by Sven Hassel
Just before darkness falls the Old Man asks for volunteers to go out and pick him up.
Nobody steps forward.
‘Bastards!’ snarls the Old Man, swinging a stretcher up onto his shoulder.
Moser tries to stop him.
The Old Man hits out insubordinately at the Oberleutnant.
‘Shit!’ rasps Porta tearing the stretcher away from him. ‘Come on Tiny, we’ll bring that bloody opera singer in! And when we get him here we’ll break his skull. He might be a volunteer who thinks war’s just a nice rough game for men.’
Bent-backed they run forward through no-man’s-land. Tiny is waving a white flag. The enemy have had enough of the screaming, just as we have.
The firing stops. They disappear into a shell-funnel. Suddenly a German howitzer opens up:
‘R-u-u-u-u-um! Buuuuum!’
The wickedly sharp splinters fly through the air. It’s not pleasant for a couple of infantrymen to find themselves on the receiving end of howitzer fire.
Oberleutnant Moser sends runners back to the artillery. The Russian commander on the other side waves a white flag. The enemy artillery is stilled. Only our own artillery is still firing.
Suddenly the howitzers are quiet.
Porta springs from a soot-blackened shell-hole only a few yards from the enemy trenches.
The badly wounded infantryman is only seventeen. The Old Man was right. He’s got a banger in the gut.
The boy dies soon after Porta and Tiny get him in, even though he gets one of our precious blood transfusions and a big shot of morphine.
We scrape snow over his body. We haven’t time to bury him properly.
We crawl over in turn to one of the many fires. Thaw out our weapons and warm our frozen joints a little.
The Russian troops have been supplied with face-masks against the cold. We have only our scarves, so we rob the Russian bodies of their face-masks and felt boots.
‘It’s the first of December, today,’ announces Julius Heide solemnly. ‘The war will soon be over!’
‘How the hell do you know?’ asks Porta. ‘You got a direct line to Stalin?’
‘The Führer has said that the untermensch will have been crushed and the war concluded by Christmas!’ says Heide with conviction.
‘Is there anything Adolf the Austrian hasn’t said?’ sighs Porta. Laughter ripples round the fires. It’s easy to hear that the company present doesn’t consist entirely of Party members.
‘Mon Dieu, how cold it is!’ mumbles the Legionnaire, and throws a piece of wood onto the fire so that the flames shoot up and send sparks flying into the darkness.
From the forest a machine-gun barks. It sounds comically harmless in comparison with the shell-fire.
More fires are kindled. A couple of mortars begin to spit bombs at us. They come in great arching curves, but they are too far away for us to bother with them as yet.
Stege looks nervously in the direction the explosions are coming from.
‘Ivan’s finger got the itch,’ he mumbles. ‘Must be about time we got our fingers out and found us a comfortable shell hole.’
‘Breathe easy, mon ami,’ says the Legionnaire, calmly. ‘It takes a while for them to get the range. When they begin to drop by the fires closest to them it’s time for us to make a move.’
‘What the hell are we waiting here for anyway!’ Barcelona curses viciously.
‘Orders, mon ami,’ answers the Legionnaire laconically. ‘C’est la guerre!’
‘See! See!’ shouts Barcelona furiously, ‘Orders! Orders! That’s the rotten Army for you. Soon as you’re in the door it’s orders, orders, orders! Shit by numbers, they say, and you shit by numbers! Stand up and get shot, they say, and up you get with your fingers down your seams and you let yourself get shot! And all because some bastard with silver braid has given an order!’
‘Those aluminium stars seem to be weighing heavily on you, Feldwebel Blom,’ grins Porta, ‘but they’re easy to get rid of! Just tell ’em you’re not playing any more. At Germersheim they’re specialists at snatching the stars off people’s shoulders!’
A mortar bomb falls on a fire over by the forest.
We look nervously in that direction and listen to the screams of the wounded.
The sinister slobbering comes again from the trees. There are more on the way. We hear the long hissing whistle followed by a grating whine, that tells us a mortar bomb is on the way. Now it’s: Move, brother! The bastard’ll fall within a radius of fifty yards from us. Even before we’ve reached cover we hear the explosion, and shrapnel buzzes through the air like angry wasps. The shock has hardly passed before the next one’s on its way.
I have only have risen to make for cover when it falls in front of me. Before I can get down I’m underneath an avalanche of snow. Like a mobile snowball I roll over to Porta and Stege who have dropped into the hole the bomb has left. It’s warm. Melted snow trickles down the sides.
‘Slop – plop!’ sounds from within the forest. Then the longdrawn whistle, the terrible roar of the strike and a wave of hot air passes over us like a giant’s breath.
Twirling like a dry leaf in a November storm I’m thrown through the air far out into no-man’s-land where my flight is stopped brutally by a barbed wire fence-post. When I come to myself again, I can still hear the slobbering of the mortars firing from the blackness of the firs.
Desperately I try to dig myself in with my hands behind the slender post. The bombs seem to be coming directly at me. The explosion is so violent that it blasts all the breath from my lungs.
‘Plop-Plop!’ the mortar goes again.
I run madly back towards our position. I’m running a race with the grating whistle above me, roll head-over-heels down to the others just as the bomb explodes behind me and fills our hole with snow. ‘Come death, come now,’ the Legionnaire hums his macabre battle hymn.
Suddenly the mortar fire ceases. We gather in the village. The section has shrunk to twelve. Sourly the Old Man requires a name-check of the twenty-three missing. He has to account for losses. It doesn’t mean much that they’ve fallen, but the Section Commander has to prove it. If not the Military Police are advised of their names as possible deserters. Nobody is allowed to get away with deserting from the German Army. In the First World War 8,916 men deserted from the Army, but only 7 got away scot-free. The MPs are proud of this record, and make use of it as a deterrent in the Second World War, but some still make the attempt.
We covered the last one for seven days, before we sent the report through to the regiment. His wife had written that the sea was coming through the dykes. It had reached the hay and was rotting it from below. If only you were here, Herbert, she’d ended her letter. And that was her man’s death warrant. Herbert Damkuhl, the farmer, started off home, but was picked up at Brest-Litovsk. He’d only been reported missing nineteen hours. He was sent to Paderborn for court-martial and sentenced to death. One rainy morning in Sennelager they shot him. The peloton consisted of twelve Landesschütze under the command of a sleepy Leutnant who’d learnt how to shoot deserters in the First World War. Behind the broken dykes in Friesland the hay continued to rot.
The Legionnaire is holding his long, French water-bottle made of leather, over the fire to thaw out the contents. You can hear the ice rattling inside when he shakes it. Silently we watch him at work. He places a delicate porcelain cup in front of him and pours warm coffee into it. He’s lived a long time amongst Frenchmen and likes to point out the fact that he is not quite the same as we are.
‘Almost like sitting in the Café de la Paix on a May evening,’ he dreams, rolling a cigarette. He does it with the earnest attention of a Spaniard. The final operation is the adhesion of a Russian mouthpiece, which gives it a particular aroma.
‘God be thanked! Tomorrow we’ll be in Moscow,’ says Julius Heide, rubbing his boots with a Kiwi cloth. They are already highly-polished. He parts his hair carefully before replacing his helmet. Then he cleans his pistol. Heide
is always ‘according to regulations’, even when he’s in bed.
‘Well we can’t stay here anyway,’ says Barcelona, holding his hand out for his share of the little Legionnaire’s coffee.
The Legionnaire regards the black grains with a longing expression in his eyes.
‘Paris, Paris, Paris in May. The girls wearing dresses so thin that you can see right through them and which the tiniest zephyr can lift. The whole world visiting one another at the Café de la Pais. C’est la vie! If you have never known it you’ve still got something left to live for.’
‘I’ve been there,’ declares Tiny, unimpressed. ‘They asked me to leave. I was that drunk it was comin’ outa me ears. While we was talkin’ it over with a lot of Frenchies the ’ead ‘unters turned up an’ closed the show. They accused me o’ bringin’ the German Wehrmacht into disrespect in the eyes o’ the bleedin’ Frenchies. As if they coulda ’eld us in more disrespect’n they did already! They ’it me a whack over the ’ead with a bleedin’ great bunch o’ keys, an’ said I was a psycho, which is about right I reckon. I got a paper ’as says so at any rate. They went blue in the bleedin’ face when I explained to ’em ’ow we’re all more or less mouldly under the bleedin’ lid but some can ’ide it better’n others. Them as is cleverest gets stars on their shoulders, I told ’em. You shoulda seen the bleedin’ Watchdog major go straight up through ’is ’air without even takin’ ’is tin ’at off. I got 8 days ’ard on the spot for insultin’ a German officer when on duty.
‘Then Staff bleedin’ Gren, the bastard, give me the treatment, till I was willin’ to testify to bein’ the one an’ only psycho in the entire German bleedin’ army. After that I ’ad no desire at all to sit in their stuck-up Café de la pissin’ Paix watchin’ all them bleedin’ ring-snatchers an’ cock-suckers sellin’ their line o’ goods! Gawd strike me down if I ever see so many tight arses in me life as I did the five minutes I ’ad to look around in!’
A series of mortar bombs cuts him short.
For the fourth time the Professor is thrown out into the wire.
This time a boot is literally blown off his foot. He’s screaming like a madman when we get to him. He’s lost his glasses. Being unable to see drives him wild.
‘Get your pecker up, matey. Think if it’d been your old napper you’d lost,’ shouts Tiny, cheeringly. ‘You don’t need to see in a war. Go for the sound! The action’s where the bleedin’ noise is!’
Our second-in-command, Leutnant Jansen, lies groaning at the bottom of the trench. We’ve covered him with a couple of greatcoats taken from the dead but he’s shivering and has a high fever. He groans continually from excruciating pains in his kidneys. Even though he is 2 i/c he’s still younger than most of us. He came to the unit straight from the officer factory. What he knows he’s learnt from us.
The Leutnant watches us with childish fear. He’s been at the front long enough to know what he is to us. Trouble! If we wish him dead it’s not to be wondered at. Whilst we’re stuck here it doesn’t make much difference, but as soon as the battle starts rolling again, one way or the other, he’s a burden on us. He knows that sooner or later we’re going to have to roll him in a greatcoat, give him a packet of cigarettes and leave him to freeze to death quietly.
‘Done!’ cries Porta. ‘He snuffs it within three days!’ We discover Jansen watching us and feel ashamed. Look away and busy ourselves with the automatic weapons.
The Old Man sits down by the Leutnant’s side, rolls a plug of tobacco into place behind his teeth, and spits at a snow hare which is sitting on the edge of the trench wagging its ears at us.
‘How’s it going?’ he asks, pushing a gasmask bag under the young officer’s neck.
‘Bad!’ answers Jansen tiredly, wiping a hand over his wet brow. ‘Have you written me off?’
‘Balls, why’d we do that?’
‘Porta took three days!’
‘Some bet about a bottle of vodka,’ laughs the Old Man, throwing a snowball at Porta.
‘They were betting on how long I’ll last. Porta gave me three days,’ mumbles the Leutnant, stubbornly.
‘Herr Leutnant, pull yourself together now. Don’t forget you’re 2 i/c. You’re duty bound to show an example!’
‘I’ll finish myself,’ says the Leutnant firmly. ‘I’m sick! I’m trouble!’
‘Come, come now,’ the Old Man soothes him. ‘It’s not that bad. What was your job in civilian life?’
‘I was something in a bank,’ answers the Leutnant tiredly. ‘I’m not suited to be an officer. You should’ve been an officer, Feldwebel.’
The Old Man laughs aloud. It’s the last thing he could ever imagine happening. He’s never understood how he came to be a Feldwebel, even though he is a born leader.
‘What’s Ivan up to?’ asks Jansen.
‘I was over at No. 3 last night and heard them examining prisoners,’ answers the Old Man despondently. ‘The other lot are marshalling everything they can get hold of. New troops with the best possible winter clothing and equipment. Countless battalions of Siberiaks. First class fighters who’ve been promised the earth if they crush the Fascists. Hundreds of T-34s ready to roll. If what the prisoners say is true, we ought to lose no time packing up and getting away from here.’ The Old Man pushes a new plug behind his teeth, takes the magazine off his submachine-gun and examines it critically. ‘Still no orders from regiment?’ he asks.
‘None yet,’ answers Jansen, shaking with a new attack of fever. ‘Something’ll come through. They can’t just take off and leave us here.’
‘Yes, they can,’ answers the Old Man, ‘and I believe they will. What’s a lousy company against the safety of a regiment! The good of the majority comes before the good of the individual, says the Party.’
‘To hell with the Party, the Führer and this whole bloody war,’ whispers Leutnant Jansen through chattering teeth.
Violent artillery fire cuts short the conversation. A seething cloud of smoke cloaks everything. Men are blown from their holes and strewn about the snow. A few get up and run until they are caught again and blown higher than the flaming tree tops. In the wink of an eye frozen snow and earth is turned into a boiling broth whipped up by glowing metal.
We retreat at speed, racing through thick, steamy mist. The Russians cannot follow us through the sea of flame. We throw hand grenades behind us, shoot into the flames.
An Oberst sits against a tree, his teeth showing in an obscene deathshead grin. Both his arms are gone. The Cossacks dash past, sabres gleaming, and disappear into the smoke.
A German artillery limber rushes past as fast as the horses can go. There is a long thunderous roar and it disappears. The horses fall screaming from the sky, their legs splaying outwards, to splash to a bloody gruel on the ground.
The earth opens up in front of us like the mouth of a roaring volcano. Stone, earth and snow fly far away through the riven air. A giant crater, large enough to hold a four storey building, is torn out of the ground. A lorry comes flying through the air. The driver is still at the wheel as if he is steering it. With a crunching sound, it lands at the bottom of the crater in a heap of tangled metal.
A soldier runs towards us. His insides trailing like ghastly snakes behind him. His mouth is one great gaping, screaming hole. He stumbles over his own entrails, falls, gets up, and runs on until he disappears in a flaming explosion.
A two-storey house hangs seemingly suspended in the air, above a company. It falls and house and soldiers mingle to an unrecognizable mash. Long tree trunks with parts of bodies hanging between their branches come flying through the air with inconceivable force and bore themselves into the ground like giant javelins. A salvo of shells turns them to firewood.
Porta and I are lugging the heavy machine-gun. Tiny has Leutnant Jansen over one shoulder like a sack.
We take up position behind the ruined village. A swarm of Jabos hoses the battleground clean of stragglers.
1 Izba (Russian): Peasant hut.
&nbs
p; 2 Moujik (Russian): Peasant.
3 Staross (Russian): Mayor.
4 Kolchos: Collective.
5 Rasbom: Blast bomb (compressed air).
6 ICH DIENE (German): I serve.
7 PG Parteigenosse (German): Party Member.
‘It is no longer necessary for the Courts to give a decision. An order from the Führer is sufficient where the execution of criminals, for crimes against the state or for parasitism, is concerned.’
Reichsführer Himmler to Police President
SS-Gruppenführer Kurt Daluege, 3 January 1942.
At Headquarters Hitler raged for the third hour without pause. ‘Cowards, traitors, bunglers,’ he howled, at the officers sitting in silence along both sides of the heavy oak table.
Marschall Keitel fiddled with a pencil. General Olbricht watched a fly crawling around on the great war chart. It edged its way between the coloured pins and flags and stopped on a large red spot: Moscow. General-oberst Jodl leafed through documents concerning the disappointing tank production. Reichsmarschall Göring sketched ideas for new uniforms. SS-Reichsführer Himmler noted energetically the confusion of orders flowing from Hitler.
‘Guderian is to be dismissed!’ he roared. ‘Hoepner, that criminal dilletante, must go too!’
