Cauldron of Blood

by Leo Kessler

  Cauldron of Blood

  Leo Kessler

  © Leo Kessler 2014

  Leo Kessler has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in Great Britain by Macdonald Futura Publishers in 1981

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  ‘Buy combs, lads, there’s lousy times ahead!’ From: The Sayings of Sergeant Schulze

  ‘If you’re up to yer kisser in crap, it’s wiser to keep yer cake-hole shut!’

  The Sayings of Sgt Schulze

  Table of Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  THE BATTLE OF FEDOROVKA

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  THE BIG BREAKOUT

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  ENVOI

  Extract from Guns at Cassino by Leo Kessler

  ONE

  A fiery white flare hissed into the sky over the snow-bound clearing like a miniature sun. It was the signal!

  The Vulture, wrapped up to his monocle in a great fur collar, looted from the last Russian village that Wotan had crawled through, slapped his riding crop against his boot, and rapped, ‘Major von Dodenburg, answer it before the idiot sets off another flare. Doesn’t the fool know the shitting Ivans are right on our heels!’

  ‘Sir,’ his second-in-command snapped, raising his machine pistol and hoping that the freezing Russian cold had not solidified the grease in the moving parts, fired a burst into the misty sky.

  A skinny figure clad in a thick Russian woman’s padded jacket, but wearing a German steel helmet, slipped from the snow-heavy trees and waved to them to advance.

  ‘Ours,’ Sergeant Schulze breathed a sigh of relief. ‘There must be a crappy sky-pilot up there after all, protecting His SS.’ He looked upwards in mock reverence.

  For six days now the beaten remnants of the demoralized German divisions on the Northern Front had been retreating towards this point, which was marked on the maps of a dozen divisional generals simply with a large ‘E’. For ‘Erika’ was the code-name for the only spot in the broken front, through which the defeated divisions might still escape the deadly Soviet pincers.

  Von Dodenburg dropped into the deep snow from one of SS Assault Battalion Wotan’s surviving halftracks and doubled back awkwardly to where their guide waited, shivering in every limb, an opaque-grey dewdrop hanging at the end of his red nose. ‘How far?’ he demanded.

  The guide, a skinny mournful NCO, looked at von Dodenburg’s tarnished SS runes and the death’s head badge on the battered cap and said, ‘SS?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘My orders are to let the Wehrmacht stubble-hoppers through first,’ the NCO answered. His breath was fogging on the icy air in little grey clouds, as he indicated the long lines of field-greys who were coming to a weary halt around the handful of surviving Wotan troopers.

  Von Dodenburg’s pistol appeared as if by magic. ‘SS Wotan goes first,’ he snarled, his emaciated face wolfish and lethal.

  ‘Natürlich... natürlich,’ the man quavered hurriedly. ‘Of course, sir, follow me.’

  Von Dodenburg waved his arm and then pumped his clenched fist up and down three times — the infantry signal for advance. The drivers, who had been gunning their engines to keep them from stalling in the bitter weather, rammed home first gear and began to rumble forward, the noise of their motors drowning the angry cries of the field-greys. The watching von Dodenburg could not overlook their raised fists and angry faces. There was going to be trouble.

  Pistol clenched in his gloved fist, eyes searching the terrain ahead for the first sign of the Ivans, von Dodenburg plodded through the deep snow at the side of the Wehrmacht guide. Minutes passed leadenly. They emerged from the snow-bound forest onto a rough wooden road made of birch trees. At its start a notice read: ‘HERE BEGINS THE ARSE-HOLE OF THE WORLD! COURTESY THE GREATER GERMAN WEHRMACHT.’

  In spite of his hunger and exhaustion, von Dodenburg grinned. ‘You’re a bunch of cynics up here, eh.’

  The NCO pulled a sour face. ‘If you’d been holding this shining river-line all week Major, you’d be a cynic too. The shit the Popovs have flung at us is unbelievable!’

  ‘You want eggs in your beer, Corporal.’

  They plodded on. Through the grey mist, which thankfully hung over the immense snowfield, von Dodenburg could now see the slow snake of the river and the rough wooden bridges that ran over it. Surprisingly, it was not frozen over.

  The guide seemed to be able to read his thoughts. ‘The Popovs further up-stream keep blowing up the ice. They hope that the floating pack-ice will bring down the bridges,’ he explained.

  ‘I see—’ Von Dodenburg caught his breath suddenly. ‘What the devil?’

  Out of the mist there had loomed the strangest sight he had ever seen in three years of total war. A German cavalry group had obviously stopped there to rest during the snowstorm of the previous night and had been frozen to death. Naturally von Dodenburg had seen plenty of frozen men since the invasion of Russia had commenced the previous year, but never like this.

  Horse and man, frozen rock hard and waist-deep in the snow, they stood like a shocking equine-monument to the horror of war. In the saddle of a big bay, a wounded man slumped, one arm in a sling, his bushy eyebrows white with frost. Next to him sat a lieutenant, bolt-upright in the saddle, as befitted a dashing young officer, his clenched fists still gripped the reins of his mount. Wedged in between the horses were three skinny troopers, dead like the rest, who had obviously squeezed in there in an attempt to steal the animals’ warmth. As for the skinny horses, emaciated by the long flight, they posed like the heroic animals of some 19th century sculpture, heads held high, their tails whipped up by the wind, but frozen into immobility.

  Von Dodenburg swallowed hard and threw a hurried glance at his own men. Their noses dripped icicles too and their sunken eyes were caked with ice and snow. He knew instinctively that they wouldn’t last another day if he didn’t get them across the river to the warm food and quarters of the Wehrmacht which were supposed to be waiting for the beaten survivors over there.

  Now they were at the bridges, three of them. They were terribly fragile constructions, made from wooden rafts and barrels and joined by iron bars some one hundred metres long, which swayed alarmingly every time one of the great ice floes coming down from the Soviet positions slammed into them.

  ‘You’ll have to leave your vehicles behind,’ the morose guide said, signalling with his pocket-lamp to the infantry wading into the slit-trenches on the other bank. ‘They’re too heavy for those bits of pisspot and match-wood.’

  ‘What did you say, Corporal?’ the Vulture rasped, screwing his monocle more firmly in his eye and looking down the length of his great beak of a nose at the corporal from his position in the turret of the halftrack. ‘Eh?’

  Hesitantly the corporal repeated his statement.

  ‘Impossible!’ The Vulture barked in his arrogant Prussian manner, ‘The Wotan never abandons its vehicles!’ He dismissed the man completely. ‘Von Dodenburg, I want you to ensure that none of that rabble...’ he indicated the massed field-greys with a contemptuous wave of his riding crop, ‘... block the bridges until Wotan is across. We will use all three bridges.’

  ‘All three,’ the corporal began to
protest, but then thought better of it.

  ‘And you, sir?’

  ‘I shall cross with the first vehicle. I wish to contact the commanding general on the other side immediately. Wotan must have quarters as first priority.’

  In spite of his weariness, the tall young major smiled faintly. The Vulture was certainly no coward, but when he felt the balloon might go up and there’d be trouble, the CO always ensured that he was the first man to reach safety. ‘I’ll see to it, sir,’ he answered and waving the Vulture’s driver to continue, he shouted to a waiting Schulze. ‘Hey, you big rogue, secure this side of the bridge, I’ll do the same on the other side. As soon as the Wotan is across, make dust.’

  ‘It’s always us little blokes who get the shitty jobs,’ the enormous NCO called back.

  ‘Get on with it, you big rogue,’ von Dodenburg shouted. ‘Here, you can have Sergeant-Major Metzger for morale support.’

  ‘But sir—’

  A suddenly alarmed Butcher started to protest. But the young major didn’t give him a chance to get any further. He thrust his own machine pistol into the Butcher’s paws and said, ‘Let’s not waste words, Sergeant-Major. Get on with it!’

  Now the twenty or thirty surviving halftracks of the Wotan started to nose their way across the dangerously swaying bridges, which creaked alarmingly under the weight of the twenty ton vehicles, watched by thousands of sullen Wehrmacht men, many of whom had already thrown away their weapons in their headlong flight from the advancing Russians. Posted at the end of each of three bridges, the Butcher, Schulze, and his wizened-faced, one-legged running-mate Lance-Corporal Matz could see it would be only a matter of minutes before their panic got the better of them and they’d rush the bridges.

  As yet another halftrack began the crossing, splattering him with mud and snow, the big, broad-faced Hamburger noisily slipped back the bolt of the schmeisser and said aloud: ‘Now gentlemen, let’s not get nervous. You ‘ll get across.’ He slapped the weapon slung across his barrel-chest significantly. ‘And I have no doubt anyone who gets a bit too pushy might find himself swallowing a lead-sandwich.’

  For a few moments Schulze’s threat worked and the field-greys drew back, but almost immediately they started to crowd forward once more, their faces heavy and dangerous with repressed rage. And then it happened.

  Suddenly there was the hoarse cry of a man beside himself with fear. ‘The Ivans... The Ivans are here!’

  ‘You must be meschugge...’ The words died on Schulze ‘s cracked lips. To the right on their side of the river the mist had parted and there, perhaps some half a kilometre away on a ridge overlooking the Erika crossing-point, half a dozen Josef Stalin tanks were poised motionless. There was no mistaking them. They were the latest Popov tanks all right.

  Schulze felt his stomach churn. He half raised his machine pistol, but it was already too late. A panic-stricken group of Rumanians in their tall fur hats bolted towards him. A fist slammed into his chin and caught him completely off guard; he staggered back against the wooden support.

  Next moment, with a great roar of primeval fear, the mob streamed forward swamping the men guarding the bridges, throwing away their remaining weapons as they did so, clawing and grabbing at each other in their attempt to reach the safety of the other side. A halftrack, which had just been about to enter the third bridge, cut a wide swathe through the hysterical Rumanians, but even as they died, horribly mutilated under the whirling tracks, they reached up and tried to cling to the steel sides, eyes wide and piteous, as they died with a plea for help on their lips.

  ‘Schulze... Matz...!’ Schulze, sprawled on the floor and submerged by a mass of screaming fighting fugitives, dimly heard von Dodenburg’s heart-rending cry on the other bank. Then the tremendous thump of the Russian 75 mm cannon split the air and the first huge shell came howling in to drown out every other sound in its murderous explosion.

  One of the Wotan’s fuel bowsers blew up. Its neighbour followed suit a moment later. Flaming fuel streamed down to the river, singeing a black path through the snow and within seconds it became a ghastly burning wave. A group of Rumanians rowing across on a raft screamed and activated their paddles with furious crazed energy. Too late! The wall of flame engulfed them. The oars reared up like fireflies, as the Rumanians tried to beat out the flames which were everywhere. To no avail! Panic-stricken, they dived into the burning water, their heads bobbing up briefly before the infero swept over them.

  The first bridge went up. And the second. The third followed an instant later, and still the tanks fired into the packed masses of frightened men who milled around on the wrong bank of the river. Everywhere the dead lay like broken dolls, trampled on by their comrades, who ran back and forth trying to find some way across before it was too late.

  But it was already too late. Schulze, his head still ringing from the blow he had received, crouched there in a daze watching what looked like a dwarf hobble towards him, its hands held out in bloody supplication. He swallowed hard to repress the bitter vomit — just in time. The thing was a soldier, who had just had his legs and hips blown off — they lay behind him in the snow. Schulze watched it open and close its mouth to suck in air and felt that the horror’s gaze was directed at him. Finally the mouth slacked, the eyes glazed and it was dead, the torso instantly frozen upright.

  Schulze screamed and screamed, the small hairs at the back of his shaven skull standing upright with fright.

  The Kessel of Demyansk had been closed for good...

  TWO

  The wind howled relentlessly across the steppe. It turned the snow drifts into mountain ranges, burying the odd isolated farmhouse or cottage metres below the white surface, turning the remote fir forests into impassable barriers, and swamping the few roads beneath the freezing mass. It was as if some vengeful god on high had decided to obliterate this miserable, war-torn world for good, bury it deep, deep below the surface of the snow to remove it from his angry gaze. For hundreds of kilometres to east and west the steppe seemed dead, abandoned to the storm, devoid of humans.

  But that was not the case. That night, as the Demyansk Kessel was finally sealed off, the steppe teemed with desperate men. Some were in groups, some travelled alone, but all were trying to battle westwards through the howling snowstorm in the vain hope that they could reach the safety of the German lines before the Cossacks caught up with them. German soldiers and Russians who had collaborated with them — men, women, even children, they staggered on, faces frostbitten, feet lumps of ice, bent almost double against the wind, propelled ever forward by the naked desire to survive.

  Some couldn’t keep up. That night the bitter cold claimed countless hundreds of them. Worn out completely they gave up the terrible struggle and sat down to sleep. They never woke up again. Now, as the survivors of the Wotan led by the Butcher and Schulze staggered down the third class road they had discovered leading westwards, the dead lined both sides, frozen upright in many cases, like spectators at some ghastly road race. Time and time again, Schulze, a great raging anger blazing within him because they had been cut off like this in the very last moment, was tempted to blast away at the corpses with his machine pistol. But as dawn finally started to break on the horizon to reveal the immense white steppe stretching as far as the eye could see, he was suddenly glad of the ghastly spectators; for they had become the only visible road-markers. Now the dead guided the living!

  Just after dawn, Metzger the Butcher finally ordered a halt. Numbly he stared around him while the exhausted survivors, some twenty in all, waited expectantly for the Wotan’s senior NCO to come up with a suggestion.

  None was forthcoming. The Butcher, his normally fat, well-fed rosy face now grey and sunken, was frankly lost and afraid. For the first time since the German Army had marched into Russia in 1941, he was on his own, without an officer to tell him what to do. The Butcher was at the end of his tether!

  Finally Schulze broke the heavy silence, disturbed only by the howl of the wind, with one o
f his classical, musical farts that were famous and admired throughout the Wotan on account of their length, strength and variety. ‘Well, Butcher,’ he demanded, ‘are you gonna take root here?’

  The Butcher looked at him, as if he were seeing the broad-faced, cheerful Hamburg ex-docker for the very first time. ‘Butcher, you can’t call me—’

  ‘Shove it, Butcher,’ Schulze interrupted his weak protest brutally, ‘shove it where the sun don’t shine! How long do you think we can stand around like this, with our thumbs up our ass? If I know anything about the Popovs, they’ll be pushing their cavalry into the Kessel already.’ He looked wickedly at the miserable Butcher, ‘And those Cossacks’ll be looking for a big chunk o’ meat like you to sharpen their sabres on.’

  The Butcher, a shadow of his former self, shivered violently and asked, ‘But what can we do, Schulze?’

  Schulze did not answer the Butcher’s question immediately. Instead he looked around the circle of shivering troopers, eyebrows white with hoar-frost, icicles hanging from their nostrils and said, ‘Comrades, do you agree that I take over, instead of this cardboard soldier here?’ he indicated the Butcher with a careless jerk of his thumb.

  ‘What yer asking for, Schulzi?’ Matz said scornfully, ‘You know you’ve been running the whole shitting Wotan since the days you were a wet-tail, still damp behind the shitting spoons! Natch, you’re in charge.’

  There was a rumble of agreement from the others.

  ‘Bon, as the spaghetti-eaters say,’ Schulze smiled, obviously pleased with himself. ‘All right, Butcher and the rest of you, listen and listen carefully to what I’ve got to say, ’cos if you don’t I’ll polish yer visage with this.’ He held up a big fist like a steam-shovel.

  ‘I’ll not hide it from yer, comrades, we’re right up to our hooters in the shit this time and it’s not gonna be easy to keep our cake-holes shut. But we’re gonna try. Now Wotan’s been in a Kessel before today and managed to get out, although the Popovs were on all sides. The trick was, as far as I could make out from listening to the Vulture and Major von Dodenburg, to keep in the centre of the shit-thing and keep marching till you found the opening to the sack.’