Cauldron of Blood

by Leo Kessler

  ‘Shit on the shingle,’ Matz whispered out of the side of his mouth, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte!’

  The strange officer touched the large bandage at the side of his jaw and then hesitantly took what looked like a cork out of his mouth. ‘I speak with difficulty,’ he said carefully in good German. ‘The Reds shoot me here.’ He indicated the bandage. ‘My jaw, it is wired. The cork I need to keep the bones in place.’

  The Golden Pheasant breathed out a sigh of relief. ‘Thank God, you speak German! I thought we had landed...’ he hesitated, ‘I don’t know where I thought we had landed.’ The fat man thrust up his belly and said as proudly as he could with his shattered jaw. ‘You are with the Blue Division, Regiment El Alcazar,’ he announced. ‘I am Commandante Almazen. Welcome to my regiment.’

  So that’s who they were, Schulze told himself. He had heard of these Spaniards who had been ‘volunteered’ by Franco, the Spanish dictator, to fight against the Ivans for Hitler. The Blue Division was generally reckoned to be as fanatical as they came — and by the looks of the little Napoleon facing them, the rumours were not far wrong.

  ‘We are from SS Assault Regiment Wotan, Major,’ Schulze said hurriedly when no one spoke. ‘We were cut off. Now we’re trying to make our way back to our regiment.’

  Little Napoleon took the cork from between his front teeth. ‘You were,’ he said calmly and replaced the cork hurriedly, as if he thought his upper jaw might fall down and remained clamped there for good.

  ‘What do you mean, sir?’ the Golden Pheasant stuttered, fear written all across his fat face. ‘I am Gauleiter Kirn. I must return to my Gau at once. These men are now acting as my bodyguard.’

  Schulze flashed the Golden Pheasant a quick look of admiration. The fat bastard was thinking on his feet.

  The Spaniard was not impressed. ‘Every man is needed here,’ he said. ‘I have heard of the SS. They are good soldiers. Almost as good as the men of Regiment El Alcazar. You will stay here and hold the Citadel.’

  ‘The Citadel?’ the other three echoed.

  ‘Here. This building.’ The Little Napoleon slapped his hand down hard on his desk.

  The three of them started.

  ‘My regiment is named after our heroic defence of the fortress of Alcazar against the Reds during our civil war. There we held off the Red scum for months, even though we had to eat rats and cats to do so. But we beat them, and here we will beat them again!’ Hastily he slipped in the cork and rested for a few moments, obviously taxed by so much talking, his eyes staring at them with haughty imperiousness — like the Little Corporal himself might have done from some heroic painting by David.

  After a few moments he recovered. Removing the cork, he waved a fat beringed hand at them. ‘Dismiss now. You will be told your duties later,’ and with that, the little soldier with the bayonet was ushering them outside, crying that word which they would come to hate, ‘Adelante... adelante, hombres....’

  ‘Well, what do you make of it, Schulze?’ the Butcher asked morosely, as they sprawled there in the dirty straw in the big shed that ran the length of the back of the ‘citadel’.

  ‘Not much,’ Schulze grumbled, as he cleaned the dirt from beneath his yellowing toenails with the point of his bayonet, delicately depositing the result in the straw next to him. ‘Fanatical little bastards they look to me, even if they are only spaghetti-eaters.’

  ‘That you can say agen,’ one of the other men crowded in the big room agreed.

  Schulze looked across at him. Like the rest of the German soldiers which the Spaniards had trapped in the little town he was from one of the elite divisions that had been decimated in the battles of the previous week. Around his sleeve he wore the armband of the Hermann Goering Division.

  ‘What you say, flyboy?’

  The bearded heavy-set sergeant from Reichsmarschall Goering’s own division ignored the insult. ‘I said they were tough bastards. They won’t make dust like we did. They’re already down to eating roof-hare, dead men’s feet and giddi-up goulash but they’re going to stick it out to the bitter end.’

  ‘What’s this shitting Alcazar business?’ Schulze asked, leaving off cleaning his toes, now that he had found someone among the exhausted apathetic Germans who lay in the dirty straw who seemed able to give him some information.

  ‘During their civil war, back in ’37, I think — I was down there myself with the volunteers,’ he guffawed at the word, ‘of the Condor legion at the time — a bunch of their regulars and some guardia civil were caught up in this mountain fortress with a lot of wet-behind-the-spoons cadets. Well the Reds soon had them surrounded and even put the commandant’s son on the phone to his father to tell the old man they’d slit his throat if he didn’t surrender the fortress. But the commandant didn’t and so they held out for months against all the shit the Reds could toss at them. It became a big thing in Spain. The spaghetti-eaters go in for that kind of self-sacrifice bit, something to do with their religion, I shouldn’t doubt. Any road, all of their officers want to do the same. ‘

  ‘Do you mean that pot-bellied Little Napoleon really thinks he can hold this place against the Popovs?’ Matz asked in amazement, lowering the match which he had been running along the seam of his shirt, trying to kill the lice which were housed there in flannel comfort.

  ‘Sure,’ the Hermann-Goering man said easily.

  ‘But does he realize I am an important man?’ the fat Golden Pheasant blustered, his heavy jowls shaking. ‘I am personal friend of the Fuhrer....’

  ‘Don ‘t piss yer pants!’ Schulze interrupted crudely, more interested in picking the Hermann-Goering man’s brains than the fat Party official’s protestations. The Golden Pheasant stuttered into an outraged silence and Schulze continued with his questions.

  ‘But why haven’t you fellas done a bunk? Let him play Napoleon if he likes, that’s his neck. You boys from the Hermann Goering and the Grossdeutschland,’ he pointed to a group of snoring soldiers who bore the armband of that elite infantry division, ‘ain ‘t exactly made of sugar. you could have slung yer hook easy, you know the drill.’

  ‘Sure,’ the Hermann-Goering man’s face creased in a weary, cynical smile. ‘That is if you’d like to enjoy a lead breakfast.’

  ‘Lead breakfast?’ Schulze echoed.

  ‘Yeah, out back of town he’s got a line of moros — that’s black niggers from Africa to you — armed with machine guns. They’d mow you down as soon as give good day. Yer see we’re Christians and they’re Mohammedans — and they hate the lot of us, Popovs, spaghetti-eaters, Germans. It don’t mean anything to them, ’cept that we ain’t mule-suckers like them.’ He sucked his teeth and spat into the straw next to his holed dice-breakers. ‘There’s no way past those shitting moros, believe you me.’ He lay back and closed his eyes, as if he were sick of the whole miserable business and wished to blot out the world for good.

  Schulze frowned and pondered the information. It would not be long now before the Popovs hit them. Of course the Little Napoleon hadn’t a chance in hell of holding the place, but he’d try and a lot of good boys would go hop while Little Napoleon earned his little footnote in the Spanish history books. What the hell was he going to do? For the time being it was pretty obvious the spaghetti-eaters would keep them under guard in this place, until the balloon went up and there would be no other alternative for the Germans but to fight; then it would be either kill or be killed.

  But then it would probably be too late. If he was going to get the boys out of this shitty Popov trap, he would have to do it before the Russians made an appearance. But how?

  TWO

  One by one the Cossacks filtered into the trees and reined in their weary mounts, the steady stream of heavy, wet snowflakes muting any sound they might make.

  Ivan the Terrible, as he was called behind his back by his half-wild horsemen, slid gratefully from his horse and beckoned to his second-in-command. ‘Sotnik — personal reconnaissance.’

  The Sotnik, as weary as he
was after twenty-four hours of hard-riding behind the Fritz lines, did not argue — you never argued with the huge, black-bearded Ivan the Terrible, whose hot-temper was legendary among the ranks of Red Cossack Corps. Why after the trick the Fritzes had played on them at the kolhoz the other day, he had personally flogged the surviving horse-minder, even though the man had been severely wounded by the Fritz bandits!

  Together, the two officers, the Sotnik dwarfed by his mighty commander, crawled carefully through the snow-heavy firs to the top of the hill from whence they could overlook the town below.

  In silence the two of them swept the place with their binoculars, repeatedly wiping the lenses free of snow, identifying the fortified positions, attempting to roughly estimate the enemy’s strength, while the snowflakes beat down upon them in relentless fury.

  ‘By the Black Virgin of Kazan,’ Ivan the Terrible cursed finally and rose to his feet, allowing the binoculars to fall back on his barrel-chest. ‘You’d think the Fritzes were digging in for eternity!’

  ‘Do you think they’re going to make a stand, Comrade Major?’ the Sotnik asked hesitantly, treating the unpredictable giant with kid-gloves as always.

  Ivan the Terrible tugged at the ends of his thick spade-like beard, which was trained to end in two points that he had begun to braid in the old Czarist Cossack fashion, his cruel dark eyes reflective. ‘Tavorisch Sotnik, I believe they are. Horoscho!’ he slapped his knout against the side of his riding boot. ‘There is only one way to find out, isn ‘t there.’

  ‘How comrade?’ the Sotnik asked, already knowing the answer and telling himself the major must really be crazy to attempt to attack a fortified position in this weather with a handful of cavalry.

  ‘By attacking them!’ He raised his voice. ‘Cossacks, mount up, we’re gonna pay fat Fritz a little visit....’

  *

  Schulze morosely peered out of the door at the softly falling snowflakes. He had bribed one of the spaghetti-eaters to let him out of their prison and now he was deciding whether it was worth risking getting cold and wet in order to have a look at the lie of the land. Despite the snow and the fact that this morning he had eaten nothing more than a couple of dead men’s feet, smeared with a trace of rose-hip jam, he decided that he had to make the effort on behalf of his comrades — though most of them were already back on their straw-beds snoring their heads off, as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

  Tucking his head deep into his collar and thrusting his hands into his pockets, he started to trudge through the miserable, war-torn streets of the Russian town, asking himself as he always did when he chanced to visit such places, why the Fuhrer had ever decided to conquer Russia. The place was cold, miserable, and the women looked like stokers with tits. Not that there were any Popov slits around today. They had long vanished from the scene.

  He left the ‘Square of the October Revolution’, as the central squares were always called in Russian provincial towns, and headed west. Here and there he glimpsed a spaghetti-eater crouched over a miserable fire, his pale southern face peaked and mean in the biting cold. ‘Poor shits,’ he’d mutter to himself, telling himself the next moment, however, that they wanted to be heroes. Well, heroes had to suffer....

  He passed from the centre to the shabbier isbas with their straw roofs and fading white picket-fences, which you always found at the edge of Russian towns. Most of them seemed empty, but he was not going to risk trouble by investigating them, though he did file the places mentally as a good starting point for any Wotan break-out to the west.

  Time passed. The snow became heavier until he could hardly see more than five metres ahead. The snowflakes zipped through the air now like white tracer. He decided he’d go on for another five minutes then he’d turn back. There was not much he could do in this kind of weather.

  Abruptly he stopped, becoming aware of men talking in harsh gutturals with much clicking of tongues, which he knew instinctively wasn’t Spanish. After a moment he started to advance once more, but more cautiously this time. To his right, he felt warmth streaming out through the white fog. He turned in that direction, the voices getting louder. He stopped again.

  Some ten metres or so from where he crouched, there was a small line of men, their faces glimpsed through the whirling flakes, hard, black and cruel, each man clutching a large piece of firewood in one hand, with his weapon slung over his other shoulder. The moros! The religious fanatics whom the Little Napoleon relied upon to keep the Germans in their positions once the shit hit the fan. But what were they doing standing out in the snow? And what was the purpose of the firewood?

  In spite of the miserable cold, Schulze was intrigued. Backing off, he crept round the side of the little thatched hut, an unusual yet familiar sound starting to impress itself on his trained ears — the regular rusty squeak of ancient bedsprings.

  Cautiously he approached a little cracked window to the back of the isba, the noise becoming louder and awakening a vague longing in his loins. ‘Down boy,’ he whispered to himself. ‘You won’t be riding that particular mare this day, I’ll be bound!’ He paused and ducking lower hurried across the space between the cottages to the one he sought. He raised himself and peered in through the dirty cracked window. ‘Grosse Kacke am Christbaum!’ he cursed at the sight which met his eyes there.

  A great, gross woman lolled on the little bed the but contained, wearing a steel helmet and puffing a little soldier’s shag-pipe, while she stared morosely and in obvious boredom at the wattle ceiling. Rising wearily from her lower body which was naked, save for the soldier’s jackboots on her sturdy legs, one of the black men was pulling up his pants, obviously satisfied, as a comrade thrust the piece of wood he had been carrying into the purple-glowing stove and began to rip open his flies.

  Schulze breathed out hard. Little Napoleon had seemingly found the best method of keeping his black-faced fanatics happy and loyal — the mattress polka! He licked suddenly dry lips, as the next man mounted the gross mountain of female flesh, looking a little like some native porter toiling up the snow-covered slope of Mount Everest, while the woman, preoccupied with her obviously gloomy thoughts, puffed ruminatively at her pipe and stared at the ceiling.

  Schulze grinned and told himself he and the Wotan boys could use a bit of that too. He hadn’t knocked off a piece of salami for so long, that he had now begun to think Matz was quite beautiful. But how was he going to do it?

  But before the big NCO could give any further consideration to that particular thought, the sudden muffled beat of galloping horse-hooves and the thick triumphant cry of the Ivan attack awoke him to the new danger.

  He whirled round, already fumbling for his machine pistol while at the door the moros scattered wildly, pelting madly through the deep snow towards their dug-in machine guns.

  Cossacks were streaming towards them, the thin winter sunshine glinting on their silver sabres, as they whirled them around their fur capped heads, tossing the curved swords from hand to hand, bending low over alternate sides of their sweating mane-flying mounts, like some trick rider at a circus.

  Schulze dropped to one knee, pressing himself to the hut and fired a quick burst from the hip. But the Cossacks were still out of range. His slugs stitched a pattern in the snow some fifty metres before them. But his burst had its effect. The Cossacks split into two groups, screaming with excitement, bodies bent low over the necks of their horses, obviously aiming at coming on both flanks of the outlying isbas and cutting them off. Schulze realized his danger. Unless the moros could get their guns into action soon, which he doubted, the Cossacks would be in among the huts, slaughtering everything that they ran into. He did not fancy being carved by some hairy-arsed Popov. It was time to make a run for it, back to the town’s main defences.

  He was about to do so, when a thick, booze-heavy voice cried in German, ‘Well, don’t stand there like a wet fart waiting to hit the wall, help me!’

  He spun round. It was the whore, hastily pulling on a pair of field-gr
ey trousers, while her last customer, pants wrapped around his neck, black rump naked to the icy cold, pelted past her heading for his comrades. Schulze acted instinctively. He knew he would never be able to make it with the whore. The Cossacks were already in among the fleeing moros. He caught one last glimpse of a black-bearded Popov giant leaning low from his flying mount and neatly slicing off one black cheek from the running man, then he gave the whore a shove which sent her careering back into the isba.

  ‘What in three—’

  ‘No time for that now,’ he panted, as she slammed into the wall, her whole massive bulk trembling like jelly with the impact, and flung home the heavy wooden post which barred the door. ‘The Popovs are all around us!’

  ‘Will they abuse me?’ the whore-cried in a shrill falsetto.

  ‘Abuse!’ Schulze began in disbelief, but the rest of his words were drowned by the first crazy bursts of machine gun fire and the screams of the moros going down beneath the flashing sabres of the Cossacks. ‘Get down, for Chrissake, get down and—’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Pray to mother. The shits are everywhere now!’

  Schulze flung himself down to the dirt floor of the cottage at the same moment as a burst of machine gun fire shattered the little window, showering the whore’s great heaving bulk with glass.

  Together they lay there, while outside the Cossacks rode back and forth among the isbas, slashing and cutting with their deadly sabres, running the moros down, riding full tilt into the but in which they were hiding more than once, unable as they were to control their crazed mounts in the confused slaughter of the black men.

  ‘Will they find us?’ the whore quavered, over and over again, as flying hooves halted just in front of the hut and they could hear the hoarse exultant cries of the triumphant riders outside the barred door.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ Schulze soothed her in a whisper, getting a quick feel of her mighty right udder. ‘They’re very gentle with virgins, they tell me.’