by Leo Kessler
Down below in the Allied positions, preparations were being made for the last offensive to kill the survivors of Wotan. Maps and orders were checked for the last time. Fitters and drivers squirmed from under their vehicles, confident that they were in perfect condition. Stores and ammunition were stowed in the backs of the trucks and tanks. Officers and NCOs held their final conferences and briefings.
Those with nothing to do now slept in the sunshine, but these were the old sweats. The new men - and there were many of them - sat around and tried to hide their fear and uncertainty by telling dirty jokes. Some wrote letters beginning with the traditional line:
`If you don't hear from me for a little while, don't worry ...’
A few prayed. By the late afternoon everything had been done. The guns had ceased firing, saving their ammunition for the great bombardment which would herald the advance. A strange silence descended upon the Cassino front: a silence heavy with tension and menace. The German guns fell silent too.
As the hours ticked by to H-hour the silence grew more oppressive. An artillery commander, thinking that the Germans might become suspicious at the lack of fire, ordered a few shells to be aimed at the enemy. The waiting infantry breathed a sigh of relief as the 25-pounders thundered into action. Silence at the front was something sinister. The situation now seemed normal again. They relaxed.
The sun went down, sliding blood-red behind the mountains which barred the way to Rome. A little later the stars came out, bathing the land in silver. The commanders began to glance more frequently at the luminous dials of their watches.
At eleven o'clock precisely, one thousand six hundred guns thundered into action, shattering the night calm. As far as the waiting men could see, the mountains were burning. Against the background of flames, it almost seemed as if the great earth masses had begun to dance under the weight of their fire. Ten minutes - twenty - thirty. The valleys and ravines echoed and re-echoed to the tremendous thunder of the guns. Forty-five minutes. Suddenly all fell silent. Then the whistles began to shrill. Officers shouted orders. NCOs cursed angrily. The waiting infantry stood up from the protection of the olive trees. The tanks took up their positions at the heads of the columns. The great khaki wave, designed to swamp the German Cassino Front once and for all, began to roll.
Eighteen
Dawn came at last. It had been a terrible night for the men of Wotan. The Poles - their new attackers - had come marching out of the wall of smoke in solid khaki ranks, bugles blowing, eagle banners flying. They had stopped them less than fifty metres from their perimeter. Polish dead were piled up a metre deep in front of the Wotan's positions. But they had come again. This time the Wotan had only managed to stop them when they were within a grenade's distance of the first foxhole line.
An hour before dawn they had tried once more. The exhausted SS men had succeeded in halting them. But this time the Poles did not fall back down the hillside as before. Under the cover of a concentrated mortar barrage, they dug their heels in. With their bayonets, helmets, canteens - bare hands - they scraped shallow holes in the hard stony soil and fought on. Now, as the sun started to slide up over the mountains, their dead littered the whole hillside. But they were no less than twenty metres from the Wotan's out perimeter.
Dawn brought other problems. While the Poles contained the Wotan with a steady stream of mortar and machine-gun fire, another enemy began to slip into the German's positions from the peak. All night their patrols had wormed their way through the minefield, digging out the deadly `deballockers'. Now the rest of the burnous-clad French Goumiers stole through the paths the patrols had cleared, the first rays of the sun sparkling on their knives.
General Juin, the French: Army Commander, had unleashed twelve thousand of them on the Cassino front.
`Their method of working is similar to the action of an incoming tide on a series of sand castles, Mon général,' he had explained to Clark three days before. 'My Goumiers move up silently on any opposition, concentrate, dispose of it, and disperse again to deal with the next one. And the only sign of their passing is that their dead enemies are minus their heads. You see, my Goumiers like to bring back tangible evidence that they have carried out their orders.' He had shrugged. 'Unpleasant, possibly, but it puts the fear of God into the Boches!'
Now the first company crept from the rocks towards the Twin Tit position, their feet bare to make no noise, their set and determined faces dark beneath their turbans. Lieutenant Bogex, their commander, knew they were out for blood.
Sergeant Metzger had volunteered to do the dawn spell of sentry duty at the CP. During the night he preferred to cower in the deepest corner of the well-protected command bunker. Dawn, as he saw it, was the safest time of the day during a battle; at least you could see your enemy - and there was always the possibility of getting a bit of extra food because the dawn sentry was in charge of cooking the breakfast.
Now he leaned against the rock on which he had mounted the CP's spandau, half listening to the battle on the other side of the perimeter, half dozing. Time and time again he had to force his eyes open to prevent himself falling into a deep sleep. All night long he had not been able to sleep: the possibility of the Poles' breaking through had kept him awake and quaking at the thought of a grenade coming through the open door of the bunker, followed by squat, flat-faced Polacks spraying the men inside with tommy guns.
The eastern sky was glowing red now. Metzger yawned. The arsehole of the world - Cassino - looked almost beautiful this morning. He yawned again; he shoved his helmet to the back of his head and lit the stump of his last cigar. With a sigh of contentment he breathed out a stream of blue smoke. He thought of his wife Lore. He wondered where she was this morning? His face grew grim.
`She'd better be in her own bed with her legs shut tight!' he said half aloud in a thick voice coarsened by years of cheap Kron and bellowing at recruits on barrack squares. 'I don't want her giving it away to any of them rear echelon stallions.' His grim look softened, as he fell to recollecting Lore's ample charms. She had not really been the right wife for the proud holder of the SS's senior non-commissioned rank in its premier formation, the Wotan; but she had a superb body. 'Legs right up to her sweet little arse,' he told himself and puffed a little more rapidly on his cheap ten pfennig cigar.
‘Là!’ Bogex whispered and pointed to the thin pillar of blue smoke rising from behind the boulder. 'Sentry!'
Sergeant Achmed and Corporal Abou smiled. To Bogex they seemed to have more teeth than normal people. He shuddered. He wouldn't like to fall into their hands. But they were damn good irregular fighters - and they were expendable; there were thousands of them still in Morocco ready to die for La Belle France, for a few sous a day and as much plunder as they could carry in their infantry packs.
The two Africans hushed forward. Their skinny brown feet did not seem to feel the cruelly sharp rocks. Bogex watched as they crept closer to the Boche position. Once they had knocked out the sentry, he would rush their main bunker. With luck he could do it before they tumbled to the fact that they were being attacked. Now the Goumiers were crouched behind the rock. Achmed stuck his long curved knife between his teeth. He sought and found a stone. He nodded to Corporal Abou. Achmed tossed the stone to the right of the boulder. In the same instant Abou moved swiftly to its left.
They caught Sergeant Metzger by complete surprise. As he turned startled, to the right, his heart beating suddenly like a trip-hammer, the brown arm snaked round his neck. His cigar-stump popped out of his mouth and his shriek was stifled instantly. Something sharp stuck into his ribs. In a flash there were dark, hawk-faced men all around him, breathing their garlic breath into his face.
`Comrade ... comrade,' he quavered, feeling the hot urine trickling down his leg into his dice-beaker. (1)
Roughly Abou propelled him forward towards Bogex, his boots, full of urine, squelching as he did so.
`Quoi, mon Lieutenant?' Abou asked gutturally.
Bogex, preparing for the
rush on the bunker, drew his forefinger across his throat. Metzger's face went ashen-grey.
`No, no. I'm a cripple!' he pleaded, holding up his mutilated hand, the souvenir of Russia, which had saved him from frontline combat duty ever since. Bogex spat drily in the dust.
`SS,' he said contemptuously, looking up at the panic-stricken Sergeant, 'I've shit 'em! Allons!' he whispered, `allons et vivent les goumiers!'
As the North African irregulars streamed forward silently to attack the Twin Tits position, Abou slit Metzger's throat with deliberate, unhurried calm. The former butcher boy could not have done the job better hirnself. Abou allowed him to sink to the blood-stained dirt. Swiftly he rifled the German's pocket. He found nothing save an Italian pornographic magazine. But Abou wasn't interested in women, unless there was nothing better available. He spat into Metzger's face and ripping open his flies, began to wield his knife swiftly and expertly on the German's loins. Within seconds he was finished and stowing his bloody souvenir in his pack. Silently he ran after the rest, leaving Sergeant Metzger to die, minus that organ of which he had once been so inordinately proud.
`Five women I used to keep satisfied at one time,' he had been wont to boast to his cronies of the Sergeants' Mess, 'and one of them a doctor's wife - and you all know what dirty pigs they are in bed!'
But another veteran of the SS Assault Battalion Wotan (2) Captain Schwarz did not fail his duty that dawn. He had just groped his way out of the still sleeping bunker, latrine paper in his good hand, when he heard Metzger's last dying gasp as Abou emasculated him. He could not identify its cause, but he could interpret its significance. The Amis had somehow or other worked their way through the minefield! Schwarz did not hesitate a second. Grabbing his machine-pistol he sprang into the latrine pit. His dark Jewish eyes gleaming crazily, he screamed: 'Alarm ... alarm,' and fired a burst into the crouched, running ranks of the Goumiers. The Vulture, helmetless and without his monocle, swung himself behind the sole remaining recoilless rifle, assisted by a trembling Creeper. The first shell blew a great hole in the Africans' ranks. Bogex went down. Abou and Achmed fell with him, their hawk-like faces impassive even in the moment of death. Still the Africans came on.
But the three, officers held them. Knee-deep in stinking faeces, Schwarz swung his Schmeisser from left to right in a deadly arc. The Vulture pumped shell after shell at the Africans over open sights. Each one tore the attackers to pieces. But they did not surrender. They ran bare-footed at the German position time and time again to be slaughtered, their coal-black eyes gleaming in the frenzy of death; and it was only when the sound of running boots told them that reinforcements were arriving from the perimeter that they broke off their attack. Sullenly, they backed into the rocks from which they had come bending every now and again to pick up their fallen comrades' packs. Their dead and wounded could fend for themselves, but the loot could not be abandoned. Finally as a panting von Dodenburg appeared with his gasping, leaden-lunged section, they withdrew for good, and there was no need for his aid.
The Vulture slumped down on the rock behind the gun, while Schwarz clambered out of the latrine pit, his boots encrusted with faeces. Geier fought to control his hectic breathing:
`Damn close thing, von Dodenburg,' he said. 'Damn close.'
But if he had managed to control his breathing, he could not control his hands. As he finally rose to his feet, von Dodenburg's eyes fell on them. They were trembling violently. The Vulture was mortally afraid.
The Peak became a graveyard for the young men of the Wotan: The foxholes were heaped with their bodies. When the survivors stood on them, cries escaped from their open mouths; it was the gas escaping from their bellies, bloated in the warm Italian sun. Rats the size of cats were everywhere. The wounded near Twin Tits had to be given revolvers to fight them off. If they failed, they woke up to find them gnawing at their toes, fingers, even their noses.
The whole perimeter was heavy with the sickly sweet stench of the dead and the dying. Those who could still stand and fight wore dirty rags soaked in grappa to ward off the smell. Otherwise they retched continually with dry, body-racking sobs that left them green and shaking. And still the enemy attacked. They no longer knew their nationality. Their attackers had become one amorphous mass, intent on wiping them off the face of the earth, dying in their scores, crying out in half a dozen European languages.
The stream, their sole source of water was captured, its course full of bloated corpses. They drank the stagnant, green-scummed water from the shell-holes, fighting off the rats which infested them with hand grenades. Their food began to run out. At night when the shelling had died down, they crawled out into no-man's land and robbed the dead Tommies of their bully-beef and biscuits.
`The best grub I've ever tasted,' Schulze cried, gulping down the stuff, his filthy hands covered with grease, the biscuit sticking to the thick stubble on his chin. 'Nothing like it in this world!'
He spent the rest of the night spewing his guts up. The dead Tommy's hand from which he had torn it, was alive with maggots.
The enemy brought up light tanks. How they ever got them up the slope, the red-eyed, exhausted Wotan men neither knew nor cared. Suddenly they were there, churning up the bodies of their fallen, as they crawled over them in low gear, their tracks covered in blood, whipping new life into the dead, making their arms and legs flail in ghastly motion.
Their recoilless rifle had gone. Knocked out long ago. Screaming troopers rushed forward armed with grappa bottles filled with petrol, the rags being used as wicks burning brightly. One after another the tanks went up in flames. So did the troopers, dodging back too late as the flames roared up. Screaming men, burning oil and petrol, the nauseating stench of burned flesh.
When the enemy were not attacking, the shells plastered them. A man fell, fountains of blood spurting up in the sunshine where his head had been. An NCO lying in a shell-hole, trying to stuff his guts back into the hole that was his belly and dying with his hands buried deep inside him. An officer running panic-stricken across the ever-shrinking perimeter, dragging his guts behind him like a monstrous worm. And at the end of one such bombardment, the single shot of the big Bavarian surgeon committing suicide because all his supplies had run out. Besides, his left hand had just been severed by a shell fragment.
Occasionally they had a breather - a minute, an hour - they did not know. Time had no meaning for them now. Death had placed his hand on their shoulders and there were no more places to run. Their salvation was to accept his cold and final embrace and get it over with. On the morning of the third day, von Dodenburg found that two of his men had not responded to the weary order to 'stand to'. One had removed his boot, hooked his big toe in the rifle guard and wedged its muzzle under his chin; there was not much left of his face. The other had slit his wrists with a razor-blade.
Slowly, but inevitably, the Tommies, the Polacks, the Niggers started to push them back. At the end of the fourth day they were down to two hundred men unwounded and their perimeter wasn't much bigger than a couple of pre-war football pitches. At the end of the fifth it was one football pitch, held by a hundred weary men. The ammunition began to run out. The end on Peak 555 was not far off now. On the morning of the sixth day - to the accompaniment of the belch and plop of the Tommies' 3-inch mortaring softening them up for yet another attack - the Vulture called the officers of Battle Group Wotan together for his last conference. There were exactly four of them: the Vulture, the Creeper, Captain Schwarz and von Dodenburg - four survivors out of forty.
`Gentlemen.' The Vulture began exactly as he had always begun a conference since von Dodenburg first joined Wotan four years before as a young lieutenant. But the harsh Prussian rasp had gone from his voice now. 'I - we - have to make a decision.'
A mortar bomb landed close by, and the bunker shook like a ship hitting a trough in the waves. The Hindenburg Light (3) flickered wildly and cast its shadows in monstrous relief on to the dirt wall.
`You were saying, sir?' Sch
warz was nursing his wooden arm as if he could still feel 'pain in it.’
The Vulture licked his scummed lips as if he were not only afraid, but also embarrassed. 'Well, we ... we must evacuate the perimeter – evacuate the whole peak.'
If he had expected any reaction to the announcement, he didn't get it. They all knew that there was no other way out if they wished to save the handful of men still alive. Besides, Peak 555 had no military value left now. The Cassino line was about finished. The Tommies were already well lodged on Monte Cassino itself. It would be only a matter of hours before they took the ruin itself.
`I see you expected the decision.'
Von Dodenburg nodded.
`The problem is how we are going to evacuate the men. I've got fifty - ' he shrugged – 'perhaps sixty walking wounded. The rest will have to take their chance that the Tommies beat the Polacks up here. The Tommies may not shoot them, but the Polacks will. And I've got some forty men still capable of fighting.'
Schwarz let go of his wooden arm.
`We've got roughly the same number around the CP, sir,' he snapped. 'But we can't move them until - '
The Vulture held up his hand. 'There is a slight technical problem.' He paused. Outside their spandaus belted lead into the Poles in short rationed bursts. In the pauses, von Dodenburg could even hear the guttural Slavic sounds of their officers' orders. ‘You see, all of us are not coming out.' The Vulture lowered his eyes as if he did not wish to see their dismay.
`Not all of us,' Schwarz broke the silence. 'May I volunteer to stay behind with the rearguard?'
`It is not a matter of a rearguard, Schwarz,' the Vulture said carefully. 'You see, I have Smiling Albert's permission to take out a few men who will form the cadre of a new Battle Group Wotan, to be formed in the Homeland with this summer's seventeen year olds. I shall select the members of that cadre who will be picked up in an hour's time by Kesselring's two personal Fieseler Storchs. They will land behind the CP. For that reason we must hold on to this position to the last.'
