Thursday 22nd – Jan and Mechelen – Spring/Summer 1941

“And most of the women were raped of course – even the old women and the young girls. We caught some of the partisans soon after the massacre – some rival group of nationalists betrayed them. We had them here – ” – he gestures back over his shoulder with his thumb, towards the distant barracks – “ – for interrogation. Before they died, they said that the rapes were concerned with two things: the honour of their country, and to make sure that no man would want the women once they returned to their ancestral homeland. This is a weapon that they use in the way that they fight their wars – even against each other in their civil wars. It’s what we should expect if they ever defeat us. And it’s why we can never allow them to win. They’re barbarians.”

Jan can see that Mechelen is genuinely angry, frightened and moved. He looks away, afraid of embarrassing the older man. There’s oil on the track bed gravel below, and weeds thick between the sleepers. He thinks he can see scraps of clothing caught in the branches of the trackside bushes, and there are bits of rusting metal strewn along the bed of the cutting.

“So, anyway,” continues Mechelen, “we collected all the survivors and shipped them back to the homeland. The men are buried out there in graves at the edges of the fields.”
Jan squints through the leaves and branches to where crops are growing in ranked profusion. The air is vibrating with light and heat.

“And we caught most of the perpetrators. They’re buried near here, too. It was pretty ugly. Pretty ugly.”

Mechelen picks at his left thumbnail with his index finger.

“Let’s get back. I want to get something to drink.”

[…]

[NB – Before we get to the expulsions and the war and the Einsatzgruppen proxies we need to have established ‘the Slav’ as something alien to the westerners – something dark and fear-inducing, and ‘dirty and unhealthy’. As something mythically, subconsciously wrong and frightening – unassimilable and not rationally understandable. How? (i) via Jan’s childhood/youth/young manhood culture and upbringing – and popular iconography – all the influences (include. Education) that he’s been exposed to ever since he was a child, and the dominant images of Slavs therein…how could he think anything different, having been exposed to all this? And yet he could have turned out differently, of course…the elements of choice, and insight – compare Mathilde’s post-war upbringing, and her rejection of racism and bigotry – to a limited extent, at least…; (ii) ??]

[…]

The invasion is going incredibly well – much better than had been anticipated. The Russian’s border defences melted away under the shocking weight of the initial Imperial attack, and the enemy’s entire command and supply structures have collapsed. In many sectors, the Slavs are in headlong retreat, leaving behind men, vehicles, weapons and supplies of all kinds. Astonishingly, most of the day three objectives were taken before nightfall on the first day, and the only thing that’s holding up the Imperial troops’ advance is the need to wait for their own supply lines to be established. There’s almost no resistance, and no partisan activity. The local people are neutral at worst, and many of them are actively welcoming.

The speed of the advance means that Jan’s unit have been activated four days earlier than the plan stipulated: they crossed the border on day four rather than day eight of the invasion, their trucks and cars passing over a broad stone-built bridge spanning the river [B.]. The customs post was still in place, with its red and white hooped pole barrier fixed in the raised position, as if it were saluting the conquering army. The roadway was scored and cracked by the passage of Imperial tanks, and engineers, stripped to the waist and belly-deep in river water, were carrying out reinforcement work on the bridge piers and [spans].

Jan was shocked when he saw the first dead bodies of Russian soldiers lying where they had been killed: on roadways; in ditches; in the cabs of their trucks; hanging halfway out of their open cab doors, riddled with bullets; carbonised by fire in the turrets of their feeble, ancient tanks; shot in the back in waves as they fled across fields and streams; blown into pieces by overwhelmingly superior artillery; bombed and strafed in columns by Imperial fighter-bombers; executed in groups in yards and village squares half-glimpsed from Jan’s passing truck; dismembered and crushed and crushed again by convoys of trucks and tanks. What was shocking to Jan was not so much the violence and gore – that was horrible at first, but he found that he rapidly became desensitised to it – as the indignity and banality of all this death: so many bodies, killed and lying in such a variety of ways and postures, and yet each individual’s identity was lost, subsumed in the in the anonomysing crusts of dust and ash, and dehumanised by the ubiquity of the Russian’s brown uniforms and standard issue belts and equipment.

All the personality of these thousands of dead (and it must have been thousands that he saw on those first two days of travel through the burned countryside) had been erased in their mass death. Their humanity had disappeared as heat, rot, flies, vehicles and animals removed their flesh and they swelled and then shrank in their uniforms. Soon there would just be the stains of their rotted bodies and the remnants of their clothes and equipment. In some places, children poked at the bodies with sticks, twisting their faces into expressions of mock disgust, and then shrieking with fear and laughter when a piece of the body became dislodged or a belch of corpse gas was emitted.

[…]

The mobile bakery unit has arrived, and the smell of baking bread is drifting on the warm early summer evening air. It’s the evening of the fourth day of the invasion, and the unit is parked for the night on the verge of the main highway to [Smolensk proxy]. The Russian air force has been destroyed, so everyone has confidently lit fires for heating water and cooking.

Jan is leaning against the bonnet of Mechelen’s staff car, drawing patterns – circles and ‘M’s – in the dust that’s collected on the metal during the long cross-country drive. The metal is still hot from the engine, and he can smell oil and petrol.