The Devil's Shield (Dogs of War)

by Leo Kessler

  ‘Piss off,’ Schulze said without rancour. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy, you horrible, garden dwarf!’

  He was naked save for his dice-beakers and pistol-belt. He always maintained that ‘a good soldier’s ready for battle – or bed – at any time!’ And Matz could see that the big sergeant-major was ready for both. Putting his hand on the blonde’s pudding-like breast, he gave it a hard squeeze and stuck his tongue in her left ear, ignoring the red-faced, panting Matz.

  ‘Schulze,’ he pleaded. ‘Come on, get your duds on. You’re needed.’

  ‘Didin’t I tell you piss off?’ Schulze breathed, his voice muffled. ‘I don’t fancy a threesome tonight. Go away into the corner and tackle the five-fingered widow, or have you hurt your wrist again?’

  Matz ignored the insult. ‘Schulze, the CO is going up the walls. You’re wanted on patrol. We’re off up to Height 239 – wherever the hell that is – you, me, the CO and that crazy man Schwarz. Now come on!’

  Schulze took his hand from the whore’s breast. ‘Oh, you piss Henry, Matz, why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘I did, you horn-ox. But you wouldn’t listen. Now in heaven’s name, get on your hind legs and let’s get the hell out of here before the CO has the eggs off us.’

  Clamping his helmet firmly on his big head, Schulze turned to the whore and bowed gravely over her hard calloused hand, as if he were a hero in one of those Viennese operetta films that were so popular that autumn in the Reich, and she were some society heroine.

  ‘Madam,’ he declared, ‘I’m afraid I must leave. The trumpets are sounding and the drums of war are beating. My duty is at the front where I shall ride at the head of my men. Till then I beg you to wait loyally for me. Hark, the cannon are beginning to roar.’ He raised his left leg and gave vent to one of his celebrated farts.

  His voice back to normal, he added. ‘And mind you keep those knees of yours crossed till I get back. I don’t want that dirty old rear-echelon stallion getting it up.’ He indicated the SA man.

  Laughing uproariously, Schulze rushed out into the street, naked as he was, his clothes in a careless bundle beneath his arm, with Matz limping after him as best he could.

  The SA man waited till the sound of their boots on the cobbles had died away completely. Then he raised himself. ‘I’m going out,’ he announced.

  The girls did not react.

  ‘I said I’m going out,’ he repeated.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said the blowsy blonde whore, busy pulling on her black panties again. ‘Take off! Don’t give me a shitty heart attack about it. Piss off!’ She turned round, ignoring him as if he were less than the cockroaches which crawled up the dirty concrete walls of the cellar.

  The SA man clenched his fists. ‘Sow,’ he cursed under his breath. ‘Just you wait. One day soon you’ll be singing a different shitting tune.’

  But he controlled himself in time. Thrusting up his collar, he pushed aside the blackout curtain and stepped into the pink-tinged night. The Jewboys would be very grateful for the information he had about SS Colonel Kuno von Dodenburg – very grateful indeed.

  Notes

  1. GI slang for Pigalle.

  2. Untranslatable phrase. Roughly ‘area of main concentration’.

  3. Armoured tracked vehicles mounting 4.20-mm flak cannons.

  FIVE

  The little VW jeep, driven by Matz, ground by the straggling rows of houses that lined the country road, with Schulze eyeing the apparently deserted street suspiciously, finger on the trigger of his Schmeisser. At the least sign of movement, he would fire. Although they were still within the German lines, the big NCO had an uneasy feeling that everything was not well.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Schulze?’ von Dodenburg sitting beside him asked. ‘Wind up?’

  ‘Of course not, sir,’ Schulze answered firmly. ‘But you can’t be too careful — and I wouldn’t want to drive right into the Ami lines.’

  ‘What? And miss that real coffee and real cigarettes they keep promising us in their leaflets?’ von Dodenburg said.

  ‘They can stick their real coffee and real cigarettes right up their fat Ami arses,’ Schulze growled.

  The little VW left the hamlet. A heavy, unnatural silence, broken only by the persistent rumble of the heavies in the distance, hung over the rough, winding road leading up to Height 239. They passed what had once been a thick pine wood. Now the trees were flattened and the German convoy which had been sheltering in its cover was scattered everywhere – overturned Opel trucks, burnt-out VW jeeps, a shattered armoured car, still glowing a dull-red with the heat, and dead bodies everywhere.

  ‘Oh, my aching back,’ Matz groaned at the wheel, ‘there’s enough roasted meat in that wood to feed half the Wehrmacht for a whole week!’

  ‘Knock it off,’ von Dodenburg snapped, appalled by the sight of half a dozen bodies lying in the nearside ditch, charred black by the intense heat and shrunken to the size of small children. ‘Those poor bastards over there were once your comrades.’

  They drove on in an embarrassed silence towards the height, outlined menacingly against the pink-tinged battlefield sky. Schulze swallowed and licked his dry lips, trying in vain to fight off a sense of foreboding and apprehension. He knew that something was going to happen – that something was wrong. But he could not put his finger on it.

  Lieutenant Wertheim had planned the ambush on the narrow country road leading up to Crucifixion Hill very carefully. He had spread the bulk of his men along both sides of the road in the ditches to a depth of twenty yards. Once the Kraut colonel came driving up, forced to slow down by the hairpin bend site he had selected, one of his men would slip out of the trees and lay a daisy chain of Hawkins grenades to the rear. Even if the Kraut escaped the ambush and tried to back out, his vehicle would run into the grenades. His own guess was that if the Kraut became suspicious and tried to make a run for it, he would bug out to one side of the road, and as he told Fein, ‘The boys will give the bastard what he deserves – a bellyfull of good old American lead!’

  All the same he knew he had to make sure that he had gotten the right man. The success of the Big Red One’s push depended upon their killing the SS colonel. According to Porter, von Dodenburg’s SS Battle Group was the only real fighting force in Aachen. Without him, the defence would fold up and Huebner’s boys would be able to take the city with their eyes closed and one hand tied behind their backs.

  ‘So what do we do, Fein?’ he had asked the burly unshaven Top Kick after they had picked the site of their ambush. ‘You and me have got to check the bastard out. We’ll stop him with this,’ he had indicated the red light and the rough-and-ready German traffic signal he had fashioned during the night in the deserted farmhouse. ‘Once we know we’ve got the right guy, we shout to the men and hit the dirt fast! My guess is that the Kraut will try to break left or right and you know what will happen then?’

  Fein had nodded sagely. ‘Yeah, Lieutenant, it’ll be curtains for the Kraut.’

  ‘You ain’t shitting, soldier.’

  But Lieutenant David Wertheim did not know the men of Wotan.

  Time passed leadenly. Twice there were false alarms. Once a column of ancient nags bearing supplies for the men on the height came plodding by, the steel-helmeted German drivers clearly silhouetted against the night sky. For Wertheim it was a strange feeling to be crouching so close to them, while they passed in weary file unaware that they were being watched by men whom they had once driven out of their country so cruelly that now their greatest desire was to kill so many of their comrades as possible. Half an hour later a motor-cycle combination rattled past, the dispatch-rider’s fat leather pouch clearly outlined against his greatcoated belly. Thereafter silence.

  At about eight, as the Big Red One’s artillery fire started to intensify, he heard the faint but definite sound of a motor grinding up the slope in second gear. Wertheim dug Fein in the ribs urgently.

  ‘It could be them,’ he snapped. ‘Warn th
e guys.’

  Fein slipped his two fingers in his mouth and gave a shrill whistle. Concealed by the bushes, the waiting men crawled into their positions, weapons held at the ready. To the rear, the man with the daisy chain crouched behind a tree ready to slip out and cut the road off, once the unsuspecting enemy had passed. Wertheim clutched the traffic disc in his sweaty palm.

  ‘Stand by with that signal light, Fein,’ he hissed, his throat strangely constricted.

  ‘Wilco, Lieutenant!’

  The roar of the motor came closer and closer. Wertheim felt his heart thumping violently. He swallowed hard and told himself to calm down. For a moment it worked. Then his heart was thumping so loudly again that he thought Fein, crouched next to him, could not help but hear it. Suddenly a little VW jeep swept round the corner and he found himself illuminated in the blue glare of its headlights.

  ‘The signal, Fein,’ he yelled and in the same instant, holding up the traffic disc, added loudly: ‘HALT!’

  Matz hit the brakes. There was a rusty squeal and the VW jeep slowed down rapidly. Wertheim pressed the trigger of his grease gun. Nothing! It had jammed.

  ‘Fein,’ he screamed, ‘hit the bastards – quick!’

  Fein dropped to one knee and levelled his carbine. Too late! Matz, bleeding from a shoulder wound, was reacting as the Wotan men always did, trained by the bloody partisan warfare in Russia where every secondary road behind the line was always liable to be ambushed. Cursing like a lunatic, he crashed home first gear, crouching low over the wheel. Next to him Schwarz let go a wild burst of Schmeisser fire. Behind him von Dodenburg and Schulze, carrying out the anti-partisan techniques automatically, fired into the trees on both sides. Then contrary to Wertheim’s expectations, Matz drove his jeep straight forward. Wertheim flung his useless grease-gun at the roaring jeep. It clattered against the side purposelessly. At the last moment, he sprang to one side. The burly Top Kick was not so quick. He screamed piteously as the corrugated pointed nose of the jeep struck him squarely in the chest. Then he fell under it and the one-and-a-half-ton weight rolled over his body, the left wheel crunching his bearded face to a pulp.

  ‘You sadistic bastards,’ Wertheim screamed, tears of rage streaming down his cheeks. He fumbled frantically for the grenade attached to his belt. From the right a bazooka fired, but the aim was too wild. The projectile struck the cobbles a couple of yards away from the jeep. A shower of fiery sparks. The bomb ricocheted upwards and caught the vehicle in the rear axle.

  The jeep skidded to one side as a tyre exploded. It slewed round in a crazy semi-circle, flinging the occupants of the jeep on to the road in a crazy heap.

  But the veterans of the Wotan reacted quicker than their ambushers in the ditch. They scrambled hurriedly to their feet, firing as they did so. A heavy-set man charged Schulze. He side-stepped and gave him a swift chop across the throat. Another ran at Matz, tommy-gun clasped tightly to his hip. Matz, angry at being wounded for the fourth time and yelping with pain, lowered his hard head and butted him in the guts like an enraged billy goat. The man dropped, gasping hard. Matz bent, seized him by both ears and bashed his bare head against an upturned cobble.

  ‘Over here – for Christ’s sake, over here!’ Wertheim yelled desperately, as the four SS men started to back up the hill firing in short, concentrated bursts. It was a foolish thing to do.

  ‘Get that bastard, Schulze,’ von Dodenburg ordered above the rattle of their Schmeissers.

  Schulze doubled forward, while the other three covered him, swinging their crouched bodies from left to right systematically, as they swept the trees with tracer, keeping their ambushers at bay.

  Wertheim flung his stick grenade. It exploded harmlessly, a good dozen yards behind the big man doubling towards him. All it served to do was to illuminate him momentarily in its blinding red-white light. Wertheim grabbed at his boot. He had his trench-knife stuck down inside. But his trembling frantic fingers never found it. Two hundred pounds of trained muscle crashed into him. He went down with a stifled gasp as a heavy nailed boot smashed into his jaw. Red lights danced before his eyes. Just before he lost consciousness, he felt himself being lifted unceremoniously and flung over the big man’s shoulder. Then Lieutenant David Wertheim blacked out, knowing that Operation Black Guard had failed.

  SIX

  ‘You filthy Hebrew swine – wake up, will you?’ the metallic voice thundered. ‘Come on, you heap of shit, open your eyes!’

  The voice seemed to come from a long, long way away, but there was no mistaking its fervent hatred nor the fact that he was a prisoner in Kraut hands.

  Slowly Wertheim shook his head. It felt twice its normal size. He wiped his hand across his face. He felt something warm and wet. He opened his eyes and stared down at his palm. It was smeared red with blood – his blood. He raised his head. A blurred picture of Adolf Hitler came into view. Then a face – a terrible, mutilated face, one half of which looked as if it had been chewed away by a wild animal. He closed his eyes again, wanting to blot it out.

  ‘Schwarz,’ rasped the voice which had awakened him, ‘make him open his eyes.’

  A small pause. Then a fist that seemed to be made of steel smashed into his unsuspecting face. Wertheim flew against the wall, his chair careening after him. A boot splintered his ribs. He cried out with pain. He let himself go limp to try to minimize the effect of the kicking. It seemed to go on for ever. He felt himself beginning to bleed inside.

  ‘Thank you, Schwarz,’ the voice said, ‘that is sufficient.’

  The man who was kicking him, his breath coming in thick pleasurable gasps, did not respond at once and the metallic voice had to repeat the order before the kicking finally stopped. Wertheim lay there weakly, allowing the warm blood to trickle down his side.

  ‘All right, put him back in the chair, again, will you.’

  Big hands seized him, as if he were an infant and placed him back in the chair. The horrible mutilated face came close to his. The stench of faeces was overpowering. He gagged. But the face did not move away. The one immobile glassy eye bored into his.

  ‘Now, you shitty Yid,’ the cold voice said without any emotion, ‘I am going to ask you some questions and I want the answers to those questions – quickly!’ To emphasise his point, the German grabbed Wertheim’s cropped hair and pulled up his battered face to within inches of his own. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘I’m an American officer – that’s all I can say,’ Wertheim gasped painfully, his tear-filled eyes screwed up with the pressure exerted on his scalp.

  ‘You are a Yid, born in the East Mark1 – and you have absolutely no protection. We can do with you exactly what we want. Then you were dressed in German uniform when we captured you. Even the shitty Swiss Red Cross can do nothing about that.’

  Wertheim said nothing. His mind was racing, trying to find a way out. But he knew his position was hopeless, no better than that of a spy.

  The mutilated questioner seemed able to read his mind. ‘You understand, don’t you Jew? You are a non-person now. A dead man who is still walking around. All that is left to you is to decide the manner of your death.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Wertheim croaked through blood-caked lips.

  Donners relaxed his grip on the prisoner’s dark crew cut. ‘Whether you will die as a human being or whether you are tortured to death like a base animal, Jew.’

  Wertheim understood all too well. But his hatred was greater than his fear. He thought of Rosie and how beautiful she had once looked before she had disappeared into the maws of the concentration camp with its mocking sign above the gate, WORK MAKES FREE. ‘Of course I understand, what you mean, you cripple,’ he yelled angrily. Then his burning rage and fear ran away with him, ‘CRIPPLE … CRIPPLE … CRIPPLE …’ he shouted over and over again.

  In the end Donner had had enough. Trying to control himself, feeling the faeces dribbling out of his ruined body as anger overwhelmed him, he thundered, ‘Schwarz – Schulze, stop the Yiddish bastard, w
ill you!’

  Schulze rolled up his sleeves. ‘All right, Lieutenant, this is where you started collecting your teeth in your cap!’ He doubled his ham of a fist. But before he could bring it crashing into Wertheim’s tortured face, Schwarz, his mouth contorted with rage, smashed his wooden fist down like a club on the nape of Wertheim’s neck.

  The lieutenant screamed shrilly. Like two boxers working out in some dirty backroom gym, beating a punchbag with routine precision, the two SS men began to beat up the American officer, the silence broken only by their heavy breathing and the thud of their fists on his flesh.

  It seemed to go on for ever, but finally a distant voice said: ‘All right, he’s had enough for the time being.’

  The two SS men stepped back, panting. The one who spoke with a Hamburg accent spat on his knuckles as if they hurt. The other one – the officer – stood there motionless, his crazy black eyes full of hate.

  The horrible face loomed up through the haze again. Once more the stench of faeces was overpowering. ‘Listen Jew,’ the metallic voice rasped. ‘I am a professional police officer. I have been all my life. For thirty years I have been used to asking people like you questions and getting the answers to those questions. In the old days in Weimar we had to work more slowly. Now, our methods are a little more streamlined.’ He doubled his fist to indicate what he meant. ‘But in both cases, I always got my answers – even from much tougher people than you, Jew. Do you understand?’

  Wertheim said nothing. His mouth was still full of blood from the gaps where his teeth had once been. Donner paused for a moment, considering how he should phrase the all-important questions. Behind him at the window, Colonel von Dodenburg frowned. He knew how vital it was to elicit the information from the skinny Jewish officer, but he didn’t like methods of this kind. ‘For God’s sake answer and let’s get it over with, Jew,’ he told himself, angry at the Jew’s stubbornness.