by Sven Hassel
‘Get a move on up there! I’m not going to wait all day for you!’
It was Porta. Still alive and in one piece, perched on a slab of rock and beckoning impatiently to me.
‘Come on down! You can’t spend the rest of the war sitting half-way up a mountain!’
I wrapped both arms round the trunk of my pine tree and crouched there, shivering with fright, snivelling like a baby and dripping blood all over myself.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ snapped Porta.
He clambered up towards me, and still I held on tight to my tree and whimpered self-pityingly.
‘You’re going down this perishing mountain if I have to throw you down!’ snarled Porta.
He pushed his bottle of sake into my mouth and forced me to drink. And then, when I was half choking and almost purple in the face, he tore my arms away from my protective pine tree and set off again down the steep slope, dragging me behind him. It was easier now, there were patches of coarse grass and a few stubby bushes growing out of the rock, there were foot-holds and handholds and a man could at least control the speed and the direction of his descent. But my nerve had been broken and I shouted and fought the whole way down to the valley, where I was met by Tiny and slapped soundly across the face until I managed to pull myself together.
‘I should bloody well think so,’ he said. ‘Bloody awful racket.’
We collected ourselves up at the foot of the accursed mountain. We were a sorry-looking lot. Tattered and torn, with an assortment of bruised and broken limbs, uniforms ripped from top to bottom, faces covered in blood and dust and half our equipment wrenched away in our landslide descent. From far above us, from the other side of the plateau which we had just vacated, came the steady pounding of artillery. The enemy had obviously not yet discovered we had fled, and we had a few moments’ breathing space.
I threw myself to the ground, my heart still hammering against my ribs. Slowly I became aware of the racking pains in my body. The whole of my right side was bruised and battered. My head was cut open, my lips were hanging in shreds, my nose was swollen to twice its normal size. But it could, of course, have been far worse. I could have broken my back, or shattered a leg so I’d have to be shot like a horse. There was no way of taking the badly injured along with us. A man either kept up or he fell behind, and that was the end of it. We were in no condition to carry passengers.
There was a sudden lull in the firing, and the Old Man hauled himself to his feet.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, abruptly.
We strung out behind him in a long, limping line. The Colonel was still with us, marching grimly, head down, by the side of the Old Man. We left the valley and passed through the bottom of a narrow gorge, where we found ourselves up to the waists in a glutinous bog. Several of those who lost their footing floundered deep in the mud and were never seen again. There was no time to stop and organise rescue parties. It was each man for himself. You struggled on as best you could and had no energy left for anything other than your own survival.
We left the bog and cut across the middle of a cornfield. To one side of us lay a burning village. To the other side lay the river, and the Russian artillery. The Old Man pressed relentlessly on. I staggered and stumbled and would have fallen but for Gregor who gave me a hearty kick.
‘Pick your feet up, you stupid clumsy sod!’
I wiped the sweat from my forehead and the blood came cascading down my face, dripping into my eyes and half blinding me. The straps of my pack were cutting into my shoulders, rubbing them almost raw. I could hear my own breath coming and going in great gasping sobs, and the black night suddenly turned vivid scarlet before me. I stumbled again, and this time Gregor’s infuriated kick had no effect. I lay where I had fallen, with my head on the cool earth. Let them go on without me. I wanted no more part in it. Let the Russians capture me and do with me what they would. I was beyond caring.
‘Shoot that man!’ screamed the Colonel, galloping past me on his way to round up the stragglers. ‘The advance must continue!’
‘Advance?’ sneered Porta. ‘I thought it was a strategic withdrawal?’
The combined efforts of Gregor and the Legionnaire hauled me to my feet. Tiny forced open my mouth and poured half a bottle of singularly repellent liquid down my throat. It was so utterly vile that I vomited it all up on the spot and at once felt a great deal better. God only knows what it was. I never had the courage to inquire.
Another half mile and we were on the edge of a forest. We dragged ourselves thankfully into the welcoming shelter of the great trees and hacked our way through the undergrowth into the comparative safety of an encircling thicket. There at last, as the dawn rose, we were able to find peace. You could hide an entire army in a Polish forest, and we were but one depleted company. The Russians would never find us there, unless by some most unhappy accident.
We stretched out on the ground, and the earth was as soft and as welcoming as a feather bed, and the sheer luxury of being able to relax was almost enough to convince a man that life was after all still worth living.
‘We shall not flinch from the shedding of blood, be it foreign blood or be it German blood, should the nation so demand it of us.’
Himmler. Article in the Völkischer Beobachter, 17th January
1940.
Pelagaja Sacharovna, captain of the NKVD and liaison officer for the Polish partisans of Lublin, had endured seventeen hours of torture at the hands of the SS. Not until they held her naked body over an open furnace did they manage to break her resistance – and even then she passed out before she could tell them anything.
They brought her round by douching her with icy water. The burns on her back were deep and searing, and a judiciously placed finger was enough to make her scream in agony. She had been a beautiful woman before her torturers had been let loose upon her. Dirlewanger himself had slept with her on several occasions. Now there was nothing left of her former glory; nothing but the ugly wreckage of humanity, degraded beyond the limits of what is endurable. A body flayed raw and burnt to the bone, and a creature that moaned and called out for death.
When at last she had told them all that she knew, they put her out of her misery with a bullet through the back of the neck.
The Pole
We had been in the forest for thirty-six hours, and it was raining again. It had started shortly after we arrived, and it showed no signs of letting up. It dripped off the trees and ran in torrents down the rutted paths of the forest. The ground was soft and spongy, it squelched as we walked on it, and then men at the back of the column found themselves having to splash through muddy water ankle deep.
We stopped for a rest in an area of dismal brown marshland, and Porta took off his boots and wrung the water from them. Heide, to the astonishment of those who did not know him, took out a cleaning kit from his pack and began solemnly to scrub and polish himself. He removed his boots and scraped them free of mud. He examined the soles and discovered that three of the thirty-three regulation studs were missing. But naturally, being Heide, he carried a spare tin of studs with him wherever he went. Having fixed up his footgear, he next turned his attention to his uniform. He sponged dry blood off the sleeve of his jacket with a piece of rag dipped in a pool of rainwater. He brushed the mud off his trousers. He counted all the buttons he could find, and then solemnly pulled out a rag and began polishing them. Even the Colonel sat watching him in unconcealed fascination.
‘Any minute now,’ said Porta, ‘and he’ll start checking his pubic hairs to make sure they’re all present and correct.’
Heide laid down his brushes and his cloths. He buttoned up his tunic and he smoothed back his hair and he turned, very slowly, to contemplate Porta. He let his gaze run up the length of the mangy body, from the bare black feet with their horny nails, to the unshaven face and the matted hair that was caked with mud. He didn’t say anything. He just gave a cold, superior smile and began to reassemble all his cleaning kit.
The Colonel lean
ed across excitedly to the Old Man.
‘Tell me, sergeant,’ he whispered, ‘is there something wrong with that soldier?’
‘Wrong?’ said the Old Man.
‘Up here,’ said the Colonel, and he tapped significantly at his forehead with one bony finger. ‘Something loose in the top storey, eh?’
The Old Man allowed himself a faint smile.
‘Not really, sir. He’s just what you might call a Living Rule, as it were.’
‘A living rule, Sergeant?’
‘Like in convents, sir—’
‘Ah! Aha! Yes, indeed, yes.’ The Colonel slowly sat back, never once taking his gaze off Heide. ‘Frightening,’ he said. ‘Positively frightening.’
Private Abt, who had been a schoolteacher before joining the Army to do his not very useful bit for the Fatherland, had been hit by a bullet in the thigh. It had passed right through and left two clean, neat holes, but the way he was carrying on you’d have thought he’d had his whole leg amputated. He lay moaning on the ground calling out for morphine, while men far worse off than he sat silently in pain because they knew there was nothing to be done for them. We had no morphine, and hadn’t had any for some time. Private Abt was very well aware of the situation, but still he went on whining and groaning and driving us all mad.
I wondered how many of his pupils he had beaten into submission in the good old days before the war, when any child who flinched from pain was accused of cowardice, when boys were taught that suffering would make men of them, when tears were punished by ten regulation strokes of the cane. I wondered how many of Abt’s former pupils were now coming to manhood on the battlefields of Europe, while Abt lay on the wet ground and slobbered and snivelled with a bullet hole in his leg. It was easy enough to rear and train cannon fodder for the Führer, but not nearly so easy when you yourself were being fed into the mouths of the Russian guns.
Tiny, who had been sitting next to Abt, suddenly walked across to the Colonel and stood to attention before him. The Colonel looked up, mildly amazed.
‘Yes, Corporal? What is it?’ It was some time since anyone had taken any notice of the Colonel. He seemed both surprised and gratified. ‘Speak out, man! I shan’t bite you!’
‘Well, sir,’ said Tiny, ‘it’s not for myself, you understand, but for him over there—’
He gestured towards Private Abt, who was still histrionically clutching at his leg and writhing on the ground.
‘Yes, yes?’ said the Colonel, eagerly. ‘What is wrong with him?’
‘Well, he reckons as he’s dying, sir, and he keeps on nagging at me to come and ask you if you don’t think it’d be a good idea if we – er—’ Tiny glanced across towards Abt, who anxiously nodded his head and made unmistakable gestures of encouragement. Tiny shrugged a contemptuous shoulder. ‘Well, all right, then,’ he said, turning back to the Colonel. ‘He reckons as we ought to surrender, sir. Give ourselves up, like. Call it a day and go over to the other side . . . on account of he thinks he’s dying, sir. He says he’s made a study of the Reds and they’re not nearly as bad as what everyone says they are. He says they’re civilised people same as us and they—’
‘Oh, he does, does he?’ The Old Man leapt to his feet and strode angrily across to Private Abt. ‘Snivelling little rat! Haven’t you been in the Army long enough to know by now that if you’ve any suggestions to make you make them to me, you don’t go bothering senior officers!’
He picked the man up by the collar and shook him, while the Colonel watched with wide eyes and said nothing. I had never seen the Old Man lose his temper like that before. I think perhaps he didn’t place too much importance on the Colonel’s strength of mind. It only needed some yellow-bellied punk like Private Abt to go putting ideas into his head and before we knew it we might all be handed over to the tender mercies of the civilised Russians. The Colonel meant well, but he was old and he was frightened, and he should have been pensioned off some time before the First World War.
The Old Man flung Abt away from him, slinging him towards Tiny, who received him with wide open arms.
‘All right, Corporal Creuzfeldt, he’s all yours. From now on, he’s under your command. He does whatever you say, and if you catch him trying to escape, shoot the bastard in the back.’
‘You bet!’ said Tiny, enthusiastically.
We set off again, single file behind the Colonel and the Old Man, skirting the edge of the marshes. Thanks to his persistent whining, Private Abt was now far worse off than he had been before: Tiny had loaded him up with half his own gear plus the machine-gun tripod into the bargain, and the man was bent double beneath his burden. Lutz, finding himself temporarily forgotten, had slunk off to the tail end of the column, as far away from Tiny as he could possibly get, and was keeping very silent.
Half-way down the column, Porta and Heide were exchanging obscenities and threatening to punch each other’s heads in. Heide had accused Porta of deliberately pushing him into the bog in order to mess up his newly polished boots. It was more than likely true. Porta certainly wasn’t bothering to deny it. He was merely jeering and sneering and generally goading Heide into one of his states of manic wrath, and they were on the point of flying at each other’s throats when the Old Man held up a hand and brought the column to a sudden halt.
‘What is it, what is it?’ demanded the Colonel. ‘Why have we stopped? What have you heard? Where is it coming from? What are we—’
‘For God’s sake, shut up!’ said the Old Man, tersely and without ceremony. It at least startled the Colonel into a temporary silence. The Old Man beckoned Tiny to the head of the column, and the two of them stood listening.
‘Sounds like dogs,’ said Tiny, after a while. ‘I reckon they must be out looking for us.’
‘With dogs?’ said the Colonel. ‘What utter rubbish! Stuff and nonsense!’
He was, as usual, ignored. The Old Man began giving orders.
‘The rest of you had better stay put. I’ll take my section up ahead and find out what’s going on.’
‘Us again?’ said Gregor.
We crept silently forward through the forest. I could hear now for myself the occasional whimpering and whining of dogs, and as the trees began to thin out we could see that we were approaching a small village. The Old Man waved us to another halt, and we crouched in the undergrowth while he surveyed the scene through field-glasses. I could make out four large trucks with American markings, and a group of men wearing the green uniform of the NKVD, the dreaded equivalent of the German SS. At the head of the group, tugging at their chains and obviously eager to be off, were half a dozen dogs, fierce-looking creatures rather similar to Alsatians but larger and heavier. Probably some Siberian breed, judging from the thickness of their coats.
‘Well, they’re obviously not just out for a Sunday afternoon stroll,’ observed the Old Man, drily. ‘I reckon it must be us they’re after.’
‘If they’d offer us a good square meal and a bed for the night,’ muttered Gregor, ‘we’d be theirs for the asking, without all this stupid fuss and bother.’
Private Abt limped up, eagerly.
‘Why don’t we try it, now that we’re here?’ he said. ‘If we gave ourselves up voluntarily, as an act of good—’
He was cut short by a savage blow on the head from Tiny.
‘Any more of that and I’ll throw you to the dogs myself! Get that machine-gun set up and be quick about it.’
‘OK.’ The Old Man turned and motioned to us to take up our positions. ‘Porta, your group stays here with me. Gregor, you take your men and spread out on the left. The rest of you, be ready to fire the minute I give the signal.’
We crouched among the trees, waiting for the unsuspecting Russians to come within range. The dogs were whining and straining to go, having evidently picked up our scent.
Porta was eating again. He had opened his last tin and was greedily licking his lips.
‘Bully beef,’ he said, as he saw me looking at it. ‘You want some?’
‘Not right now,’ I said. ‘I don’t much care for the smell of it just at this moment.’
Porta buried his nose in the tin and inhaled ecstatically. It smelt to me like a million city dustbins. No wonder the dogs were so anxious to be off. Half the animals in Poland were probably twitching their nostrils and turning their heads into the wind.
Private Abt was sitting on the damp grass complaining again about his leg. The bullet holes had now turned blue at the edges and his thigh had swollen up like a sausage, but by now we had reached the stage where we didn’t care if his entire leg dropped off. It would, in a way, have been a relief. At least he’d have had nothing left to moan about.
‘You know what you want for that, don’t you?’ said Barcelona, solemnly.
‘No, what?’ Abt looked up at him with a gleam of hope in his piggy schoolmaster eyes. ‘What do I want?’
