Death's Head

by Leo Kessler

  But it wasn’t only the Russians who no longer observed the rules.

  On 16 November, Wotan reached the outskirts of Sevastopol. In a heavy downpour of rain which had turned the approach road into a sea of mud, they passed sweating, swearing, mud-splattered men laying into trembling horses, frothing at the mouth, up to their bellies in the thick black goo. Everywhere the soaked fields were full of the litter left behind by the retreating Russians – shell-boxes, radios, rifles, dead horses, cows with their legs sticking stiffly upwards – and bodies. Always bodies, surrounded by fat black crows pecking steadily at them.

  When they passed through the area of the most recent fighting, the rain had ceased and the wounded, lying in their thousands on both sides of the road, raised their hands to them and cried piteously “Voda, gospodin…voda!”1

  Their pleas remained unanswered, save by the handful of Germans in the black uniform of the Death’s Head, who beat those capable of walking to clear them out of the way. As the tanks rolled by, the Russians who could move started to drag themselves to the rear supported by makeshift crutches, surrounded by swarms of huge flies. Behind them the ones who could not walk settled back to wait for death, their eyes gazing stoically at the crows flapping slowly overhead.

  But there was worse to come. Later that same after noon while the tank crews showered and underwent delousing in a local barracks, von Dodenburg and Sergeant Schulze, acting as bodyguard, for there were still snipers about, went wandering around the smoking ruins. Alerted by quick bursts of sub-machine gunfire, which kept disturbing the afternoon torpor, they advanced round a hillock to be confronted by a horrifying sight. A huge hole had been bulldozed behind the mound. Now it was full of dead and dying Russian soldiers, packed in like sardines, some lying on top of the others’ heads, blood streaming from the wounds in their faces. On the far side of the pit an officer from the Death’s Head was sitting, a cigar clenched between his teeth, a tommy gun cradled on his lap. Suddenly one of the bodies groaned. As casually as if he were swatting a fly, he raised his tommy gun and fired a burst at it. Then he noticed that he had company, raised his hand lazily and said, “Heil Hitler. Christ, it’s hot, isn’t it?” He jerked his head at the men packed into the pit. “Stalin’s scholars – what’s left of the 76th Officer Aspirant Brigade from Novorossiysk – excuse me.” Lazily he fired another short burst at a Russian who had moved. The soldier groaned weakly and dropped his head. “Pong isn’t there?” he said easily. “Most of them skit themselves before they get the chop.”

  “What’s this?” Schulze said gruffly.

  The officer was not offended by Schulze’s lack of military courtesy. He was obviously a man who was happy with himself and the world. “Orders from the Reichsführer himself. Wipe out their officer corps when it’s young. Keep ‘em quiet for another fifty years after we’ve conquered the bastards.” As if to emphasise his point, he fired another casual burst at a moving head and began to change the magazine, chatting away as easily as if he were at some fairground shooting-booth and the men lying in the pit were wooden targets.

  For the first time he turned round fully to look up at them, and von Dodenburg recognized that pig-like face at once. It was the officer who had commanded the firing squad at Henri Chapelle! Another officer cadet moved in the centre of the pit. “Excuse me,” the Death’s Head Officer said formally. Turning, he fired a short burst and the man fell back without even a groan. “Every slug a Russ, eh?” he joked. “For Folk, Fatherland and…” His mouth fell open suddenly as von Dodenburg began to draw his pistol. “What are you doing, Captain?”

  Von Dodenburg did not answer. Instead he clicked off the safety catch and brought the pistol to bear on the Death’s Head officer. The slug thumped into the man at ten metres’ range. Slowly he began to fall back into the pit. Deliberately, von Dodenburg put his pistol back into his holster, took care to fasten up the flap, as if it were very important to do so, and then began to walk away without uttering a single word.

  There were others who profited from the complete breakdown in human values in the Crimea. At night they boasted of their exploits in the rough-and-ready accommodation they occupied while the Battalion waited for the great attack on Rostov, now that the capture of Sevastopol was being left to the infantry. In the shattered church which Metzger occupied with the Battalion’s other senior NCOs he was obliged to listen to them boasting of their sexual adventures.

  “At ten years old, they’ve got tits like balloons,” they would say. “You can get your head right up to your sodding spoons between them!”

  “I had the daughter for a can of ‘old man’2, the mother for a packet of tea and I bet I could have had her husband for a couple of cancer sticks.”

  “Dirty buggers they are, though. Sleep with a plug in it.”

  “Go on!”

  “It’s true. They put the plug in to keep it nice and randy, everybody knows that.”

  “For a packet of cancer sticks they’ll give you a right old gobble. They won’t do anything else, mind you. It’s something to do with Stalin. He laid down that they have to keep their cherry till they’re eighteen. A law it is – a Soviet law. But a gobble’s something different. I had one this afternoon – I bet she wasn’t more than twelve. But, believe me, she nearly had me back collar stud down her throat the way she went at it. Like mother’s milk it must have been for her.”

  The thought of the youthful libertines haunted Metzger. He went about his daytime duties in a dream, his mind full of dark-eyed Crimean beauties with wide-open lips, beckoning to him in undisguised lust. At regular intervals he disappeared into the sack-walled latrine, heavy with the odour of lime, to check whether the fantasies were having an effect on that long-limp organ; and it seemed to him they were. Wasn’t there a certain hardness there, just as there had been when the gross Polack peasant had put the eggs in his pocket? He even risked the Vulture’s absence to lock himself in the CO’s makeshift office, rip open his flies and take a hurried look at himself in the flyblown mirror which was its only decoration. He was sure he wasn’t mistaken. There was definitely something there!

  The evening their new movement order came in he slipped out and wandered around the shattered streets until he was sure that the curfew had cleared most of the rank-and-file out of the place. Now the only ones who would risk a clash with the chaindogs would be men like himself out for sex and those civilians who were prepared to risk a spell in jail to give them it. His mind full of hot fantasies, he hurried down the back allies, full of mosquitoes and the red ends of cigarettes which marked the whores or their pimps.

  Once, he was stopped by a whore and her pimp, a cross-eyed runt who spoke some German and stank of garlic. “You jig-jig?” he asked, thrusting his finger through the circle made by the thumb and forefinger of the other hand to make his meaning clear. He lit a match and for an instant, Metzger had a glimpse of the whore’s face. She was young and pretty. Her pimp saw the gesture. “Upstairs,” he whined. “Two cans – Old Man.”

  Upstairs. The word stopped Metzger. A fear of being knifed in the back while he was on the job rose in him. He pushed the man aside.

  “Piss off,” he said. “You’re talking to a senior NCO in the SS!”

  He stamped on.

  “Gospodin!” a husky voice said in the darkness. “Gospodin.”

  A small slim shape detached itself from the darkness. “You jig-jig?” it asked. “Two cans – Old Man?”

  Metzger could not see the woman’s features in the darkness but the voice seemed young. “You gobble?” he asked.

  “Da, da, gobble,” she answered. “Gobble – three packets, cancer sticks.”

  She used the soldiers’ slang word for the issue cigarette. Should he – could he? What if she had her ponce there in the darkness with a knife in his hand? In the position he would be in, he would have no chance of defending himself.

  The girl made up his mind for him. A small hand wormed its way into his flies and he could feel its touch on his
skin. “Here,” he gasped, as her hands crawled over him, inside his jacket, feeling the hair on his chest, his belly – everywhere. “Here – here’s your cancer sticks. Now gobble!”

  She grabbed the cigarettes and stowed them away. Then she got on her knees. As she began to work her trick and he realised joyfully that it was going to come off at last, he already started to frame the words he would use to the others back in the room. “She was only ten, but well-rounded, with the face of a little Goddess.”

  And then lust overcame him and he cared no longer. It was all over in a matter of seconds. But leaning against the cold wall, his pants around his ankles, he was gasping as if he had been running a great race. Yet in spite of the effort, he was happy, happier even than that tremendous day when he had first been promoted lance-corporal and he had known that he was going to be somebody in the Wehrmacht. Slowly he started to pull up his pants, then remembered he had not even seen the child who had restored his manhood. He must see her face so that he could boast about her to the other NCOs.

  Somehow he managed to get out his matches. Once, twice, three times he tried to strike a match. But in his nervous excitement he kept breaking the matches. Finally he succeeded. Shielding it carefully with his hand, he brought it forward so that he could get a brief glimpse of her. An ancient, slack-cheeked crone, her face covered in liver spots, grinned back at him, revealing a toothless mouth. He stared at her in horror. She must have been at least sixty! “You like gobble?” she mumbled.

  Two days later their tanks started to roll east again. It was a beautiful morning, the sky a bright blue, the birds singing in the trees. “It’s good to be alive on mornings like these,” von Dodenburg said enthusiastically as the clean-shaven, well-rested young tankers passed, their eyes searching the distant horizon for the enemy.

  “You get your share of it, sir,” Schulze said sourly, his head aching from the load of vodka he had taken aboard the night before.

  “Come on, Schulze,” von Dodenburg urged. “Don’t be such a grumpy old bear. You’ve got a face like forty days’ rain.”

  Sergeant Schuze stared up at the grey rolling cloud which was beginning to form over the distant mountains. “It’s not rain we’re gonna get,” he remarked sourly. “The sky up there’s hanging full of violins, believe you me, Captain.”

  But in the roar of the tanks no one heard him and even if they had they would have not believed his forecast on that wonderful autumn morning, with the prospect of fresh action and fresh glory blinding their eyes.

  Notes

  1. Water, sir.

  2. Army slang for a meat ration can.

  FOUR

  The icy wind roared over the great white waste beyond the river and slashed their faces with snow crystals. The three hundred odd men left of Wotan had been holding the eight kilometre line of the Don, south-east of Rostov for three weeks now, ever since they had seized the vital bridge into the city and made its capture possible. But in those terrible three weeks they had lost more men than in the whole campaign.

  They had fought off attack after attack across the River Don, steadily losing men and tanks. At first it had been easy, in spite of the tremendous Soviet superiority. But now the Don was frozen solid and, with the exception of half a dozen Mark IVs, their own vehicles were destroyed or immobile because they lacked winter oil and special greases to prevent the periscopes and gun-sights from freezing up.

  There were no reserves left. Every man was in the line, thin summer uniforms covered in sparkling white hoar frost, their breath fogging the air like cigarette smoke at 50 degrees below zero and forming glittering crystals on their earflaps. Lousy with lice they began scratching frantically as soon as they were brought into the “warming bunkers” to receive their only hot meal of the day, “giddiup soup”, made of horseflesh and army bread, which had been sawn into slices with a wood saw and thawed out in the fire.

  Now, at the end of their tether, they knew that the last Soviet counter-attack must come soon. All day there had been activity in the ruined villages on the other side of the river and, the night before, a sentry had spotted a long Soviet convoy sneaking its way towards their positions. Thus they waited like condemned men, their shoulders sagging, scarcely able to open their eyes; waiting for their turn to join the elongated white hummocks, from which a hand or a jackboot often protruded to indicate that this had once been a human being.

  It was not surprising, therefore, that the sentries did not hear the returning patrol until it was almost upon them. Suddenly, like white ghosts, they loomed up out of the howling blizzard. “Who’s there?” an alarmed voice called through lice-ridden face rags. “Halt, or I’ll fire.”

  “Sergeant Schulze!”

  He plodded up to the German positions, his body wrapped in a looted rug which he had pinned round the front and stuffed with old copies of the SS news paper Das Schwarze Korps. Behind him the rest of the patrol came to a halt.

  Von Dodenburg plodded forward. “Is Major Geier up front?”

  The young sentry tried to salute.

  “No, sir,” he said. “He’s back at Handgrenade Rock.” Weakly von Dodenburg touched his mittened hand to his white helmet. “Thank you.” As if he had a very stiff neck, he turned his head to the others. “Get under cover. Try to get some warm food. Sentry, you take care of the stiff. SS Rifleman Krause - II Company.”

  The sentry looked at the long bundle trussed up in a tarpaulin. Von Dodenburg raised his voice. “And everybody on your toes. The Popovs’ll be coming soon.”

  “Yer,” Schulze added, “and, remember this, they won’t be bringing yer hot giddiup soup either! So keep yer eyes skinned, ponemyu?”1

  “Ponemyu,” the sentry said automatically. While the rest of the patrol scrambled into the trench and wound their way to the ‘warming bunker’, von Dodenburg and Schulze set off towards Handgrenade Rock, heads bent and mouth shut against the blizzard. They skirted ‘Cockup Corner’, where their own Stukas had wiped out a platoon of III Company; past the ‘horses’, three dead artillery mares, a dead sergeant slumped over the middle one, frozen for eternity, and plodded on to the Rock, which stuck up from the white desert like a gigantic potato masher. They pushed aside the stiff tank tarpaulin which covered the entrance to the dark little bunker, built against the side of the big rock which formed one wall, and coughed at the fug. The Vulture was sitting on a tank seat, ripped from some immobile Mark IV, his frost-bitten right foot propped up on a case of 75mm ammunition. In the dark corner Metzger was poking with his bayonet at a smoking fire, made of frozen horse manure and ration boxes. On the dirt floor next to him there was an open tin of grits and several slices of dark bread.

  “Welcome,” the Vulture said, as if there was nothing in the least unusual about his headquarters or their own filthy appearance. “Metzger, a glass of creme de crime for Captain von Dodenburg and Schulze.”

  Metzger dropped his bayonet and picked up the five-litre oil-can containing the home-made spirits. He poured them two canteen cups half full of the liquid, made of looted medical rubbing spirits and the jam issued to the troops. They took the metal cups gratefully and took a deep gulp.

  “You hungry?” the Vulture asked, when they had finished their drinks. Metzger had started toasting a piece of thawed-out bread on the end of his bayonet. “There’s shit on shingles.”2

  “No time, sir. The balloon’s going to go up at any moment.”

  “Go on. What did you find out?”

  Von Dodenburg fumbled in his pocket and dropped the metal insignia on the map table. “325th Rifle Division and the 60th Cavalry. Cut them off their dead last night, only four kilometres away from the river.”

  “Tanks?”

  “I don’t know sir. We didn’t hear any last night.”

  “But we did see horse tracks in the snow,” Schulze butted in.

  The Vulture tapped the map in front of him thoughtfully. “So that’s three positive identifications – the two rifle divisions – the 325th and 31st – and th
e cavalry division.” He tugged at his monstrous nose. “It doesn’t look good. Three hundred of us holding a front that should be the responsibility of a division and now this – perhaps thirty thousand Russians ready to jump on us!” He slapped the map. “God knows what those damned base stallions at headquarters are up to! Why can’t they leave this sort of job to the stubble-hoppers? We’re armour – we’re bloody well wasted here!”

  Von Dodenburg knew that the Vulture was not afraid of the odds; his mind was too full of decorations and promotions to concern itself with the emotion of fear. His major preoccupation was ensuring that the Wotan was not wiped out in some purposeless operation which would not further his career. “What are we going to do, sir?” he ventured.

  “What the devil can we do?” the Vulture said angrily. “We’ll just have to sit it out here and see what happens.”

  It had been a long frightening night. All along the vast horizon, the Russians had lit hundreds of braziers. But not to warm themselves. Indeed nobody could be seen round them. They were being used to dazzle any possible German observers, while everything else was plunged into darkness through which the Russians brought up more and more reinforcements. Now even the thickest of the peasant ‘booty Germans’ knew that the Russians would soon attack. Still some of them had been able to sleep, curled up in the ice-holes, covering themselves up with everything they could find, while the more nervous played skat in the flickering light of a ‘Hindenburg Candle’ or if they were lucky by that of a lamp-heater, which operated on both gas or paraffin. The lamp-heater was a much prized possession; and there was a story going the rounds that the Wehrmacht was working on an improved model which would dispense endless streams of good Munich beer.