Blitzfreeze (Cassell Military Paperbacks)

by Sven Hassel

  ‘Speed, speed!’ orders Oberleutnant Moser.

  ‘Faster, faster,’ scream the section leaders furiously, raising their clenched fists above their heads in the signal for: ‘Forward! Quick march!’ The artillery fire is to be ‘ducked under’ as the Army calls the manoeuvre. It sounds easy. Marshal your forces close to where the shells are dropping, and execute a quick forward movement under the barrage. There is a lot of stuff like this in military manuals. The fat HDV is the German Army’s bible. There are even people who run their private lives according to HDV. Iron Gustav at Torgau, for example, has brought his wife almost to the verge of madness. Like a good housewife she prefers to change the bed-linen every fourteen days. Iron Gustav won’t permit it. According to HDV, prison personnel change every six weeks, and prisoners every eight weeks. In Iron Gustav’s home they take a bath every Saturday between 10 and 12 o’clock. The water is 18° C., neither more nor less, and bathing is carried out, of course, under the shower and lasts for exactly seven minutes. After twenty years of married life the good woman is still unable to understand why they mustn’t use their bath-tub, and this despite the fact that her husband has explained to her countless times that bath-tubs are for officers only. Over Iron Gustav’s front door, in beautiful gothic letters, is the inscription ICH DIENE.6 And this is the motto the family has to follow. Soldiers spring up from the snow and start off on the race with death. We pant under the heavy weight of weapons. Suddenly the road grows steep.

  We use bushes and saplings to pull ourselves up the slope. An infantry Gefreiter just in front of me gets his. He stops as if he has run into a wall. His carbine flies up into the air, he falls backwards and rolls down the hill, over and over and over in a cloud of snow. His body is stopped by a bush, his steel helmet rolls on by itself. His hair is yellow as corn, and shows up against the snow like a newly-opened sunflower.

  I stop for a second to look back down at him before following the others.

  The MG-fire grows still fiercer. They are firing from above us.

  The MG salvoes tear long splinters from the trees. Great pieces of stone and ice come howling transversely in amongst us.

  No. 5 Company seek cover in the scrub. With practiced speed machine-guns are mounted to cover No. 7 Company, the spearhead. Below the heights the heavy company places its mortars and soon after we hear the cosy: Plop! Plop! of our own mortar bombs. Enemy mortars sound terrible, but ours have a wonderfully comforting sound.

  ‘Fix bayonets! Prepare to advance singly!’ comes the order.

  ‘Hold on to your guts, Ivan Stinkanovich, I’m comin’ to carve ’em out of you!’ shouts Tiny drawing his short bayonet from its sheath. He is off at an amazing speed under Heide’s covering fire.

  Muzzle-flashes from the Russian fortifications make a long necklace of light. Heide relieves me at No. 1. I’m a grenade specialist and must now go forward and attempt to blow up the machine-gun nest. It’ll have to be fast. I throw five grenades, one straight after the other. They fall where I want them to. One by the heavy MG, which is now on continuous fire. One a little to the right where the command group is lying, and the rest behind, where the ammunition is stacked.

  Porta shoots from the hip as he runs. Tiny follows him with the light grey bowler jammed down on his head. He affects to believe that it makes enemy bullets veer away from him in sheer horror.

  ‘Get your finger out!’ screams the Old Man furiously. ‘Use your grenades! Stop that Maxim!’

  ‘Bugger off!’ I answer, and stay down.

  The heavy Maxim is firing so that even a fly would get itself killed if it were mad enough to run across the snow.

  ‘Forward, or you’re for court-martial!’ shouts the Old Man, raging.

  The Maxim gets a stoppage and, tight with nervousness, I spring up and run forward.

  I throw my grenades on the run. The heavy machine-gun is blown high into the air together with the gunner.

  Our legs move under us like racing pistons. The bloodstained bayonets gleam dully on the end of our guns.

  We tumble into the enemy entrenchment. Now it’s not half so dangerous, as long as you don’t run blindly down the straights.

  We know to perfection how to roll up a trench with hand grenades. The enemy mustn’t be given time to think. The first three minutes in the trench are decisive. I throw a grenade into each dug-out as I pass. Explosions crash behind me. A group is about to leave the trench as I round a corner. My last grenade drops in amongst them and explodes with a vicious crack. There is blood everywhere on the snow. I tear the sub’ from my shoulder and empty a magazine into those who are still moving. Then I drop down between a couple of torn-open bodies.

  ‘You did very nicely!’ says the Old Man, appreciatively.

  ‘’E’ll ’ave ’is name mentioned on the bleedin’ wireless as an ’ero some day,’ jeers Tiny with a grin. ‘Then they’ll find out afterwards ’e’s a bleedin’ Yid an’ ’ang ’im with the Star of David spinnin’ merrily on the end of ’is prick!’ He throws his MG quickly up over the lip of the trench and opens fire on the fleeing Russians who are rolling in panic down the slope.

  ‘Cease firing!’ orders Oberleutnant Moser. ‘Five minutes rest!’ We drop where we stand. Most of us fall asleep.

  Half unconscious I hear Porta explaining something to Stege about a donkey which had to cross the Landwehr canal, an exercise in which the military observers had decided all bridges had been blown.

  ‘Everything would have gone off all right,’ I heard Porta say, ‘if only the bloody donkey hadn’t been white! It was immediately suspected of being a spy for international Jewry. . . .’

  I fell asleep and unfortunately heard no more. When I asked Porta, later, for the end of the story, he had forgotten it and denied ever having known a Jewish spy in the shape of a white donkey.

  ‘2 Section take the lead. Take up your arms! Get moving! Forward, you sad sacks!’ orders Oberleutnant Moser.

  Mortar grenades fall around us. We look back and are glad we are spearheading the advance. A wall of fire and steel rises where our trench has been. The heavy Russian artillery is spotted in on it.

  ‘There’s the river,’ says the Old Man, with relief, pointing with his Mpi.

  We can’t realize that this dirty brown ditch is the Nara. Even the ice, which is screwed up into hillocks, is a filthy brown.

  ‘So this is the trickle of piss we’ve been chasing after for the last few weeks,’ mumbles Porta wonderingly. ‘I can well understand never having heard of it.’

  ‘Rinse, please!’ grins Tiny, as he urinates in the river.

  ‘Nara!’ mumbles Oberleutnant Moser. ‘So we’ve made it. We’re that close to Moscow.’

  ‘Can we take the tram in, please, Herr Oberleutnant?’ asks Porta. ‘I’ve got such pains in my knees.’

  We have become noticeably more disillusioned recently. Even though we have gone from victory to victory, passed endless columns of prisoners and seen mountains of captured equipment, Heide is still the only one of us who believes in the ultimate victory.

  ‘I don’t give a sod who wins this war,’ says Porta. ‘When I get back to Berlin they can all fuck a pig far as I’m concerned!’

  No. 3 Company begins the river crossing. We give them covering fire with automatic weapons. They are almost halfway over when suddenly it’s as if the whole river explodes. Yellow, stinking watery mud flies hundreds of feet into the air. A seemingly endless sheet of flame spreads out to all sides, and great chunks of ice are thrown far into the forest. No. 3 Company is gone without a trace under the gurgling, bubbling water.

  The Stalin Organ starts up. It sounds as if every planet in the Solar System is on its way towards earth, and it looks like it. The entire sky is covered with the long fiery tails of great rockets like shooting stars.

  Where they strike every living thing is annihilated.

  ‘The bloody swine,’ curses Heide indignantly.

  ‘Why?’ asks Stege in surprise. ‘They’re only using what
they’ve got. They won’t stop till we’re spitted and roasted!’

  ‘These untermensch will never live to see that!’ shouts Heide fanatically.

  ‘Don’t be too sure,’ grins Porta. ‘I do believe they’ve given your Führer an unpleasant surprise.’

  ‘He’s your Führer too, isn’t he?’ shouts Heide threateningly.

  ‘So he says at any rate. These Austrians have always been good at persuading themselves. Their mountains give them a superiority complex.’

  ‘Joseph Porta I intend to make a duty report to the NSFO. Take warning of that!’ screams Heide, his eyes flaming.

  ‘Be a good little boy now, and bend you ’ead down so’s Daddy can put a bullet through it,’ says Tiny pleasantly, pressing his gun against Heide’s neck.

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ howls Heide, dodging to cover behind the Old Man.

  ‘Bet your sweet life I would dare,’ answers Tiny, with a perfectly diabolical look on his face. ‘You wouldn’t believe what I’d dare do now that I’ve put on the Wehrmacht uniform! Prepare to be shot. I don’t like these long drawn out executions.’

  ‘Stop that piss!’ orders the Old Man, knocking the muzzle of Tiny’s Mpi down. ‘That’s no toy you’ve been issued with.’

  ‘I do ’ave a lot of fun playin’ with it though,’ says Tiny pleasantly.

  ‘I’ll have you shaved with the big razor,’ shouts Heide desperately. ‘Threatening an Unteroffizier in the German Army is not a cheap amusement, Obergefreiter Creutzfeldt! It’s bloody dear!’

  ‘No. 2 Section follow me!’ commands the Old Man curtly.

  Porta stumbles over a body, a dead German major with the Knight’s Cross round his neck.

  ‘The heroes are all dying!’ mumbles Tiny, seating himself comfortably on the body. He takes a long pull at his water bottle before handing it on to us.

  ‘Where in the name of hell did you get this?’ coughs Porta gripping his throat which burns as if he had swallowed acid.

  ‘Can’t you take it?’ grins Tiny. ‘It’s a naphtha and reindeer piss cocktail.’

  ‘Where’d you get it?’ asks Porta doubtfully, sniffing at the bottle which gives off a dreadful aroma.

  ‘A present from a departed comrade commissar who thought I might need somethin’ with a kick in it before I knocked on the gates of the Kremlin,’ grins Tiny, clicking his tongue.

  ‘What the devil are you men doing sitting here staring?’ shouts a strange Feldwebel briskly.

  ‘Giving the dead major here, sir, extreme unction, sir, if you please, sir,’ shouts Porta in military parade-ground manner.

  Tiny sticks his water-bottle between the dead major’s lips.

  ‘’E’s gone,’ he sobs aloud, and falls on his knees with folded hands.

  The Feldwebel is visibly confused. He doesn’t know what to think. On the other hand he doesn’t feel he can start bawling them out with a major present – even a dead major!

  ‘Get along with you, quick,’ he orders tamely and disappears between the trees.

  ‘’Ero!’ grunts Tiny, brushing the snow from his trousers.

  ‘Have you looked?’ asks Porta suddenly.

  ‘Oly Mother o’ Gawd from the slums o’ Jerusalem. I bleedin’ near forgot!’ howls Tiny shocked, and with a sharp tug he opens the major’s mouth.

  Three gold teeth.

  ‘What the devil have you three been farting about at?’ grumbles the Old Man.

  ‘Court-martial ’em,’ suggests Heide in comradely fashion.

  ‘We’ve been giving extreme unction to a hero with the Knight’s Cross, a major of Jaegers,’ intones Porta in his ‘holy’ voice.

  ‘Amen!’ echoes Tiny virtuously from the background.

  ‘Liars!’ snarls the Old Man. ‘Breathe out! What the devil have you been drinking? What a hell of a stink!’

  ‘We shared the oil with the dead hero,’ answers Porta, with an insincere parson’s smile, crossing himself.

  Suddenly a machine-gun comes down on us and breaks up the interesting entertainment.

  Shadowy shapes disappear hastily into the brush. A few indistinguishable words come from the darkness.

  I throw a hand-grenade. Heartrending screams come from the thick underbrush.

  ‘Come death, come . . .’ hums the Legionnaire satanically, and empties a magazine at some flitting shapes.

  ‘Light!’ commands the Old Man brusquely.

  Stege holds his signal pistol high above his head. With a crack the phosphorous flare explodes replacing the darkness with stark white light.

  ‘Cease fire!’ shouts the Old Man furiosly. ‘Here Panzer Regiment 27 z.b.V!’

  ‘Here Rifle Regiment 106. Password?’ comes from the other side.

  ‘Rotten apple!’ answers the Old Man.

  ‘Running rat!’ comes immediately from the heavy brush.

  ‘Runnin’ prick! sounds closer,’ considers Tiny insubordinately. We get up, go slowly over towards the brush, and suddenly find ourselves face to face with the Feldwebel from before.

  ‘You again!’ he roars in an enraged voice.

  ‘Herr Feldwebel, sir, Obergefreiter Joseph Porta, always at your service with last rites, sir! According to Regulations the dying defender of the Fatherland has the right to prayer, oil and a final shot over the open grave, sir!’

  ‘I think you are doing your best to get yourself on a court-martial,’ raged the Feldwebel, reddening.

  ‘Beg to report, Herr Feldwebel, sir, that I have seen service with the Army Courts Martial at Torgau, Glatz and Germersheim. At 6 Army HQ at Münster I was responsible for changing the water in the decanters. Beg to report, Herr Feldwebel, Herr Kriegsgerichtsrat Dornbusch drank like a hole in the sand.’

  ‘You ought to be choked with your own shit,’ states the Feldwebel, disappearing with his men into the darkness.

  ‘Lot o’ bleedin’ idiots,’ says Tiny, ‘lettin’ theirselves get shot at by their own mates!’

  ‘That sort of thing happens quite often in war,’ explains Porta waving his arms about. ‘We live in surprising times. There was once a Herr Bauer who had a house in the hills outside Eger. In 1915 he became a one-man unit. They made him a Cornet and sent him off to the 2nd Imperial Jaeger Regiment. But when Cornet Bauer couldn’t find the Imperial Jaegers in Galicia – they’d been sent in the meantime to Italy to defend the Fatherland there – this intrepid man decided to form himself into a separate individual unit and develop a new kind of strategy to be used against the Czar’s Cossacks. . . .’

  Just then we run into the arms of another company and we hear no more about the heroic Cornet Bauer from the Eger Mountains.

  ‘Good thing you got here, Feldwebel,’ thunders an Oberleutnant with a black patch over his eye. ‘The Reds have mined the river and blown the bridge.’

  ‘Very good, Herr Oberleutnant!’ answers the Old Man tamely, thinking to himself, ‘Wish you’d gone with it!’

  ‘But they didn’t manage to drop the bridge entirely,’ continues the Oberleutnant. ‘So now it’s up to us to get across before the bastards realize they’ve left us some bridge. Move straight across with your section and establish a bridgehead. I’ll follow with my company. On your way, Feldwebel!’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ replies the Old Man apathetically, and moves towards the bridge with the section behind him. What good explaining to the officer that we were not under his command. He regards us as sent from heaven to do his dirty work. He’ll get the kudos for the bridgehead, we’ll do the paying – in blood – ours!

  ‘You first,’ orders the Old Man, pointing at Porta with his gun.

  ‘Go fuck a pig!’ says Porta disrespectfully. ‘If the Bohemian Boy, Adolf, came in person with all his Party Uncles and ordered me to step out onto that bridge I would still veto the idea. What about Julius? He’s a born hero!’

  ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ protests Heide furiously.

  ‘Well, now you ask. Your being a PG’s7 enough. Membership’s the first step up the suicide ladder.’ />
  ‘Stop talking about that blasted Party. Save it for after the war,’ snarls the Old Man impatiently. ‘Get on, Porta! It’s bloody Moscow we’re after now! Take position at the third pillar! Sven you’ll help him. You can throw hand-grenades from there!’ He throws a sack of grenades at me. A present from the Oberleutnant with the black patch.

  We edge our way carefully along an iron girder. It’s covered with ice and several times we almost fall off. Besides the grenades I have both ammunition bags to carry.

  ‘Should’ve joined the bicycle dragoons,’ grins Porta, ‘we’d have pedalled over in no time on the Wehrmacht model 1903 with turned-up handlebars and valuable improvements such as the free wheel, pneumatic tyres and adjustable shithouse.’

  A machine-gun spits tracer at us from the opposite bank.

  ‘A nice welcome,’ shouts Porta, raising his top-hat to them politely. At last we reach the pillar and take up position.

  With unbelievable slowness Porta inserts the belt and pours half a bottle of Russian frost oil over the lock.

  ‘The greasier, the easier,’ he grins. ‘I learnt that from a Chinese wholesaler dealing in cunt in the year 1937. He handed out two pounds of vaseline to his workers every Saturday morning so they didn’t feel the pistons going in and out.’

  There is a heavy bump above our heads. It’s Tiny throwing himself down with the SMG.

  ‘’Ere we are then, my sons, ‘ow d’you like the view? Some people’d pay money for it!’

  ‘Hombre,’ groans Barcelona. ‘It’s just like old times when we were pissing about on the Ebro trying to take the spaghettis in the black shirts.’

  A mortar bomb explodes close in front of us and blows half the pillar away.

  Two of the section get hit and disappear into the unbelievably filthy waters of the river. A 20 mm automatic cannon begins to jolt away from the far bank. It’s a wicked weapon. The small shells tear great jagged shards from the concrete and send them flying like shrapnel around our ears. Two heavy Maxims sight in on us.

  ‘Think I’ll go home,’ says Porta rolling his eyes skywards. ‘There’s too much going on here for a peace-loving Berliner.’