood straight up.

“He probably saw the sniper at the last second and tried to shout something. The bullet went in his mouth, clipped this tooth, and entered the back of the throat. It hit the top of the spine, probably cut it in two, then bounced out here under the ear.”

Thorvald flicked the standing pencil with his fingertip. “This is the path of the bullet. It went in straight. He had his face turned at the sniper when the bullet struck. Let’s see….”

He fingered the hole beneath the ear, pulled the pencil from the mouth, and slid it into the neck. Again he kneaded the muscles and skin around the pencil.

Thorvald studied the wound, then withdrew the pencil and pulled the blanket over the body. He patted the head once when it was covered.

Still kneeling beside the body, Thorvald looked across the row of draped corpses. He spoke, addressing them: “The chest shots didn’t tell me much. Once a bullet hits the torso’s muscles and organs, it bounces around a lot. But…” He turned to Nikki. “Look here.”

He turned back one of the blankets to reveal the pallid mound of a dead boy’s bosom. He circled the wound with his finger.

“All the chest-wound entry holes are round,” he said. “That indicates a ninety-degree angle of entry.”