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

He touched a blue and red bruise ring around the hole. “See this circle of color? When a bullet penetrates, the skin stretches and becomes scraped. Then the skin snaps back and leaves this bruise around the hole. This abrasion, like all the abrasions on the other chest wounds, is symmetrical.”

Thorvald covered the body and stood straight, easing his back. He pointed with the pencil down the row and shook his head.

“The head shots are useless. All except this last one. The mouth shot gave us a straight path in. I could only guess where he was looking when the bullet hit him. The exit wound was just under the ear, which tells me he was looking at ground level. If he’d been looking up, the exit would’ve been lower on the neck.”

Judging by the angle of the exit wound in the last corpse, plus the even roundness of the entry wounds of the head shots and the abrasion rings on the chests, Thorvald concluded that the Red snipers were not in the buildings but on a level plain with the soldiers. If the snipers had been above, below, or to the side of the targets, the abrasion rings would have been wider on the side of the bullet’s entry, like a slash or skid mark, and the holes would be oval, not round. From the accuracy of the shots, Thorvald put the distance at medium for an experienced sniper, about three hundred meters. There were at least two snipers working the area, a spotter and a shooter. These Reds were good; the targets, according to Captain Manhardt, had exposed themselves for only a moment. The Reds were working close and unseen. This sort of killing was easy pickings.

Thorvald gazed at the seven shrouds a last time. The soldiers beneath them were boys, all of them; none had looked older than Nikki.

“These snipers are making sport.”

Nikki led Thorvald through the wreckage to the aid station. He approached one of the nurses bending over an unconscious soldier. The man’s chest was wrapped in seeping red gauze.

“Nurse, pardon me,” Nikki whispered.

She kept her hands on the wounded soldier. The face she turned to Nikki was round and deeply lined. Her eyes and mouth were hung with the sort of soft flesh that holds exhaustion like a sponge.

“The colonel and I need to talk with some of the men,” Nikki said. He looked at the bleeding soldier on the ground. “We want to know about the snipers who are working the railroad mound. Could you ask if any of the men were wounded there?”

“There are no wounded from the railroad mound, corporal.” The nurse shook her head. “Every man shot there is dead.”

Thorvald leaned down, quietly as a leaf falling.

“Madam, tell me, please, were you at the railroad mound?”

She turned her head to the soldier to wipe a froth of blood and spittle from his mouth. “Seven times. I carried them out.”

Thorvald laid a gentle hand on the nurse’s arm. She stopped wiping the cloth across the soldier’s lips.

“We’re here to fight the Russian snipers. We’re specialists. Will you help us?”

The nurse laid the cloth on the soldier’s chest and stood. Nikki saw the stains on the front of her uniform. Her broad shoulders and chest were blotched with a rusted brown crust. She did carry them, he thought. She had lifted the bodies in the trench and carried them out. She laid them down and closed their eyes and covered them with blankets one by one.

Thorvald spoke, deference in his voice. “If you could show us where those boys fell, it would help us determine where the snipers are. We won’t take long. You can come right back here.”

She called to the other nurse. “Madeleine. This one goes next.” Pink bubbles boiled at the man’s lips.

Outside, the woman ducked behind the frozen tank, then scurried to a pile of rubble. With a nimbleness that challenged Nikki to follow, she wended among debris heaps and mortar holes to halt behind an abandoned Russian truck with its roof burned off. In a burst across an open ten meters, she flew behind a line of ruined rail cars sitting atop a dirt mound one meter high.

She slid into the trench behind the mound. Nikki followed and was relieved to have arrived without drawing the attention of the Red snipers.

This nurse, Nikki thought, ran this route seven times in, stopping, ducking, waiting; then straining under the yokes of the dead men while she carried them out, dodging and weaving. We’re three hundred meters behind the lines, normally a safe distance. But the mere presence of Russian snipers in the area changes everything. Each step has to be careful and calculated or it’s an invitation to a bullet. When the Red snipers move in, you risk your life just to walk upright, just to peek over a trench. Every movement becomes strained and burdensome when enemy snipers are near; hot tension brands every second with the crosshairs.

Once in the trench, gathered low behind the mound, Nikki turned to look for the colonel. Thorvald was thirty meters back, still hunched behind the chassis of the Red truck. Thorvald pawed the air. This meant that Nikki was to go on without him. He’ll be all right, Nikki thought. No sense risking my flight back to Germany across that open stretch. I can take care of this part without him.

The nurse led Nikki through the trench. It ran the length of the rail mound, over two hundred meters. Five cars were spread out on the rail, somehow refusing to crumble off their steel undercarriages. Behind the cover of each car, a unit of a dozen or so soldiers sat assembled around a machine gun boxed in by sandbags. None of the five guns was manned.

The nurse stopped at the first, second, and fifth of the units in the trench. At the first, she pointed down twice to the spots where she’d picked up bodies.

Each of the seven times the nurse pointed, she said only, “Here.” Nikki asked if she could recall the order of her trips to the units. She could remember only the first two and the last two. He inquired what sort of wound had been suffered by each soldier she’d collected. She shook her weary head and looked away down the trench to the next unit. Nikki stopped asking.

He knelt among the men to question them about the sniper attacks. Had they seen anything? What had they heard, what was the sound that had made the soldiers look? Had it been the same sound each time before a sniper shot? Had they heard the sound again?

It had been several weeks since Nikki had been among regular foot soldiers. His work for Ostarhild had kept him isolated while he roamed the battlefield sketching out maps and scribbling notations. The sixty-odd men in this trench looked damned. Many of the vacant faces were cloaked behind beards. There was no warmth in the trench; the men sat huddled, mingling the clouds of their breaths and the closeness of their fear. Some offered him drinks from bottles that were cologne vials. Nikki was horrified. They’re drinking captured perfume for the alcohol. My God, what’s happening to these men?

Kneeling beside the soldiers, Nikki understood that these men were no longer fighting to win in Stalingrad. Here in the chill of November, their combat was not just with the Red Army but also with dread, the horror that howled when it snatched the fellow next to them without warning. Their enemies were men, yes. But every second they fought other, smaller battles: the wretched lice tormenting their skin, hunger and thirst that burned without warming, and the cold silence that threatened to close around them day and night.

Their downcast eyes and grinding jaws revealed to Nikki that these soldiers had at last glimpsed their fate: cannons, rifles, and grenades could no longer win their freedom from Stalingrad. Stalingrad was a filthy, decrepit tomb, without remorse, pity, or relief. The city was no longer a battlefield; it was an affliction. The last weapon against it was hope.