by Leo Kessler
The vastness of the mountain became an infinity of rock, ice, snow, seen at the closest range, so that one minute piece of ice resolved itself into a mountain, which had to be assessed, considered, conquered.
Stuermer knew they were moving. But when be looked back it seemed that the two bowed figures behind him moved at the pace of tortoises. And all the time the wind howled and shrieked about them, whipping up the frozen snow particles so that they writhed and coiled around their slow-moving feet like white ghosts. Step by step.
Midday. They had been climbing for four and a half hours. Stuermer knew they must have a break. He held up his hand and in their exhaustion the two men behind him almost stumbled into him before they realized he had stopped. ‘Break,’ he said through lips which were a mass of bloody, black cracks, ‘break.’
There was no response from them.
Stuermer dug his hands under his armpits for a moment to warm them a little, while they stood there, swaying on their feet, their eyes behind the goggles blank of any emotion. Stuermer felt that he had insufficient life in his fingers to reach into his pocket. Guiding his right hand into it, taking what seemed an age to open the flap, he pulled out the chocolate bar, which he had saved for this last stage. Not only did it contain dextrose-sugar, but there was also a certain amount of the stimulant pervitin in it. It went against his mountaineer’s code of conduct to give them it, but without it, he knew, they would never reach the top.
Carefully he broke off a piece of the dark-brown chocolate and shrieked at Meier, ‘Open your mouth!’
Numbly, like a very small and stupid child, the big sergeant-major did as he was ordered.
With thick unfeeling fingers, Stuermer slipped the piece between Meier’s terribly cracked and swollen lips. There was no reaction. The dark brown square lay on the red wet tongue unswallowed. Stuermer took the NCOs lips and pressed them together. ‘Swallow!’ he ordered.
Meier swallowed.
With infinite weariness, Stuermer repeated the performance with Jap, before he swallowed a piece himself.
‘Now,’ he bellowed, feeling the fresh energy already beginning to stream into his unutterably weary limbs, ‘fifty metres more and we’ve done it!’
They reached the western peak of Mount Elbrus in a completely undramatic way, by plodding up the incline, their legs lent new energy by the chocolate, until there was no more incline to climb.
Abruptly before them was a stretch of wind-flattened snow leading to a gentle cone in the centre with, beyond, the sky that — just as abruptly — was beginning to clear to reveal the vast plain below.
Stuermer sat down suddenly in the snow. ‘We’ve reached the summit,’ he announced, not having to bellow for the first time in hours, for now the wind was beginning to drop too, as if Nature itself was acknowledging that it had been defeated by these puny mortals.
‘This is it, sir?’ Meier said incredulously, looking down at the C.O. ‘You mean this is all there is to it?’
Stuermer nodded numbly, while the other two stared around in disbelief.
‘Well, I’ll piss in my boot,’ Jap said, ‘all that shitty carry-on for this! Was it worth it?’
Stuermer stared up at the outraged look on his wrinkled yellow face and could feel with him. Was it worth it, so that the ego of some brown-uniformed dreamer could be flattered? He stumbled to his feet and indicated the panorama. ‘Out there, Jap, we have Asia — the Caspian Sea, Persia, Afghanistan, India, where our Japanese allies are already fighting. Here, we are as far from Munich as we are from the Persian border. Isn’t that something?’
‘Give me Munich, a litre of Löwenbrau, and a big fat peasant girl with plenty of wood in front of her door, any day,’ Meier said, and spat drily in the snow. ‘You can—’ He stopped suddenly, his eyes keen and alert.
‘What is it, you big rogue?’ Stuermer asked.
‘Out there in the plain. Like a long black snake moving, sir.’ Stuermer focussed his binoculars painfully. At that distance, it was impossible to make out the details of the long column of vehicles but he knew they had to be military. The average Russian peasant moved by panje-cart2 and besides, peasants wouldn’t move in such huge numbers.
Now he knew why the woman had attempted so desperately to stop them; the Ivans thought Stormtroop Edelweiss was the recce party for a large force to come after them. Now the Soviet High Command was obviously splitting their army so that they could cover both exits from the mountains. That would be a very valuable piece of information for the gentlemen of the staff with their monocles and purple-striped, immaculate breeches.
He dropped his binoculars into their case and turned to the others. ‘All right, you two,’ he snapped, very businesslike now. ‘Who wants to get his ugly mug into the papers — come on, which one of you am I to photograph?’
Ox-Jo looked at Jap, who was already positioning the bravely fluttering Edelweiss flag of the Stormtroop in a cairn of stones, and then back at Stuermer. ‘I might not be the answer to a maiden’s prayer, sir…’ he began.
‘Yer,’ Jap sneered, ‘that you can say again — twice!’
‘Up yours!’
‘Can’t,’ Jap retorted, equal to the insult. ‘Got a 75millimetre field howitzer up there already.’
‘Well, as I was saying, sir, before that little owlshit interrupted me, I think I’d be more suited. I mean, what would the Führer say if he saw that half-breed’s ugly yellow mug staring back at him from the front page?’
‘Three farts for the Führer!’ Jap snarled.
Ox-Jo ignored the remark. ‘It stands to reason, sir, that the Führer would prefer to see my own homely-handsome, perfectly Nordic face looking at him, with all due respect, as befits a senior NCO of the High Alpine Corps.’
‘Oh, my aching arse!’ Jap groaned and clapped his hands to his head in mock anguish. ‘Look at the Prussian prick — Nordic! Ow, slap my cheek!’
Stuermer grinned and raised his camera, taking care to ensure that the lense remained covered until the last moment so that it didn’t freeze over. ‘All right, build a monkey in front of the flag, Ox-Jo. Here you go, heading straight for history.’
Dutifully Ox-Jo ‘built his monkey,’ throwing out his magnificent chest, his hand clasped rigidly to his cap, staring woodenly, hard-jawed, at the fluttering red-and-white flag.
‘Now!’ Stuermer snapped and in that instant, he raised his fingers from the lense and clicked the catch down. ‘All right, let your guts slip down again. I’ve got you.’
While Jap and Ox-Jo scraped at the frozen earth around the stone cairn so that they could bury the bottle which contained the scrap of paper on which their three names and the date, ‘21st August, 1942’ were recorded, Stuermer stared out into the far distance.
Somehow he knew, this August day, that he would never see that panorama again. With the clarity of a vision, he knew that this would be the furthest point of the German advance into the Caucasus. The Wehrmacht would defeat those unknown Russians down there in the plain time and time again. But in the end the woman (Roswitha had been her name, according to Meier), and the millions of Russian women and men like her, would beat them. The brown tide had reached its high-water mark.
Totally unexhilarated by his conquest of Mount Elbrus, he turned and said: ‘All right, let’s get back…’
Notes
1. A mountaineer’s command, roughly: ‘Up we go!’
2. A pony-drawn vehicle.
SIX
On that same night, the radio message flashed from headquarters to headquarters. First from Dietl’s Corps HQ; then to Army HQ; from there to Army Command; and, finally, in the early hours of the 22nd August, 1942, it reached the Führer HQ itself. Jodl felt it important enough to wake the Leader at ten o’clock, one hour earlier than his normal rising time. Hitler was a little angry at being wakened early, but Jodl’s presence convinced him that the signal must be important. Therefore, he smoothed back his dyed black hair and adjusted the gold-rimmed spectacles, in which it was a pun
ishable offence to photograph the Greatest Captain of all Times, and read it. ‘Mission accomplished. At exactly fifteen hundred hours on 21 August, 1942, soldiers of the Alpine Corps planted flag on west summit of Mount Elbrus.’
His sallow, sickly face lit up. In that characteristic gesture of his, he raised his right knee under his nightgown and slapped his hand down hard upon it. ‘Grossartig!’ he exploded. ‘Grossartig, Jodl!’
‘Jawohl, mein Führer,’ the pale-faced Chief-of-Staff agreed dutifully.
‘Now indeed the world will know just what we Germans can do,’ Hitler cried exuberantly, pacing the bedroom in his ankle-length cotton nightgown, message clutched in his hand as if it were very precious. ‘In the midst of war, our brave soldiers have conquered their greatest mountain. That will show them, friend and foe, that nobody and nothing can stop the German soldier.’ He paused in mid-stride. ‘Bring them back,’ he snapped dramatically. ‘Bring them back to Berlin!’
‘Bring back whom, mein Führer?’
‘The men who conquered Elbrus, I want to shake each and every one of them by the hand personally. It will be a triumph, a personal triumph for my brave Bavarians and Austrians of Dietl’s Alpine Corps.’
‘Jawohl, mein Führer,’ Jodl answered, and went out to prepare the movement order, telling himself that he hoped he would have nothing to do with the Southern German mountain-hoppers and their cousins from Austria. Mountaineers always seemed to smell so dreadfully of serge, sweat and the mule-shit which they invariably seemed to collect on their big boots…
Thus the survivors left the mountains: first by mule, then by truck, until finally, after a week of infinitely slow progress, they reached the railhead, where the train which would take them to Berlin was already waiting for them in spite of the demands on transport being made by the new summer offensive.
Just before they embarked to the cheers and jeers and cries of envy of the fresh cannon-fodder going up to the front, Colonel Stuermer, his right hand heavily bandaged still, took one last look at Mount Elbrus, nearly a hundred kilometres away. Suddenly it emerged from a far cloud, drifting up against the dark velvet of the early night sky, the starlight glittering coldly on its twin summits, looking as icy and as remote as a whore’s heart.
‘Alles einsteigen!’ the red-capped guard yelled, and waved his metal disc.
His whistle shrilled. The train’s wheels shuddered. Steam hissed from the locomotive. Across the way, the cannon-fodder jeered ever louder, knowing that men heading for Berlin would be saved, while they were bound to die on the remote steppe.
‘Alles einsteigen…der Zug fahrt ab?’
‘I shall never see Elbrus again,’ Stuermer whispered to himself, as Greul closed the door of their compartment, ‘and I don’t want to.’
The train began its long journey to Berlin.
ENVOI
ENVOI
It was ‘Führer weather’.
The sky over Berlin was a perfect, cloudless blue, the sun a bright yellow ball, its heat eased a little by the faint wind which blew tiny dust-devils around the elegant riding boots of the generals and the fashionable hems of their ladies’ dresses where they stood behind the rope which marked the edge of the parade ground.
All Berlin was there, high Party officials in the chocolate brown uniforms, the elegant senior officers of the Greater General Staff, representatives of the leadership of the youth movements — the Association of German Maidens, Beauty and Belief, the Young Folk, the ambassadors of Germany’s allies, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Rumania, Finland, even the Japanese Ambassador, that bespectacled, grinning, yellow ‘honorary Aryan’, had turned up to welcome the heroes.
In the middle of the square, the battalion of the 9th Berlin Guards Battalion, every man of them a giant, looking immaculate in their pressed, bemedalled tunics, contrasted strongly with the handful of mountain troops, bronzed and tough-looking, yet awkward and out of place in their brand new, ill-fitting uniforms. In the midst of that great, smart assembly, the ‘heroes of Mount Elbrus’, as the Ministry of Propaganda had been calling them these last few days, looked distinctly out of place.
But not all of them were awed by their surroundings. Major Greul was thinking, it will be an honour that my grandchildren will recall; they will say, ‘once Grandfather touched the Führer’s hand — he actually did!’ Colonel Stuermer, on the other hand, was telling himself, ‘What if I threw his damned medal in his face? What would the Greatest Captain of all Time make of that, eh?’ Ox-Jo’s thoughts were less idealistic. His wicked Bavarian eyes were roaming the front ranks of the youth movements, quickly eliminating the ugly, frumpish ‘folk comrades’ of the ‘Beauty and Belief movement — ‘all belief and no beauty’, he told himself scornfully — and fastened onto a particularly well-endowed member of the Association of German Maidens. He jabbed Jap in the ribs, ‘Get a load of them lungs, ape-turd. By the Great Joker and all his triangles, I’d like to put—’
‘Stillgestanden!’ the hoarse voice of the Guards Battalion Commander cut into his words.
The Guards snapped to attention, their gleaming black boots raising a cloud of dust as the steel-shod heels smashed to the ground. To their rear, the band crashed into the Deutschlandlied1 in a flash of silver and gold.
In the same moment that the last note of the anthem had died away, the hoarse voice of the Guards Commander shrieked, ‘Present — arms!’
As one eight hundred pairs of arms completed the intricate drill movement, the slaps of the hard hands against the oiled stocks of the rifles coming in well-drilled unison, a thrilled Major Greul was standing rigidly to attention, his right hand glued to his peaked cap, eyes fixed in fanatic fascination on the well-known, well-beloved figure advancing towards Stormtroop Edelweiss. Dwarfed as he was by his elegant, huge, black-uniformed SS adjutants and bodyguard, there was no mistaking him. It was the Führer!
The band broke into the Führer’s favourite march, der Badenweiler, as he presented the first medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross to Stuermer, taking, as was his custom, Stuermer’s right hand in both his after the presentation.
Stuermer did not hear the Leader’s words. He was remembering the sense of destiny which had once been the mainspring of his life. Now after all its triumphs and tragedies, it appeared he had lived it only to become this man’s instrument: to conquer great mountains in order to further the vulgar, brown dream of this little, sallow-faced, pudgy Austrian.
‘You will eat with me this evening, my dear colonel,’ Stuermer heard the words, as if they were coming from a great distance, ‘I have a bold new project for you and your brave men,’ and the Greatest Captain of all Times was passing down the row to Major Greul.
One by one they all received the various forms of the simple black and white cross, then the band was playing the Fredericus Rex march, the Guards Battalion was goose-stepping past the saluting base in perfect, mechanical unison, raising great clouds of dust, and that elegant assembly was clapping and cheering and crowding around the handful of shabby mountaineers. Colonel Stuermer stood looking down numbly at the medal hanging from its red and white ribbon from his neck, not hearing the congratulations raining in on him from all sides, not feeling the colonels and generals pumping his hand, not seeing the flash of the cameras, of the men from the Ministry of Propaganda. All that enthusiasm, that human determination, that self sacrifice — and hadn’t that Russian woman been possessed of the same qualities that made mountaineers a different breed? — for this. A cheap piece of metal around one’s neck. With sudden determination, Colonel Stuermer pulled the bauble from his neck and stuffed it in his pocket. He must get away from this mob and take a drink to wash the unpleasant taste out of his mouth.
Ox-Jo and Jap were in their element.
The General’s wife, who had kept calling them ‘my dear, brave boys’ and had fumbled with Ox-Jo’s flies in the lift, had vanished into the elegant throng; but it didn’t worry them. Everywhere the upper-class, expensive room tinkled with medals, champagne g
lasses, chandeliers; even the tall languorous women, who were everywhere in their afternoon gowns, seemed to the awed soldiers to tinkle, as they moved in that slow way of the rich, who know that they can buy even time with money.
‘Devil and a tit!’ Ox-Jo exclaimed to his companion, who was feasting his eyes on the mass of powdered bosoms all around him, roughly at the level of his snub nose. ‘All you need is the band of the SS Leibstandarte2 and yer’d feel they wanted yer to come, Jap!’
‘I’m coming already!’ Jap whispered in awe, ‘I’ve had ten pairs of knockers pushed in my mug already. I’ll swear one of those slits just put her nipple in my mouth a minute ago.’
‘Shouldn’t walk around with yer snout open,’ Ox-Jo commented. ‘Yer can catch cold that way. Come on, let’s get our paws on all that lovely grub — and I don’t mean the smoked salmon sandwiches.’
But the two NCOs didn’t get far. A tall emaciated woman with dark circles under her eyes, who had once been very beautiful and who was wearing what appeared to be a negligée trimmed with ostrich feathers, put a restraining hand on Ox Jo’s sleeve and giggled, ‘The mountain-boys have come down from the hills then.’ She giggled again. ‘You want champers, or do you backwoods men prefer beer?’ She indicated the tableful of drinks behind her. ‘Always the best place to be at these affairs.’
‘Champagne!’ the two NCOs said in unison.
The woman handed them a bottle each and shrieked with laughter when they popped the corks and sent a stream of foaming wine high into the air. ‘How symbolic!’ she cried to someone else in the thick, sweating throng, that smelled of power and expensive perfume. ‘I bet that’s the way it is with you mountain boys. Go on, don’t bother about glasses. Take it straight from the bottle. Prost!’
