“Another five trainloads are advised for tomorrow!” Leutnant Friedrich Hameling reported, then sighed and shook his head.
“Where on earth…? Oh, bugger. What can you do?” Oberst von Mergentheim shrugged. “Get telegrams out to Korpsbereich and instruct the posts in Liegnitz, Tarnowitz, Ratibor, Oppeln and Brieg to secure more space. We’ll be sending at least some of the trains right through.”
Hameling saluted. “Very well, Sir.” With the modicum of daring that a reserve commission could give a man whose livelihood did not depend on military advancement, he added: “They aren’t likely to find enough room there.”
“Like we will here?” The colonel gestured out of the office window. The station concourse was a mess: Bundles of rags, people sleeping above and between them, people bundled in rags, rags that looked like people. Solitary suitcases and battered steamer trunks rose above the mass like churches over the low roofs of a medieval town. Every public building in Königshütte, every school gymnasium, every portico, warehouse and locomotive shed looked like that. It had started with returning prisoners of war, and they were still coming through in their thousands, haggard, hollow-cheeked men in threadbare uniforms on their way home, if ‘home’ still existed. But the Russians had also imprisoned nobody knew how many thousands of civilians, Germans from Poland, the Baltics and the Volga, and Berlin had decided that they would not allow these people to become hostages in the hands of a hostile and desperate power. Which put them here.
Hameling raised his hands helplessly. What else were they to do? These were Germans – at least that was what everybody said. The lieutenant sometimes wondered just how German some of them were. People he could barely understand, ragged, dazed and terrified, surrounded by the trappings of a modernity that frightened them – they reminded him of a Völkerschau more than of compatriots. Some younger men were still wearing the tattered Russian military uniforms they had put on two years ago to attack a country they now claimed as their home. How willingly? Who could say? Korporal Eisenstedt had actually met a fellow yesterday who had faced him at the battle of Auschwitz in the early days of the war. In the meantime, both had been wounded and invalided out of frontline service, the German for a railway regiment, the Russian for an internment camp. They had taken it with better grace than Hameling thought he himself could.
“Telegram from Korpsbereich, Sir!” A young telegraphist entered the office just as Leutnant Hameling reached for the doorknob.
“What of it?” The officer took the paper and read. A smile spread over his face.
“What does it say?” the colonel asked.
“We are getting accommodation for the evacuees.” Hameling explained. “Berlin has decided to send home the Russian POWs early. That opens up the camps for our people.”
Von Mergentheim nodded slowly, chewing on his pipe stem. “Does it say when?”
“A week or two. According to corps command, they intend to start with the easternmost camps and move in evacuees as soon as the POWs are out.”
“Best get used to doing with less sleep then, eh?” the colonel pointed out with forced jollity.
“Sir?”
Von Mergentheim rolled his eyes. “Leutnant, the OHL just decided to move a million people from Germany to Russia in a matter of weeks. Who do you think is going to do the scheduling? Acquire the provisions? Stock coal? We’re looking at an interesting month ahead.”
He gestured at the area map. The good news was that Silesia wanted neither for coal nor for food. With the American charities sending through what looked like all the grain in Kansas, there were also openings in eastbound traffic that could be reallocated. But it would still be hell on the scheduling. You couldn’t shunt a POW train onto sidings for a week like they’d been doing with goods trains, after all. And east of the border, a lot of the standard gauge lines the Poles had built were still single-track. Oh, this was going to be fun.
