Guns At Cassino

by Leo Kessler

  `That'll be all the documents you'll need, take it from me,' she said mysteriously. 'Now shut up, here comes the hospital train.'

  Well, all I can say is that I wouldn't like to buy all that by the kilo,' Schulze whispered, his eyes fixed on the white-painted train which was now beginning to pull into the little station.

  With a rusty squeal of brakes and emitting a great cloud of steam, the white-painted locomotive came to rest at the end of the platform. For a moment nothing happened. Then the stretcher-bearers started to file on the platform, pushing their way through the MPs armed with sub-machine guns who were watching the streets. The young Red Cross nurses hurried out of the blue-lit waiting-room, shivering in the night cold, their knives and scissors held ready in their hands. The doors of the train were flung open everywhere and now the two watchers could identify the strange sound which had puzzled them ever since the locomotive had stopped.

  `It’s the wounded,' Fat Erna hissed. 'They've been locked up in that train for three days, ever since it left the front. You can imagine the state of the poor bastards, can't you?'

  Schulze did not need to; he could see their state with his own eyes, as the ragged, lice-ridden soldiers were laid out in long rows on the freezing platform while the nurses went down their moaning ranks slicing their lousy, blood-stained clothes with professional speed. They were followed by elderly soldiers with masks over their mouths, pumping great clouds of lice-powder over their naked, broken bodies.

  `Against typhus,' Fat Erna explained. 'There was a typhus epidemic out here last year, but the authorities hushed it up - as always.' She gave a last quick look at the platform and nudged Schulze. 'All right, soldier boy, let's go!'

  Schulze needed no urging. Together they scrambled down the steep wooded slope, Fat Erna showed surprising energy and agility for such a big woman and, crouching low, clambered over the gleaming rails towards the train.

  `Towards the rear,' she hissed. 'It's darker there - behind that flak wagon.'

  Hurriedly, but taking care not to make too much noise, they worked their way past the stark outline of the Luftwaffe anti-aircraft car, its four 20mm cannon pointing mutely to a silver night sky. Erna stopped suddenly, so that he nearly bumped into her.

  `This is it - the dysentery latrines.'

  `Yeah, I can smell them! Christ on a crutch! That pong certainly makes yer hair curl, doesn't it?'

  `By the time you get out of them, soldier,' Big Erna said grimly, 'your hair will probably have started to fall out. All right, once you're in them, stay there until we cross the bridge over the Elbe at Lauenburg. Got it?'

  `Got it.'

  `Good, now give me a leg up to the carriage - and no trying to get your big hand up my skirt when you do, do you hear?'

  `A gentleman never takes advantage of a lady in a tricky situation, madam, especially when she's as big as you.'

  Big Erna mouthed an obscenity and reached upwards.

  `I shall have to speak first with my chaplain before I can answer that,' Schulz said and took the strain, pushing at her enormous buttocks, as if he were back in the Hamburg docks heaving up hundredweight sacks of flour.

  The corridor leading to the dysentery latrines, marked by the big official sign 'ATTENTION DYSENTERY PATIENTS ONLY, was empty, but the bloody mixture of faeces and dirty linen which littered the floor showed clearly that the latrines had been in full use in the hospital train's long journey from the front. Further up, an orderly was sluicing down the floor with a stirrup pump attached to a pail of water.

  Big Erna coughed thickly.

  `All right, soldier. Now you're on your own. Sister Klara must get some rest for the long journey back to the front.'

  `Lucky you,' Schulze grumbled, then he turned and began to make his way towards the latrine area, already beginning to gag at the nauseating odour which rose to meet him.

  Big Erna faced him on the rattling, swaying connection between the two carriages. The noise was so loud that the frozen-faced air-raid sentry in the little wooden tower above their heads could not hear a word they spoke. Outside it was snowing hard - thick white flakes coming down in solid sheets as if God had decided to blot out the miserable war-torn world below for good. Big Erna handed him the little bottle of Kron.

  `Clean your mouth out with that,' she ordered gruffly. Gratefully he took a deep drink of the fiery, clear schnapps.

  `Man, that tastes good,' he gasped, wiping his cracked lips with the back of his hand. 'I thought I was going to lose my ring in that bog for good - I puked that much.'

  `Better than losing your turnip' (1) she commented laconically and watched the flat white Mecklenburg countryside flash by.

  Feeling better now, Schulze looked at the big woman in the Red Cross uniform curiously. 'You been inside?' he asked. She nodded and took a bite of the sandwich she had pulled out of her pocket.

  `Is that why you're working with that lad in Hamburg?'

  She swallowed a big chunk of the black bread and salami.

  `I suppose so. I'm not in the movement because of the ideology, that's for sure. The Party's philosophy is still bourgeois, you know. Not much better than the old anti-feminist business of children, kitchen and cooking. Our leaders haven't much time for the kind of - er - weakness I'm addicted to.'

  She lowered her eyes with unusual shyness. Schulze did not ask what her 'weakness' was. He knew Fat Erna well enough now to realize that she would only tell him what she wanted to tell him.

  `I'm in this,' she said slowly, taking another bite of her sandwich, as if her very life depended upon her swallowing it, 'because I hate the Nazis, oh God, how I hate the bastards! I'd give my very life to bring them down.'

  Still Schulze did not speak. Up above them the anti-aircraft guard removed his leather face mask and wiped the sweat off his brow. His face was young and pale; more cannon fodder to feed the Russian front's insatiable appetite, Schulze thought. The boy smiled down at them and then replaced the leather mask hastily as the full force of the icy, snow-laden wind struck him.

  `They took me in in 1934' She stuffed the rest of her sandwich into her mouth. 'I'm a pervert you know.' She laughed bitterly. 'What else could I be – the way I'm built? No man would ever look at me.'

  Schulze looked at her in amazement.

  `Do you mean?' he stuttered. She grinned at him cynically. 'I do! All my life I've never let one of you male pigs up my drawers. At first I hated you because you men despised me for my size. Later I began to look at you in contempt. After all,' she pulled another black bread sandwich out of her pocket and began stuffing it into her mouth, as if Schulze might take it from her, 'I can do things to women with these hands that you could never hope to do with that dirty little thing you've got hanging in your trousers.'

  `Don't say that, Erna,' Schulze protested, 'what do you think I've got these round shoulders for!'

  But he could see his humour was out of place. Big Erna's mind was on other times and other places; he was just a sounding board for her memories.

  `Funnily enough, the Nazis did me a favour when they sent me to Dachau. I met Elli there – the one great love of my life. And they killed her when they found out. Those Nazi pigs killed her. No gas chamber, no firing squad, no executioner's axe – no, nothing as clean and simple as that for my poor beautiful Elli.' She looked at Schulze, her eyes blazing with sudden hate. `Do you know what the bastards said? If a man's tail couldn't satisfy her – that was after six of them had been through her - then they'd see what a - ' She broke off suddenly.

  When she spoke again, she was the old Fat Erna again, completely assured and in control of herself.

  `They stuck something up her. I could hear her screams right on the other side of the homo block. Then they left her to bleed to death - slowly.'

  She said the words without any emotion, fumbling in her pocket for yet another black bread sandwich.

  `She was the only person I ever really loved. Now can you understand why I hate them?'

  The big SS man no
dded silently and looked at the driving snowflakes, burying the winter countryside under their white cruel mantle.

  `What a rotten world, it is,' he told himself bitterly, 'what a rotten shitty world.'

  Slowly the big hospital train started to steam into the platform, crowded with morose pale-faced soldiers returning to the front and their sobbing wives, watched everywhere by helmeted chain-dogs ready to stamp out any sign of trouble.

  The train came to a halt and the wives and girl-friends sobbed into their handkerchiefs with renewed energy, while their menfolk made embarrassed 'tut-tutting' noises. High above them in the shattered glass roof, the loudspeakers came to life:

  `Special troop train for Koenigsberg, with connections to Warsaw, Brest-Litovsk, Smolensk, will be leaving Platform Four. Planned departure fifteen hours, forty-five.' The soldiers started to pick up their rucksacks, engulfed in steam and smoke. 'Good luck', the women cried with mounting hysteria. `Good luck, Willi ... Good luck, Karl! Now don't forget to look after yourself like I said ...’

  `All right,' Big Erna whispered as the soldiers began to enter the train, pushing their kit and weapons in front of them. ‘Now's the time. Walk behind me. When I drop this (she indicated her shabby briefcase) jump the barrier, head into the crowd and run like hell!'

  `And you, Erna?'

  `Don't worry about me, soldier,' she said gruffly, 'I've got papers. I've nothing to fear.'

  He held out his big hand.

  `All right, if you say so ... Thanks for everything you done for me.'

  She took it in a fist that was as hard and firm as his own.

  `Don't mention it, soldier. At least, you didn't try to put your hand up my skirt - which is more than I can say for the rest of them.'

  Schulze simpered.

  `Well, you see I don't really like girls.'

  She gave him a playful push that nearly sent him through the open door.

  `Get on with you. All right now, let’s go. Time's running out.' Hastily she pushed her way through the soldiers crowding around the door.

  `Make way there,' she commanded imperiously. 'I've got a seriously wounded man with me. Sauerbruch himself is going to operate on him.'

  The name of Germany's greatest surgeon worked like magic. They fell back on both sides to let her emerge, followed by Schulze trying to look seriously wounded. A fat housewife sobbing into a damp handkerchief did not get out of Erna's way quickly enough and the big woman gave her a hefty shove.

  `Get out of the road, will you,' she growled, 'you silly sow, or I'll really give you something to cry about.'

  The barrier, guarded by two chain-dogs and a civilian who was obviously a member of the Gestapo or Secret Field Police, was only fifteen metres away now. Fat Erna walked towards it purposefully, as if she hadn't a care in the world, fumbling in her briefcase, apparently looking for her pass to show to the guards. Schulze followed at five metres distance, holding his hand to the side of his bandaged face. Suddenly big Erna dropped her briefcase on to the platform, scattering the contents everywhere.

  `Holy shit!' she cursed loudly so that everyone turned to look at her, 'the sodding thing has come open again!'

  With a theatrical grunt she bent down slowly to pick up the contents. Her nurse's skirt rode up her huge flanks to reveal the full glory of her black-silk clad buttocks. At the barrier the chain-dogs' eyes bulged out of their heads at the spectacle. Somewhere close by, a soldier groaned in awe:

  `Oh, holy strawsack, get a load of that! All that meat and no potatoes!'

  The civilian pulled his dark felt hat down more firmly on his head, as if he were afraid it might be blown off by the shock of the sight being revealed to him and stepped forward.

  `Let me give you a hand, sister,' he said hastily, 'before you split your knickers altogether!'

  `Now,' Big Erna hissed, not looking up. 'And the best of luck, you lump!'

  Schulze waited no longer. With one jump he was over the barrier and in the midst of the surprised crowd of shabby civilians waiting for their trains.

  `Hey, what's this,' an officious-looking man with a battered case shouted, 'what you think you're up to?'

  Schulze gave him a shove in the face, ripping at his bandages with the other hand. The man sprawled full length on the platform. His case burst open. Eggs cascaded on to the ground.

  `Black market,' someone shouted. 'Black market eggs!'

  The crowd surged forward greedily, attracted by the promise of this luxury. A fat woman slipped on a yolk and careened forward into Schulze, still occupied with his bandage. He jabbed his elbow into her middle and she went down gasping, like a punctured barrage balloon. Schulze pushed on through the chaos.

  Behind him the chain-dogs' whistles began to shrill. A red, steel-helmeted face loomed up in front of him. Schulze stopped momentarily and drove his knee into the officer's stomach. The man's knees gave way beneath him like those of a newborn foal. Schulze gave a great guffaw and giving him the slightest of pushes with his right hand, watched him fall on his back.

  A severe-looking woman in the grey-green uniform of the `Belief and Beauty' organization shouted something at him and swung her briefcase. Schulze ducked. The woman overbalanced and Schulze caught her instinctively, his big hands squeezing her breasts.

  `Let go,' she gasped in a high-pitched spinster's voice. 'Let go of me!'

  `Gladly!' he roared. 'But I bet it'll be the last time somebody'll feel your tits in 1944!' He pushed her to one side. `Count yourself lucky, missus.'

  He ran on, leaving her gasping and protesting in the confused mess of his wake. And then he was outside, the shrill sound of the MPs' whistles and the yells of the crowd getting ever fainter. He flung the bandage into the snow and adjusting his cap, forced himself to walk more slowly towards the front of the station, knowing that if von Dodenburg was not there, he would be sunk.

  But Major von Dodenburg was there, standing next to a pale, pretty blonde in Maiden uniform, who hardly came up to his shoulder. He hurried forward, trying to contain his hectic breathing and flung von Dodenburg a tremendous salute.

  Von Dodenburg looked at him, his face unshaven, his jacket torn and covered in something which looked like egg-yolk, his Knight's Cross hanging over his shoulder instead of round his neck.

  `Heaven, arse, and twine, Schulze,' he roared, 'where the hell have you been? You look as if someone has dragged you through a hedge - backwards!'

  And it feels like it too, Schulze told himself, but he did not tell von Dodenburg that. His eyes curiously sizing up the Maiden, he said:

  `I was in a hurry to get back, sir.'

  `Back to the front?'

  Schulze sighed and relaxed.

  `Sir, the front will be a rest cure after what has happened to me in the last forty-eight hours.'

  Von Dodenburg's grin faded.

  `You might be right there, Schulze. The front is preferable to this mess. All right, park your big rear in the car. We're off in a minute.'

  He indicated Wagner's Volkswagen jeep which he had simply driven away from Madame Kitty's without the big adjutant's permission, consumed as he had been with a burning rage at the whole miserable state of the Reich and the traitors working so industriously behind the scenes to bring about its downfall. He turned to the girl, who was shivering a little in the cold, and extended his hand formally.

  `Well, it's goodbye, Heidi,' he said softly, while Schulze's eyes swept curiously from the oddly matched pair to the exit from the station to check whether the MPs were still after him.

  The girl accepted it with the same formality.

  `I suppose it is, Mr Major,' she hesitated, opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again.

  He stroked her straight blonde hair, as if he were patting a small child, not the woman whom he had taken so violently and cruelly that night.

  `Look after yourself, Heidi,' he said gently, the rage gone from his voice, now that his mind was made up. 'And don't go back there again - you know what I mean - eve
n if they do tell you that it is your duty to do so. It isn't, you know.'

  She nodded mutely. For a moment the two of them stood there in the falling snow, no sound save the soft hiss of the car tyres and somewhere far off the rattle of a tram bell.

  `Shall I see you again, Mr Major?' she asked finally, not daring to look at him.

  `No, Heidi, you won't see me again. I shall never come back here now.'

  `Then goodbye and happy landings,' she said, raising her face to show that her eyes were full of tears. 'Thank you, Mr Major.'

  Major von Dodenburg did not speak all the way to Tempelhof, driving numbly through the winter streets, crowded with pinched scared people hurrying to the shelters because a fresh air-raid warning had sounded. At the airport, he confined himself to a few tense questions to the young pilot of the 'Auntie Ju' (2) which was going to fly them, complete with recoilless rifles, back to Rome Airport.

  It was only when they were airborne and the first of the 8 mm flak started to pepper the grey December sky with black bursts that he ripped open his tunic, slumped deeper in the bucket seat opposite Schulze and uttered a great sigh of relief.

  `Thank God, that's the last of Berlin!'

  `Thank God, that's the last of Germany!' Schulze added feelingly. 'The front's simpler for dumb arseholes like me. Down there you've got to have your head screwed on the right way to know who's your friend and who's your foe.'

  Von Dodenburg nodded, as the pilot took violent evasive action, swinging the big slow plane out of the way of the first flight of Ami Flying Fortresses gleaming a deadly silver in the harsh sunlight above the cloud base. How right Schulze was. At the front the decisions one had to make were clear-cut and simple. Black and white. None of the corrupting greys of the base stallions.

  Now as the transport began to plough its way steadily southwards, Kuno von Dodenburg sat slumped in his seat, his eyes closed, his Fatherland below completely forgotten, his mind completely occupied with a single question, the result of his sudden decision in Madame Kitty's: when and how would he kill Colonel Geier?

  Part Three: Battle for the Perimeter