by Leo Kessler
Some of his shivering listeners nodded, as they hopped from foot to foot trying to prevent their toes from freezing.
‘All right then, where is the centre?’ With the toe of his boot, Schulze drew a rough circle in the gleaming surface of the new snow and tapped it lightly in three spots, saying, ‘The towns of Demyansk, Fedorovka and Romushevo. They’ll be held by what’s left of our troops and they’ll be the centre ’cos of the main road westwards. That’s where we head for. Now here,’ he drew a straight line in the snow to the left of the circle, ‘is the river line made up of those three rivers whose shitting names I’ve forgotten.’ He nipped the end of his red dripping nose and whipped the liquid artistically from his big fingers into the snow a dozen metres away.
‘Now all of you current-crappers know the generals. There’s nothing they like doing more than holding a river line. It’s what they learn in those fancy military schools of theirs. Hills and river lines. They spent years learning all about them.’
Matz laughed scornfully. ‘Hark at him — Field Marshal Schulze, the Fuhrer’s personal adviser on strategy!’
Schulze took no notice of the little man. ‘So it stands to reason, if our lot are going to stop the rot out here in the Kessel or are preparing to relieve us...’
‘That’s a pious hope, if I ever heard one,’ someone said cynically.
Schulze pretended not to hear and continued with his exposé, ‘... that’s where they’re gonna make their stand — and that’s where we’re gonna head for.’
He fell silent and let them absorb his words, as the snowflakes started to drift down once again. His voice rose, hard and brutal, knowing that he had to impress his will on them right from the start, because what lay before them now was at least two hundred kilometres of sheer hell.
‘I’m not gonna shit you, lads. It’s not gonna be easy. We’ve got to face the weather. We’ve got to face the Popovs... And no doubt we’ll have to face some bloody hero on our own side who’ll want us to fight to the last,’ he emphasized the words with a sneer, ‘under his command. So remember this — it’s every man’s hand against us. We’ve got to have no pity for nobody and nothing except ourselves. From now on lads, it’s march or croak!’ He wiped the snowflakes off his suddenly angry face, as he thought once more of the hopeless mess they now found themselves in. ‘Warschieren oder krepieren!’
He pumped his hand up and down swiftly three times. ‘Advance!’ he barked and without another word, turned and set off across that immense white steppe. Wearily the others followed reluctantly, one by one, as if every single man had been forced to take his own separate decision before he could commit himself to this last decisive step.
The survivors were on their way — tiny insignificant figures dwarfed by that tremendous plain, which seemed to go on for ever...
*
‘Colonel, I wish to speak to you,’ von Dodenburg said, the colour back in his thin cheeks and the eyes no longer so listless after the first good meal he had enjoyed since the Russian breakthrough.
‘Then speak,’ the Vulture said easily. He was sprawled in a heavy leather armchair, his feet toasting in a tin-bath full of hot soapy water, a cigar between his lips and one of his favourite magazines on his lap: a glossy publication regularly sent from Berlin in a plain brown cover and full of high-quality photos of handsome and naked young men.
‘It’s our people who we had to leave behind in the Kessel, sir,’ von Dodenburg began hesitantly as the Vulture eyed him through his monocle, his ugly face a mixture of benevolence and cynicism.
‘What about them?’
‘It’s not only them, but all those hundreds of others who are trapped back there with them. Can’t we do something, sir?’
‘What do you suggest, my dear chap?’ the Vulture said easily, leaning back with a sigh of pleasure and puffing lazy smoke rings into the air above his head.
‘Something on the lines of Peiper’s thrust into the 316th Infantry’s Kessel back in the early winter.’
‘Peiper! That arrogant young swine!’ the Vulture snorted, always jealous of any other SS officer who was being promoted faster than he was. It was pretty obvious that Jochen Peiper of the Adolf Hitler Bodyguard, the premier SS division, was slated to become a general, the Vulture’s dream, before he was thirty. ‘That man has only glory and the next piece of tin in his mind. He’d do anything to win the cure to his throatache.’ He touched his Knight’s Cross anxiously, as if to ensure himself that it was still there and that he had ‘cured’ his own case of ‘throatache’.
‘But sir, if we could get together a task force of armoured cars, halftracks and a few amphibious VW jeeps and ask for volunteers — I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole of Wotan didn’t volunteer — we could be over that river, into the centre of the Kessel, and have carved them out before the Ivans knew what had hit them,’ von Dodenburg said excitedly, willing the hook-beaked CO to approve of his hastily improvised plan to save Schulze, Matz and the rest.
Slowly the Vulture put down his cigar and looked at the flushed young officer coldly.
‘My dear fellow,’ he drawled in his best Prussian accent, ‘do not let your emotions run away with you. They’re lost, don’t you realize that? If they’re not dead already, they soon will be, believe you me.’ Von Dodenburg opened his mouth to protest, but the Vulture held up his manicured hand to stop him. ‘There are no buts, mein Lieber. I value your loyalty to your chaps, but forget them. In due course, you will be able to write to their relatives that they died a hero’s death for Folk and Fuhrer,’ he chuckled softly. ‘What higher honour could be paid to a member of the Fuhrer’s SS? Beside,’ he winked wickedly at the dismayed von Dodenburg, ‘after all they are only common-or-garden NCOs and other ranks, and as you well know, real human-beings only begin with the rank of lieutenant.’
Von Dodenburg rushed out, enraged, in the icy morning, with the Vulture’s cynical laughter still ringing in his ears...
THREE
It was the harsh regular grating noise which first told them that long building, which had obviously once been a modern kolhoz, a collective farm, but which was now buried almost up to the eaves in snow, was occupied.
In spite of his weariness — for they had been plodding through the knee-deep snow for four solid hours now — Schulze was alert at once, every nerve tingling, heart pounding away furiously. Unslinging his machine pistol, he signalled left and right. The Butcher and Matz nodded their understanding swiftly.
Behind them, without being told, the Wotan veterans unslung their weapons and loosened the stick-grenades stuck in their boots or in the deep pockets of their white camouflage smocks. Schulze impatiently waited until they started to steal left and right like sly grey wolves ready to rob the farmer’s coop, then he advanced alone, nerves racing, body tensed for the first burst of Russian fire, getting ever closer to that strange sawing sound and asking himself whether it could be from some lone farmer preparing wood for the great greedy Popov tiled-ovens.
Cautiously, very cautiously, placing his feet down with exaggerated care on the hard squeaky surface of the snow, Schulze approached the icicle-hung window, while the troopers tensed along the length of the wall to left and right, fingers curled round their triggers in readiness.
Schulze drew in a quick breath and popped his head up. The window was snowed up to about three-quarters of its height, so that now he was looking in at the room from above, virtually at ceiling level.
He gasped.
A tall, emaciated man in the bloody rubber apron and gumboots of a surgeon, the glittering light of madness in his eyes, was sawing away at a naked white body on the table in front of him, while a portable heater hissed underneath, its gas jets obviously trying to thaw out the corpse, which was frozen rock hard. Opposite him crouched a fat man in the brown uniform of a Party official, his plump unhealthy face running with sweat, his dark eyes wild with fear, as he waited with a notebook in a hand that trembled crazily.
Schulze gasped again,
as the crazy surgeon dug his scalpel into the corpse and began to make a modified Y incision, cutting nauseatingly from each clavicle inward to the sternum, tracing a dark red revolting line along the stiff white flesh, right down the length of the torso, right to the pubis itself.
Sickened, Schulze turned his head, thinking that man’s most precious adornment might be sliced off too, but when he forced himself to look again, the surgeon had dropped the scalpel short of the penis and taken up a pair of surgical shears. Schulze pressed his head to the window, lifting up the flap of his fur cap so that he could hear better. The surgeon’s skinny arm muscles tensed as he snapped through the rib cage, while the sweating and obviously very frightened golden pheasant tensed with his pencil poised above his notebook.
‘Thoracic cavity, complete absence of subcutaneous fat...’ Schulze whistled softly to himself. He couldn’t understand the words, but he knew they were German all right, both of them. For a moment or two he was held there by a morbid curiosity, as the crazy surgeon snapped through bone and cartilage, before reaching into the centre of the breast and pulling out a heart like a butcher might do that of a pig.
Schulze felt the green bile rise into his throat and threaten to choke him. Hastily he swallowed and heard the surgeon say: ‘Shrunken to the size of a baby’s fist. The man starved to death. I cannot see any other valid reason for this man’s death. Write it down,’ he gestured at the sweating golden pheasant, heart still clutched in his bloody gloved hand.
Schulze had seen enough.
The men were German. They would have food and drink and crazy as the man in the bloody white apron might be, he looked well nourished enough, so did the golden pheasant.
‘All right, lads,’ he called, ‘they’re ours. Get round to the door. We’re going in!’
*
‘Thank God, oh thank God!’ the Golden Pheasant breathed fervently as he glimpsed the death’s head badge on the fur caps and heard the first words of enquiry in his native language. ‘Another day of this and I would have turned through — gone meschugge like him!’ He indicated the surgeon who had not even turned at the rude entrance made by the excited Wotan troopers, but was continuing his strange autopsy, muttering crazily all the time to himself, as he sliced and cut. ‘Even the Ivans would have been preferable to him!’
‘What in three devils’ name is this place?’ Schulze asked, now for the first time becoming aware of the drunken wild singing from the far end of the kolhoz.
‘A madhouse,’ the Golden Pheasant wailed. ‘A complete madhouse! The whole damn bunch of them should be taken away in the rubber wagon and locked up deep below the earth, where they can eat each other up and have finished with this horrible business once and for all.’
‘Eat each other up?’ Matz queried, hardly daring to believe his ears.
‘You heard — eat each other up. Come on, I’ll show you. Now you men are here, I’m safe at last. Come!’
The Wotan troopers followed the excited fat Golden Pheasant until he paused at the end of a long corridor and raised his finger to his lips in warning. Looking slightly absurd, he tiptoed the rest of the way to a small window which gave into what might once have been a long stall used to house the farm’s pigs.
‘Look in there,’ he whispered to a curious, yet apprehensive Schulze, ‘but don’t let them see you. They’re mad. They wouldn’t care that you’re armed. They’ll come for you like a pack of wild animals.’
Schulze peered in and gasped with horror.
Sprawled in the dirty straw of the stall, their faces filthy, hair long and wild, were perhaps a hundred soldiers, gnawing at half-cooked bones, with, in the centre of the stall, a crazed creature in rags roasting what looked like a oversized sausage. But then a second glance told Schulze that it wasn’t a sausage. The man was cooking a human trachea! His horrified gaze swept to the end of the long stall, where a tall burly man in the tattered uniform of a sergeant in the Tank Corps stood, as if on guard, with a club that was made of a long shin-bone.
But it was not the weapon which made Schulze’s stomach churn nauseatingly. It was the material the NCO was guarding, for it consisted of a pile of human limbs, heads with the brains scooped out and torsos, minus livers and kidneys, the tastier parts obviously already consumed by the crazy cannibals in the stall!
Sickened and ashen he took his gaze from the window and asked thickly, ‘God in heaven, what is going on in this place?’
The Golden Pheasant held his fat finger to his lips for silence. ‘I shall tell you in my place, it’s safer there.’
His place was the freezing loft above the long low kolhoz building entered by a hidden ladder, which the Golden Pheasant drew up hastily after the last Wotan trooper had crawled up.
‘Even Doctor Chop-Chop couldn’t protect me when they’re on the prowl for fresh flesh,’ he explained.
‘Chop-Chop?’ Schulze queried settling down gratefully in the straw with which the floor was covered. ‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’
‘The medic you saw at the operating table. That’s what the mob calls him — Doctor Chop-Chop — because he’s always working on those corpses,’ the Golden Pheasant said. ‘Day and night, cutting them open and making me write down those damn nonsensical reports of his.’
The Golden Pheasant wiped his damp brow with a fat hand that trembled violently. Matz licked cracked lips and looked to left and right, as if he half expected one of the cannibals to suddenly loom out of the gloom. ‘Great God and all His Triangles, what in three devils’ name is going on here?’ he asked urgently.
‘I don’t know the whole story. I was on my way back to the front — I’d been visiting the boys of a Baden regiment, my Gau — when my convoy ran into the Cossacks. I managed to escape in the last surviving goulash cannon and landed here.’
‘Get on with it,’ Schulze growled. ‘I don ‘t want the shitting story of your life.’
The Golden Pheasant’s bottom lip trembled and his eyes moistened, as if another hard word might make him break down for good and sob his heart out. ‘You don’t need to be so harsh on me, Sergeant. I was just trying to tell you what I know.’
‘Oh shit on the shingle! Don’t turn on the waterworks now,’ Schulze grunted. ‘If you’re a good little boy, I’ll hold yer sweet little pinkie for yer.’
‘Well, I didn’t know what kind of a place I had found when the snowstorm stopped and I finally landed here with no more gas in the tank of the truck towing the goulash cannon. But I soon learnt. You see, the Commanding General had ordered a select number of corpses of those who had apparently died from natural causes to be brought back from the front. It was Doctor Chop-Chop’s task to find out what those causes really were and he was aided by mainly those wild creatures you saw in the pig stall.’
‘You mean those pigs were medics?’ the Butcher breathed in awe. ‘I’d crap my pants if I landed in their clutches!’
‘You certainly would,’ the Golden Pheasant agreed. ‘So far they’ve contented themselves with the corpses Doctor Chop-Chop hands out to them after he’s finished with his autopsy. But they’re not going to last for ever and then...’ the Golden Pheasant swallowed fearfully, his Adam’s apple riding up and down his fat throat like a lift, ‘... they’ll be looking for fresh meat.’
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ one of the listening troopers said in a thick Bavarian accent and crossed himself hastily.
‘So that mob down there are sitting it out here till the Popovs come, eating up the corpses and hoping they’ll last?’ Matz asked.
‘I suppose so.’
‘And you?’ Matz persisted. ‘Why didn’t you just take off?’
‘I wouldn’t have dared. Once I was out of the protection of Chop-Chop, who dishes out the corpses to them, they’d be after me like a pack of wolves.’ The Golden Pheasant’s whole body trembled violently.
Schulze watched the heavy, shaking jowls, a strange light beginning to dawn in his eyes. ‘Just one thing, my fat Golden Pheasant, how have you managed
to survive so long? Have you been gnawing a little bit of tender human shank?’
‘God forbid!’ the Golden Pheasant exclaimed. ‘I could never sink that low!’ he licked his lips and looked around the circle of emaciated faces uncertainly, as if he were debating with himself whether he should continue. ‘No, you see the truck pulling the goulash cannon was full of cans...’
‘Cans!’ half-a-dozen suddenly enthusiastic voices cried as one.
‘What kind of cans?’ the Butcher demanded harshly, little flecks of spittle suddenly appearing in anticipation at the corners of his big mouth.
‘All sorts,’ the Golden Pheasant said with an easy shrug of his well-nourished shoulders. ‘Sausage, potato-soup, Old Man.’ He rose to his feet and burrowed in the straw to rear of the loft, while they watched, their hearts beating excitedly, to reveal a small mountain of Wehrmacht ration cans. He pulled out one and presented it almost formally to a Schulze, whose lips drooled at the sight of the first meat he had seen for nearly a week.
‘Old Man,’ he croaked hoarsely, ‘a tin of Old Man!’ He clutched the tin to his chest as if it were Holy Grail itself, although the meat it contained was reputed among the troops to be made of the flesh of dead old men collected from the Reich’s workhouses. Then as an afterthought, he bent down and kissed the beaming Golden Pheasant’s gleaming bald head. ‘Golden Pheasant, I love you. Will you many me!’
Next instant, every man of the famished little group had his bayonet out and was stabbing at the lids of the precious tins, cramming the cold sausages and meat-stew down their hungry throats with their dirty, frostbitten fingers, the grease running down their skinny bearded chins, while a happy Golden Pheasant presided over the feast like a broody old hen. Thus it was that they didn’t hear the muffled clip-clop of the horses approaching the kolhoz until it was almost too late...
