by Leo Kessler
The first question was answered for him a moment later when the Sergeant-major bellowed: ‘Sir, I’ve found the route map.’
Greul straightened up and looked at the big NCO, crying, ‘Excellent, Meier, you have done—’ The words froze on his lips when he saw what Meier was holding in his other hand.
It was a severed head, complete with Russian Army cap — and the cap bore the insignia of the Red Army’s Alpine Corps!
THREE
Colonel Stuermer sat on the ration box in his tent, waiting, and listening to the lazy evening buzz of the camp around him. The big officer in his mid-thirties, who had been one of Germany’s leading climbers before the war, always savoured this moment of peace. It reminded him of all the countless times on some ascent or other when he had really been able to let himself go, smoke his pipe, drink his coffee or eat some awful mess of strawberry jam and condensed milk, and forget the awesome responsibilities of leadership.
Stuermer loved the mountains. He loved the physical effort, the danger, the skill and craft one needed, the wealth of memories and the friendships that they created. He liked the responsibility they had thrust upon him, too: the responsibility for a group of brave men, who had to be commanded, not by orders but by example, real leadership and firmness.
But most of all, the mountains meant dignity and freedom for him; removed from the loud, jackbooted, cheap vulgarity of the National Socialist 1,000 Year Reich: clean, wholesome, eternally wrapped in the silence of the deep snow. The mountains, or so it seemed to him as he sat there, quietly puffing his pipe and listening to the sounds of the camp settling down for another night of war, were the last refuge from the evil tide of arrogant aggression, which in these last three years had engulfed the whole of Europe. They were the final escape.
‘Sir!’
Stuermer shook himself out of his reverie. Greul was standing at the open flap of the tent. He must have just come back from Corps HQ after completing his mission. ‘Come in, Greul,’ he snapped, a sudden look of anger on his thin face. ‘I want to talk to you.’
Greul entered and replaced the flap carefully. It would soon be dark and the major took the Corps blackout regulations seriously, although the enemy air force had not attempted to bomb them yet, and this was 1942, the second year of the campaign against the Soviet Union.
‘Sit down,’ Stuermer indicated the other ration box, ‘I’ve something to discuss with you.’
‘About this afternoon, sir?’ Greul said eagerly, as if he could not contain his excitement.
‘Exactly.’ Stuermer pointed the end of his pipe towards his second-in-command angrily, as if it were an offensive weapon. ‘What in the name of the great whore of Buxtehude were you trying to do this afternoon on that face?’
The excitement vanished from Greul’s haughty arrogant face. ‘You mean the pendulum, sir?’
‘I damn well do, Greul! You know I’ve forbidden that kind of trick in this unit.’
‘But Meier—’
‘Even alpine eagles could get vertigo up there. What if that big ox of a Bavarian rogue, Meier, had got dizzy or lost his balance, Greul? Where would you — and probably he, too — have been then? I’ll tell you,’ he snapped, answering his own question. ‘You would have been a nasty mess on the valley floor, that’s where you would have been!’
‘Sir, with all due respect,’ Greul sneered, ‘one can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. In this world one has to take risks to achieve success. Hasn’t the Führer himself said many times that only a nation which thinks heroically can win through?’
It was on the tip of Stuermer’s tongue to tell Greul what he thought of his damned Führer and such foolishness. But he knew that loyal as Greul was, he was first and foremost a National Socialist. He would not hesitate to report his commanding officer to the Gestapo. Therefore, he snapped instead, ‘The Führer is not a mountaineer, Greul. We are, and in my unit at least, unnecessary risks will not be taken.’ He looked at Greul’s flushed face with his hard eyes and said, ‘Do you understand that, once and for all?’
Mutely Greul nodded his head, his grey eyes fixed on his dusty mountaineering boots.
For a few moments, Colonel Stuermer let him stew in his juice, while he listened to Ox-Jo telling one of his disreputable stories to his laughing cronies in what the big NCO probably imagined was a subtle whisper. Finally he broke the heavy silence in the tent. ‘Light the lantern, Greul, would you please?’ he asked in his normal, polite voice. ‘I want to talk to you a little about tomorrow’s programme.’
Obediently Greul did as he was commanded, avoiding his C.O.’s eyes as he did so.
Stuermer pretended not to notice. Instead, he spread the little chart in front of him on his knees, saying, ‘I don’t think I am revealing any great military secret or showing any special insight, Greul, when I tell you that it is certain that the army is going to go over to the offensive pretty soon.’
Greul, a little more at ease now, nodded his agreement.
‘And it is obvious where we’re heading — for the Caucasus and the Ivans’ oil.’
Again Greul nodded his agreement. Outside Meier was saying: ‘Then I put my hand up her skirt and you know what I found?’
‘Now the question for us is what role will the High Alpine Corps play in the coming offensive?’
‘That she’d got two of them?’ a voice queried amid a burst of raucous laughter. Stuermer recognized it as that of Jap, Meier’s half-breed running mate. Stuermer smiled and Greul frowned severely. ‘Prig’, Stuermer told himself and went on to answer his own question.
‘So far I haven’t been taken into General Dietl’s confidence, but one does not need to be a clairvoyant with a crystal ball to guess what it will be. The Alpine Corps will probably be given the job of securing the left flank — the one based on the mountains — of our advance, and Stormtroop Edelweiss undoubtedly will be assigned the mountains to check that the nasty Ivans don’t attempt any flank attack with their own alpine troops. Now tomorrow I want the men to practise an emergency climb—’
‘But sir,’ Greul interrupted, unable to contain his excitement any longer, ‘there will be no need for an exercise tomorrow.’
Stuermer looked keenly at the major. ‘What do you mean, Greul?’
‘We are both summoned to meet with the Corps’ Commander tomorrow morning at eight hundred hours, sir. General Dietl told me to tell you — and also to have Stormtroop Edelweiss on a two-hour stand-by.’
‘Action?’
Greul’s grey eyes flashed with excitement. ‘It looks like it, sir.’
‘But, Greul,’ Colonel Stuermer objected, ‘the army is not ready to move yet. The units are not all in position by any means, and the necessary supplies are not available in sufficient quantities. My guess is that we will not be able to launch our attack into the Caucasus for another couple of weeks yet.’
‘I agree, sir. I think it is something else — perhaps something connected with what we found in that wrecked Russian plane this afternoon.’
‘What do you mean?’
Swiftly and eagerly Greul explained how he and Meier had found the dead Russians and how one of them had been wearing the uniform of the Soviet Alpine Corps. Colonel Stuermer sat silent for a few moments in thought after Greul had finished, obviously absorbing the information the major had just given him.
Then he said, ‘So you feel that the dead Russian officer was engaged on some sort of recce of the mountains?’
‘Yessir.’
‘But to what purpose?’
‘To launch some sort of flank attack, is my belief,’ Greul answered swiftly, ‘and my guess is that General Dietl is going to ask us tomorrow, sir, to get up into the mountains and stop them.’
Colonel Stuermer shook his head. ‘Impossible, Greul,’ he snapped. ‘The Russians are on the run everywhere. They are in no position to attack in strength, as you well know. No, an attack is out of the question.’ He pointed the stem of his pipe at the major. ‘My guess i
s that probably the dead Russian was trying to find a stop-line — one of the high passes up there in the mountains — where they could stop any attack on our part over that terrain. Yes, that will probably be it, Greul. Tomorrow morning General Dietl will most likely ask us to find and occupy that stop-line before the Russians do. Yes, that will be it.’
Major Greul still seemed doubtful; and in the event both officers would be proved wrong on the morrow. Yet, when Greul had gone, Colonel Stuermer, sitting alone in the tent, sucking moodily at his cold pipe, felt none of the Major’s elation at the prospect of fresh action. Instead, he experienced that old sinking feeling of apprehension at the knowledge that he must soon lead good men to their deaths…
FOUR
‘Meine Herren, der Kaukasus!’ the craggy-faced, skinny Commander of the High Alpine Corps rasped in his thick Bavarian accent, and slapped the map in front of him with his scarred mountaineer’s hand. ‘At present our troops are stretched across a somewhat loose front between the River Kuban — here in the north — and the Black Sea — in the south — poised, as you can see, at the entrance to the Caucasus.’
Both Colonel Stuermer and Major Greul nodded their understanding, but said nothing. General Dietl had a notoriously bad temper; he didn’t take kindly to interruptions during a briefing. Instead they sat on the hard wooden chairs in the small room which had once been some Russian peasant’s kitchen and listened.
‘It is an open secret that the Führer’s summer offensive will head into the Caucasus to seize those vital oil fields. Without more oil the Wehrmacht is going to grind to a halt this winter — the Rumanian fields are not enough. Now, as I am sure you have anticipated, the Corps’ mission will be to guard the army’s flank, to prevent any Russian counter-thrust over the mountains and ensure that nothing will bar the army’s progress from that quarter.’
Greul flashed Stuermer a knowing look.
Dietl raised a long finger in warning. ‘However, gentlemen, that is not going to be the task of Stormtroop Edelweiss. The Führer has better plans for your unit, Colonel Stuermer.’ His craggy face broke into a sudden smile, and Stuermer could guess why. Direct attention from Adolf Hitler could only mean that the Führer was following the progress of the Alpine Corps personally and in its turn that could mean possible promotion for Herr General der Gebirgstruppen Dietl. He sniffed, a little contemptuously, and waited for the General’s revelations.
Dietl took his time, obviously savouring whatever knowledge he possessed to the full. ‘In the last two years our Corps has been given some strange assignments in remote places from Norway to Greece, as you both know. We have climbed and fought in mountains far removed from the rest of the Army. But I think I have never been given a stranger assignment than this. In the middle of a total war to assign men to tackle a peacetime climb, and one that most Westerners would give their eye-teeth to attempt!’
Now Dietl knew he had his two subordinates’ attention. Both of them were numbered among the handful of German climbers who had belonged before the war to the international mountaineering élite, ranking with the top Austrians and the British. ‘As you both know,’ he continued, keeping Greul and Stuermer on tenterhooks, ‘Soviet Russia was a closed book to Western climbers before the war. Since the Revolution, no Westerner has ever obtained permission to climb here. The Ivans were always afraid that a Western climber might turn out to be a spy in disguise — they have this almost pathological thing about spies.’
Greul clicked his tongue in impatience, eager to be let into the secret. Dietl ignored the sound, enjoying this moment of suspense. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘the Ivans are no longer in a position to enforce that ruling. We Germans make the rules this year.’
‘Yes indeed, sir,’ Greul interrupted eagerly. ‘But—’
Dietl frowned. ‘I shall explain in due course, Major,’ he said severely. ‘Be patient.’ He tapped the chart again. ‘Here is Cherkassy, the foremost position of our troops at the moment. Not more than two days’ — perhaps three at the most — march from that town, along the valley of the River Kuban, there is the Elbrus.’
Now it was Colonel Stuermer’s turn to interrupt. ‘The Elbrus!’ he echoed, puzzled. ‘What possible military value has that mountain for Germany, General?’
Dietl smiled at him bleakly. ‘None whatsoever, my dear Colonel,’ he answered. ‘It would be impossible for the Russians to maintain any kind of military post up there. The peak is well above the snow line and there are easier passes they could use much lower down if they wished to slip troops through the mountains to attack our flank. No, Mount Elbrus has no military value at all.’
‘So?’ Stuermer asked, a little angry and very puzzled.
‘So, Colonel, my Corps — and in particular, Stormtroop Edelweiss — has been given the honour by our Führer Adolf Hitler of climbing Mount Elbrus. As far as I can find out you will be the first Westerners to do so in this century.’
‘But why?’ both Greul and Stuermer asked in unison, astonished at his announcement that in the middle of a life-and-death struggle between the East and West, they were being asked to go off on a climbing jaunt.
‘Because wars are not always won simply by military means,’ Dietl answered. ‘The war in Russia has dragged on too long. We have lost too many good men here, and much equipment. This year, we must finally break the Russian bear’s back or be broken ourselves. But even though the Russians are still retreating, they have a superiority in numbers which we cannot match. We must, therefore, convince them and their many subject peoples that Germany and its soldiers are unbeatable. The Führer wants a symbol — a symbol of German invincibility, which will have such a tremendous moral effect upon them that they will know, whatever their officers and political commissars tell them to the contrary, that there is no hope for them. With luck, when our new offensive in the Caucasus starts, they will break, and come flocking to our colours in their thousands — their hundreds of thousands — as they did in 1941 when we broke through and drove for Moscow.’ His voice rose with excitement. ‘“Give me the conquest of Mount Elbrus, gentlemen, and I. will guarantee you the conquest of the Caucasus” — those were the Fiihrer’s own words to me yesterday on the telephone.’ The Corps Commander’s eyes blazed fanatically. ‘Elbrus, the key to the conquest of Southern Russia. A bold blow carried out by a handful of brave men, which will give our Fatherland all the oil it will ever need and might even mean the end of this war this very year. Don’t you think that is a gamble worth taking?’
‘Of course, General,’ Greul responded to Dietl’s enthusiasm readily, his own flinty grey eyes gleaming wildly. ‘We Germans will show the world that we are unbeatable; that neither man nor nature can stop us!’
Colonel Stuermer’s face remained cold. He did not share the other two men’s vulgar dream — the conquest of a peak as a symbol of national superiority. For him it was yet another example of National Socialist Germany’s contemptuous élitist thinking. Icily, he said, ‘Naturally Stormtroop Edelweiss will carry out any mission assigned to it, sir. But aren’t you forgetting one thing, General?’
‘And what is that, my dear Stuermer?’ General Dietl asked in high good humour.
‘The fact that yesterday a member of the Soviet Alpine Corps reconnoitred Mount Elbrus. What are we to make of that?’
General Dietl’s look of self-satisfaction vanished abruptly, but he remained silent. He had no answer ready to that particular question.
FIVE
‘Piss pansy!’ Sergeant-major Meier bellowed, as the truck hit yet another hole in the terrible road that led into Cherkassy. ‘Can’t yer watch what yer doing? My kidneys are floating in my throat already.’
Jap wrestled with the wheel of the ancient Opel truck and narrowly avoided a deep rut in the unsurfaced road. ‘Shut up, you Bavarian slime-shitter,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Can’t yer see I’m doing the best I can? It’s not my shitting fault that the shitting Popovs build such shitting lousy roads.’
‘Yer’ll
get a knuckle sandwich planted in the middle of your ugly yeller kisser if you talk like that to me, ape-turd. Don’t yer know you’re in the presence of a senior NCO of the High Alpine Corps.’
‘Up yours!’ was the sweating little half-breed corporal’s sole reply, as he spun the wheel round to avoid another bump.
Meier gave a mock sigh, looked morosely out of the window, and said, ‘No respect these days in the German Army for old long-serving NCOs, who have given their all for Fatherland, Folk and Führer. No respect at all.’
‘What do you think this lark’s all about, Ox-Jo,’ Jap asked, as the outskirts of the town began to come into sight ahead of them — a collection of shabby, white-painted cottages with straw roofs, surrounded by tumbledown picket fences, the gardens almost hidden by the tall yellow sunflowers.
‘Search me, Jap,’ Meier answered, idly glancing at the houses, most of which seemed abandoned. ‘The C.O. told me to get down here and round up what mules I could find — that’s all. The rest of the troop would follow in twenty-four hours. Now what do you make of that?’
Jap changed down before answering, ‘Well, of course, you Bavarians are known to have, bird-brains, so I’ll put it to you nice and simple. If we’re to look for mules, that means that wherever we’re going, it wouldn’t be by truck, right?’
‘Right,’ Meier agreed, eyeing with interest the first woman he saw: a barefoot, dark-haired beauty, with a heavy bosom for such a youngster. ‘She’s got plenty of wood in front of her door,’ he remarked appreciatively. ‘I’d like to get my head between them and go brr!’
‘Perverted Bavarian barn-shitter — she can’t be a day over twelve!’
‘As old as that?’ Meier said, as the girl disappeared from view. ‘Watch yer tongue, you Chinese crap-can, or yer’ll be lacking a set of ears before we get where we’re going.’
‘As I was saying,’ Jap continued, unmoved by the threat, ‘If we’re walking, where are we walking to!’
