Reign of Hell (Cassell Military Paperbacks)

by Sven Hassel

  A new divisional commander had been appointed and turned up complete with monocle and champagne-blacked boots to take a look at us. Much to his disgust, Wolf had to arrange for two lorries to transport all the General’s gear. Heaven only knows what the man thought he was going to do with two lorry-loads of stuff in that God-forsaken part of the world.

  ‘The bastard’s even brought a flaming grand piano with him!’ said Wolf.

  The General’s inspection took place at mid-day. He was driven out from the village in a Kubel and was met by Colonel Hinka, the regimental Commander-in-Chief. We all stood to attention in the middle of a bog, and then trotted off to show our paces, marching like mad through the marshes, and ending up looking like columns of mud-covered statues. As we stood there, the mud dried on us and began to crack apart at the edges. But von Weltheim didn’t appear to notice, or perhaps he thought that was the natural condition of the proletariat masses. He strutted up and down a few times, peering at us through his monocle. Then affably informed us that we were a credit to the German Army, that he was proud, yes, proud, that the Fatherland was still able to produce such a fine body of gallant men, and that when the final glorious victory came, our country would have cause to honour us. I was so astounded that my mouth dropped open and a chunk of hardened mud fell off my chin.

  ‘Sod that for a laugh,’ muttered Porta, at my side. ‘No bloody heroics for me, mate.’

  It was a sure sign that we were losing the war. To be lauded as the saviours of our nation, instead of being bawled out for being a bunch of lazy, cretinous, criminal-minded layabouts, which we undoubtedly were – or would be, given half a chance. It was enough to make you fold up in the middle, but we managed for once to exercise a bit of self-control and hear the man out in decent solemnity. He was, after all, a divisional commander.

  ‘Only one more effort,’ he said, earnestly. ‘Only one more effort, that is all we ask of you gallant lads . . . One final burst of glory and the Russians will be routed and put to flight! We have lulled the enemy into a state of complacency. Yes, complacency! They think they have gained the upper hand, because we have chosen to employ – ah – strategical – ah – tactics. Tactics, yes. Strategical tactics. That is what we have employed, and by such means have we bluffed them! But before Christmas, before Christmas I promise you, our hour will have come!’

  A faint-hearted cheer went up from the ranks, whereupon the General, evidently very much excited by such a display of loyalty, turned to Hinka and promptly ordered that we be given double rations that night. The faint-hearted cheer instantly increased in volume until it was a massive roar of approval. Hinka gave a sickly, green smile and inclined his head. I thought for one moment that he was going to disgrace us all by vomiting.

  ‘Whatever you say, sir,’ he muttered.

  Von Weltheim removed his monocle and peered about him with a prominent myopic eye.

  ‘This is good, Colonel Hinka. This is very good. I am proud of your regiment. When one thinks that these men, who, out of sheer love of their Fatherland and devotion to their Führer, have descended from their tanks and volunteered as foot soldiers, it makes one proud to be a German. Proud, I say! Proud!’ He screwed back his monocle, apparently much moved. ‘God bless them, Colonel Hinka! With such stout fellows as these, victory cannot help but be ours.’

  It was obvious even to the least intelligent – as, for example, Tiny – that in all his long and distinguished military career, the General had very little experience of life at the front. Barely seconds after he had taken his departure, men were laying bets on the probable length of time he would manage to stick it out. It was the popular opinion that the first attack would see the General and his grand piano receding into the distance at twice the speed of light.

  That same evening, we were dished out with our double rations as promised. And, in addition, were given a fair tonnage of beer with which to wash them down. For a few blissful hours the pestilential marshes were forgotten, and the war effort was suspended while we shamelessly caroused and drank ourselves insensible. A couple of girls had stumbled in upon us, having taken the wrong turning out of Brest-Litovsk when fleeing from the advancing Russians. They were telephonists attached to the Luftwaffe, and should by rights have been shunted back to them immediately, but Sergeant Hofmann took command, and decided they would provide good entertainment for the NCOs. The girls, I have to admit, seemed by no means averse to the idea. The last I saw of them, Hofmann had them both flat out on a table top with their skirts pulled up. One of them, according to a wide-eyed Private Ness, was wearing no knickers. From what I could gather, it would seem to have been a somewhat traumatic experience for him. At all events, it was his main topic of conversation for weeks to come.

  Later that night, when the Luftwaffe girls, with or without any knickers, and most of the NCOs too, had fallen into a drunken stupor, a select gathering of sergeants were left together to enjoy the last few bottles of beer. They were all, needless to say, unsteady on their feet and befogged in their brains, and as is the way with sergeants, they very soon began to grow disputatious and belligerent with one another. The conversation – such as it was – turned at last to Communism. And in order to settle a shouting match, which threatened before very long to lead to physical violence, Oberwachtmeister Danz conceived the brilliant notion of calling in little Lenzing to set them straight on the subject. Lenzing had come to us in the latest batch of volunteers. He looked like an undersized sixteen-year-old, although he was in fact approaching his twenty-first birthday. He had been a student once upon a time, in a past that must now have seemed to him to be lost way back in the mists of pre-history. He had been arrested on account of his Communist sympathies, of which he had made no secret.

  He was asleep when the two drunken emissaries despatched by Danz called to collect him. They hauled him straight out of his blankets and down into the vomit-ridden, smoke-filled den where the sergeants were disporting themselves. They set him shivering on a table and gathered about him like a crowd at an execution. Danz bade him give them a lecture on the ideals of Communism – ‘simple enough so that even a bunch of bone-headed Nazis like us can understand them’ – and there the poor fellow was, caught between hell and high water with death leering in his face whichever way he turned. If he held forth a second time about Communism, he was virtually signing his own execution order; if, on the other hand, he refused to comply, Danz would almost certainly polish him off there and then. He really had no choice in the matter. He shrugged his bottleneck shoulders and began jerking out the first string of claptrap clichés that came to mind.

  ‘Communism is the struggle of the proletariat against international capitalism. It is the fight against imperialism. It is the rising of the working classes against their oppressors—’

  For ten minutes they listened to him in a respectful drunken silence, and then Danz gave a loud cheer and smashed the last beer bottle against the wall. He dragged Lenzing down from the table and clapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘That’s not bad, my little red comrade! Not bad at all!’

  Proudly he paraded his protégé about the room, showing him off like an exhibit in a fairground. See, this is the man who dared stand up and preach Communist propaganda to the soldiers of the Führer . . .

  It was of course inevitable that before very long some quarrelsome ape like Hofmann or Sergeant-Major Kleiner – Kleiner it was, from all reports – should take it into his head to become obstreperous and break up the party. To begin with, he started arguing with Lenzing; and being far too drunk to speak clearly, he very soon got the worst of it. From there it was but a short step to denouncing Lenzing as a traitor, and a Communist dog, and a friend of the Jews; and from there an even shorter step towards a general howl for blood. Danz, by this time, appeared to have taken Lenzing under his wing, for when someone bawled across the room that all Communist sympathisers were lily-livered cowards, Danz was instantly up in arms in his new friend’s defence. It was thereupon proposed
to put his courage to the test by standing him up against a wall and playing William Tell with him, taking pot-shots at a beer bottle perched precariously on top of his head. This idea seemed to have satisfied Danz, for at that point he faded out of the picture – in all probability lying on the floor unconscious. It was Kleiner who appointed himself chief marksman.

  ‘Just try to keep still, Communist puppydog, unless you fancy having your brains blown out . . . I don’t very often miss the mark, but even if I do, there’s no cause for alarm. You’ll be dead before you even know you’ve been hit.’

  He pulled out his revolver and took aim with a hairy porcine paw which wavered perceptibly from side to side. It was then that Hofmann, of all people, began to lose his nerve. We were, he no doubt reasoned, at the front now, not at Sennelager, and awkward questions might well be asked if a man was found dead next morning with a bullet through his forehead.

  ‘You reckon?’ jeered Kleiner, in high good humour at the prospect of murdering someone. ‘I’d like to see the court martial as would tear a man off a strip for shooting a lousy Communist. More likely give you a medal for it.’

  He held the revolver before him and squeezed the trigger. The bullet ricocheted off the wall and went screaming out through the window. Half the assembled company at once dived under tables and chairs, while the other half, either more drunk or more full of patriotic fervour, urged Kleiner to ‘have another go at the bastard’. Kleiner scarcely needed any encouragement. He seemed puzzled that he should have missed the target first time round, though whether the target was by now a beer bottle or a man’s head was anybody’s guess.

  ‘For Chrissakes!’ gasped Hofmann, holding a chair in front of him by way of protection from stray bullets. ‘For Chris-sakes, you’ll have the whole place buzzing round our ears!’

  Kleiner ignored him. He staggered back against the wall and again took aim. Someone bet him three bottles of vodka that he’d miss. Someone else offered a month’s pay that he wouldn’t. The revolver in Kleiner’s sweating hand waved slowly from side to side. Hofmann, from behind his chair, began to babble tearfully about repercussions if anything should happen to Lenzing.

  ‘Go and stuff yourself,’ said Kleiner, quite amiably for him. ‘When I want your advice I’ll ask for it. Meanwhile, piss off out of it, and leave us alone. There’s three bottles of vodka at stake here.’

  Not, of course, to mention a man’s life. Kleiner closed one eye and squeezed the trigger a second time. The bullet tore into the wall only centimetres away from Lenzing’s head.

  ‘He moved!’ screamed Kleiner. ‘The stupid cowardly bastard went and moved!’

  By this time, Lenzing was trembling all over from head to foot, and Kleiner himself looked as if all his bones had turned to jelly. His knees caved in and he kept wavering from side to side. He took a third, shot, with his hand dancing about like a snake in a high wind. The beer bottle bounced off Lenzing’s head and crashed to the floor, but the shouts of jubilation were silenced by an acid voice which spoke from the doorway.

  ‘Would someone be kind enough to tell me what the hell is going on in here?’

  Slowly, Kleiner turned his head. From all over the room, men crawled out of their shelters and staggered to their feet. Lieutenant Löwe stood with his helmet pushed down over his eyes, his thumbs stuck in his belt, coldly regarding them all. He jerked his head at Lenzing.

  ‘Get back to your quarters. I’ll deal with you later.’ He waited until the terrified boy had left the room, then kicked the door closed behind him. ‘Sergeant-Major Kleiner,’ he said. ‘You have obviously been hiding your light under a bushel. I had no idea you had such a passion for firearms. We shall have to make better use of your talents . . . As from this moment you are transferred to the anti-tank section. I shall expect great things of you.’ His lip curled distastefully. He let his eyes travel slowly over the rest of the assembled company. ‘You realise,’ he said, ‘there is one reason and one reason only that I am not hauling the whole miserable puke-making lot of you up before a court martial and having you packed straight off to Torgau? We’re in the fifth year of the war, and we’re on the verge of disaster, and by God I’d rather keep you out here to get your heads blown off by Russian artillery than send you back to the comparative luxury of a military prison. I may as well tell you here and now that I don’t give a damn if every man jack of you ends up with your guts hanging down between your legs and both your arms blown off. It’s not going to be any use coming whining to me about it. As far as I’m concerned, you stay out here and you fight until you drop. And when you drop, you die, because believe you me there’s not going to be anyone hanging around long enough to stop and pick you up again.’

  He turned abruptly and left the room, slamming the door behind him. There was a shocked silence. Suddenly, no one was drunk any more. Perhaps at that moment, for the first time, they were realising what it meant to lose a war. Perhaps they knew, then, that Löwe had not spoken in vain, and that they were all under sentence of death.

  Kleiner collapsed heavily into a chair and lay there, sweating, with his legs sprawled out before him, his arms dangling down to the floor. His revolver slipped out of his grasp and he let it lie where it had fallen. Grimly, Hofmann picked it up and thrust it at him.

  ‘Best hang on to that,’ he said. ‘Might come in handy one day for shooting yourself with . . .’

  The following morning we took up a position alongside the 587th Infantry Regiment, relieving the 500th, which was a disciplinary regiment composed not of criminals but almost entirely of disgraced officers. All the WUs,1 no matter to which regiment they belonged, had to wear a red badge on their backs. Thus, they were easily distinguished.

  We found the front line at that point almost uncannily quiet. The first of the Russians’ trenches was over on the far side of the marshes, and the no-man’s-land between them and us lay silent and deserted. The day we arrived was a Thursday. According to those who had been in the area some time, this was the day when the vodka rations were dished out to the Russian troops; one and a half litres per man, generally consumed in less than an hour. We were informed that we could look forward to an eventful night.

  Here, in the very midst of the marshland, the mosquitoes swarmed and buzzed like one of the plagues of Egypt. They were worse by far than the ever-present lice which we carried around. We had been issued with mosquito nets, but the brutes found their way inside and set about guzzling blood to their hearts’ content. Porta claimed to have found a remedy, but in our view it was every bit as bad as the presence of the mosquitoes. He covered himself in foul-smelling grease scooped out of a truck which had been blown up and left to bury itself in the marshes, and from that moment on he was shunned not only by the pestilential insects but by everyone else as well. We were waiting with interest to see if he repelled the Russians as well.

  Dotted all round us in the trenches were the prominent red badges of the WUs. Cannon fodder pure and simple. They had been promised free pardons if they distinguished themselves in battle, but we knew and they knew, that this was merely a myth for the credulous. They were lost men. They were there to swell the numbers. They were there to die. They huddled together in groups, full of resentment and misery, waiting only to be herded out into the middle of a minefield, or kicked out of the trenches to meet the first blast of the Russian guns. No one took any notice of them save to curse or kick them. Like loathsome prisoners of war, they were avoided and treated with contempt. When the fighting began, they would be of no use to themselves nor to anyone else. They had nothing left to live for and might just as well die.

  Shortly after 2000 hours the fun started. For some time we had listened to them shouting and laughing over on the far side of the marshes, bracing ourselves for an attack. But mortar grenades are no easier to live with simply because you’ve been expecting them. They were aimed with uncomfortable accuracy, and a couple of WUs were blown to shreds before Tiny (who was always one of the first to jump into action), had
a chance to retaliate with his machine-gun. After that it was phosphorus bombs which caused wholesale panic when they exploded directly in front of the unfortunate WUs, who ran about screaming in all directions like sheep with a wolf in their midst.

  The firing went on spasmodically throughout the night. We had a short burst of peace during the morning, and then in the afternoon the snipers started playing havoc with us. They were Siberians, perched like great black crows in the treetops. I swear they must have been handpicked for the job, because they never wasted a shot. If you showed your head over the edge of the trench for even a hundredth of a second, you’d get a bullet straight between the eyes. They were devils in disguise, those Siberians. Even the Russians themselves feared them. They killed for the sheer animal joy of killing, counting their toll day by day, saving up the corpses for a medal as other people save sixpences for their grandmother’s birthday present. Still, I suppose we could scarcely complain. We had almost their exact counterpart in the Tyroleans, who showed the same zeal and accuracy in splattering people’s brains about.

  It was the little Legionnaire who scored our first definite hit in reply. I saw him shoulder his rifle, take careful aim, fire, and from one of the topmost branches of an oak tree a body came hurtling to the ground. We had barely finished congratulating him when Porta followed suit and a second Siberian came skydiving out of nowhere and plummeted down into the marshes. For a brief moment the sun appeared from behind the clouds, and a stray metal object in the bushes glinted in a shaft of light. Barcelona grabbed Porta’s arm and pointed.

  ‘There he is . . . over there in the reeds with bits of grass stuck on his head, stupid git—’

  Porta, in his excitement, snatched the field-glasses away from Barcelona and pushed him to one side to take a closer look. An explosive bullet thudded into the ground where he had been standing. Porta wasted no time. The field-glasses were abandoned. He stood up and fired three shots in quick succession, and out of the reeds, a body reared up. The top half of its head had been blown off. It threw its arms into the air, took a step forward into the mud and collapsed. In a few moments it was sucked out of sight, down into the depths of the heaving marshes. Only a few, obscene brown bubbles in the mud were left to mark its downward passage. The area was becoming one vast burial ground. One day, perhaps, when all the fighting was over, the bog would release its numerous victims and all the empty skulls would be thrown back to the surface to float in silence on the sea of mud. That would be a sight worth seeing. That would be a fine memorial to five years’ butchery.