Lift The Siege 5 - The Siege Of Stalingrad

The siege that turned the tables on the besiegers. Stalingrad was of little military or strategic value, yet Hitler was hellbent on obliterating it from the map, probably because it bore the name of his arch foe Stalin. The Russians forces were surrounded, but managed to keep sending in troops through the river Volga’s access into the city, just long enough to hold out until winter. The Russians then launched a counter-attack in November, punching through the Romanian and Hungarian allied forces of the Germans and were able to complete an encircling movement so that it was now the Germans pressed back into the city. 

The same bitter fighting continued as before, but now the Germans were unable to supply their forces, nor could the airforce be brought into play with the zero visibility of snow storms. Despite constant petitions for the army to fight their way out of the siege, Hitler refused his troops from leaving the city. They were left to rot there, suffering from the twin assaults of the cold and starvation in addition to Russian attacks. Stories of troops eating their own dead supply horses abound. 

After five months General Von Paulus negotiated a surrender with the Red Army and the tide of the war had turned against the Nazis. At Stalingrad, they had lost an entire battle group, one of their three in the whole of Russia and never fully recovered their strength, while further weakening the Western Front defences to bolster the Eastern campaign. In all up to two million lives were lost at Stalingrad, including civilians trapped there.

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"Three Dreams In The Key Of G" has three female voices in a state of siege. One a young mother in sectarian Northern Ireland, just after the Good Friday Peace Agreement has returned paramilitary fighters from both sides back into the domestic realm for an uneasy peace there. The second a Waco-like siege in Florida, as the FBI, DEA and ATF surround a compound full of women, which they see as a threat to all of mankind. The third is in laboratories all over the globe, the Human Genome is being besieged by scientists as they try and uncover its code for life. 

 The siege will be lifted 26/07/2018

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

Lift The Siege #1 - The Siege Of Troy

Lift The Siege #2 - Waco

Lift The Siege # - Balcombe Street 

Lift the Siege #4 - Crusader Castles

Dead Line - Flash Fiction

The hands were the last outpost of activity. Or rather the fingers gripping his pen. The rest of the musculature had withered through disuse. The mouth, that other outlet for words, had seized up through a wholesale aridity, dry river beds of sputum, meaning his desiccated lips were unable to form even the simplest phoneme. His legs stilled through stagnation in the chair, had now become paralysed with a deep vascular thrombosis. He could no longer feel his feet, uncertain and uncaring that he was receiving no proof of the floor pushing back at his undersoles for being in contact with one another. His abdomen, having initially echoed the current concavity of his sallow cheeks, had now blazoned its tocsin through distension, an ill-windsock of fetid air. A second, unadvised gastrulation returning him to a state of the scaffolded truss of the womb. His serpentine labyrinth of bowels having fruitlessly demanded their regular oblation, therefore began to devour him from within. While the sphincter had drawn down its shutter and closed for the business end, but only after its liquidation sale had left him marinading in his own soil in the writer’s chair. There was a deadline to be met after all. 

I have commissioned the above image as a T-Shirt design from the wonderful Little Appleseed.

It's a bastardisation of one of the tenets of Sergey Nechayev's "Revolutionary Catechism" which I use as the epigraph in my book "Not In My Name" in its original, unadulterated form for a book about terrorism. 

What do you think? 

Possible coda for the above story:

His literary agent prised the pen from the author's cold, dead hand and set it on the writing desk. He shuffled the sheaf of papers straight and slipped them into a manilla envelope. He smiled at the thought that the publishers had little chance of getting their advance back as it would go into the marais that was probate. How were they to know what he held in his hand was the final work? he could claim it was an old manuscript found beneath dust on the author's shelf. He would pocket all the proceeds, save for an honorarium to pay for the author's pauper's grave. A writer's final resting place marked without any words at all.