Heinz the armorer appeared then, followed by a trio of privates hauling the additional crates of ammunition, grenades and satchel charges. He spent a great deal of time checking over grenade heads and magazine springs, which was rather a silent ritual reminiscent of a priest placing wafers upon the tongues of the damned. Jolly by nature, his occasional jokes and those of the men echoed feebly in the frozen air.
Himmel strode from the main house then, replete in his white regalia, and I suddenly wished to be skiing in Graz. For the very first time, he, too, was wearing a helmet, and the only things to distinguish him from the rest of his officers were his eye patch and his very black Knight’s Cross, which poked out from the collar of his tunic and looked much like a target against the white of his anorak. His gloves were gripped in his right hand, and he slapped them into his palm and grinned.
“Guten Morgen.”
The troops snapped to attention. I remember very well that just then, the sun peeked up from a bank of horizon fog, and it gleamed from the barrel of a light machine gun perched upon its bipod.
“We are going to Russia,” he announced. Then, after a beat, “As if you didn’t know.”
The men laughed softly, and I realized that the real talents of command were very subtle and psychological.
“The 48th Panzer Corps is in the shit near Kamenets Podolsky, just over the Dniester River. They are going to attempt a breakout. But, in Chernovtsky, the Russians are assembling a full company of tank busters. We’re going to go into the town, kill as many of them as we can, and get out. It is going to be strictly house-to-house, and strictly ugly. No prisoners, please. Any Russian you leave alive will surely be killing German panzers on the morrow. If I am killed in action, your captain and lieutenants have studied the route and target area, and you will complete the mission. Any questions?”
There was none. There was not even a murmur. Himmel nodded his approval, and then he clicked his boot heels, saluted his troops and snapped, “Glück auf!”
“Good luck!” They all shouted in unison, but no more than a croak emerged from my own dry mouth...
* * *
Our convoy wound its way first toward Le Pontet via Vedène, where the earliest of the French workers briskly clipped along the cobblestones, wearing fingerless gloves and blowing steam from their nostrils like horses. We had welcomed an additional truck into our complement, as our troops were ballooned like snowmen in their coveralls and could not all fit into the transports at hand. A Luftwaffe reconnaissance car led the procession, and in our staff car just behind, the Colonel and the army intelligence major continued to peruse and mark a pile of aerial photographs.
As we passed the Wehrmacht field hospital, I found myself sitting a bit more erect in my seat, and I could not help but let my eyes cast about, perusing the nurses and aides already scurrying about with their bandages and pails. I did not really expect to see Gabrielle, and when I did see her, I felt a strange constriction in my throat. She stood upon a small mound of sandbags near the hospital’s perimeter, and she was wearing a white nurse’s apron and a white woolen scarf, and I thought for a moment that she surely had become the angel of some Wagnerian god, bearing a message as yet to be deciphered.
She watched us as we passed. I fully expected Himmel to look up, and to offer a smart salute or a cocky grin of departure. Yet in the staff car’s rearview mirror, I observed him glance briefly in Gabrielle’s direction, and immediately return his attention to his work. I envied his compartmentalization of his emotions, for my own were a swirling pool of fear and longing. Her eyes met mine for a long moment, and from where her hands clutched a bandage basket to her chest, she raised a single finger. My mouth made a very small smile as I then refocused on the road ahead, determined to return alive, and wishing for perhaps just a minor wound.
Beyond the field hospital were some humps of rolling hills, and below them a wide cow pasture, and upon that sat a Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 52 transport airplane. Its sides were flat and corrugated, its fuselage and wings painted white and striped with slim green snakes of camouflage, and its three large engines were already sputtering and coughing black smoke. The plane was designed to accommodate a limited number of paratroopers, but its benches had been stripped away and our entire troop turtled up the ladder and squeezed inside, sitting knees to rumps upon the freezing metallic floor. The arsenal of assault equipment was piled upon us, slipped beneath our legs and stuffed between our bodies, and as I realized that even a moderately rough landing would purée the lot of us like apples in a baker’s mixer, we were quickly airborne.
I have, since the night of that “Vol Du Nuit” from France, experienced perhaps scores of airplane flights. Some have been luxurious, and most of a certain discomfort, yet no simple excursion of cramped calves in coach class or less-than-gourmet airline repasts shall ever compare to that most unforgettable journey.
It was a day without end, as we flew from a clear French dawn into a chowder of clouds above the Italian Alps, and trundled through thickening storms above Czechoslovakia. The Junkers’s steel skin was so cold that frost formed upon the ceiling, and the engine heat piped through thin floor channels was entirely ineffectual. Only the tight packing of our trembling bodies served as enough insulation to prevent hypothermia, and as our breaths rose in the air and melted the frost above, the dangling droplets quickly froze into taunting icicles. The thrum of the big tri-motors was maddening, although I am certain that each of the troop prayed fervently to his private deity that it should carry on without a sputter.
At the rear of the Junkers there was a small steel waste commode, yet being so tightly packed and obstructed by our equipment, there was no hope of forging one’s way to the toilet. And so, a small iron kitchen pot was passed from man to man, accompanied by much laughter and bitter curses as the commandos tried to locate and extract their shriveled penises. As the pot filled, it was passed to the rear, where a private named Donau, who resembled me in form and age, inherited the misfortune of spilling urine into the commode tube. The men chewed dry crackers and took small sips from their water bottles, and so many smoked that soon the cabin air turned into a rank, swirling fog. After a few hours, the inevitable occurred.
“I have to shit,” someone groaned.
“Then shit in your pants and sit in it,” Captain Friedrich ordered. “It’ll keep you warm.”
I do not know if any of the men took his instructions to heart. Thankfully, my nostrils were frozen beyond all sensation.
Colonel Himmel was perched in the cockpit with the pilots, yet at some point during the afternoon he sensed the sullen silence that had by then overtaken the cabin, and he bent his head and made his way among the troop. He carefully stepped between the men, reviewing assignments with his officers and stopping to joke with the lowest of the ranks. And as I watched him, I wondered. Had Gabrielle refused his bed, would he in fact have had those orphans of Avignon executed? Perhaps one by one until she relented? Yet I came to no conclusion, and when at last he returned to the cockpit, he paused to look down at me, amused by my effort to smile through my chattering teeth.
“Did you bring the Leica, Brandt?”
I froze momentarily. I had completely forgotten about the camera.
“No, Sir.” I shook my head. “I apologize.”
He squatted then before me, yet still smiling. “Don’t worry. It will all happen in the dark at any rate, so you couldn’t use it. Besides,” he added as he slapped the top of my helmet, “I expect you to shoot something more than pictures tonight.”
Sometime after dusk, when I believe we were above the southern wastes of Poland, the airplane entered a monstrous bank of winter storms. It shook and rattled and pitched and rolled, and the wings moaned like banshees and flexed to nearly snapping, and we were forced to grip each other’s shoulders and thighs to keep from being tossed about the cabin. In the few small open spaces between our bodies, our ordnance slid
and scraped across the floor like dinner plates in a submarine’s mess, and very soon, the first man began to vomit. Someone crawled to a fuselage window and managed to crack the ice with a pistol butt and slide it open, but the terrible wind that screamed through the cabin did little to stem the infectious tide of nausea, and soon the piss pot was filled with bile. I do not know how I managed to keep my own stomach from regurgitating its meager snacks, but I concluded then that every army designs its sea and air transports with a precise objective in mind: the more horrible the trip, the more anxious will the troops be to debark and charge into the face of enemy fire.
I believe that it was sometime close to midnight when we finally landed outside Chernovtsky. I had only recently acquired my very first wristwatch, bartered from a badly wounded soldier at the field hospital in exchange for a bottle of schnapps. Yet the many hours aboard our flying ice box had crippled the hands of the timepiece, which hardly mattered since the precise hour was relevant only to Colonel Himmel.
My stomach rose toward my throat as the Junkers dipped into a gliding dive, the pilots throttling the engines back to reduce the noise and enhance our chances of a surprise arrival. The pair of dim light bulbs that had heretofore glowed in the cabin were extinguished, and only a crimson combat lamp gave eerie silhouette to the pilots in the cockpit. The raven dark inside was matched by the blackness from without, and I could only surmise that we were weaving very low between the mounds of a hidden valley, as the nearly silent airplane banked this way and that. My master did not bother to warn us to brace for landing, for we knew full well it was about to pass, and more than thirty sets of teeth gritted hard as the wheels finally smacked once, then again, upon some unforgiving surface, and the tail settled as waves of powdered snow washed over the wings and whirling propellers.
We stopped.
“Thanks be to God in hell,” someone muttered.
“Raus!” Himmel snapped from up forward, yet he had no need to coax. The door was sprung immediately, and the entire Commando abandoned the airplane like convicts from a prison fire, scorning the ladder and leaping into the snow, then turning quickly to receive their hurled equipment from the next in line. Those whose bladders were already empty quickly loaded their weapons and covered the flanks, squinting into the white flakes swirling from a black sky as the rest of us pissed and groaned with relief. And more than a few trudged off and squatted in more elaborate efforts, or rubbed the stench and taste of vomit from their mouths with gloves full of ice, and all of us cranked our cramped arms and stamped out our aching leg muscles.
The airplane had set down upon a very narrow country road, and I marveled that just a few meters beyond the cockpit, that road made a very sharp turn around a high embankment, which would have abruptly terminated our venture if not for the precision flying of the pilots. Already a panzer officer in a long, frayed greatcoat had rushed out to greet Colonel Himmel and the pilots, and the four of them conferred in whispers beneath a wing. A small squad of panzer soldiers were gathering their now extinguished landing beacons, while another struggled with large petrol drums, rolling them toward the Junkers across a flat expanse. Tightening my trouser cuffs against the shin-deep snow, I turned wide-eyed when I heard the copilot chuckle to the panzer officer.
“We didn’t have to cut the engines. We were out of fuel.”
Within minutes, the commandos had assembled themselves into a pair of long spaced lines, their weapons loaded at the ready, their equipment strapped upon their backs and buckles tightened. Beyond our small landing area the visibility was nil, as shallow hills rose all around, yet soon a pair of reconnaissance scouts appeared on slim skis, their iced fur caps and goggles making them appear otherworldly. As Himmel strode to the head of his column, I trudged quickly to his side, remembering the exhortations of Edward. A scout approached the Colonel, but he did not salute.
“Guten Abend, Herr Standartenführer,” he said. “The Russians have gathered mostly in the cathedral tonight.”
“Good,” said Himmel. “We’ll give them something to pray for.”
He turned to the troop, waved his gloved hand, and we were off.
At the crest of the very first rise, Chernovtsky appeared immediately in the distance, mostly a dark complex of low buildings, with a very few windows glowing in the snow. It was, perhaps, not three kilometers away, yet after only a sixth of that quick march, I was utterly exhausted. I had no idea that one could sweat so in the midst of this frozen and bitter landscape. My winter costume, whose insulating abilities had seemed nonexistent aboard the Junkers, now transformed itself into a fireman’s suit in the midst of a house blaze. My woolen cowl was soon soaked with salty drippings from my scalp beneath my helmet, and rivulets ran down my arms and slithered between my legs. I was breathing like an asthmatic, barely able to keep up with Himmel’s careless long strides through the snow, and I wished for nothing more than to strip myself of every piece of clothing and make the raid in my shorts alone. The reconnaissance men skied easily along at the point of our columns, and at last I began to fully appreciate the level of training of the SS to my rear. Not one of them flagged or strayed or fell behind. There was not a single grunt of effort or complaint from their ranks. I felt rather like the aging mascot dog to a team of Olympians.
Yet I managed to take heart, for certainly as we approached the town, Colonel Himmel would halt the troop. He would have us gratefully lie in the snow as he made a final assessment, and I could catch my breath and allow the winter night to cool my fevers. Yet this respite was not to be, as Himmel had clearly chosen aggression above care. There would be no careful crawling into positions, no tiptoeing along alleyways to lengthen the surprise. As we neared Chernovtsky, my master abandoned stealth, and without another word, he began to run.
And I remember it all quite clearly, every bit of it, for unlike my first venture into combat in Italy, this snippet of my personal history is seared into some corner of my brain. Like a strip of film engaged upon a continuous loop, it replays itself for me to this day, without warning, flicked on with the scent of an impending snowfall, the sounds of aircraft engines on a winter night, or even the sensation of harmless woolen gloves.
We charged directly into the mouth of the enemy’s cauldron. Perhaps we were merely two hundred meters short of the town’s perimeter, yet even as we gathered speed that distance seemed to stretch, like an agonizing pull of licorice. We were facing directly down the tunnel of its main thoroughfare, a long wide street of trampled snow and mud between dark edifices of stone. There were no outskirts of the town to speak of, not even a suburb of hovels. In less than half a minute, we would be in it.
Shocked by this discard of sanity, I tucked myself up behind the Colonel’s back, trying to keep erect in the accursed snow as I ran. My helmet slipped back upon my head, its bouncing brim retreating to fully expand my vision, and as I glanced aside, the troop fanned out to the flanks, their figures blurring with their tremendous forward speed. Each squad knew precisely its objective, and they passed our spearhead and flew over the snow, heading directly for the streets and alleyways they’d memorized from the aerial photographs. Our pair of reconnaissance scouts fell away from us like pilot fish abandoning a shoal of sharks, and me, I felt merely a hostage rider on this cavalry charge into hell.
A jolt of pain shuddered through my shinbones as our boots struck the first street stones, and I inhaled a gasp through gritted teeth as I saw a cluster of Russian trucks and motorcycles parked along the thoroughfare. The relative silence of our boot heels upon snow had instantly become a thunderous stampede, accompanied by the racket of bouncing ammunition pouches and rattling weapons slings. The first to hear our onrushing storm was a huddle of tethered horses, and they flicked their heads about with widened eyes as beyond them I first saw the cathedral at the center of the town on the left. Its flat stone face appeared enormous to me, its thrusts of pointed onion spires like gleaming papal hats. Below, yet so much cl
oser, were the first of the Russian troops.
A cluster of them stood in the very middle of the street, wearing heavy fur hats with earflaps, and long coats that nearly swept the ground. From their shoulders, the heavy wooden stocks, round magazines and gleaming perforated barrels of their PPSh-41 submachine guns still hung casually, and the glows of their cigarettes made orange arcs as they slowly turned from their chat.
It was Himmel and myself and Captain Friedrich and seven more in our gang of onrushing madmen, yet in that agonizing and endless moment on the precipice of discovery, I felt utterly alone, like a naked thief discovered in a bank vault. Yet certainly to those unfortunate Russians, we were at first an apparition, an unexplained arrival of their own troops, our haste a curiosity. And then, as our speed even doubled again, they discerned our helmets and our weapons and their eyes flew wide and they unslung their guns, and it was far too late for them.
Himmel roared like some wild animal as he began to fire from the hip, the explosions from his Schmeisser barrel blinding me, and I went instantly deaf as all the other guns joined his. The buildings flashed with the lightning of bursting machine pistols, the spent shells spinning through the air as one hot brass casing struck my frozen cheek and I winced as it hissed against my flesh. I saw one Russian thrust his gloved hand against a comrade’s shoulder to save him, yet as both men flung themselves wide apart Himmel’s bullets lifted them high and backward and they smashed down upon the muddy street. I found my pistol extended at the end of my quaking arm, yet I dared not fire as my master’s form bobbed so close before me. A Russian leaped out from behind a stone escarpment and I saw his machine gun barking white gouts of flame, and to my right beyond Friedrich one of our men grunted and fell to his face as if his ankles had been struck from under him, and his helmet rim banged and echoed on the cobbles as all of our guns spun to that lone Russian and his long coat was shredded from his body by a vengeful hosing of bullets. A horse, perhaps his tether split by an errant projectile, thundered past our flanks, and as we passed the others they reared and bucked, their eyes huge and white and their nostrils spewing steam and panic. One of them was down in a pile of bloody snow, his flanks split open and drooling entrails, and he kicked his hooves and screamed an unearthly howl.
The Soul of a Thief Page 10
