by Leo Kessler
Now Colonel Stuermer was no longer cold. His body dripped, indeed, with sweat: the sweat of tension and fear. Now they were well onto the glacier, strung out right across its dull-gleaming surface, with the colonel in the lead, probing with the tip of his axe before he took a step forward, wondering, when the tip went in deeper than it should, whether he dared risk it.
At regular intervals, Stuermer stopped to give his exhausted men a breather and at the same time to check for the tell-tale crevasse shadows. So far Edelweiss had been lucky. They had managed to avoid crevasses and there had not been a single serious fall on the treacherous surface of the glacier. But visibility was bad and he knew he had to hurry his men if they didn’t want to be caught still out on the glacier by the advent of darkness. That would be fatal.
He pushed on, working his way round the hummocks of ice, circumventing the deep ice fissures, taking his life into his hands to spring across the smaller ones and hoping that the thin film of snow on the far side would bear his weight, the knowledge that it was getting progressively darker all the time constantly at the back of his mind.
It was about four that afternoon when it happened. They had just surmounted the highest point of the glacier and were beginning the descent which would place them directly below Elbrus House, which lay somewhere in the gloom a thousand metres above them. Suddenly, completely without warning, the ground gave way beneath his feet. His axe flew out of his startled hand and he was falling at an alarming rate in a great flurry of snow. A jerk, which knocked the breath out of him. The rope around his waist held. But he was still falling. For a moment he panicked. If he didn’t stop soon, that would be that. A second jerk. The rope cut painfully into his stomach. He gasped with both pain and fear. Would it hold? The question flashed through his mind. But the stout rope held, and abruptly he was swinging there wildly, gasping for breath, his startled eyes trying to see in the glowing semi-darkness of the deep crevasse into which he had fallen.
He calmed himself and started to work swiftly. He knew that the pressure of the rope cutting into his waist would render him unconscious in a few minutes if he didn’t relieve it at once. With fingers that were shaking wildly, he fought the Prusik sling, trying to lever it down his body so that he could get one foot in it, feeling the black waves of unconsciousness streaming back and forth, threatening to swamp him at any moment.
Then he had done it and the pressure was relieved from his chest; his weight supported now by the sling around his right foot, the black waves banished. He took a deep breath and hoping that every one above was obeying the standing order in such circumstances not to unrope and try to help him, he surveyed his surroundings. He had fallen into a deep crevasse — how deep he could not tell in the dim glow. But he could make out that the hole into which he had slipped was of the worse kind: broad at the bottom and narrow at the top. It would be a beast to get out of, when the ice walls on either side were far beyond his reach.
Stuermer knew he must get started. The hole was freezingly cold. If he didn’t move soon, his limbs would grow numb and refuse to function. He breathed out hard and commenced the back-breaking, interminably slow ascent up a makeshift ladder of slings. First the weight off one foot, followed by thrusting the Prusik sling higher up the rope which held him, foot back in the sling and jamming the knot. Now the same procedure with the other foot. Higher and higher, the muscles of his arms and legs afire in an agony of pressure, feeling the strength ebb from his lean, trained body, as if someone had opened a tap and let it drain out.
The climb seemed to take an eternity: a nightmarish eternity, an endless numbing time of racked, tortured muscles, with the deadly cold gripping at him with icy fingers, attempting to pluck him into that lethargy of inaction which would be death itself.
With all his mental strength, the source of that power which had made him Germany’s finest climber, he forced himself to drain all thought and all emotion out of his tortured body and concentrate solely and exclusively on each new move, turning himself into a climbing machine.
Foot by foot, centimetre by centimetre, he raised himself up the crevasse, the only sound the harsh rasp of his own breath and the metallic scrape of his boots on the sling. Now it was getting lighter. He was close to the exit. He could hear voices, faint and far away, yet somehow anxious. He fought on. His comrades had not abandoned him.
Suddenly his head bumped into something. He looked up, startled. The rope which was holding him had bitten deep into the overhanging snow lip of the crevasse’s exit! Now the mound of snow barred his way. He would have to clear it in order to get out. But he had lost his axe. He cursed bitterly and for the first time felt like giving in. Bitter tears of self-pity trickled down his ashen, frozen face. How could he get through that frozen mass?
Then, miraculously, the ice began to give. At first it was only slivers which fell onto his upturned pathetic face. But soon the slivers became chunks and he ducked his head into his shoulders in order not to be hurt by the rain of ice.
The voices became clearer. He recognized one of them. It was Jap’s. ‘Get the h—’ he attempted to warn the little corporal, but he didn’t have the strength to complete his warning. Instead he hung there and let it happen.
A few moments later, Jap had broken through and Stuermer was staring up in numb astonishment at the half-breed’s face. For a moment he couldn’t understand what was wrong with him; then Jap gasped, ‘Hurry up, sir. Here’s the rope! That big Bavarian barnshitter is holding me by the feet and I don’t know how much longer he can hang onto me.’
Gratefully Stuermer accepted the rope and looped it round his waist the best he could. Now two ropes held him just under the lip of the crevasse. Jap disappeared. Ox-Jo’s voice commanded, ‘All right, you bunch of wettails — pull!’
Next instant Colonel Stuermer, more dead than alive, felt himself being tugged free from the lethal grasp of the crevasse.
Now it was night, and the utterly weary men, who had managed to cross the glacier just before complete darkness had descended upon them, were squatting in their tents, cooking their evening meal — an appalling mess of oatmeal, cocoa and strawberry jam, generously laced with condensed milk — over the flickering spluttering tommy cookers.
Stuermer had already eaten, thanks to a concerned Ox-Jo, had just finished bathing and bandaging Greul’s hands, which had been cruelly cut when he had been forced to take Stuermer’s full weight at the crevasse, and was now smoking the finest pipe he had ever enjoyed in his whole life.
‘I thought I was going to have to look at the potatoes from underneath that time, Greul,’ he confessed, breathing out a stream of blue smoke pleasurably. ‘That crevasse was a bitch.’
For once the keep-fit fanatic, who abhorred all stimulants, did not object to his C.O.’s smoking in the close confines of the two-man tent. ‘Yessir, it was definitely dicey.’ He winced.
‘Does it hurt, Greul?’ Stuermer said concerned. ‘You should have taken the aspirin.’
Greul shook his head firmly. ‘The new German must learn to accept and bear pain,’ he announced, trotting out one of those National Socialist clichés which Stuermer detested.
For once, Stuermer did not allude to it. Instead, he said, ‘Why don’t you get into your sack, Greul and try to get some rest? It’ll ease the pain. I’ll take first duty. I’ve recovered now.’ He smiled at the other man, whose face was white with pain, his liquid eyes clearly revealing that his hands were burning like hell. ‘Off you go, that’s an order now.’
Without protest, Greul crept into the bag and turned his suffering face to the wall, while Stuermer dressed, took one last long suck at his pipe before putting it out, and crawled into the star-studded, icy velvet darkness of the mountain night.
From the tents grouped behind the overhang, there came the sporadic, hushed talk of weary men, preparing to turn in for the day. For a moment or two, Stuermer listened, reassured to hear that his men were not complaining about their lot, cut off in the middle of enemy territ
ory, attempting to scale an unknown mountain at the idle whim of the ‘Greatest Captain of All Time’, as the National Socialist hierarchy called their Führer without the slightest shame. Instead their talk was that of soldiers everywhere: women, food, duty — and women again. He smiled to himself in the glowing darkness. As long as his mountaineers stuck to ‘subject number one’, as they called women, there would be nothing to fear.
Slowly he plodded through the deep snow, checking the sentries posted all around the little camp. The men were alert in spite of the murderous gruelling day on the glacier and he spent a few minutes with each man, exchanging the usual meaningless conversation that was customary between a C.O. and an ordinary soldier, yet knowing those few minutes meant something to the soldier; it cemented the bond between superior and subordinate.
Now he knew he could have returned to the tent and slept; everything was under control. But the activity and alarms of the day had left him tired in body, yet alert in mind. In spite of his physical weariness, he pulled himself up and climbed over the top of the ledge which hid their camp.
The snow glittered like diamonds in the bright moonlight, and visibility was excellent. Standing these alone, no sound disturbing the silence of the night save the faint hiss of the wind moving over the surface of the snow, he stared at the heights above him. Again he felt that sense of impotence and unimportance when confronted by the enormous majesty of the high mountains, and the immense velvet-Silver sweep of the glowing night sky. How insignificant he — Man — was in the face of Nature! What did human existence, with its petty, squalid, minute progress, signify in such a world? A man’s whole life was nothing but a pin-scratch on the endless wall of history.
Standing there, with the wind brushing the snow against his immobile body, like a supplicant praying in front of some great altar, Colonel Stuermer wished fervently that the war would be over and he could do the only thing he still wanted to achieve in this life: the ascent of that remote ‘German Mountain’1 that had been his dream ever since he had begun climbing.
But Colonel Stuermer’s dream was an idle one. Even as he stared upwards, dreaming a dream that was manifestly impossible, a long boatlike shape emerged momentarily out of the sparkling gloom. It was Elbrus House, and for one instant before it sailed silently back into the night again, Colonel Stuermer saw that lights blazed from its porthole-like windows. His heart sank. Elbrus House was occupied, and that could mean only one thing: fresh bloodshed.
Note
1. See Stormtroop 1 for further details.
TWO
‘Oh, my God—’ Roswitha Mikhailovna caught herself just in time. She must not frighten her Red Ravens. ‘Quick,’ she ordered, ‘bring her inside!’
A half-dozen hands hurried to help the grievously injured woman. Gently they escorted Sergeant Lermintov to the steel table in the centre of the main hail, blood trailing across the hall from her wounded leg, and laid her there.
Roswitha drew her knife. Swiftly and expertly she slit the blood-stained clothing from the sergeant’s gross body, leaving her naked, her terrible wounds revealed to their frightened eyes.
Lydia bent over the sergeant and then drew away, her pretty face wrinkled in immediate disgust.
‘What is it?’ Roswitha asked, dropping the soaked bloody rags on the floor and looking at the gaping wounds in the sergeant’s right leg and right breast, which had been almost shot away.
‘Take a smell at that, Comrade Captain,’ Lydia answered thickly, holding her hand in front of her mouth, as if she might be sick at any moment.
Roswitha bent and smelled the unconscious sergeant’s body. The stench was vile. Bile rose in her throat and she pulled her head away hastily. ‘Gas gangrene,’ she announced. ‘God knows how the poor one managed it this far!’
‘What can we do?’ Lydia asked.
‘Nothing,’ Roswitha said with more conviction than she felt. She knew she must keep her head, set an example. The Red Ravens might well be as courageous as any man, yet they were still women with all their female revulsions at physical disfigurement. The sight of the gross sergeant’s terribly hurt body might well panic them.
Sergeant Lermintov’s eyes flickered, opened, closed and then opened again. It seemed to take her an age to recognize Roswitha Mikhailovna. ‘Drink…drink,’ she croaked…. ‘Drink, please.’
Roswitha clicked her fingers. One of the Red Ravens thrust a bottle of vodka into her hand. Supporting the sergeant’s neck, she raised her and held the bottle to her mouth.
Lermintov gulped greedily at the bottle, gagging, spluttering, coughing as the fiery spirit trickled down her parched throat. ‘Good…good,’ she gasped.
Gently, but firmly, Roswitha pulled the bottle away from her lips.
‘Comrade Lermintov,’ she said speaking very slowly and dearly, ‘what happened?’
‘They—’
‘The Fritzes?’ Roswitha interjected.
‘Yes, the Fritzes. We thought we had them pinned down. Our position was so good. I’d—’
‘Tell me what happened, please, comrade.’ On a sudden impulse she smoothed the sergeant’s cropped dark hair out of her bleeding mask of a face.
‘They caught us…off guard… Up on the height.’ Sergeant Lermintov groaned from deep down in her tortured throat. The moan set Roswitha’s teeth on edge. At her side she felt Lydia’s hand creep into her own, perhaps with fear. She pressed it hard to reassure the girl — and herself. ‘Go on, comrade,’ she urged, trying to keep her voice steady.
‘They wiped out the girls… We didn’t have a chance… They panicked…ran right into the Fritz fire.’
‘And you?’
‘I stuck it out in my hole, although I was wounded… Then when…when they stopped firing, I… I ran away.’ She looked up at Roswitha with eyes that were liquid with pain. ‘Did I do wrong, comrade Captain?’ she asked plaintively.
‘Of course not, sergeant,’ she answered. ‘How brave you were to climb up here with your wounds. Comrade Stalin will learn of this.’
‘Thank you,’ the grievously wounded woman whispered. ‘I tried all my life to be like a man…’
‘And where are they now?’ Roswitha said when the other woman’s words had trailed into nothing.
‘Down…down,’ Sergeant Lermintov tried to raise herself, but she had no strength left. ‘Down…’ Suddenly her frozen, bloody face lolled to one side, forlorn and lifeless like that of a broken doll.
Swiftly Roswitha held the face of her wristwatch close to the sergeant’s gaping mouth. The glass remained clear. She wasn’t breathing any more. She felt Lydia’s hand gripping her own more tightly with fear. ‘Give me a blanket,’ she said, forcing herself to keep her voice, calm and unemotional. ‘Sergeant Lermintov is dead. She died for her Motherland.’ Slowly and respectfully she spread the army blanket across the gross body, while Lydia sobbed softly at her side.
‘Comrades,’ Roswitha said sombrely, staring around at their faces, and telling, herself that although they had recovered from the shock of the sergeant’s death, they were still nervous and a little apprehensive, ‘it is clear that the enemy is heading this way. It is, clear, too, that the Fritzes are a determined, experienced group of mountaineers. Only skilled climbers could have managed to surmount that peak and come up behind the pass. So, comrades, we have a problem on our hands.’
‘What do you mean, Comrade Captain?’ Lydia asked and Roswitha could see that the nervous tic at the side of her pretty face had still not vanished. Hastily she fought back the impulse to rush across and comfort her.
‘This. This afternoon the Stavka signalled that the Army is beginning to move troops into the area beyond the Elbrus. Finally the Comrade Generals have taken our warning about the enemy intentions seriously. If those Fritzes manage to penetrate our line and cross the mountains, then they will not only have pioneered a way for more Fritzes to follow, they will also have discovered our new dispositions. They will know that we have weakened the Black Sea front in order t
o cover the mountains. That might mean their generals may decide to attack through our weakened Black Sea front after all.’ She licked her dry lips. ‘Don’t you see, my Red Ravens, if we don’t stop the Fritzes here, they could be in a position to roll up our whole front and thrust deep into the Caucasus?’
‘But what can we do, Comrade Captain?’ Lydia asked. ‘There are only a few of us — and they are real soldiers, trained and…’ the words trailed away into nothing as she saw the look on Roswitha’s face.
‘That was unworthy of you, Lydia, unworthy of the Red Ravens, unworthy of us as women. Aren’t we trained soldiers, too? Aren’t we trained mountaineers?’ Roswitha Mikhailovna wagged her finger at the pale-faced pretty girl in the same manner she had seen Comrade Stalin himself use often enough.
‘No one wanted this terrible war, but in a way it is a blessing for us women. Now we can show that we are every bit as good as our male comrades. We are no longer the stupid housewife of old, her only concern kitchen, cooking and children. We are the new generation of Soviet women. But we must be prepared to take the same risks and the same sacrifices as our male comrades in the Red Army.’ Her voice rose. ‘Comrades, if necessary, we must be prepared — to die!’
She allowed the terrible words to sink in, staring around at their young faces with eyes that were both hard and resolute, yet filled with a barely controlled passion, and telling herself that her Red Ravens would not let her down; they had conquered their initial fears. They would fight.
‘And now, comrades, the time for talk is over. Now action counts. The Fritzes will be here by the morning, and we have a lot to do this night. To work…’
THREE
Like a gigantic metallic Pullman car, Elbrus House slid into view through the thick, milky white dawn fog. Colonel Stuermer, at the head of the column of mountaineers, held up his hand for them to stop. ‘Major Greul,’ he commanded, ‘to me, please.’
