by Sven Hassel
An Oberscharführer appeared, followed by a group of young SS infantrymen. They looked more like schoolchildren than soldiers.
‘What’s going on?’ demanded the Oberscharführer. ‘Who are you? Where have you come from?’
‘Over the hills and far away!’ snapped the Old Man. ‘We’ve been having a tea party with the Russians, and we’ve run away with all the best silver stuffed up our arses . . . What the devil does it matter where we’ve come from?’ he said, testily. ‘Are you people in the habit of shooting up your own side?’
The Oberscharführer hunched an apologetic shoulder.
‘What can you do?’ he said, and he indicated his flock of smooth-faced cherubim. ‘They only got here yesterday. They’re taking them straight out of the cradle and expecting us to fight a war with them. It’s hopeless. They don’t know one end of a gun from the other.’
‘Well, you hang around here very much longer,’ said the Old Man, grimly, ‘and they’ll soon have the opportunity of finding out. The Reds are on their way, and it’s my bet they’re going to catch up with us any minute now.’
‘The Russians? On their way here?’
‘That’s what I said,’ said the Old Man.
The Oberscharführer mopped gingerly at his face with a pad of material. He had no flesh at all on one cheek, and his left eye was puckered up like a piece of smocking.
‘Have they got tanks?’ he said.
‘Well, they’re certainly not pushing through the forest in wheelbarrows, I can tell you that!’
A Haupsturmführer now arrived on the scene, strolling leisurely as if he were doing the rounds of his estate. He heard the Old Man’s report and frowned, querulously.
‘Why did your company not pull out along with the rest of the division?’
‘We never had any orders to pull out,’ said the Old Man, shortly. ‘We were told to wait for the signal; and the signal never came.’
The Hauptsturmführer immediately took a note of all the details, including the name of the divisional commander, General von Weltheim and his grand piano, who had been responsible for the déba^cle. Tiny and Porta made no attempt to conceal their glee. The prospect of a full-blown general for once being held responsible for his own criminal negligence was sweet indeed.
Barcelona was shipped safely aboard an ambulance which was leaving for Warsaw, but it scarcely looked like it would be a very pleasant journey. The ambulance was full to overflowing, and he had to share a stretcher with a man who was quite plainly going to die long before he arrived. An hour later, the rest of us pulled out and subsequently fell in at the tail end of a long line of trucks and ambulances heading for Warsaw. The procession was accompanied by a straggle of Polish refugees, clutching their belongings in pillowcases or pushing them on rickety handcarts.
We had not been going long before the inevitable squadron of Jabos roared out of the clouds and came diving down towards us. The truck we were in reared up and plunged off the road, overturning in the ditch. We scrambled out before it could catch fire and tore hell for leather into the meadow which bordered the road, dropping down behind a hedge for cover. There was the sound of explosions as the Jabos scored direct hits on some of the vehicles in the convoy. Over the brow of the hill, away across the other side of the fields, a KW2 surged into view, accompanied by several T34s. As we watched, the tanks ploughed right through the middle of a knot of infantrymen and calmly continued on their way. A section of pioneers came running up to us. With quite astonishing rapidity they distributed bazookas all round, and promptly shot away out of sight across the road. The Old Man scuttled sideways like a crab on his short bandy legs and tapped Gregor and me on the shoulder.
‘OK, Sven. You take the leading T34. Gregor, you take the second. I’ll leave Porta to look after the KW, and Tiny can have whatever’s left over. Nobody to shoot until—’
His words were cut short by the sudden and premature firing of a bazooka further along the line. The grenade went hurtling straight towards the leading tank, ricocheted harmlessly off the turret and flew fizzing into the air like a firework display. The Old Man swung round, his face pursed up with fury.
‘Who the bloody hell did that?’
Whoever it was, he had successfully taken away all element of surprise. The tanks were now aware of our presence. They hesitated just a fraction of a second, as if to draw breath, then turned in formation and came towards us, cannons firing. A small fleet of ambulances and stretcher-bearers were wiped out en route. The ambulances were reduced to burning wrecks. The wounded lay scattered in the mud. Some were caught up in the tank tracks and churned to mincemeat. I saw one of the stretcher-bearers sitting on his own stretcher and staring with blank incomprehension at his legs, which had been sliced off at the thigh and were lying on the ground in front of him. A major from an infantry regiment was running about like a headless chicken with great geysers of blood pumping out of his neck. A sergeant stooped to pick up his severed hand, but was blown to pieces by Russian artillery before he could reach it.
The leading T34 was coming nearer, and I took a firm hold on my bazooka. The KW2, all eighty tons of it, reared up slightly each time it fired its cannon. The nose had been painted to look like the open mouth of a killer shark, with all the teeth carefully depicted in a luminous gold. A couple of grenades which some fool had fired too early bounced harmlessly off its belly. It was useless attempting to fire at more than fifty feet; the grenades were unable to pierce the heavy steel plating.
I fixed my eye to the sights. Still a good thirty yards away. Much too far. I forced myself to keep calm and patient. There was always a temptation, when other people were losing their heads, to join in and start going berserk along with them. The Old Man had his hand held up in readiness for the signal to fire.
A couple of men were caught by the leading T34 and tossed limbless into the air. I caught a brief glimpse of an officer as he took a casual glance out of the open turret, but he disappeared before I had a chance to pick up my rifle.
It was said, these days, that the Russians were using female radio operators in their tank crews. I looked steadily at the approaching T34, the one that was my own particular target, and I wondered if I was going to kill some poor woman. Not that I really cared. There was no room for sentiment when you had sixty tons of tank lumbering towards you. But if there was a woman inside, I did hope it wouldn’t turn out to be Tania. Tania had once saved my life, and I didn’t want to kill her.
Tania had saved many men’s lives. She was a young surgeon, a captain in the Red Army, who had worked as a prisoner of war in our divisional hospital at Kharkov. We were short of doctors, and it was Tania who performed most of the emergency operations. It was Tania who had so patiently dug all the shrapnel out of me when a shell blew up under my feet and almost killed me. She had disappeared one night during the Russian advance on the town. She had gone round the wards shaking hands with every patient and wishing him luck, and then she had slipped away in the darkness and presumably rejoined her own side. I often wondered what had become of her. The Russians would not easily forgive her for having tended the German wounded. She could well be in that T34 at this very moment, stripped of her rank and sent to the front to be killed—
‘Fire!’
The field before us disappeared beneath a rolling sea of flame. I caught the leading tank on the upper half of the turret, which was where I had aimed – just in case there was a girl like Tania somewhere inside. It would give her a bit more chance of getting out alive. The officer whom I had previously seen was blown out by the explosion. He was lifted high up in the air, sitting astride a great blue tongue of fire. As the flames roared upwards they opened out into a vast black umbrella which covered the entire sky. Three of the tanks had been put out of action, but the fourth was still intact. Tiny stared at it, indignantly. He seemed scarcely able to believe that he, of all people, could have failed to hit the target. He aimed a savage kick at the bazooka, as if that alone were to blame, snatched up
a magnetic mine and went racing with it towards the tank. Nothing happened: the mine was a dud.
A sergeant from the Pioneer Corps seized upon a discarded bazooka and raised it to his shoulder. He fired, and the weapon exploded in his face. A tongue of flame about twenty yards long shot out backwards and wrapped itself round him, and he hurled himself, screaming, into the ditch. There was nothing anyone could do to help him. Withing seconds he looked more like a side of underdone roast beef than a human being. Raw flesh falling off the bones and an appalling stench of burnt meat. And, incredibly, the creature was still alive. It rose up in its ditch and extended its twisted claws towards us. From eyes which could no longer see in a face which was no longer there, it seemed to be begging us to take pity on it. I recoiled in disgust and bumped into Gregor, who was standing directly behind me. He nudged me forward again with his elbow.
‘Do something,’ he said. ‘Do something.’
I pulled out my revolver and slipped back the safety catch, then moved hesitantly forward to the thing in the ditch. Before I could take aim, it had snatched at the weapon with its bare-boned fingers and turned it towards the black hole where a mouth had once been. A shot rang out, and I stood watching in silent horror as the last charred remains of flesh slipped away from the skeleton and what was left of the creature sank back into the ditch to die.
The T34 moved implacably onwards. We abandoned our positions and fled, but even as we left the shelter of the hedge a squadron of fighter planes came swooping down upon us. They skimmed low across the fields, strafing everything within sight, and were followed almost immediately by Jabos disgorging napalm bombs.
The whole world seemed to be on fire. The fields were burning, the roads were burning, even the topmost branches of the very tallest trees were alight. Men, women and children, soldiers and civilians, milled in panic in the centre of the inferno. Those on the edges stood more chance, provided they were young enough and fit enough to outstrip the encroaching flames. The very young and the very old, the sick and the wounded, were left behind for the funeral pyre. I saw a peasant woman drag herself along the ground with her belly ripped open and all her insides trailing after her. I saw a mother crouched over a small child who had had both its arms blown off. I saw men writhing in agony with all their clothes on fire.
The Jabos came roaring overhead a second time, and a lance-corporal who was a perfect stranger to me suddenly snatched my bazooka away and turned it up into the sky.
‘Don’t be a fool!’ I yelled. ‘You won’t do any good with that!’
‘You wanna bet?’ he said.
I probably would have done, had there only been time. I had never seen anyone bring down an aeroplane with a bazooka. But the Jabos had become over-confident. They were darting and diving like swallows in search of flies, and one made the mistake of coming just a little bit too close to my friend with the bazooka. We shouted together in evil triumph as it went crashing into the trees and smashed itself to pieces.
‘Very clever,’ said the Old Man. ‘Now perhaps you’ll be satisfied.’
We looked at him, reproachfully.
‘We just got a Jabo,’ I said.
‘That’s as may be!’ he snapped. ‘Meanwhile, it may have escaped your attention that while you’ve been fooling about taking pot shots at enemy aircraft, there’s been a full-scale retreat going on!’
He prodded us both forward, and suddenly infected by the general confusion, we took to our heels and joined in the flight. For three hours we continued along the road, with its dismal scattered wreckage of abandoned humanity and burnt-out vehicles. The dead and the dying were left for the Russians to mop up. There was no time to be spared for men who were clearly beyond help. The wounded, if they were lucky enough to draw attention to themselves, were picked up and bundled pell-mell into trucks and ambulances. There were no more bandages, no more ointments, no more morphine. They should have considered themselves fortunate that they had not been left lying on the road.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, appeared a company of T34s, with hordes of Siberian infantrymen clinging to them like flies on a flypaper. At once the column broke up and dived for cover, but some were not quite quick enough. The tanks churned straight through the middle of us and wiped out almost an entire company at one blow. I myself was caught in the neck by a stray bullet and instantly went galloping off in search of a free place in one of the ambulances. I was streaming with blood and I knew perfectly well that the bullet was lodged against my vertebrae and that at any moment I should be attacked by total paralysis. The Orderly who attended me was a coarse, brutal fellow with evidently no medical knowledge whatsoever.
‘Bullet?’ he said. ‘I can’t see no bleeding bullet. All you’ve got, mate, is a slight scratch.’
‘A slight scratch?’ I said. ‘Are you raving mad? I’ve got a bullet stuck in my neck, and if you don’t get me to a hospital pretty damn quick you’ll have a corpse on your hands!’
He shrugged his shoulders. He obviously couldn’t have cared less.
‘Hospital!’ he said. ‘That’s a good one!’
‘Look here,’ I demanded, ‘are you or are you not going to do something about this wound?’
‘Not,’ he said; and he winked at me. ‘Next time, sonny, try getting your head blown off. You stand more chance that way.’ He turned to the next customer, who was sitting smugly on the ground with a couple of raw stumps where his feet had been. ‘No doubt about this one,’ said the orderly, cheerfully. He selected a red form from a pile by his side and grinned at me. ‘That’s the way to do it,’ he said.
‘But I can’t get my helmet on!’ I said. ‘I can’t move my head!’
‘A German soldier shouldn’t want to move his head.’ He picked up a rubber stamp and thumped it on the form. ‘Where else do you need to look but straight ahead?’
It was obviously no use arguing with the fellow. I slid my eyes away to the pile of forms. One red form and a rubber stamp, that was all it required . . . Slowly, I stretched out a hand.
‘Oh, no, you don’t!’ The orderly had turned, quick as a flash, and caught me in the act. ‘Go and get yourself decently torn to shreds, and then perhaps I might think about it. Until then, get the hell out of here and stop pestering me’. There are sick men waiting to be seen to.’
A couple of sergeants picked me up and frogmarched me outside. They threw me to the ground and beckoned to a nearby military policeman.
‘Hey, you! Just keep an eye on this skyving bastard. Make sure he doesn’t try any more funny business.’
Furious, I scrambled to my feet and found myself facing straight into the barrel of an automatic rifle.
‘Funny business, eh? You been trying it on, have you?’
‘Trying it on!’ I said, indignantly. ‘I’ve got a bullet pressing on my spinal cord and the swine refuses to send me to hospital!’
‘That’s hard luck,’ he said. ‘That’s real hard luck . . . I suppose you was trying to nick one of them little red passports to a free holiday?’
I raised my eyes from the barrel of the rifle and saw that the man was a corporal. I relaxed slightly. You stood a fair chance with a corporal. You could sometimes even talk to them like human beings.
‘I reckon a man’s entitled to it,’ I said. ‘After five years of war.’
There was a pause. He could shoot me for that, I thought. It all depended upon whether he was a Prussian or a Porta. Slowly he lowered the rifle.
‘I guess you’re right,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, mate, everyone’s got the same idea. You’re the fourteenth what’s tried it on in the last hour . . . I’d try it on myself if I thought I’d get away with it. But not a hope. Not a hope in hell.’
‘Bastards,’ I said. I felt cautiously at the hole in my throat. I was glad to note that it was still bleeding. ‘I suppose I’d better try to rejoin my company,’ I said. ‘Though I doubt if I’ll ever make it. I’ll probably get gangrene long before I get there.’
The corporal slung his
rifle over his shoulder and we set off together.
‘You’ll be lucky,’ he said. ‘You’ll be lucky if you’re alive long enough to get gangrene. Between here and Warsaw the whole place is crawling with MPs. You know what for? To shoot deserters.’
‘I’m not a deserter,’ I said.
‘Everyone’s a deserter, these days. They catch you strolling about the countryside all by yourself, they’ll shoot you soon as look at you. That’s the way it goes. Shoot on sight, that’s what we been told. Seems like half the bleeding Army’s running in the wrong direction. Still—’ He closed one eye and pulled a cunning face. ‘Don’t you worry, mate. You’ll be all right with me. I’ll see you through it.’
We walked the road together, swinging along quite cheerfully. No enemy aircraft came to disturb us. For nearly half an hour we were by ourselves, following in the wake of the retreating army, picking our way through the trail of carnage and desolation. I forgot about the bullet pressing on my spine, and for a while we played at kicking a stone in and out among the corpses and the wrecked vehicles, laughing like children on their way home from school. At one point we were interrupted by a convoy of trucks. An impatient sergeant in a large Krupp stinking of petrol fumes, leaned out of the cabin and yelled at us to get off the road. But at the sight of a military policeman he instantly withdrew his head and sent the vehicle careering onwards in a cloud of dust.
‘Deserters,’ said my companion; and he shrugged a careless shoulder. ‘They’ll never make it, poor fools. There’s a road block somewhere ahead. They don’t stand a chance.’
We sat down under a hedge to rest our legs, and the corporal pulled out three packets of Camels and insisted on giving them to me.
‘You take them,’ he said. ‘I can get plenty more . . .’
There was no reason to break our necks to arrive anywhere. We sat smoking and chatting together for almost an hour, until a column of SS tanks appeared and covered us in a spray of mud and oil from the churned-up road.
