Edelweiss

by Madge Swindells

  ‘It’s the Russians’ secret weapon,’ Schneider told him. ‘We call it Stalin’s Organ. It’s a large rocket launcher, built on to tracked vehicles. Effective and mobile – we must all watch out for it.’

  When darkness fell, the Eastern sky glowed blood red from reflected fires from the burning city. Louis knew that they would be in the thick of the fighting by the next day. As usual, his stomach twisted with cramps in reaction to his fear and he was unable to eat much of the stewed horseflesh he was given.

  That night in his tent, Louis tried to make sense out of the rumours he’d heard in the camp. Stalingrad, he remembered from army school, was an important industrial centre set on the River Volga in the Caucasus Mountains. Its factories were churning out a quarter of Russia’s tanks and armoured vehicles, and Russia’s vital oil wells lay in the mountains just beyond the city. Now, Stalingrad was defended mainly by armed civilians, and many of the women and children had not been evacuated. Two days ago, German troops had crashed through the city’s southern defences to reach the river. The rest of Stalingrad had become a raging inferno.

  *

  Early next morning, Louis was ordered to take his squad and flush the Russian workers out of a tractor factory. He did not expect much trouble and opened the operation with a massive barrage. After two hours, when the factory was a mess of fire, smoke, tangled steel girders and blackened walls. Konrad, who spoke some Russian, hailed the workers through a loudspeaker.

  ‘Surrender. We will spare your lives. Come out with your hands raised.’

  The answer was a hail of bullets. Louis flung himself down, feeling nothing but hatred for the Russians. Couldn’t they see that there was no hope?

  From the firing, he guessed there were about thirty armed workers. He gave the signal for storming the factory and watched his squad run for cover. Seconds later they were moving in.

  It was like going into hell, Louis thought. He gagged on the smoke and heat. His eyes were streaming, his throat burning. He heard footsteps, but whose were they? He couldn’t risk firing . . . panic gripped him.

  Out of the gloom, a gaunt man with staring eyes, black hair, and a fixed bayonet sprang towards him. Louis froze in a split-second of incredulity. Then he kicked at the bayonet, and they fell in a heap on the floor, tearing at each other’s faces. The end came abruptly as Konrad thrust his bayonet into the Russian’s back.

  ‘Thanks,’ Louis croaked. He signalled to Konrad and they threw a grenade into the next office. When they charged in, the room was wrecked, but deserted. Some sixth sense made Louis yell, ‘Get down!’ A split-second later, shots came from the room they had just left. They were being circled.

  With a sinking heart, Louis realised that each square foot would have to be fought for time and again, against civilians who were mad with rage and determined to die rather than retreat. He was filled with savage anger for the Russians and their inhuman heroism.

  *

  By dawn on their second morning, Louis was on the point of collapse. His hair was blackened stubble and he could scarcely see. He felt weak from lack of sleep and his hands were blistered with burns.

  There were four surviving Russians and they had barricaded themselves into the stairwell, between the first and second floors. From their impregnable vantage position they could snipe at the Germans for as long as their ammunition lasted.

  ‘Bring in a flame thrower,’ Louis ordered grimly. ‘Set it up there. Now! Get ready. Fire!’

  As the flame shot up, a horrible scream echoed around the shaft.

  ‘Burn the bastards,’ Louis shouted. Despite their cries, he kept the flame thrower spurting up the stairwell. Soon the agony stopped and the bodies fell, charred and unrecognisable.

  Bastards! he thought as he surveyed the corpses pitilessly. Two days lost and four of his men dead. For what? A ruined factory.

  *

  As winter set in, a final attempt was made to clear the city of Russians. It failed and German casualties were excessive. Louis and his squad were still fighting along the Tsaritsa River, trying to reach the Volga. Day after day, Louis was up to his thighs in thick, cloying, freezing mud. When their equipment was bogged down, he and his men put ropes around their shoulders and hauled their anti-tank guns through the mire. They sweated and cursed and fell, until they dropped with exhaustion.

  It rained heavily for weeks, a churning mass of water that turned the roads to swamps, reduced vision to a few yards and bogged down their motorised vehicles. Only horse-drawn wagons were able to keep moving. At the beginning of November the rain stopped and the cold set in. Now they were able to fight again on solid ground, but soon the temperature began to plummet. It began snowing and by dusk on December 1, a blizzard raged mercilessly around them.

  The troops had not been issued with winter clothing, so Louis padded his clothes with sheets of newspaper and strips of his blanket. To stop the wind blowing up his sleeves, he bound his wrists with string. This was only the beginning, Louis knew. They were fighting in unknown conditions, in temperatures that they had never before experienced, made worse by the icy wind. Every day, convoys of ambulances moved toward the west, filled with wounded, frost-bitten soldiers. The streets were full of German casualties, freezing to death as they lay on their stretchers. Many more kept arriving. They would lie there until the ambulances returned on the next relay to take them westwards. Louis felt sick with anger and grief.

  Louis had a mild case of frost-bite in his fingers and toes. If it worsened, his limbs would have to be amputated. After agonising over it, Louis decided that they must raid the prisoner-of-war cages being sent to Germany across the snow. He stole the overcoat, fleecy-lined trousers, pullover, felt-lined boots, gloves and helmet from a Mongolian lieutenant who was about his size. He ignored the slit-eyed grimace of ferocious despair, as the Mongolian was left clad in his underwear for the long journey to the slave camps of Germany in sub-zero temperatures.

  That night Louis and his squad found shelter in a dugout under a burnt out railway carriage. He ordered the men to light fires and keep their guns warm for instant firing. He fell asleep smiling. He was no longer freezing.

  He dreamed that he was retreating at the end of the column of men when he heard a low moan coming from behind him. Something about the sound made his skin tingle with horror. He stared over his shoulder and in the twilight gloom, he saw the ghost of the Mongolian lieutenant gliding over the snow, barefooted and clad in his underwear, moving as silently as a shadow. ‘You will join me in this icy hell,’ he screamed.

  Louis woke, sweating with fright.

  By Christmas, Louis and his men were freezing and starving. They fought until their strength was spent, in temperatures of fifty degrees below zero in howling icy winds. Then the blizzard stopped and the sun hung poised over them in a steel grey sky. But now it was colder still. It seemed that the entire earth had frozen into a gigantic ball of ice crystal.

  *

  Only stone rubble and ruined walls remained in Stalingrad, but the city could not be taken. Below the rubble were the cellars and underground tunnels, linking the Russian’s defensive positions, some stretching to the gullies and ravines that ran along the outskirts of the city and even to the river, providing marvellous cover for the defenders. Armed civilians and soldiers emerged in unexpected places from unseen holes, to inflict grave casualties.

  At the end of the year, Louis received mail from home, his first for months. He crouched between a half-ruined wall and a burnt-out tank and opened the envelope with trembling fingers. He could hardly read from the smoke in his eyes, he’d been deaf for days from blast, and he was shaking so badly that he had to lie the letter on the broken wall and crouch over it, to read the words.

  My dearest Louis, I love you and I am praying for your safe return all the time. Try hard to stay fit and well and come back to me, my darling, because I have special need of you. Our loving produced a wonderful result. I am pregnant . . . a warrior child, I feel sure, although I shall do
my best to persuade him otherwise. Yes, I am sure it is a ‘him’. I can picture him exactly. I have never felt more contented. I spend my days decorating a nursery in what was the guest room. Oh, how I love you, and now I have a part of you with me, growing larger each day, and beginning to kick . . . Louis’ tears were spattering the paper, smudging the precious ink. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

  There was much more, but the sudden horrendous wail of a rocket sent him diving under the tank. Moments later there was an explosion that knocked him out momentarily. He recovered to find himself lying on a heap of stinking corpses. They had been piling their dead in ghastly heaps, because there was no time or energy to bury them and the ground was frozen.

  The following day, the long-expected Russian counteroffensive began. The Soviets fell on the Germans’ Rumanian army back-up with a barrage from 3,500 guns attacking from the north and the south. The Rumanians broke and fled leaving a quarter of a million German soldiers surrounded and trapped without supplies. Louis was one of them. He was called to a meeting under a ruined railway bridge.

  ‘Bad news, men,’ Schneider told them. He looked twenty years older, his face was haggard, sunken eyes stared from folds of grey skin and his hair had turned white. ‘We’re trapped here. Five hundred tons of food a day are needed to feed us. The Luftwaffe is going to do its best to fly in our provisions and ammunition.’

  *

  Over five hundred supply planes had been shot down by the Russians, and it was only a matter of time before their stocks dwindled to nothing. Louis ached with compassion as he watched his fellow troops suffering. They had come to realise that Hitler’s dream of Lebensraum had become a nightmare. God was not on their side . . . yet they fought on with untold heroism against impossible odds, and without hope.

  By January, the troops had eaten what was left of the Rumanians’ horses. Rations were reduced to a few ounces of bread. General von Paulus was forced to make the terrible decision to feed only those men fit enough to fight. Those who could not fight sat around waiting to die of starvation and the cold.

  Then the moment Louis had dreaded came upon them . . . the Volga froze. Earth met sky in a blank canvas that seemed to stretch to eternity. Out of the misty whiteness, Louis saw his worst fears materialise. Siberian soldiers, clad in white, were pouring across the ice into Stalingrad, with dogs, staunch little horses, skis and guns that functioned in these icy temperatures.

  Supplies to the beleaguered Germans had ceased completely. Louis was weak from hunger and exhaustion, and so were his men. He had no ammunition or fuel left. Smiedt gave orders that they should destroy their guns. Truck drivers were ordered to set fire to their vehicles. All around him, the wounded lay untended, their faces exhausted and expressionless, blood and pus seeping through the torn rags of their bandages, dying of their wounds, or starvation, or exposure, whichever took them first.

  The Soviets began to move around them freely, knowing that they had no ammunition. Many of the troops tried to surrender, but the Russians did not want to be burdened with prisoners of war. They were going to die, Louis knew.

  On January 22, Louis was called to the radio by Smiedt. He listened to von Paulus explaining that without ammunition, he was forced to capitulate, together with his remaining 94,000 men. The radio switched off for the last time. Louis could see that Smiedt could not grasp the awful reality of their helpless position. ‘Old friend, take your men and join the rest of the Sixth Army,’ Louis told him. Smiedt nodded wearily and slowly walked to the back of the tent. Seconds later Louis heard the sound of a gunshot.

  Louis decided there was no point in trying to go anywhere. He sat on a broken axle outside Smiedt’s tent and gazed around. Shells and bombs were pounding the ground. He wished that a bomb would shatter his anguish.

  At 10 p.m. all sounds of war ceased. Apart from the howling wind, an eerie, painful silence descended on the dead city. Louis stared around, filled with horror. Dead soldiers, frozen stiff, seemed to glare at him accusingly. All around him lay the snow-covered debris of a ravaged city. Louis stood up and stumbled forward. In the pale moonlight his shadow stretched out huge and menacing.

  What was he? Man or beast? A beast . . . he knew that now. He looked up and howled. It was a harsh, resentful mourning for his fallen comrades and the enemy he had killed. Black despair clutched his heart . . . for the deeds he had done, for his Catholic soul that was damned forever, and for the suffering he had wreaked on the human psyche and most of all for Andrea.

  A ghastly apparition loomed out of the snowscape. It was his Mongolian lieutenant, once more clothed and armed. Had he come to lead the way down to his terrible, ice-bound hell? The Mongolian beckoned and Louis stood shocked and staring. He beckoned again, and, as if mesmerised, Louis followed him.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  It was almost dawn when Marietta and Jan climbed down through the forest keeping close to the rushing river to muffle their footsteps. In the distance, she could hear dogs barking. The unwelcome sound brought a vivid recall of the camp, the smell of unwashed bodies and the prisoners’ sickness and fear, the sound of marching feet and shouting . . . always shouting. The scream of pain as someone was struck. ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘I must never remember. Never again.’ She realised Jan was staring at her and cursed herself for her lapse of concentration. She was wearing a nurse’s uniform and it was crumpled and damp. The navy cape was inadequate against the cold mountain air, and she could feel a sore throat and cough begin to form. She had dyed her hair black and plucked her eyebrows to a thin line. This, plus a pair of spectacles, completed her disguise. It was absurd, she felt, anyone would recognise her. But if her real identity was discovered she would be lost. Hugo would look for her until he found her and would return her to the camp and this time she would be executed . . . She huddled into herself and searched for courage.

  They had travelled by train from Vienna to the border town of Gmünd, a hazardous, frightening journey, with uniformed guards checking their papers at every station. At Gmünd they simply walked to the outskirts of the town and hiked through the forest. Later came a gruelling climb through the snowy, forested mountain slopes to cross the border into Czechoslovakia. Jan had chosen an inaccessible area through the frozen bogs, where he knew there would be no fences or guards. Afterwards, the going was easier as they descended towards the Upper Vltava Valley. Jan knew the way intimately and she tried to remember it in case she had to flee this way.

  Out of the pit of her agony and her fear grew a small resolve. I have come here of my own free will to help to destroy Hugo and his kind. Despite the dangers, this is what I must do. Whatever I am going into, I must put my fears aside.

  Nevertheless, she could not stifle the last remnants of fear and they remained with her like a tiny sick feeling in the pit of her stomach as they walked.

  ‘I have arranged for you to run a dairy,’ Jan told her. ‘You know the work, and it will ensure that you are fed adequately, and give you freedom to move around, as well as the use of some sort of vehicle. You’ll have to deliver milk to the troops and collect butter from the farms. You will be able to talk with the soldiers and make friends. You’ll pick up all kinds of useful tips. Remember you’re a Volksdeutsche, one of them . . . the reason why Hitler went to war, you don’t have to be scared.’

  So he had noticed. She tried harder to pull herself together.

  ‘If the British are correct and the V-3 is in Czechoslovakia, then it’s my guess that von Hesse inspects the place often. You might make friends with his driver.’

  And if Hugo catches sight of me? she thought, keeping her mouth closed.

  ‘While you’re doing this, I may ask you to run messages, or help to transport people. You will also be in charge of the radio. Communications are our lifeblood. Our groups are scattered and they seldom meet. Only proper liaison can mould them into a unit. Then we report regularly to the Free Czechs in London . . . it takes hours to get through. That will take up much of your nigh
ts.’

  She began to wonder if Jan was talking so much to keep her mind off her fears as they descended into the Upper Vltava Valley. He had changed, she realised as she listened to him. He was an equal, not a servant.

  ‘I assume you know that Hugo has been appointed a Brigadier-General and that he has expropriated Sokol Castle for the Nazi party. That means for his own use.’

  ‘Father told me,’ she answered softly.

  ‘I’ll try to draw you a broader picture of how we operate . . .’ Jan said.

  The temperature slowly rose as they tramped downhill. As she listened, Marietta began to understand that Jan was the overall chief of the various groups in Bohemia, while George Kolar, who used to manage her Sokol estates, ran the Resistance group around Prague. She tried to memorise all she was learning, but time and again memories intruded, for they were approaching mist-covered lakes and they could see the forest in the dim morning light. Her lakes! Her home! She caught her breath, and then put foolish memories away. That happy, carefree countess belonged to another lifetime before Edelweiss, before the war, before the camp.

  She shuddered, remembering that it was Hugo who had supervised the destruction of Lidhaky and sent Andrea to a camp. When she had heard the news she had been physically ill.

  ‘Wait,’ Jan said, holding her by her shoulders and swinging her round to face him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said in surprised alarm.

  ‘Your eyes! They burn too fiercely. You are not cowed, nor beaten and you have learned to hate. Don’t ever look at the Bosch as you’re looking now, if you can’t control it always avert your eyes, pretend to be demure. That look, more than anything else, gives you away.’

  *

  There was a horsedrawn cart full of cabbages waiting at the edge of the forest. Herr Zweig was smoking a pipe while his horse grazed on the grass. ‘You made good time,’ he said, by way of greeting.

  Jan indicated Marietta. ‘This is Lara Zimmerman, a nurse, who is joining my group in the forest. She has returned voluntarily to help our fight.’