Assignment Gestapo (2 page)

Obediently, the little old chap groped for his spade, which had fallen from his pack. He began trying to dig. It was comical and pathetic. The rate he was going, it would take him the next thousand years to dig a hole for himself. According to regulations, it should take a man no more than 11½ minutes from the time he got the spade in his hand. And God help anyone who took a second longer! Of course, when you’d been in the front line as long as we had you learnt to do it in even less time – you had to, if you wanted to survive. And we’d had enough practice to put us in the champions’ class. The holes we’d dug stretched in a practically unbroken line from the Spanish frontier to the summit of Elbroux in the Caucasus. And we’d dug them in every conceivable sort of terrain. Sand, snow, clay, mud, ice – you name it, we’d dug holes in it. Tiny was particularly gifted in that direction. He could provide himself with a dug-out in 6 minutes 15 seconds flat, and he boasted that he could do it even quicker if he really put himself out. He probably could have, only he was never put to the test because no one ever set up a new record for him to aim at.

The Oberfeldwebel stretched out a foot and pushed at his victim.

‘Come on, grandfather, you’re not building sandcastles! At this rate we’ll all be dead and buried before you’ve even scraped away the first layer!’

Grandfather suddenly expired. Just lay down and died, just like that, without even asking permission. The Oberfeldwebel seemed genuinely astonished. It was a good few seconds before he turned round and bellowed to the two nearest men to come and pick up the body.

‘Call themselves bloody soldiers,’ he muttered. ‘God help Germany if this is what’s being used to protect her . . . but just you wait, you innocent load of bastards! I’ll get you licked into shape before you’re very much older!’

Oberfeldwebel Huhn, the terror of Bielefeldt, rubbed his hands together in anticipation. There weren’t many men he couldn’t lick into shape, once he’d set his mind to it.

And perhaps, after all, his treatment of the old man had had its effect: certainly none of the others dared to collapse.

‘What a callous bastard,’ said Porta, carelessly; and he stuffed his mouth with a mutton sausage rifled from a dead Russian artilleryman.

We were all eating mutton sausages. They were stale and salty and hard as stone, yet they tasted pretty good for all that. I looked at my half-eaten sausage, and I remembered the occasion when we had acquired them: only five days ago, and it seemed five months.

It was on our way back through a vast tract of thickly wooded land that we had stumbled upon the Russian field battery. As usual, it was the Legionnaire who had first spotted them. We attacked with more speed and stealth than even Fenimore Cooper’s Indian braves, cutting them down silently with our kandras.
¹
By the time we’d finished it looked as if a heavy shell had exploded in their midst. We had come upon them quite out of the blue. They had been lying in a clearing, sleeping, sunbathing, relaxing, totally unprepared for any sort of attack. Their chief had been drawn out of his hut by the sounds of the struggle. We heard him calling out to a lieutenant, his second-in-command, just before he appeared.

‘Drunken bloody swine! They’ve been at the vodka again!’

Those were his last words. As he appeared at the entrance of the hut, his head was severed from his shoulders by one well-aimed blow, and two spouts of hot blood burst from his body like geysers. The lieutenant, who was behind him, didn’t stop to inquire what was going on. He turned and plunged into the undergrowth, but Heide was on him almost immediately with his kandra. The lieutenant fell like a stone.

We were horrible to look upon by the time the massacre was over. And the scene of the carnage was like some nightmare from a butcher’s shop. Several of us vomited as we surveyed it. The spilt blood and the trailing intestines smelt disgusting, and there were thick black knots of flies already settled on every juicy morsel. I don’t think any of us really liked the kandra, it was too primitive, too messy – but, on the other hand, it was an excellent weapon in certain circumstances. The Legionnaire and Barcelona had taught us how to use it.

We sat down on the ammunition boxes and the shells, with our backs to the corpses. We were not so squeamish that we denied ourselves the pleasure of eating Russian sausages and drinking Russian vodka. Only Hugo Stege seemed to have no appetite. We all used to make fun of Stege on account of he’d had a good education and was reputed to be brainy. Something of an intellectual. And also because no one had ever heard him swear. That in itself seemed to us totally abnormal, but even more incredible behaviour came to light when Tiny discovered that Stege always, and assiduously, washed his hands before eating!

The Old Man regarded the store of sausages and the crate of vodka.

‘Might as well take them with us,’ he decided. ‘Those poor devils won’t be needing them any more.’

They had an easier death than many,’ remarked the Legion-naire. They never really knew a thing about it.’ He ran a finger down the razor-sharp edges of his kandra. ‘Nothing brings death as quickly as one of these.’

‘I find them disgusting,’ said Stege, and vomited for about the third time.

‘Look, they asked for it,’ argued Porta, fiercely. ‘Lazing about with their thumbs up their bums and their brains in neutral . . . there is a war on, you know! It could just as easy be us lying down there with our heads hacked off.’

‘That doesn’t make it any better,’ muttered Stege.

‘So.what are we supposed to do about it?’ Porta turned on him, furious. ‘You think I enjoy ripping people’s guts out? You think I
like
this sort of life? Did anyone ever bother to ask you, when they dragged you into the flaming Army – they ever bother to ask you if you
wanted
to go round killing people?’

Stege shook his head, wearily.

‘Spare us your home spun philosophies,’ he begged.

‘Why?’ said the Legionnaire, rolling his cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘It may be simple, but it’s none the less true . . . we’re here to kill, whether we like it or not. It’s the job we’ve been given and it’s the job we’re expected to do.’

‘Besides,’ added Porta, beating wildly at a cloud of flies that was trying to get up his nose, ‘I don’t remember you being particularly backward when it came to clobbering people . . . and what about when you took the thing in the first place?’ He jerked a thumb at Stege’s kandra. ‘What about when you nicked it off that dead Rusky? What was the point of taking it if you didn’t intend to use it? You didn’t want it for cleaning your nails, did you? You took it in case you needed it to stick in somebody, just like the rest of us.’

At this point, the Old Man dragged himself to his feet and jerked his head impatiently.

‘Come on. Time we were moving.’

Unwilling and protesting, we nevertheless picked ourselves up and formed a column, single file, behind the Old Man. We moved off through the trees, to be joined shortly afterwards by Tiny and Porta, who, following their usual practice, had stayed behind to do a bit of looting. From the state of their faces, there seemed to have been some disagreement between them, and it looked as if Porta had been the victor: he was proudly displaying two gold teeth, while Tiny had only one.

As always, the Old Man raved at them without it having the least effect.

‘One of these days I’m going to shoot the pair of you. It makes me sick! Yanking the teeth out of the mouths of dead men!’

‘Don’t see why, if they’re already dead,’ retorted Porta, in cocky tones. ‘You wouldn’t leave a gold ring to rot, would you? Or set fire to a bank note? So what’s the difference between them and teeth?’

The Old Man continued silently to simmer. He knew, as well as the rest of us, that in every company you always had your actual ‘dentists’, who went round the corpses with a pair of pincers. There was little, if anything, that could be done about it.

And now, five days later, we were sitting beneath the fruit trees, watching the reserves come up and stuffing ourselves with mutton sausages. The rain was slashing down, and we pulled our waterproofs higher over our shoulders. These waterproofs served a variety of purposes, being used, according as circumstances demanded, as capes, tents, camouflage, bedding, hammocks, shrouds, or simple sacks for carrying equipment. A waterproof was the first item to be handed to us when we went to collect our kit, and it was the one we valued above all others.

Porta screwed his head round and squinted up into the wet sky.

‘Bloody awful rain,’ he muttered. ‘Sodding awful mountains . . . worst bleeding sort of country you can get . . .’ He screwed his head back again and glanced at his neighbour. ‘Remember France?’ he said, longingly. ‘Jesus, that was something! Just sitting on your arse in the sun, drinking wine till the cows came home . . . that was something, eh? That was quite something!’

Heide was still staring moodily down at the approaching column of men. He pointed with his mutton sausage towards Huhn, who had tortured the little old fellow with the tin helmet.

‘Going to have trouble with that one,’ he said, sagely. ‘Feel it in my bones.’

‘No bastard gives us any trouble and gets away with it!’ declared Tiny. He glared in the direction of Heide’s pointing finger. ‘Let him just try and he’ll get what’s coming to him . . . One thing I am good at, that’s exterminating rats like him.’

‘That’s all any of us are likely to be good at, by the time the war comes to an end,’ said Stege, bitterly. ‘Killing people . . . that’s all it’s taught us.’

‘At least it’s something useful,’ jeered Tiny. ‘Even in peace-time, I reckon, there’s always a need for professional killers . . . ain’t that so?’

He jabbed at the Legionnaire for confirmation. The Legionnaire solemnly nodded. Stege merely turned away in disgust.

The lieutenant who had brought up the reserve troops now began to assemble them in ranks preparatory to his own departure. He had delivered them as ordered and was now suddenly anxious to be gone, prompted perhaps by some instinct warning him that it would not be wise to hang about too long. The area was not a healthy one.

With the men ranged before him, he delivered his parting speech. They heard him out with an air of total indifference.

‘Well, men, you’re at the Front now, and pretty soon you’ll be called upon to fight against the enemies of the Reich. Remember that this is your chance to win back your good names, to become honourable citizens of the Fatherland and earn the right to live amongst us once again as free men. If you acquit yourselves well, all marks against you will be expunged from the records. It’s entirely up to you.’ He scraped his throat selfconsciously and fixed a stern eye upon them. ‘Comrades, the Führer is a great man!’

There was total and uncompromising silence following this observation. And then Porta’s evil laugh rang out, and I’m pretty sure I caught the muttered comment, ‘Balls!’ In all the circumstances, it seemed a likely enough sort of comment. The lieutenant swung round and let his glance range over us. The blood poured up his neck and into his cheeks. He stiffened, and his hand went automatically to his holster. He turned back to his own band of villains.

‘Let there be no doubt in your minds! All your actions will be noted and recorded!’ He paused, significantly, to let this sink in. ‘Do not disappoint the Führer! It is up to you to take this opportunity of making amends for the crimes you have committed against Adolf Hitler and against the Reich.’ He breathed deeply and glanced once more towards the twelve of us, sheltering beneath the apple trees. He met the defiant stares of Tiny and Porta, the one looking a complete half wit, the other with a face as low and cunning as that of a fox. He blenched slightly, but nevertheless pressed on. ‘You will find yourselves fighting side by side with some of the bravest and best of Germany’s sons . . . and woe betide any one of you who shows himself a coward!’

His voice went droning on. The Old Man nodded, appreciatively.

‘I like that,’ he said. ‘The bravest and best of Germany’s sons . . . Tiny and Porta! That’s a laugh!’

Tiny sat up indignantly.

‘What’s so funny about it? I’m certainly the bravest and best of
my
mother’s sons—’

‘God help us!’ said Heide, shuddering. ‘I presume she hasn’t got any others?’

‘She did have,’ said Tiny.

‘What’s happened to ’em then?’ Porta looked at him challengingly. ‘They get killed or something?’

‘I’ll tell you. The first one, bleeding idiot that he was, went off voluntarily to the Gestapo –
voluntarily
, I ask you! Bloody fool . . . Stadthausbrücke, number eight,’ recited Tiny, as if it were engraved for ever on his memory. ‘They wanted him for questioning about something or other – I forget what exactly. Something to do with painting slogans on a wall. He was a great lad for painting slogans on walls . . . Anyway, he went off one fine day and wasn’t never seen again . . . And as for the next one – as for Gert—’ He shook his head, contemptuously. ‘You know what he went and done?’

We all wonderingly assured him that we didn’t. Tiny made a gesture of disgust.

‘Only went and volunteered for the bleeding Navy, didn’t he? Ended up in a U-boat, didn’t he?’

‘What happened to him?’I asked.

Tiny spat. Heroes were evidently not in his line.

‘Went down with the bleeding boat, beginning of ‘40 . . . We had a post-card from Admiral Doenitz about it. Lovely, it was. It said, Der Führer dankt Ihnen.
²
‘And it had a lovely black border and all.’ He suddenly gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Bet you can’t guess how that ended up!’

We could, knowing Tiny, but we didn’t want to ruin his story.

‘My old lady used it to wipe her arse on . . . Went to the shit house one day, discovered she didn’t have no bog paper in there, so she calls out to me to bring her some what’s nice and soft. Well, I couldn’t see no newspaper nor nothing, so I grabbed up the Admiral’s post-card and shoved that through the door to her . . . She was calling him all the silly buggers under the sun, afterwards. Scraped her bum to pieces, it did. Hard and rough, she said it was. Hard and bleeding rough . . .’