“They have honoured us with a visit. We are fighting an invisible army,” said an officer — one of those The Frog had just greeted with an enthusiastic Heil Hitler.
“Of bandits,” the Oberführer completed.
The officer asked who the girls were. The Frog looked at him as if he didn’t understand.
“Feldhuren,” he said. “Sex partners serving the army.”
“Disgusting,” the officer said into the freezing air.
“Quite so,” the Oberführer said.
It occurred to him, fleetingly, that the weakness of some officers possibly extended right into the Führer’s bunker. It was not just a physical weakness but equally a psychological and moral one.
The frantic bustle of the guards was largely due to their anxiety not to get frostbite. The Frog wondered how many cases he would have to treat in the morning. He divided his attention between the activity on both sides of the train. It was a frightening thought that it took just two or three guerillas to stop a Herrenwaffe train on its way into battle. A general had been killed and they’d had to carry his broken body out like split logs. By the nearest carriage on the floodlit side a young officer was standing, but almost at once his knees gave way and he collapsed, hitting the back of his head against the carriage steps. For a moment he looked like a juggler.
The Frog went on assigning tasks and supervising their execution. He issued orders for amputations of arms, legs and fingers to be performed in the tent that the guards had erected by the outside wall. It looked like a Turkish refreshment kiosk. The patients were exposed to the wind, but there was nothing that could be done about that. The male nurses worked efficiently. They knew, even in the dark, what they had to do. The Oberführer made the girls’ cubicles, the guards’ dormitories and even his own office available. He ordered more tents to be erected.
“Looters will be shot,” he shouted at Madam Kulikowa.
Within five minutes Long-Legs had given Skinny two warm flannel shirts from an open suitcase. Next to it lay a woman with a smashed head. Long-Legs was unmoved. The dead woman was too heavy for the girls to lift. Her white face was spattered with blood as if powdered with sand. The blood had immediately frozen and congealed. The woman’s eyelids were closed; darkness hid her death’s grimace.
Skinny left the shirts under the carriage.
Two hours later a rail trolley arrived from the Wehrkreis with a repair crew, doctors and the Gestapo. Behind the trolley a locomotive was pulling a field hospital. They came to a halt as close to the wrecked train as possible, where the track was still undamaged.
The Gestapo men quickly strode around the train. With them was a Waffen-S S general. The Frog was exhilarated at being in the vicinity of the top-ranking army and Gestapo officers, and he had good reason. Proximity to power like that and promotion were twins. He must not fail even the greatest challenges. He reminded himself that the army was retreating. He prepared himself for what he would say if the general addressed him. They were not hard enough; that was the prime cause of all troubles. But he was not sure they wouldn’t criticize him for letting his searchlights provide targets for enemy aircraft. Heavy guns were rumbling in the distance.
By the track the wounded were laid alongside the dead. Those rescued were stumbling about. The amputation tent was full. Amputation at that temperature, even though the tent had warmed up a little, was no fun for the doctors, the nurses or the auxiliary staff. The surgeons from the hospital train — accustomed to working 18, or sometimes 24 hours without a break, without a thought to the quality of the operations they were performing and exhausted to death — had their hands full. One of the doctors from the hospital train looked like Klaus Schneeberg, Dr Krueger’s assistant. The Oberführer thought of his friend from Mauthausen, an amputation specialist, and of his wife-to-be, now a doctor at Buchenwald.
Skinny was terrified of blood. It made her dizzy, and she closed her eyes. Even so, she felt excited, full of a secret joy, not triumphalist but no longer defeatist. Madam Kulikowa had assigned her to the matron of the Brown Nurses, Obersturmbannführer Kemnitz. The woman got her to soak patches of gauze in aluminium caprylate. The basin soon froze over, making the task difficult. Skinny straightened the blankets of the injured who were taken into the estate or the hospital train. Now and again she slowed down and faced the burning tanker to warm herself. It burned with countless flames, big and small, constantly changing colour and yet remaining the same. She felt weak.
“Keep going,” Long-Legs said.
“Yes,” she replied.
It was impossible to be amid the blood of the others and not absorb a fraction of their pain. She passed the stretchers of battered women. They looked at her as if she was one of them.
The matron scrutinized her for quite a while. She had tired watery eyes, and she was about the age of Skinny’s mother. At the moment of the train’s derailment some of the Brown Nurses were dozing, while the others had been singing about the Führer, and how he loved Berlin. “Mein Führer,” the song addressed Hitler like a prayer. It spoke of that promise which must not and would not be broken. A spiritual glow. A difficult operation from which eternal peace would spring. Of humiliation and of honour regained. What Germany was in the eyes of the world and in its own eyes. Then, abruptly, the explosion.
When dawn came they were exhausted. Heavy guns were still roaring in the distance as if they had nothing to do with what had happened on the railway track. The fire at the back of the train had burnt itself out. The area, as the Obergruppenführer informed the Oberführer, was being searched by Einsatzkommandos of the Einsatzgruppen, by their best Jagdkommandos. They would leave not a single stone unturned in the quarry. The weather was in their favour, it was a clear day. The meteorologists did not expect a snowfall for the next 24 hours, there was just a hideous wind. With these observations the Gestapo general departed, along with the hospital train pulled by a diesel locomotive and followed by the rail trolley.
The Frog’s report stated that there were 78 dead, 327 severely injured and 83 slightly injured. The train and its engines were almost totally destroyed. Both engine drivers and three firemen were among the dead. Most of the damage was repaired within six hours of daylight. The track was expected to be back in operation in another six hours.
The repair work was directed by Obersturmführer Xaver Kinkel, a dwarfish man in a colonel’s uniform which made him look like a green gnome. He wore fur boots and a woollen ski mask on his face. A little man of indefatigable energy and organizational talent, he wore several Nazi decorations. He appeared to have sprung straight from a Dr Caligari film. All one could see of him were his bespectacled eyes.
Obersturmführer Kinkel knew how often similar disasters happened on the Ostbahn, the eastern track whose repair and maintenance — but not its security — he was responsible for. Not one of them had been an accident. He claimed no other merit for his work on the Ostbahn than that which a clockmaker would claim for repairing a broken timepiece. Those who threatened the Ostbahn threatened Reich property, the spirit of the Reich. Germany’s railways now seemed to him like a wounded, bleeding beast.
The matron organized blood donors. The Brown Nurses all volunteered. So did servicemen and women who’d come through the disaster unscathed. The matron got Skinny to bring out some chairs. Who knew their blood group?
Ginger, Maria-from-Poznan and Smartie had already volunteered. The matron noticed Skinny’s tattoo on her forearm. A number? Feldhure? She was shocked. Only then did Obersturmbannführer Mathilde Kemnitz realize where they were. This was the estate they’d heard about. She stopped being impersonal.