Death's Head

by Leo Kessler

  Gasping and wheezing like asthmatic old men they stumbled down the hillsides and grouped themselves around Metzger. The Butcher beamed at them in fake friendliness. “Very good, lads,” he said encouragingly. “We’ll make soldiers of you, yet. Now then, off with them packs.”

  Groaning with relief, they removed the fur-backed packs and dumped the heavy loads in the sand. Here and there a boy worked his shoulders or thrust a sand-caked hand inside his tunic to rub the torn skin. But Schulze did not take his eyes off the Butcher. The big bastard was being a little bit too friendly.

  “Sergeant Schulze here thinks you need a bit of a rest,” the Butcher said with a false smile. “Perhaps he’s right. So what I’m going to show you now will let you have a breather. Now let’s say you’re in a bit of trouble – a big, buck-teethed Englishman is charging at you with his bayonet. What do you do?”

  Their exhausted faces remained blank of any other emotion save relief that they were no longer being forced to double up the hills.

  “You don’t know? Then I’ll have to show you, won’t I?” He pointed to a thin-faced boy with dark shadows under his eyes. “You – come at me as if you were rushing me with your side arm.”

  “Me, sir?”

  “Yes, you sir,” the Butcher mimicked his tone maliciously. “Come on, pretend you’re going to stick your bayonet in my guts. Perhaps you’d like to do that in reality. Come on now – move.”

  The boy lumbered forward slowly, but Metzger stopped him before he’d gone a couple of metres. “Get back there and do it again. Too much of the old five-fingered widow – that’s your trouble lad. It’ll fall off in yer hand one of these days if you don’t give it a rest.”

  The boy flushed hotly and the rest laughed dutifully; it always paid to laugh when Sergeant Metzger thought he’d made a joke.

  Metzger’s grin vanished. “Now come on, lad, rush at me as if you wanted to stick it right through me!”

  This time the thin-faced boy needed no urging. He rushed forward madly, his eyes suddenly gleaming with rage. Just when it seemed the two of them would collide, the Butcher side-stepped with remarkable neatness for such a large man. His hand reached out and caught the boy below the belly. He jerked – hard.

  The boy screamed in agony. The next instant he was doing a wild somersault to land heavily on his back, writhing in pain, his legs trampling the air.

  “They tell me them Tommies don’t have much to grab on to,” the Butcher chortled, pleased with the effect of his trick.

  “They let the Yids dock it for them. But they’ve got enough for you lot to grab hold, believe you me.”

  He turned his attention to the boy writhing in the sand. “Now come on,” he snapped impatiently, “don’t be so soft.”

  Schulze clenched his fists. He felt himself trembling all over with rage. As Metzger ordered them to put their packs on once more for another go at the sand hills, he promised himself that he would pay for this afternoon – tenfold.

  As October gave way to November, the brutalization continued – a systematic calculated planned brutalization designed to turn the draft into cold-blooded, unthinking killers who seemed to have laid aside their code of morals as easily and as neatly as they had done their civilian suits now hanging underneath the roof of the “clothing bull’s” store.

  Their hectic days, full of hoarse bellowed commands, curses and cries of rage, were measured out in hastily smoked cigarettes, the greedily gobbled midday meal followed by the bottle of weak wartime Stella Artois beer, and the evening’s furtive visit to the five-fingered widow in the solitude of the stinking wooden-seated thunderboxes located at the end of each corridor.

  Their nights were no different. They were full of sudden alarms and surprises. Thunder-flashes slung through the open windows of the barrack rooms and abrupt awakenings to the chatter of tracer stitching frightening patterns through the blackness outside. The NCOs flinging open the doors and bellowing at the men sunk in exhausted sleep, “All right, hands off cocks – masquerade!” An order which would be followed by a crazed scramble into the prescribed uniform complete with necessary equipment, which would have to be changed for another one as soon as they had put it on. The choking gas grenades, followed by white smoke, flung in just before dawn and the panic-stricken fight for the door to be followed by a five kilometre run in their bare feet, dressed as they were in their knee-length striped nightshirts.

  Once they were marched into Ostend and told to fall out in the dingy cobbled street just behind the fishing harbour, with the hard-faced whores hanging half-naked out of the windows of the tall, dirty houses and Metzger, hands on his big hips, shouting, “You’ve ten minutes to get the dirty water off yer chests. Have yer paybooks, five marks and your Parisians3 ready. Virgins – only four marks!” And under the hard contemptuous eyes of the ‘chain dogs’4 they had made love as if it were a military manoeuvre.

  In the second week of November Captain von Dodenburg and a small group of selected men from what was left of the original battalion were sent to the Ford Works at Cologne to pick up the new Mark IVs and be trained in driving them.

  Six days later they returned, bringing with them the squat gleaming new vehicles, the skeleton key of the ‘Adolf Hitler Bodyguard Division’ painted on their rears near the twin exhausts5. Proudly the six tanks with their monstrous 75mm guns rattled from the nearest railhead at Bruges into the barracks, to be surrounded by a crowd of curious young soldiers.

  “Look at that 75mm,” someone said enthusiastically. “Wait till the Tommies see it – they’ll fill their breeches as soon as we get off the boats!”

  “Not off the boats,” a familiar voice said behind them. They stiffened to attention. On the lead tank Captain von Dodenburg touched his cap in salute. The Vulture raised his cane in acknowledgement, then he brought it down hard on the side of the nearest Mark IV. “These beauties won’t come off the boats when we strike against the English,” he said. “But out of the water.” Chuckling, he passed on, leaving them standing woodenly at attention, mouths open in surprise and bewilderment. “Out of the water?” someone said. “What’s he mean by that?”

  But for the time being most of the Wotan Battalion had to remain in the dark about the real purpose of the new tanks. During the next few days, which brought the first snow of the winter of 1940, von Dodenburg concentrated on demonstrating to them how to take the 30-ton monsters up and down steep banks.

  Every morning, with the snow falling softly on his shoulders as he stood high above them in the turret of the demonstration tank, and a fresh driver in the seat at his feet, he would say: “Behind you you will see a bank. It’s about six metres high. Beyond it there is a steep ditch and a similarly high bank. Your problem is to get up, down and up once more without stalling the engine.” He would let the information sink in and then add: “If you do, your next-of-kin will no doubt receive the telegram concerning your ‘hero’s death’ within twenty-four hours.”

  At that the young soldiers would smile wanly, their minds full of the frightening vision of a tank falling on top of them and crushing the life out of them.

  The Mark IV would lumber forward, with the wind tearing at his goggles. Up and then down, rushing for the bottom with a feeling of wonderful exhilaration until the driver realized he would have to get up the other slope.

  The engine would grow more laboured. The black knob on the gear lever would rise in the driver’s anxious eye until it seemed to fill the driving compartment. Von Dodenburg in the turret would let the trainee sweat a little and then when it appeared that the tank engine would stall at any moment, and hurl them all to their deaths, he would order: “Keep your foot hard down on the throttle, driver. Bang the clutch out twice. Quick now! And at the same time – the gear lever right across the gate! Rush it!”

  For a moment there would be an anxious silence broken only by the breathing of the young driver coming over the intercom before the engine would burst into a full-throated roar once again and the tank would p
ress forward smoothly up the hill without a single falter.

  By the first week of December every man in the Battalion had gone through the frightening experience without a single casualty, save for one young soldier whose bowels had failed him in the middle of the change down. Thereafter the tanks were driven into the workshops for the next stage in the preparations which mystified most of the Battalion.

  Under von Dodenburg’s supervision the Mark IVs’ bellies were rasped clean and painted with an evil-smelling, colourless paint. Inspection plates were sealed with a rubbery solution and long funnels fitted to the vehicles’ twin exhausts. Yards of balloon fabric – and what looked like the inner tubes of a bicycle – were glued in position around the turret rings, the drivers’ visors and the gun mountings.

  As the rumours mounted inside the barracks, army experts came down from Brussels and sealed long cords of explosive charging under the balloon fabric. Wired by their skilled fingers, they were linked by electric detonators and the wires run to the tanks’ right head light sockets.

  “You know why they’ve done that?” they whispered excitedly to each other that night as they stretched out gratefully in their high wooden bunks. “If we don’t pull it off this time, we press the headlight switch – and boom! The tank goes up and the Tommies all around the sod – and us too! It’s going to be a real old Ascension Day Operation this one!”6

  That night there were many of the new draft who slept very little indeed.

  A week later they learned why Captain von Dodenburg had insisted that each of them should drive the Mark IV up and down the steep slope and the purpose of the lengthy session in the workshops. In the middle of a snowstorm they were driven across the Franco-Belgian border to be assembled on the sombre mud banks of the River Somme, shivering in the cold, their shoulders white with snow as they waited for the important guests to arrive from Paris.

  In due course they were able to catch a brief glimpse of their divisional commander himself. “Old Sepp,” the whisper went from mouth to mouth, “it’s old Sepp himself.” The burly swaggering divisional commander, who had been a tank corps sergeant himself in the old war, passed swiftly through their ranks, followed by his staff and the black-uniformed officers of the ‘Death’s Head Corps’. He gave them a quick, toothy smile, his jaw stuck out as always, as if he were expecting someone to punch at it, and passed on to the hill from which he was going to observe the demonstration. He picked up his binoculars and focussed on the river. The Vulture spoke hurriedly into the microphone he was holding. Suddenly the river’s surface was disturbed by a series of bubbles. A metal tube broke the surface. The gleaming black surface of a tank turret followed it. Like some mysterious prehistoric amphibian, the Mark IV, a long metal tube protruding high above its turret, started to drive towards the bank. It hesitated for a fraction of a second. They could hear the crash of the gear lever being forced right across the gate. Then it started to mount the muddy bank, the water dripping from its belly in torrents. It breasted the bank. The right headlight flickered on and off swiftly, as if in signal. In that same instant there was a soft plop. The rubber cap which covered the muzzle of the big overhanging seventy-five flew high in the air. Inside the turret the gunner let the air out of the balloon fabric. The tank lurched forward. Seconds later it skidded to a stop in the mud in front of Dietrich. Von Dodenburg opened the turret hatch and saluted the Commander.

  “Oh my aching arse,” Schulze groaned on the bank, as the rest of the tanks came streaming out of the water. “Now they want us to become sodding submariners!”

  Notes

  1. Metzger = butcher.

  2. See Leo Kessler: SS Panzer Regiment.

  3. German Army slang for a contraceptive.

  4. Military policemen.

  5. “Dietrich”, the name of the Divisional Commander, also means skeleton key – hence the divisional sign of the 1st SS Division.

  6. Himmelfahrtkommando – an Ascension Day mission – a German Army expression for a suicide mission.

  FOUR

  The blonde whore lowered herself over Schulze on the rumpled bed, her loose breasts dangling down in invitation. Wearily he pushed up his naked arm and thrust it between her naked legs. He felt the upper part of his hand brush against the warm, wet crease. But he did not stop there. He extended his long forefinger and poked it into the black whore who was kneeling behind the blonde one.

  She groaned pleasurably.

  He stifled a yawn; they had been at it all the long wet winter afternoon. He’d had enough, but he didn’t want to offend them. For the two cans of coffee, three bottles of oil and a large slice of beef he had talked out of the ‘kitchen bull’, they’d really worked hard and given him a lot of pleasure.

  “All right,” he said to the black whore, raising his head slightly from the crumpled pillow, “put your hands on her tits.”

  The black whore, who was slightly cross-eyed, did so dutifully. Her tobacco-brown fingers sought and found the blonde’s nipples. Eagerly she began to play with them. They flowered under her expert touch. The blonde, whose ample breasts contrasted with her bony ribs, giggled.

  Satisfied that they were happily engaged with each other, Schulze withdrew his forefinger and wiped it on the bedsheet.

  “Put it back.” the black whore protested.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You know what, you bastard,” she exclaimed.

  “Don’t you know that you can’t call a member of the Greater German Wehrmacht that,” he said mildly, watching them play with each other.

  “What would the Führer say? Bastard indeed!”

  “Fuck the Führer,” she retorted, squirming round so that the blonde could get at her lower body.

  Schulze shook his head in mock sadness. “Have you no respect for the greatest captain of all times?”1

  The blonde whore bent down over his stomach, mouth open like a sparrow chick ready to receive food. Gently he pushed her head away. “No use, dear,” he commented. “That particular bird won’t be flying any more this afternoon.”

  The black whore took her hands off the blonde’s nipples. They were very erect. “When the Tommies were here,” she hinted darkly, “they didn’t give up so easily, I can tell you.”

  “I’m not surprised,” he said without rancour and yawned again. “Have you ever seen a flat-chested, buck-teethed Englishwoman? Well, I have. Legs permanently crossed that kind and a padlock on it as well, I bet. Those Tommies might have been saving up their dirty water for years. Now a handsome bloke like me…”.He broke off suddenly.

  From the next room there came a sharp crack, as if from a whip, followed by a stifled groan, which had a hint of pleasure about it. “What was that?” he asked.

  The black whore reached out for a cigarette with her free hand and lit it with the same hand. “That’ll be the pig, working up one of her dirty old men.”

  “What do you mean, working them up?”

  She shrugged. “She’s the punishment type. You know, flogs those old men who can’t get their arm up without a bit of pain.”

  He nodded.

  “I think she likes beating ‘em,” the blonde girl said conversationally as the sounds from the next room intensified. She pulled a scornful face. “But God knows who would want to stick it in her. I wouldn’t if I were a man, even with a rubber dick.”

  “You mean that she beats them to make them potent?” Schulze asked, his big brow creased in thought, as the idea began to gell in his mind.

  “Potent–” the black whore said scornfully. “That’s a big word for a soldier, isn’t it? You’ll be telling me next that you once read a book.”

  “I’ll be doing something else if you’re not careful,” he threatened in mock anger.

  “That’ll be the day.”

  He overlooked the remark. “Listen,” he said as the sound of the beating rose in the next room. “I wonder if we could get the – er – Pig to take part in a little trick I’d like to play on a – a friend of mine?
”

  The plan appealed to the whores’ sense of humour. When he had finished, both of them were giggling on the rumpled bed, completely intrigued by what appeared to them to be an ideal opportunity to score off a man. “This I must see,” the black whore giggled, “the Pig and your friend. She’ll really have the balls off him, believe you me. Stella here, she and me are in this business for the money. But the Pig, she’s different.”

  “So it seems,” Schulze said as a sudden scream rang out next door, followed by silence, disturbed only by a soft blubbering.

  “Likes her work, doesn’t she?”

  He stood at the window and pulled on his underpants thoughtfully. Outside it was still snowing steadily. The cobbled backstreet was deserted save for a lone couple huddled in coats – a girl and a soldier, plodding silently side by side through the white flakes. As they turned the corner, Schulze caught a glimpse of the man’s face. It was Captain von Dodenburg. He looked grim, but Schulze misunderstood the look. His face broke into a smile. His company commander was obviously out to get a bit of the other from the Belgian girl that afternoon. “And bed’s the best place for anybody on a sodding miserable day like this,” he told himself.

  He changed his mind suddenly. He pulled at the buttons on his knee-length underpants and dropped them on the floor. “All right,” he said to the two whores huddled together in the centre of the big bed, “move yer fat Belgie arses, I’m coming back in again.”

  The snow had changed to rain, a steady persistent dreary rain which dripped down the panes of the little window like tears. They sat opposite each other in the chill dark room, full of heavy overstuffed furniture, and listened to its sad drip-drip.

  “Why did you come?” she asked, her beautiful face as cold and as inscrutably contained as it had been that first day in the hospital.