by Sven Hassel
The roar of war comes steadily closer.
An Oberst, wound in so much bloody bandage that he resembles an Egyptian mummy, demands to speak to a doctor.
‘That’s an order,’ he shouts, hoarsely, when he realises he is being ignored.
‘Yes, sir,’ answers a medical orderly, carelessly.
‘Why doesn’t the doctor come?’ repeats the Oberst.,
‘Don’t know, sir,’ says the orderly, hurrying on to the next man.
When a Sanitäts-Feldwebel comes dashing by, the Oberst stubbornly repeats his demand.
‘The Staff M.O.’ll be here soon,’ promises the Feldwebel, pulling himself from the Oberst’s grip.
But the Staff M.O. does not come. Instead two orderlies arrive and silently move the Oberst away from the growing queue.
‘You lazy sacks,’ shouts Tiny, furiously, after an orderly, ‘what a way to bleedin’ treat us after the blood we’ve shed for Führer’n Fatherland! We’re Germans! ’Uman beings!’
The orderly stops, and looks at him with a superior smile.
‘Did you say human beings? With those two bits of scotch mist you’ve got on your arm you’re not as much worth as a pimple on an elk’s arse. An Oberst’s lapdog’s higher up the ladder’n a stinking cooley like you! If we’d had an Oberst’s lapdog here, wounded, we’d have operated on him before we got to shit like you!’
‘Arsehole of the army, we are, man!’ sighs Albert. Apathetically he pulls his greatcoat collar up around his ears.
‘When we clear up after the war, the first to get it’ll be you medical shits,’ promises Porta, waving his fist threateningly at the orderly, who moves away, laughing heartily.
In the course of the night we are carried inside. A stench of gangrene hits us. The wind whistles icily down long corridors, blowing powdery snow in great clouds before it.
The wounded Oberst, still calling for a doctor, is inside too. Querulously he demands the windows closed. There are no windows to close. Blown out long since. He tries to get up. Threatens the orderlies. Groaning, he falls back on to the blood-spattered stretcher.
His eyes follow the many stretchers which are taken past him and return empty. It is only when his own stretcher reaches the far end of the long corridor that he realises what is happening. It ends in nothing. The wall is gone, and, far below, the frozen river can be seen. That is where the contents of the stretchers end. An easy way to dispose of the dead. Room, and stretchers, are needed for those still living. Those who are well enough to be transported onwards from here. Sometimes some poor chap is not yet quite dead, and begins to scream when he realises what is going to happen to him. His protests do not help him. Out into the river he goes with the rest. If he does not die on the way down the frost will soon finish him.
‘Get me out of here,’ roars the Oberst, furiously. ‘I demand to speak to a doctor! I am an Oberst and commander of a regiment!’ Nobody bothers to answer him.
An elderly medical officer bends over him.
‘We’ll soon be getting to you, sir,’ he promises, tiredly. ‘You are to go on the next transport.’ He turns to a Sanitäts-Unteroffizier. ‘A hopeless case,’ he whispers.
The Oberst hears him and begins to scream and roar. The entire staff of doctors and nurses would have come running if it had happened anywhere normal. But in this enormous slaughterhouse, where panic spreads from minute to minute, the Oberst is merely left to scream himself into exhaustion. In a mad rage he lifts a bayonet and jabs it into his throat. Blood geysers up.
Shortly afterwards an orderly looks at him.
‘Finished,’ he comments, without interest. ‘Gives us another stretcher!’ With a practised movement he sends the Oberst down into the river after the others.
A Leutnant with crushed legs gets the stretcher.
We are pushed on, right into the large operating theatre, which steams with blood and entrails.
‘That one,’ decides a Sanitäts-Feldwebel, pointing at a stretcher on which a blood-spattered engineer is lying.
‘Don’t you think he’ll die?’ asks an orderly, covered in a long rubber apron.
‘How the hell do I know? Think I’m clairvoyant, or something?’ the Feldwebel flares at him.
‘Looks like a well-preserved corpse already, to me,’ comments the orderly.
‘Very clear diagnosis,’ hisses a stressed assistant M.O., lifting the engineer’s eyelid. He knocks a fat louse from his nose, and crushes it under his boot.
‘My leg! Oh, hell! My leg!’ groans the engineer as he is placed on the operating table, and strapped down. ‘I can’t stand it any more. It’s burning. Burning like hell!’
‘Double morphine,’ says the surgeon, commencing to cut away what passes for a dressing. There is a huge gaping wound below the knee, right in to the bone. The leg is swollen and almost black. Gangrene has spread right down to the foot. The toes are like small overblown balloons.
‘Leg’ll have to come off,’ says the chief surgeon, brusquely. ‘Anaesthetic!’ he orders.
‘None available,’ answers the assistant, laconically.
‘Morphine,’ snaps the chief surgeon. He reaches for the instrument the operation room orderly is holding ready for him.
A sickening, sweetish smell fills the air.
An orderly cleans the gaping wound quickly, and the surgeon opens up the skin. The operation proceeds rapidly. Everyone works in silence. Only the chief surgeon talks. Continually. The operating-room orderly passes the various instruments to him, with trained economy of movement, as they are required. The knife bites deeper and deeper into the rotten flesh.
The engineer begins to scream.
‘Put something in his mouth,’ the surgeon orders, angrily. He begins to cut through to the bone. The clips applied to the main artery open up, and blood spurts onto his face. ‘Saw,’ he snaps, holding out an expectant hand. With a terrible rasping sound the saw eats through bone.
The anaesthetist shrugs his shoulders, resignedly. The chief surgeon attempts to hurry. The saw whines on the leg-bone. The amputated leg falls to the floor with a thump.
‘Next!’ he says.
A Leutnant, whose stomach has been ripped open, is placed on the table.
‘Transport ready,’ roars a Feldwebel. His voice echoes down the long, windy corridor.
When Albert is pushed into the ambulance, the last man of the party, he pulls his greatcoat collar away from his face and growls at the orderly. The man starts at the sight of an ebony-coloured face.
‘What the hell?’ he cries, in amazement. ‘Germany still got colonial troops?’
‘No, man!’ grins Albert. ‘Ah’se American, boss! Gran’son of Ol’ Uncle Tom, ah am, man! Yes, siree!’
The ambulance drives at a breakneck speed which throws us about inside it until we feel that every bone in our bodies must be broken. We grumble and rage, but the driver couldn’t care less. All he wants is to get as far away from the front line as possible.
‘If you don’t like the speed I drive at, then jump off’n walk,’ he yells, banging the window between us shut.
‘I’ll tear ’is bleedin’ prick off, I will!’ promises Tiny, furiously, trying to get to his feet. He has to give up. There is too little room between the stretchers.
After a couple of hours of dangerous driving, the ambulance stops. We hear petrol cans banging against one another. With a noisy rattle the back doors of the ambulance are thrown open, and a Sanitäts-Feldwebel, with an appearance reminiscent of an overfed pig, stares at us with a pair of cold, blue, Germanic eyes.
‘Anybody dead speak up now? Plenty waiting in the queue!’
‘Come in and check,’ suggests Porta, with a hoarse raven’s caw of a laugh, ‘you’ll soon find out how much life’s left in us!’
‘I’ll see to you later, Obergefreiter,’ grants the Feldwebel, slamming the door to with a reverberating crash.
‘Let’s get goin’’ shouts a Jaeger with fear in his voice. ‘Ivan’s tanks’re right up our
backsides!’
As the cold, sad day wakens from the night’s chill darkness, we drive out onto a rickety bridge, which hangs, swinging from rusty cables, looking ready to fall at any moment. It creaks and groans and grumbles in every part. Under normal circumstances no person in his right mind would risk crossing it, but now everybody rushes across in panic.
The Russian tanks, with mechanised infantry support, are after us, and represent a much greater danger than the rickety bridge.
A party of engineers, under the command of a Leutnant, are getting ready to blow up the bridge. Anxiously they chase along the hundreds of soldiers pushing and shoving in an unruly mob to get down to the river.
A tank column comes roaring, recklessly, forcing the men in its path to jump for their lives.
‘Stop! Stop!’ shouts the Engineer-Leutnant, waving his arms. ‘Do you want to commit suicide? That bridge can’t take tanks! You’ll have to cross somewhere else!’
A tough-looking Major stares down at him from the turret of the leading tank.
‘Be so kind as to shut your trap, Leutnant! I am going to cross that bridge with my tanks, whether you like it or not! Get out of my way or I’ll flatten you!’
The Leutnant steps aside, shaking his head, and sits down resignedly on an empty petrol drum. What can a Leutnant do when he is up against a mad Major?
‘One at a time,’ shouts the Major, waving his tanks forward: ‘Speed up and take it fast! And God help any fool who smashes up that bridge before the last waggon’s over!’
‘Major, sir, I hand over responsibility for this bridge to you,’ protest the Leutnant, angrily.
‘Do that, then, if it makes you happy,’ barks the Major, indifferently.
The bridge gives out creaking and cracking sounds. It swings like a hammock as the first tank rolls over it. The cables sing like overstrung violin gut. As soon as the first tank is across the next is on its way.
‘Goddam, bloody idiots,’ curses the Engineer-Leutnant. He holds his breath when one of the centre cables breaks, with a crack like a whip. Pieces of it whistle through the air. The next to last of the tanks rolls onto the bridge. What the Leutnant has been expecting, and fearing, happens. The driver is nervous. The heavy vehicle hits the supports at the middle of the bridge. They break like cotton. In a rain of steel girders and cables the whole bridge collapses. The tank turns a somersault as it whirls on its way down into the depths below. Part way down it strikes some projecting rocks on one side of the gorge, and hangs for a moment before continuing straight on down. It crashes through the ice and into the river. Faster than the words can be written thick ice floes close again over the spot where the tank has broken through.
‘God help us,’ groans the Leutnant. ‘I told ’em what’d happen. I told ’em and would they listen? Idiots never listen!’
‘It looked like the gates of hell, opening and closing down there,’ cries Porta, fearfully, staring down at the crashing ice-floes below.
A blinding flash of light illuminates the grey day. The ambulance is thrown, tumbling over and over, out above the remains of the bridge, which are swaying and thrashing in the air. A gout of flame comes from it. Two stretchers fly from its open doors. It goes into the river and is swallowed in the roiling screw of ice-floes smashing over and on top of one another.
‘Tanks! Tanks!’ comes the alarm. White fingers of light search the darkness for prey.
Panzerfausts 1 roar, hollowly. Splintered metal crashes. A jet of flame goes up as the first T-34 explodes with a thunderous roar.
‘My leg! My leg!’ groans Heide, dragging himself through the snow to cover.
I get hold of his shoulder and pull him along with me. We force our way under a lorry lying on its side on top of a number of frozen bodies.
A T-34 comes roaring straight through a house, which collapses behind it. Two heavy beams hang, see-sawing, on the front of the tank. A blue blanket waves like a flag from its double antennae. The remains of a crushed perambulator whirl round in its tracks. The characteristic whining roar of Otto motors can be heard from all sides.
They come rattling down the snowy slope. Across the double track of the Kiev-Moscow railway. Thick clouds of snow whirl out over the low houses, creating great drifts in the streets. The streets are too narrow for tanks. Houses crash down in clouds of stone and mortar.
A horde of Cossacks come, on the run with sabres drawn. They slash at the fleeing soldiers.
‘Uhraeh Stalino! Uhraeh Stalino!’ The victory scream rings from the throats of the bloodthirsty Siberian infantry. They storm forward, machine-pistols chattering. Inflamed to madness they slash, stab and batter at everything which is not Russian. “Kill them in their mother’s womb! Drown them in their own blood!” Ilya Ehrenburg’s scream of hatred sounds continually in their ears.
We withdraw slowly, fighting desperately at close quarters the whole time, to the half-burnt village, and take up position in the ruins. We forget the pain of our wounds, think only of staying alive. We fight like madmen. Combat knives cut into entrails. Infantry entrenching tools split open skulls.
In the middle of this inferno of battle a small crowd of civilians assembles on the little square, at the foot of the statue of a horse jumping. A woman commissar with the insignia of a major gives guttural orders to them. She speaks so quickly that her tongue seems to stumble over the words. The civilians, who appear paralysed with fear, huddle closer together. She takes a few steps backwards. Her Kalashnikov spits death. The civilians fall, in a kicking, screaming heap, at the base of the statue of the jumping horse.
‘Well hell!’ cries Porta. ‘Aren’t those bloody neighbours eves satisfied with wiping us out?’
The woman commissar gives out a neighing laugh, and kicks viciously at one of the bodies.
‘What the hell can they have done?’ asks Gregor.
‘Rien!’ answers the Legionnaire. ‘C’est la guerre! The lady with the golden stars is extending her collection of bodies before the war ends.’
Three terrified German nurses come running across the square. A party of grinning Siberian Cossacks are at their heels.
‘Somebody there lookin’ for a fur coat for ’is old John Thomas,’ growls Tiny. He presses the butt of the LMG into his shoulder and sends a couple of short bursts at the Siberians. They are knocked backwards as if hit by a club.
‘Prickteasin’,’ he grins clipping a new magazine on the MG.
With a wild roar, a giant Russian grabs the two nearest nurses, picks them up as if they were chickens and brings their heads together with a hollow thud. He throws his arms around them and presses them in to him in a brutal bear hug. With his free hand he draws his Nagan from its yellow leather holster and presses its muzzle into the neck of one of the girls. Three shots follow in rapid succession.
‘That’s what I call a perfect liquidation,’ cries Porta, amazed. ‘Those bullets went straight through the one and into the other. What happened to the third though?’
‘Knocked off the one over by the tree,’ answers Tiny, pointing.
The big Russian looks around him. With a brutal laugh he kicks at the two bodies.
‘He’s lived too long,’ says Porta, raising his large calibre combat carbine.
‘Shove ’is bollocks up in ’is throat,’ suggests Tiny, vengefully.
Porta takes careful aim. The carbine gives a dry crack. The Russian is hit. His entire chest is torn open by the special bullet. It is sheathed in hardened steel and can tear through armour plate.
‘Say hello in hell, tovaritsch,’ mumbles Porta, lowering the carbine.
‘The commissar cunt’s mine,’ says Tiny. He sends a burst of explosive bullets at the woman, without hitting her. Like a witch on her way to a Sabbath, she disappears between the smoking ruins.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ says the Old Man, decisively.
The Russian have found a supply depot, and for a short while think of nothing but looting. The scene resembles a lunatic asylum in which all the pati
ents have run amok. Boxes and bottles fly about. Two Siberians have got hold of a sack of flour and slash at it with their bayonets. Soon they look like a couple of lumps of dough.
Slivovitz and vodka flow in rivers. They do not waste time opening the bottles. They knock off the necks, open their throats, and put back their heads. The spirits flow down their gullets like Niagara. Nobody bothers about us. We sneak along close to the soot-blackened walls of the houses. A few miles from the village we run into the arms of a Russian mortar group.
Grenades fly through the air. Automatic weapons chatter. It takes only a few minutes to defeat the mortar group.
In a half-destroyed stable we huddle against the charred bodies of cattle. Porta finds a smoked ham hidden up under a tie-beam, but nobody feels like eating. Except Porta. He fills up on it, gluttonous as always.
Tiny is lying in a pool of blood, groaning miserably. During the encounter with the mortar group a ricochet has torn open his hip lengthwise.
‘Good Lord in Heaven,’ cries the Old Man, worriedly, when he has cut open his trousers. ‘It’ll need a hundred dressings to fill that hole.’
Tiny howls in protest as the Old Man pours a pint of alcohol down into the wound.
‘Shut it!’ snarls the Old Man. ‘You’ll be rotten in two days if we don’t get that hole cleaned out.’
‘A lorry,’ shouts Gregor, alarmingly, getting up to move out onto the road, where a large Bussing lorry has coughed to a stop. It is full of badly wounded, smothered in bloody bandages.
‘All over,’ shouts the driver. ‘The motor’s gone for a burton. You’ll have to get back best you can!’ He puts his Mpi under his arm, and pulls his greatcoat collar up round his ears.
‘You can’t just bloody leave us here,’ protests a wounded Wachtmeister indignantly. ‘It’s your duty as a medical orderly to help us.’
‘Duty,’ grins the orderly, sardonically. ‘Stick it up the Führer’s arse!’ He slips an extra Red Cross bandolier on his left arm. He has discovered that there are some Russians who do not shoot at the Red Cross.
