Guns At Cassino

by Leo Kessler

  The staff of the US Second Corps relaxed. Their hands came down from the gleaming lacquered helmets, with the silver and gold insignia. Someone broke wind. A colonel spat into the mud of the farmyard. Slowly they began to drift back into the farmhouse HQ.

  ‘Waal,' the big Colonel who had spat, said to his neighbour in a thick Alabaman voice, heavy with whisky and a lifetime of prejudice, 'it sure looks as if those niggers are gonna get their asses well and truly licked, don't it?' He hawked and spat again.

  Five

  On the same morning that General Mark Clark visited the Second Corps, the Vulture gave the assembled officers of his Battle Group Wotan a little lecture.

  Standing in front of the new command post which he had set up between two prominent hillocks that Schulze had already nicknamed Twin Tits, he rasped:

  `Gentlemen, this is where we are going to stand. I have no further orders from Smiling Albert' - he allowed himself a cold little smile at the nickname - 'than these - stand and fight!'

  He flung out his hand in an expansive gesture and the assembled SS officers stared around at the barren mountain top, covered in the debris of war, which seemed such an offence to the noble dignity of the snow-capped peak towering above them.

  `In essence, gentlemen, we have an area of four square kilometres to defend and some fourteen hundred men to do it with? Now, I don't need to tell you that that is not a very large number of bodies. So what are we going to do?'

  He paused, tugged at the end of his monstrous nose which had turned salmon pink in the biting cold.

  `We must make this peak so costly to the Amis down there in the valley that they will give up in the end. Every man in this battle group who dies - and there will be plenty, you can be sure of that - must take six Amis with him. But as you can fully appreciate, we cannot do this if we do not make the most of the natural defences of this place.'

  He pointed his riding crop at a couple of the lanky Tyroleans idly scratching at the frozen rock a few metres away.

  `Not like that, of course. Ground, as you all know from your studies at Bad Toelz and since, is the raw material of the soldier, just as his weapons are his tools. A foolish inexperienced soldier does little with that raw material; an experienced solider shapes it exactly to his purpose. What then is the purpose of this peak which we now hold? At the moment it is simply an observation point. But is also an automatic target of attack by the enemy who not only wants to knock out this observation point, but also wants to use it for his own observation purposes. Thus, in modern warfare, the advance of an attacking army is from one piece of high ground to the next.'

  Major von Dodenburg let his eyes wander over the sterile earth of the mountain top, pitted with shell holes and littered with jagged pieces of rusting shrapnel like the scabs of some ugly skin disease. His gaze passed over the slope, covered with belts of ammunition, abandoned weapons, grenades which had not exploded, rags of uniform, paper - plenty of paper – and here and there, crumpled bodies, on to the Liri Valley below. In spite of the haze, and to the left a man-made smoke screen, he could see the Allied lines quite clearly: silent, with no visible movement, but somehow sinister in their very silence. `I have discovered in my years in the military,' the Vulture was saying, 'that the Army fits in well with a certain form of laziness. Army life is divided very equally between moments of hardship, fatigue, danger - and periods of inactivity. We had the former yesterday. Today - and every new day that dawns before the Amis attack - you gentlemen and your men are in for the latter.'

  `What do you mean, sir?' Schwarz asked, always eager for an opportunity to inspire the cynical veterans of the Wotan with National Socialist purpose and enthusiasm.

  `I mean, my dear Schwarz, that the men are going to dig, dig and dig yet more until they reach hell, as far as I am concerned.' The Vulture's voice rose harshly. 'Gentlemen we are going to turn Peak 555 into a fort that will never be taken. It will become a running sore for the Allies' His hard blue eyes swept round their eager faces, glowing in the cold air. ‘For if we don't stop the enemy here, gentlemen, Cassino over there will go, and with it the whole Winter Line. And if the Winter Line goes, we have lost Italy. The war will arrive then on the Reich's own doorstep and I don't have to tell you what that would mean to our hard-pressed homeland. Meine Herren, that is all!'

  Schwarz, his black eyes gleaming fanatically, flung his arm up, as the rest snapped to attention.

  `That will never happen, sir,' he barked eagerly. `Sieg Heil!'

  `Sieg Heil!' the cry rose and reverberated around the mountain top, harsh, brutal and arrogant, flung out like a challenge to fate itself.

  One hour later, the Wotan men began to transform Peak 555 into a fort. The ground was iron-hard, but a grenade buried in its surface soon softened it up so that the digging could commence. By the end of the first day, when the pale yellow ball of the winter snow started to slide behind the snow-covered peak, they had created a series of shallow holes all along the perimeter of the plateau below it. These were covered with sacking and rags which they had waterproofed with a mixture of rifle oil, paint, petrol and candle-wax. When the Americans still did not counter-attack on the following day, the hard work of digging commenced once more, the men burying into the Italian earth like moles. That evening their narrow one-man foxholes, each shaped like a coffin, were deep enough and they set about making them, comfortable. As a sweating Schulze joked to von Dodenburg:

  `They laughed when I started digging this.' He pointed to the hole, with its straw filled mattress at the base and the stove made from a twenty-litre French oil drum, already glowing invitingly. 'But now the joke's on them. You see there's nothing like a nice warm bed to come home to at night. Just stretch out your hands, sir and feel the warmth given out by that thing!'

  No thank you, Schulze, and I'm not going to ask where you stole the fuel from for it either, you rogue. Come on, out of there, I'm going to plant a spandau here. You'll cover my CP with it.'

  Schulze wiped the sweat off his big red face with the back of his hand.

  `All right, sir, I'm coming. But that's always the trouble with this shitty war - it breaks up a feller's home life!'

  By the end of the third day, Battle Group Wotan was dug in and waiting for the enemy to appear. The Americans, hidden by the permanent smoke-screen below still did not come, and life on the Peak began to settle in to the routine of a military encampment.

  Schulze, together with one of the ex-inmates of Torgau military prison, who had been conscripted into the Battle Group just after it had moved to the Italian front, made a crystal radio set from an empty cardboard GI ration container, copper wire taken from a shell and a couple of razor blades. And in the evening after stand-down, a group of the troopers would crowd round it, listening to American jazz from the Allied military station and frying potatoes in the howitzer recoil mechanism oil which Schulze had 'organized' somehow or other.

  `They taste pretty good, sir,' Schulze told an amused von Dodenburg during the course of one of his evening rounds, 'but that oil gives yer a nice old case of the Cassino trots next morning - nearly takes the ring out of yer ass, it does!'

  ‘I remember in Russia one time,' the ex-Torgau man said after von Dodenburg had gone, 'I was caught off-guard by a salvo from an Ivan Stalin Organ (1) and I jumped in this hole without thinking. I should have. The hole was full of crap!'

  The Tyrolean boys laughed softly in the growing darkness, warming their frozen hands on the hot metal sides of their canteen cups full of bitter 'nigger sweat'.

  `And I'd put my shitty paws into it before I realized what the hell it was,' the ex-Torgau man said bitterly.

  `Must have been one of those rear-echelon stallions,' Schulze commented sympathetically. 'They crap all over the place.'

  ‘Ner,' the ex-Torgau man answered. 'They never get that near the front - their hide's too precious.' He took a sip of his nigger's sweat. 'All I'm saying is that there ought to be the death penalty for that sort of thing! Who else but a first
class crap hound with ingrowing toenails and flat feet would do that kind of thing - shitting indiscriminately for other fellers to fall into!'

  `After the war when they start making the war films in Berlin, they ought to show the front like it really is,' one of the South Tyroleans said in his almost unintelligible mountain dialect. 'Parts of soldiers lying all around, people getting shot while they're trying to take a shit - that kind of thing!'

  `Yeah,' another young blond trooper supported him, 'and they should throw a little crap into the theatre's air-conditioning when they show it, so the civilians in the audience can smell what it was like on a battlefield too. Shitty!'

  `Civvies don't want to know anything about us front line swine,' the ex-Torgau man said bitterly. 'They don't shitting well know and they don't shitting well care.'

  Schulze lowered his fork, laden with fried potatoes.

  `And I don't blame the poor bastards,' he said so softly that no one in the little group crouched around the heat glowing from the trench stove heard. 'It's better that no one knows what this kind of war is like.'

  As the fifth day came and still the Amis had not attacked, Schulze and the ex-Torgau man, who had been sentenced to death in 1942 for striking an officer and had accepted recruitment into the Wotan as an alternative, organized the Battle Group's first beetle race. There were plenty of the repulsive, black, hard-shelled insects around. All the competitors needed to do was to dig a hole at the bottom of their foxholes and an hour later it would be alive with black wriggling beetles. The racing system was simple. The beetles' backs were painted different colours and then they were placed in a large jar. The jar itself was deposited in the centre of a large circle, raised and the first beetle out of the ring was judged to be the winner.

  By the end of the first day of racing, Schulze had won over three hundred cigarettes, eight cans of 'Old Man', the standard issue meat ration, reputedly made of dead old men, and four pairs of sheer silk Italian black market stockings - 'and I'm going to draw them on myself, lads, every lovely centimetre of the wench's leg!' he had boasted, rolling his eyes lecherously.

  But when the ex-docker had discovered that he was running out of the black syrup with which he had managed to dip the feet of the other men's beetles and thus slow them down, he had decided to withdraw from 'this season's racing', as he told the others, 'Regretfully.' Still the beetle racing craze caught on and it was during the afternoon 'Derby', the major race of the stand-down period, on the sixth day, the new officer appeared in their midst.

  The race had just ended when a herd of black Italian pigs, chased up the rise by a puffing, red-faced Sergeant Metzger, the Battle Group's senior NCO, scuffled across the 'race course', crushing two of the 'favourites' under their hooves. There was an immediate outcry and Schulze cried:

  `Where the hell did those cruddy pigs come from!' Then he pretended to catch sight of the big ex-butcher with the stupid wooden face for the first time and added in mock apology:

  `Sorry, Sergeant Metzger, I didn't realize they were friends of yours!'

  Metzger's red face turned crimson with rage, but he contained himself. The Hamburger knew too much about him from the days when they had been NCOs together before Schulze had decided to desert.

  `Those cruddy pigs, Schulze, are Colonel Geier's - for your information. They cost this unit exactly one truckload of "Old Man" on the Macaroni black market. It had gone off, of course, but those stupid Italianos did not know that, did they?'

  He grinned suddenly, his little pig-like eyes full of peasant cunning.

  `You're the smart one, Sergeant Metzger,' Schulze complimented him, winking surreptitiously at the grinning Tyrolean boys, who knew just how much he hated the Group's senior NCO. 'What would we all do without you, Sergeant! When do we get our piece of Schnitzel, then?' he added, licking his lips in mock anticipation. 'I'm getting sick of that Old Man and giddi-up soup.' (2)

  `You don't, Schulze,' Metzger snapped flicking his stick across the rump of one of the black pigs, which was busily engaged in eating most of the entrants for the next race. 'These pigs are intended as our iron ration if we get cut off up here. It was Colonel Geier's idea.'

  `So that you lads up at Twin Tits can fill yer guts on the sly, eh, Sergeant Metzger?'

  Metzger opened his mouth to bellow an angry retort, but another, softer voice beat him to it.

  `That is a dangerous accusation - a very dangerous accusation to make, soldier,' it said. The Saxon accent was unmistakable.

  Schulze and the rest swung round and stiffened to attention the next instant. The man who had spoken wore the stars of a second-lieutenant on his black collar patch, and the silver SS runes gleamed bright and new on his unwrinkled grey tunic, bare of any decorations save the War Service Cross, Third Class. For the first time since any of them had joined the Armed SS, they were facing an officer of that elite formation, who actually wore glasses.

  `I didn't mean anything, sir,' Schulze said surprised, taking in the officer's pudgy face and the cunning eyes magnified by the thick lenses of the gold-rimmed spectacles.

  `Everybody here knows that Sergeant Metzger was a butcher in civvie street. It's a bit, of a standing joke among the men,' he ended lamely, disconcerted by the new officer's fixed unwinking stare.

  Finally the second-lieutenant lowered his gaze. Taking a notebook and a silver pencil from his breast pocket, he asked:

  ‘What's your name, soldier?'

  `Schulze, Hans,' Schulze snapped, 'SS man!'

  The officer made a note.

  `I shall be keeping my eye on you, Schulze,' he said softly in his ugly Saxon accent. 'You'd better watch your step.'

  ‘Yessir!'

  And with that, he tugged at his mule's bridle and kicking one of the rooting black pigs out of his way with a polished boot, plodded up the slope towards the Twin Tits' CP.

  ‘Who the hell's that when he's at home?' Schulze breathed when the strange officer was out of earshot.

  The burly NCO grinned maliciously.

  `That's our new National Socialist Leadership Officer, sent here from the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin. He's been sent to show you Bolshevik shits what it means to belong to the National Socialist elite.'

  Schulze absorbed the information with a long face.

  `And what is the National Socialist paragon's worthy name?' he asked.

  `Second Lieutenant Kriecher.'

  `Kriecher,' Schulze echoed the name thoughtfully. 'The name just fits the cunning little bastard.'

  `Perhaps,' Metzger said and flicked his switch across the plump rump of the nearest pig. 'But you'd better watch your step, Schulze. He's got his eye on you, believe you me.'

  Thus the 'Creeper' (3) entered the lives of the men of SS Assault Group Wotan. He was not sent out to one of the companies but was retained at Geier's CP, yet none of the rank-and-file seemed able to ascertain his true function, not even Sergeant Metzger. Most of his day he spent creeping around their positions, suddenly appearing behind a working party or in the midst of a stand-down group, head bent over his little black notebook, scribbling furiously with his silver pencil. The men grew to hate him, especially Schulze who took to spreading malicious jokes about him.

  `Of course they'll take anybody in the SS these days,' he would crack to someone who had not heard the story before. `Even little creep's like that. Why, didn't you hear the tale of the lad who went to see the medics with no arms and they still signed him up. And when he got to his unit, the adjutant said: "What, you've got no arms! Don't worry, there's a place for you in this battalion. Go over there and help those two soldiers pumping water in buckets." "But I can't help 'em, sir," the chap protested, "I've no arms." "Don't worry," the Adj answered. "Just tell 'em when to stop filling the buckets. You see they're both blind!” ’

  And he would follow up the joke with his own bitter assessment of Lieutenant Kriecher's motivation.

  `Of course, you know the Creeper's trouble, don't yer? Too much five against one - the old rig
ht-handed widow!'

  And when one of the Tyrolean mountain boys did not understand, he would explain with an explicit if obscene gesture. `They all get like that in the end - too much looking through keyholes and bashing away at it. That's the Creeper's problem, believe you me.'

  Once Schulze attempted to tackle von Dodenburg on the true function of the mysterious officer, but the CO had shrugged and given him the same explanation as Metzger.

  `National Socialist Leadership Officer, Schulze. Sent here personally by the Reichsführer SS to attempt to convert you heathen Bolsheviks to the true cause.'

  `That'll be the day, sir!' Schulze had grunted. 'My old man in Barmbek would half slaughter me when I went home - if I ever do get home again off this sodding mountain.'

  `Don't worry, Schulze,' von Dodenburg had laughed. 'You know the old saying? Weeds never die.'

  `I wish that particular weed would!'

  `Tut, tut,' von Dodenburg had commented without rancour, `you should not say things like that about your superior officers.'

  But in the end the big ex-docker's hatred of the little Saxon officer gave way to a kind of fear. Whenever the Creeper was near him, he could feel a cold finger of apprehension trace its way slowly down his spine and the hairs on the back of his head would stand up. He took to avoiding the man as much as possible, and he wasn't the only one.

  The officers of the Wotan did not take to the newcomer, who always ate alone and did not join the rough horseplay of the little mess they had made for themselves in the big log-covered bunker behind the Twin Tits' command post. Whereas their conversation was devoted to women, drink and the technicalities of their calling, his was limited to harsh brittle comments which always began with, 'The Führer has stated that ...' as if he alone had the ear of the Leader. Even Schwarz, the most fanatical of these young men who were the elite of National Socialist youth, could not get along with this strange officer who had appeared so suddenly in their midst.