Death's Head

by Leo Kessler

  “Next time, sir?”

  “Yes. At the divisional conference yesterday General Dietrich2 let us into the secret. We are to be mechanized at once – heavy tanks. Mark IVs, I think. The next time we have a crack at the Tommies, we land in tanks.”

  Von Dodenburg’s pale face lit up enthusiastically. “That’s great news, sir,” he breathed. In spite of the pain he sat up. Gently the Vulture placed his hand on the younger officer’s shoulder and forced him down again on the pillow. “My dear boy, take it easy. The medics – cheap quacks as they are – tell me it will be another two weeks before you can return to duty. A complicated concussion or something. They probably don’t know themselves what’s wrong with you, but like the fakes they are they’re throwing up a smokescreen of infallibility.” He picked up his cap with its shining, silver, death’s head badge. “You rest as much as you can. I’ll have need of you in the weeks to come.” He sighed. “Well, I suppose I’d better go and visit the men.” He wrinkled up his great beak of a nose in disgusted anticipation. “Are there many stomach wounds among them?”

  “There are two in my company, I know that sir.” The Vulture slapped his jackbooted leg with his riding cane. “How unfortunate. Stomach wounds do stink, don’t they?” He touched his cane to the peak of his cap in salutation and was gone. Von Dodenburg frowned after him. He knew Geier had absolutely no feeling about his men; his sole concern was to become a general as his father had once been in the old Imperial Army. He wished the Major was not so transparent about it.

  Simone Vannenberg, the Belgian nurse who had painted the number on his chest that first terrible night after the failed invasion, looked at him carefully. Her beautiful oval face was cold, contained and completely professional. But there was something about her eyes which was disconcerting, as if she were watching him for other than professional reasons. Suddenly she said: “Why are you looking at me like that, Captain von Dodenburg?”

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “As if you are trying to analyse me.”

  “I’m not trying to analyse you. I don’t try to analyse pretty girls. I just like looking at them.” He reached out a hand to take hers, but she slipped it away quickly.

  “Then you must not look at me,” she said coldly in her precise accented German. “I am your enemy, after all.”

  The grin vanished from his face. “What do you mean – your enemy?”

  “I am a Belgian and I am not like those spineless traitors in Antwerp who have fallen all over the Germans. You have occupied my country; therefore you are my enemy.”

  “But we haven’t really occupied you,” he protested. ‘We’ve come here to set you free – free from the mediocrity of your past form of government. All small countries are doomed to be mediocre – look at the Swiss, or instance. Now you are a member of the Greater German Community. Now things are different. Your people will have a chance to rise above the pettiness of their former existence. To be great!”

  Simone did not answer. Instead she picked up his slops from under the bed and poured them into her pail. She walked to the door. Von Dodenburg could not help noticing that she had a delightfully rounded figure. ‘And what if we don’t want to be great?” she asked as she opened it, a little smile on her beautiful face. Von Dodenburg had no answer for her question. But as she closed the door behind her, he could not help thinking that she liked him a little.

  Two days later he had confirmation of that belief. That afternoon a big broad, well-remembered face poked itself round the door of his room and Schulze asked cheekily, using the old-fashioned impersonal form of address when speaking to officers: “Has Sergeant Schulze permission to enter the Gentleman Captain’s room, sir?” Von Dodenburg grinned. “Come on in, you damn rogue. I thought we’d lost you in Tommyland?”

  The big ex-docker from Hamburg squeezed his way through the narrow door, his shoulders as wide as the packing cases he had once handled in Hamburg’s Free Port. “Old weeds never die, sir,” he said, grinning all over his weathered face. “Though for a while I thought the Tommies really had us by the knackers, I really did. And when you started back for the beach and I had to lay you out, I…”

  “You what?”

  “Lay you out, sir.” Schulze held up his hand. “After that rock hit you on the nut, you started back the way we’d come, shouting your head off. I mean, I know most officers and gentlemen are a bit cracked in the upper storey, but that was going too far. So I clobbered you.” Von Dodenburg felt his jaw. “It feels like it.” He indicated the bedside chair. “All right, sit down and tell me about the company.”

  “It’s not good, sir. Another couple of the lads died this morning. That makes about forty died or posted away on account of serious wounds. One good thing, though, Metzger has gone to the Battalion. He’s going to be the Regimental Sergeant Major. He got hit in the balls and that’s the kind they always use to run things in the Army.”

  Von Dodenburg opened his mouth to protest. But Schulze did not give him a chance. He pulled out a bottle of clear spirits and two glasses which didn’t look too clean. “Let’s have a gargle with this, sir” he said swiftly pouring out two glasses. “Best Dutch Genever.”

  “Those glasses don’t look too clean.”

  “Don’t worry about that, sir. This stuff’ll kill any germ – it’ll probably take the lining off yer guts too. Prost!”

  Obediently von Dodenburg tipped the fiery liquid down his throat. Schulze refilled his glass immediately and launched into the first of the jokes which had gained him the reputation of being the Battalion’s comedian.

  “Do you know why it takes three stupid Polacks to fit a new light bulb, sir?”

  “No, why?”

  “Well, sir, they need one to hold the bulb and two others to turn him so he can screw it in…”

  Three hours later the bottle was empty and Schulze was involved in a long and complicated story about circumcision. “Of course Jesus being a Jew had had it docked too. They say that the Pope keeps his foreskin in a silver jug on his bedside table in Rome, any Roman Candle will tell you that.” Then the door opened and Simone Vannenberg came in.

  “My God,” she exclaimed. “What the devil’s going on here?” Her eyes fell on the bottle of Oude Maastricht. “What are you trying to do, sergeant?” she challenged. “Trying to kill Captain von Dodenburg?”

  He rose to his feet, swaying. “Only trying to cheer him up, miss. That’s all. The cup that cheers – and all that.”

  “Get out!” Schulze picked up his cap and let himself be pushed towards the door.

  She turned to von Dodenburg.

  “And why are you giggling like a silly schoolgirl?” she snapped.

  “At the way you look.”

  “The way I look! Don’t you realise you could have a relapse drinking like that! God, Captain von Dodenburg, what a fool you are!”

  She leaned forward to take the glass out of his hand and he grabbed her around the waist. “Let go,” she commanded. He didn’t. Still holding her tightly with his right arm, he ran his left hand up her skirt. It was something he had been wanting to do ever since the day he had been admitted to the hospital. “Stop it,” she yelped. “I’ll scream.” But he tolerated no denial. He pressed her close to him, dragging her down on top of him, forcing his tongue between her lips. She struggled wildly, her body writhing from side to side, her nails scratching his face.

  He did not notice. His nostrils were full of her odour, natural and artificial. It made him crazy. His greedy fingers slid up beyond the black woollen stocking top. They touched the crisp knot of hair. Then something else – hot, wet and yielding.

  Suddenly she went limp. Her struggling stopped. In triumph he flung back the bed cover. She did not attempt to stop him. “Don’t be afraid,” he gasped in a voice that was out of control, as he opened her legs.

  “I’m not afraid – ”

  Her voice broke abruptly. She gave a little yelp of pain. Suddenly she was seized with an almost frightening, frenzie
d energy. Everything was forgotten – the war, the hospital, the fact that she had sworn to kill him and his like. The world was a crazy, hot, red frantic movement that threatened to destroy both of them.

  Forty-eight hours later he was discharged from the hospital to return to SS Assault Battalion Wotan.

  Notes

  1. SS slang for decorations.

  2. Commanding General of the 1st SS Division, Adolf Hitler’s Bodyguard.

  THREE

  It was a wet, grey, October day. A fine rain was being swept in from the North Sea and falling on the old Belgian cavalry barracks which housed the Wotan Battalion. But Sergeant Metzger, his face gleaming with damp, did not seem to notice the rain. He took up his position in front of the new draft from Germany, boots wide apart, chest and jaw thrust out, fleshy butcher’s hands on his hips. It was a pose he had once seen in a film and one that he had practised many times in front of a full-length mirror since he had become a NCO. For another moment, he savoured it, apparently not noticing the four hundred pairs of anxious young eyes watching him expectantly.

  `Suddenly he sucked in a huge mouthful of air and yelled at the top of his voice, as if they were a thousand metres away from him and not a hundred. “Draft – draft, attention!”

  Four hundred pairs of nailed jackboots crashed to attention, the sound echoing back and forth across the cobbled parade-ground.

  Metzger ran his eyes up and down their rigid ranks to check if any one of them was daring not to maintain the prescribed position of attention: fingers stretched down the sides of their field-grey pants, chin thrust out, eyes fixed woodenly on some distant horizon. But not one of the recruits deviated from the required norm. Disappointed that he couldn’t ‘make anyone to a sow’, as he phrased it in the Sergeants’ Mess, he bellowed:

  “Stand at ease – stand easy!”

  Four hundred right feet shot out at the regulation angle as one. Someone coughed. In the rear rank a man broke wind.

  Metzger’s red face flushed crimson. “If I catch the man who made that obscene noise,” he roared, “his shitty feet won’t even touch the deck, do you understand that?”

  “Yes, Sergeant-Major!” four hundred voices bellowed back. Metzger sniffed and relaxed a little. “My name is Butcher – a butcher by name, a butcher by training1 – and,” he leered at them, “a shitty butcher by inclination! So remember that, you shitty greenbeaks. One wrong move and I’ll cut the eggs off you before you know that I’ve whipped them off!” He clapped his big hand on his NCO’s dagger as if to emphasize his point and let his words sink in.

  “Now let’s get this straight right from the start. You think you’re trained infantry already. But you’re wrong. As far as SS Assault Wotan is concerned, you’re a lot of greenbeaks, wet-tails, common stubble-hoppers, still wet behind the spoons. At this historic moment in your horrible lives, you don’t know yer balls from a bayonet! Do you hear that – you don’t know your balls from a bayonet? What don’t you know?”

  As one they roared back, “We don’t know our balls from a bayonet!” Metzger sniffed, apparently a little mollified by their prompt reply. “Here then, you shitty greenbeaks, you’ve got to start forgetting all you think you’ve learned up to now – that kind of crap is all right for common-or-garden stubble-hoppers, but not for the Wotan. Here you start learning all over again. And woe betide any of you horrible wet tails, if you forget that for one single minute. You’re the Führer’s elite and in his infinite wisdom Adolf Hitler has appointed me personally to make a sow of any one of you crapheads who slips up. As soon as you can say ‘piss up the kitchen bull’s sleeve’ I’ll have you by the knackers and your shitty paddlefeet won’t touch the deck on yer way to the guard house – don’t you forget that.”

  “Yessir!” they yelled.

  Slowly, he walked down the front rank, his pig eyes searching every gleaming young face suspiciously, as if each one concealed some form of dumb insolence. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the Vulture striding across the square, slapping his riding cane against his boots. He stamped to attention. In a voice thickened with years of cheap ten pfennig cigars and Korn, he bellowed at the top of his voice: “SS Assault Battalian Wotan – attention!” Casually Major Geier touched his crop to the gleaming peak of his cap. Without preliminaries he began his set speech: “You men are the third draft I have received into this Battalion since 1939. A lot of good men have preceded you and have suffered a hero’s death on the battlefields in the east and west. But this Battalion has survived its tremendous casualties. Why? Because this Battalion is more than each individual one of you. You may die in the months to come – you probably will. But when you are long forgotten, this Battalion will be remembered. Now you must learn to prove yourselves worthy of such a great unit, worthy to die for it. And you must do so quickly for again time is running out for us. There are great tasks ahead.”

  “Down!” he said suddenly, without a change of inflection in his voice. The young men obeyed without hesitation. As one they flung themselves on the cobbles and lay there rigidly as they had been taught at the Armed SS training school outside Paderborn.

  Geier did not speak for a moment. He let the chill penetrate their uniforms and the wetness soak into their bodies. “Do you feel it?” he yelled. “The coldness of death creeping into your bones? Well, do you?” he raised his voice.

  “Yes,” they yelled back at him.

  “Then savour it for it will be the only rest you will ever have now that you have joined Wotan.”

  He stood there staring at their inert bodies, the rain dripping on their backs. His hard eyes fell on their buttocks outlined so temptingly by the tight wet material. He licked his lips and thought of other places and other young men – soft, shaven bodies of young men with plucked eyebrows, whom he met in the magic exciting shadows behind that station.

  But as quickly as it had come he dismissed the vision. He shook his head. “It hurts me to see pain inflicted on you soldiers. But it must be done. Your first duty to me, the Battalion and the Führer is to learn how to bear pain and harden yourself for the great tasks to come. On your feet!”

  Like the automatons they were already becoming, they rose – four hundred young men, the finest National Socialist Germany could produce, already dedicated to death.

  The Vulture turned to the NCO. “Metzger,” he snapped, “take them away. Training must begin at once!”

  Lieutenant Schwarz, his burned skin healing a bright pink and making his face look even more like that of the crazy man he was, drew his pistol out of its clumsy wooden holster and clicked off the safety. “On that hill up there,” he lectured the draft, standing shivering in the cold wind, “there is a Tommy machine gun nest. They are armed with brens, range four hundred metres – and accurate with it.”

  His eyes swept their ranks to check whether they had understood. Satisfied, he continued, “You could stroll towards that m.g. nest – like a bunch of shitty civilians, but you’d never make it and the only tin you’d win would be your first and last wound medal – in black.” He touched his skinny chest as if to reassure himself that his own ‘tin’ – black wound medal, Iron Cross, infantry close combat badge in bronze – was still there. “You could even run like those stubble-hoppers in the Wehrmacht. But we of the Armed SS do not do things like that. We crawl.” He raised his thin voice suddenly. “DOWN!” he yelled.

  They fell immediately.

  Schwarz tapped the butt of his pistol to check whether the magazine was firmly in place. “In a moment I am going to give you the order to crawl. But to ensure that you do so, I shall be walking in front of you with this.” He raised the pistol. “And I shall fire at anyone who raises his head higher than ten centimetres. Now – crawl!”

  Faces lathered with sweat and white with strain, they came closer and closer to the top of the hill, its surface a greasy slippery mud-bath in the rain which had suddenly begun falling. To their front, Schwarz swung his eyes from left to right, pistol he
ld at the ready, finger curled tightly round the trigger. Suddenly an exhausted boy, his uniform black with mud, eager to get it over with, raised his head above the prescribed limit. Schwarz did not hesitate. He aimed and fired in the same instant.

  The boy screamed. He clapped his hand to his wounded shoulder, a look of utter disbelief in his eyes, as the blood began to seep through his fingers. Then he fell flat on his face in the mud, twenty metres from the top of the hill.

  They clawed their way up the wet sandhills. From the white-flecked sea the harsh north-easterly thrashed their exhausted faces with flying sand.

  It was the third time they had practised a company attack and still the Butcher was not satisfied with it. “Come on you wet tails – you sacks of shit! Move it!” Waving from side to side like drunks, their shoulders bent under the forty kilos of stones their packs contained, they staggered up the hills, their breath coming as if from a torn leather bellows.

  “Can’t you give ‘em a rest, Metzger?” Schulze said. “They’ve had it. A few more minutes of this and you’ll have ‘em keeling over on you.”

  “Did I hear you say something, Sergeant Schulze?” Metzger asked with unnecessary formality. With any other NCO in the Battalion he would have swung round angrily and bellowed: “Did I hear you open your gap, you poxy tail you?” But he knew he couldn’t do that with Schulze; Schulze had seen him cowering with abject fear during the attack on Fort Eben-Emael2. Schulze knew too much about him. He had to be treated with some respect.

  “Yes, Sergeant-Major. I think they’ve had enough.”

  The Butcher creased his stupid face as if he were considering the statement seriously. “So you think they’ve had enough, Sergeant Schulze. Well, then, let us see what we can do about that?” He pulled out his whistle and blew a shrill blast on it. Then placing his hand on the top of his helmet, fingers outspread in the infantry signal of ‘rally’, he yelled: “All right, that’s enough. Everyone back here.”