‘Move left! Left!! Make for the clearing.’
The Tiger lurched on its axis, mincing the trees in its path – its machine-gun chattered briefly, then fell silent. The fifty-two-ton tank lunged down a steep bank and then reared up on the opposite side, turf and stones flying in its wake.
‘Enemy at three o’clock. Fire at will!’
The sudden recoil from the 88mm cannon threw Max violently back against the metal framework of the turret. The Russian T-34 instantly returned his fire, the shell howling through the trees beside them. The Tiger rocked to a halt, facing the enemy.
Inside the now stationary cabin Schmidt slammed his foot down on the pedal, causing the turret to revolve smoothly on its gimbals – he squinted along the firing mechanism, his brows furrowed in concentration, the sweat misting his eyes, until the triangles met over their target.
Max hammered at the metal of the turret with his gloved hand. ‘Fire, damn you!’
The 88mm gun roared. There was a sudden unnatural silence, and then the T-34 plunged onto its side, one detached track flailing in the livid phosphorescent flare of the explosion.
‘Traverse left. Enemy turret at eleven o’clock!’
The Tiger seemed to hesitate, its snout testing the air. Then it locked onto its new opponent. Max could make out the darting shadowy forms of white-coated infantry in its wake.
A tongue of flame bloomed from the Russian 122mm cannon. The explosion rocked the Tiger, sending it briefly up onto one track, stone-chips and earth cannonading against the armour plating.
‘What are you doing down there? Fire!’
The barrel of the 88 recoiled. The T-34 dipped nose down into the first shell hole, then flowered phosphorous-white as the second 88 shell struck it. The figure of the Russian tank commander flailed wildly in the brief artificial daylight, then collapsed against the turret edge.
‘Use the flame-thrower. Hausser! Do you hear me?’
The foul red tongue of the Tiger’s built-in flame-thrower blossomed beneath Max, the naphtha fumes searing his unprotected eyes as he made a belated grab for his goggles. Max braced himself against the turret and squinted into the darkness beyond the inferno. The shadowy smudges of the retreating Russian infantry flashed between the trees – it would be madness, sheer madness, to pursue them. He would simply be inviting destruction by one of their own captured Panzerfaust rockets.
‘Right. Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing more to be done.’
He threw off his goggles, choking. He’d been insanely lucky, he knew it. But friendship was no justification for stupidity. After four years of frontline fighting, two of which had been spent in Panzers, he should have known better. He’d put the lives of his men at risk unnecessarily, and there was no excuse for it. What a fool he’d been, storming into the forest like that. The entire Division had only three combat fit Tigers left, and he had risked one of them – and on a hunch. He tapped angrily at his throat microphone.
‘Warn the others that we’re coming out.’
He could feel the fury eating away at him. Meyer was dead. Had to be. The other men too. He should never have sent them in so close to a Russian push. And to hell with that bastard Schachtel and his Sonderkommando dogs. The Ivans must have been lying in wait for them.
The Tiger see-sawed to a standstill. Max slithered stiffly to the ground, the tension leaching from his back and legs, his belly muscles unknitting themselves. ‘Schmidt, bring me some water. My throat feels as if someone has played a blowtorch across it.’
From the corner of his eye he could make out the figure of Sergeant Schuss, his arms flailing, running towards him from the stationary Panther. Shit. This was all he needed.
‘Captain! More problems with the cooling system. We urgently need spare parts. If you had ordered me to enter the forest behind you, I would have been unable to do so. The situation is impossible. I—’
‘Stop shouting, Schuss. I can’t hear you anyway. The gunfire has made me deaf. Schmidt, give me the map.’
Schmidt handed him the map case and a canteen.
Max took a long pull of the ice-cold water. His ears were still hissing with the residual echo of the action. ‘Hausser will take over my Tiger until further notice. You, Schuss, will be in overall command. We’ll bivouac here.’ He stabbed angrily at the map. ‘I shall take Schmidt, Spiegel, Wanger and Müller into the forest with me. You will be able to manage with just eight men?’
‘Of course, Captain.’ Schuss was visibly pulling himself together.
‘Good. Send to the workshop for your spare parts, then. And put in another requisition for food and fuel while you’re about it – we’ll see if those Etappenschweine have kept their sense of humour.’
‘Yes, Captain. Captain, your face is bleeding.’
Max straightened up, squinting at the sky. ‘Schmidt, the men are to prepare themselves. Light arms only. No. On second thoughts we’ll take the MG42. Three hundred rounds and a hundred in the breech. The Ivans will be busy licking their wounds. And the moon is with us.’ He flared his nostrils in a vain attempt to catch the elusive smell of the night through the overlay of gasoline, naphtha and charred flesh that still assailed his senses. ‘With luck, and by the grace of God, we should have a clear run of it for once.’
Valhalla
Max led his small troop along the devastated trail left by the retreating Russians, picking his way amongst the parboiled bodies of the killing field. At one point, Müller tugged at his arm and pointed silently to a dead soldier. Max nodded. Müller crouched down and eased off the man’s felt overboots, measured them against his own dismembered pair, then attempted to put them on. As he did so, the soldier groaned.
‘Christ Jesus! The bastard’s still alive!’ Müller lost his balance and windmilled backwards into the snow. Spitting and spluttering, he eased himself up on one elbow and peered at the Russian. ‘I nearly shat myself this time. If I had a heart condition, that would have been it.’
‘Give the man his overboots back, Müller. Let nature take its course. His comrades may return for him.’
‘But, Captain…’
‘I said give him his boots back. I won’t have any Executions-Tourismus in my unit. Find yourself a dead man to rob.’
Spiegel gave the Russian a derisory nudge with his foot. ‘Müller just has. Er ist aus. The groan must have been trapped air.’
Müller glanced expectantly up at Max.
‘Very well, Müller. You may take them now.’
Twenty minutes later they reached the first of the frozen rasputitsas – the mud-filled trenches that infibulated the Russian landscape and made spring and autumn fighting such a misery.
‘Has anyone crossed here in the past few hours?’
‘Yes, Captain. Four or five men. Moving towards the Ivans.’
‘We’ll have silence from here on. Sign language only. Anyone wants to piss, they keep it in their trousers.’
For the next twenty minutes there was only the crunching sound of compacted snow to remind them that this was no dream landscape they were threading their way through, but a highway leading directly towards the enemy. At one point Spiegel touched Max’s arm and pointed through the trees at some distant pinpricks of light. Then he motioned to the spoor they were following and made a questioning face.
Max made a cutting motion to indicate that they should continue forward on their same bearing, and only later circle back towards the clearing. He was privately convinced that Paul Meyer was dead. He had to be. If he was alive and lost, the sound of the tank skirmish would have drawn him back towards their camp like a homing pigeon. If he was alive and wounded, the cold would have despatched him as effectively as it had the Popov with the world class overboots. Max shook his head in disbelief, his eyes still fixed on the distant glade with its telltale flickers of light. Meyer had always seemed next to invulnerable. Of all the Alte Hasen he had ever known, Meyer had been the most resourceful and had taught him the most about survival in the seemingly imp
ossible conditions of the Russian frontline.
He cast his mind back to their first meeting in the early spring of 1941, during the frenetic drive towards the Belgrade bridges, with Max a newly promoted Obersturmführer to Meyer’s veteran non-commissioned Hauptscharführer. In a surfeit of youthful enthusiasm, Max had pretended to misunderstand an order restricting his new platoon to the northern bank of the Danube and had inadvertently allowed his troops to become encircled. Temporarily at a loss, he had ordered his men to dig in. Meyer, knowing instantly that Max was as good as signing the men’s death warrants by his inaction, had taken him aside.
‘Remember the ambush training they gave you at Senne, Lieutenant?’
‘Of course I do, Sergeant.’
‘That’s good. Because very soon you’re going to have to use it.’
It was only because he was well out of earshot of the men that Max hadn’t issued Meyer with a formal rebuke. ‘I don’t understand what you mean, Sergeant. Explain yourself.’
‘I mean that when they eventually hit us – and hit us they will, with all the preparation time you’ll be giving them – our only chance will be to get our arses out of these holes we’re so laboriously digging, and take the fight directly to them.’
‘You’re implying that the foxholes are a complete waste of time?’
Meyer had sucked the air through his teeth, summoning up a sound that Max was to become infinitely familiar with over the next year of joint campaigning – a sound he would hear whenever he was in imminent danger of making yet another tactical misjudgement. ‘Not a complete waste of time. No. They will make magnificent graves.’
For a moment Max had hovered between vainglory and common sense. Now, in retrospect, he realized that it had been the one defining moment of his military career. And that the veteran in Meyer had suspected this at the time, and had been taking a calculated risk with him.
‘What would you do in my place?’ he said at last.
‘Fight my way back to the bridge, get my men across to safety, and only then dig in. Then swear blind that you didn’t disobey your orders, and trust that your men are grateful enough to back you up.’
‘Will they be, Sergeant? If I successfully follow your suggestion?’
Meyer had cracked his most contagious grin. ‘I personally guarantee it.’
* * *
Approaching the clearing in silence, Max pointed to each man in turn, held up three fingers and laid them across his watch face. Then he made a criss-cross motion with his left hand. Schmidt and Spiegel moved noiselessly to the left. Wanger and Müller to the right. Satisfied, Max raised the field glasses once again to his eyes.
Meyer, Doerr, and Karkowski were lying where they had fallen on the far side of the clearing. Max checked the luminous dial of his watch and began counting off the time in his head. Twenty seconds to go. He eased his grip on the Mauser. He could feel his hands sweating inside their gloves.
The three Cossack soldiers pulled Wahl to his feet and began dragging his flailing body towards two birch trees they had tied back in twin arches to the ground. Ten seconds to go. Oh Christ.
Max’s hand strayed inadvertently to the crucifix he kept tucked inside his tunic shirt, beneath his Knight’s Cross. Now the Russians were strapping Wahl to the tree, his legs splayed, one foot attached to each separate trunk. There were ten of them in the clearing. Thirteen, if you counted the women. The whole thing was insanity. He and his men were outnumbered three to one. If the Russians fought back, they were done for.
Max sprang up, firing his pistol into the air. Spiegel burst out on one side of the clearing, Wanger and Müller on the other, the Schmeissers steady in their hands, their faces livid in the smouldering glow of the birch twigs massed beneath Krug’s charred body. Schmidt moved swiftly into view, the heavy MG42 cradled in his arms.
One of the Russians made a move towards his machine pistol. Müller’s Schmeisser went tik-tik-tik and the man fell. None of the others moved. One of the men cried out ‘Pomoshch! Pomoshch! We surrender. Kamerad!’ Max saw the woman soldier drop her knife furtively behind her back, then kick it away.
He was aware, as if he were watching a shaky sequence from a slow-motion film, that Schmidt and Spiegel were herding the Russian prisoners into a group, that Wanger was attempting to untie Wahl from the tree, that Müller was throwing up what remained of his last meal near Brasick’s recumbent body.
Max strode up to Brasick, took one look at him, uttered a guttural, inarticulate cry of rage, and shot him in the head. Müller stumbled forwards, then pitched onto his knees, choking.
‘Pull yourself together, Müller. Damn you, man! Come and see to Doerr.’ Max dropped to one knee beside Meyer. He eased his friend’s head gently around, so that he could see his face. ‘What happened, Paul?’
Meyer’s eyes were wild. He opened his mouth, but was unable to speak. Max felt carefully around Meyer’s head, then down his neck and along his body. He discovered the wound at the base of Meyer’s back – a sucking hole. He dropped his pistol and scrabbled for his field dressing and morphine ampoules.
‘What shall we do with these bastards?’ It was Schmidt. His voice was trembling and on the verge of tears. ‘Major Schachtel said he wanted prisoners.’
‘For Christ’s sake, what do you think?’ Max’s eyes were almost crazy with grief. ‘Look at what they’ve done. And damn Major Schachtel to hell.’
‘And the Querfotzen?’
‘What women? Do you see women here?’
The firing began behind his back. For some time Max refused to raise his head from what he was doing.
PART TWO
Aschau, Bavaria.
December 1943
Leave
In the distance, just as in his childhood, Max could make out the familiar tocsin of the Theresien-Kirche bells calling the faithful to Sunday Mass. He shut his eyes, struggling to unlock the images which the tolling of the bells had sent seething through his mind.
One moment there would be a satisfying flash from the past – him hardening a snowball, or skating on the frozen lake with Bettina; Hans-Albin pushing him down a meadow-bank near their house, then jumping on him, pinning Max’s biceps beneath his knees until Max surrendered, shrieking with masochistic pleasure – then darker, more recent images, would crowd in to spoil them. The Russian woman with her knife. The bloodied, ruptured sockets of Walter Brasick’s eyes.
He let his grip fall to the ground. The station was empty. Fresh snow was banked up beside the tracks, piled thickly onto the overhanging eaves of the waiting room, spread uniformly across the meadows, on the fences, down the familiar paths and lanes he had believed, in his Russian dreams, that he knew so well. Now they seemed alien to him, their flat expanses threatening. He tried to tear his eyes away from the horizon, distract them from their automatic sweep of the surrounding countryside, but found himself incapable.
He stumbled to a bench, not bothering to clear away the snow. He sprawled back, his hands to his face, his eyes closed. You are in Bavaria, he told himself. It has taken you a week, one whole week of your three-week leave to get here. There are no Russians. No one is threatening you. You are among friends. Two kilometres across the fields is your family home. The bells you hear are calling your father and mother, your brother and sister, to church.
Max thrust himself to his feet and began a stumbling run along the station platform. Halfway to the waiting room he lurched away from the tracks and fell to his knees, vomiting the thin gruel of his ersatz breakfast onto the virgin snow. He could feel the damp of the snow eating through his whipcord breeches and solidifying inside his fists.
He grabbed a handful of fresh powder and scrubbed at his mouth. The sound of the church bells echoed the hissing and ringing inside his head. He struggled to his feet and stood looking down at the vivid yellow stain he had left behind him.
The boy’s sudden appearance startled him. Max reached down as casually as he could and dusted the slush from his breeches. ‘You, Bursch
e, where is Herr Greiner? You know, the station master?’ The words came out too loudly, echoing off the insulated buildings. Max modulated his tone, forcing back the bile that was still souring the inside of his mouth. ‘Why is there nobody here? This place is like a morgue.’
A body emerged from behind the head that had been silently watching Max from across the storm fence on the opposite side of the railway tracks. The face was rat-like, undernourished, the clothes shabby and impractical for the time of year. ‘He’s in Silesia.’ The boy’s voice was reedy with malnutrition, midway between the treble of the early teen and a young man’s fully-fledged tenor. Raising his catapult, the boy let fly at a rail, striking it squarely with his stone, which ricocheted out of sight behind a maintenance shed.
‘Silesia?’ For a moment Max could make no sense of what the boy was saying. ‘What is he doing there?’
The boy pointed to Max’s uniform.
Max glanced down at himself. He had taken his greatcoat off in the train, and now the black of his tunic, the glitter of his decorations, and the mirror shine of the boots – which he had buffed himself, that morning, before dawn – must have seemed overwhelming against the snow’s luminescence. ‘Eh? Oh, the war. He’s fighting in the war?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Incredible. Greiner must be nearly sixty.’ Max kicked furtively at the mess at his feet in a vain attempt to camouflage the evidence of his weakness. He started briskly down the platform to recover his greatcoat and grip. ‘Come over here.’ The boy had already begun to edge away down the track. ‘Come on then. I won’t shoot you.’
The boy stopped abruptly, like a startled deer. He seemed uncertain, for a moment, whether to run or to duck.
Max shook his head in wonder at his own turn of phrase. Had he become so brutalized by his years of warfare that he was incapable of uttering even a single sentence without a military connotation? ‘Look.’ He rummaged inside his grip, a placatory smile fixed to his face. ‘I have real Cervelat Wurst. See. It’s good and hard. It’s come all the way from Berlin. What do you think of that?’
The Occupation Secret Page 2
