Blitzfreeze (24 page)

‘’Ero!’ grunts Tiny, brushing the snow from his trousers.

‘Have you looked?’ asks Porta suddenly.

‘Oly Mother o’ Gawd from the slums o’ Jerusalem. I bleedin’ near forgot!’ howls Tiny shocked, and with a sharp tug he opens the major’s mouth.

Three gold teeth.

‘What the devil have you three been farting about at?’ grumbles the Old Man.

‘Court-martial ’em,’ suggests Heide in comradely fashion.

‘We’ve been giving extreme unction to a hero with the Knight’s Cross, a major of Jaegers,’ intones Porta in his ‘holy’ voice.

‘Amen!’ echoes Tiny virtuously from the background.

‘Liars!’ snarls the Old Man. ‘Breathe out! What the devil have you been drinking? What a hell of a stink!’

‘We shared the oil with the dead hero,’ answers Porta, with an insincere parson’s smile, crossing himself.

Suddenly a machine-gun comes down on us and breaks up the interesting entertainment.

Shadowy shapes disappear hastily into the brush. A few indistinguishable words come from the darkness.

I throw a hand-grenade. Heartrending screams come from the thick underbrush.

‘Come death, come . . .’ hums the Legionnaire satanically, and empties a magazine at some flitting shapes.

‘Light!’ commands the Old Man brusquely.

Stege holds his signal pistol high above his head. With a crack the phosphorous flare explodes replacing the darkness with stark white light.

‘Cease fire!’ shouts the Old Man furiosly. ‘Here Panzer Regiment 27 z.b.V!’

‘Here Rifle Regiment 106. Password?’ comes from the other side.

‘Rotten apple!’ answers the Old Man.

‘Running rat!’ comes immediately from the heavy brush.

‘Runnin’ prick! sounds closer,’ considers Tiny insubordinately. We get up, go slowly over towards the brush, and suddenly find ourselves face to face with the Feldwebel from before.

‘
You
again!’ he roars in an enraged voice.

‘Herr Feldwebel, sir, Obergefreiter Joseph Porta, always at your service with last rites, sir! According to Regulations the dying defender of the Fatherland has the right to prayer, oil and a final shot over the open grave, sir!’

‘I think you are doing your best to get yourself on a court-martial,’ raged the Feldwebel, reddening.

‘Beg to report, Herr Feldwebel, sir, that I have seen service with the Army Courts Martial at Torgau, Glatz and Germersheim. At 6 Army HQ at Münster I was responsible for changing the water in the decanters. Beg to report, Herr Feldwebel, Herr Kriegsgerichtsrat Dornbusch drank like a hole in the sand.’

‘You ought to be choked with your own shit,’ states the Feldwebel, disappearing with his men into the darkness.

‘Lot o’ bleedin’ idiots,’ says Tiny, ‘lettin’ theirselves get shot at by their own mates!’

‘That sort of thing happens quite often in war,’ explains Porta waving his arms about. ‘We live in surprising times. There was once a Herr Bauer who had a house in the hills outside Eger. In 1915 he became a one-man unit. They made him a Cornet and sent him off to the 2nd Imperial Jaeger Regiment. But when Cornet Bauer couldn’t find the Imperial Jaegers in Galicia – they’d been sent in the meantime to Italy to defend the Fatherland there – this intrepid man decided to form himself into a separate individual unit and develop a
new kind of strategy to be used against the Czar’s Cossacks. . . .’

Just then we run into the arms of another company and we hear no more about the heroic Cornet Bauer from the Eger Mountains.

‘Good thing you got here, Feldwebel,’ thunders an Oberleutnant with a black patch over his eye. ‘The Reds have mined the river and blown the bridge.’

‘Very good, Herr Oberleutnant!’ answers the Old Man tamely, thinking to himself, ‘Wish you’d gone with it!’

‘But they didn’t manage to drop the bridge entirely,’ continues the Oberleutnant. ‘So now it’s up to us to get across before the bastards realize they’ve left us some bridge. Move straight across with your section and establish a bridgehead. I’ll follow with my company. On your way, Feldwebel!’

‘Yes, sir!’ replies the Old Man apathetically, and moves towards the bridge with the section behind him. What good explaining to the officer that we were not under his command. He regards us as sent from heaven to do his dirty work. He’ll get the kudos for the bridgehead, we’ll do the paying – in blood –
ours
!

‘You first,’ orders the Old Man, pointing at Porta with his gun.

‘Go fuck a pig!’ says Porta disrespectfully. ‘If the Bohemian Boy, Adolf, came in person with all his Party Uncles and ordered me to step out onto that bridge I would still veto the idea. What about Julius? He’s a born hero!’

‘Do you think I’m mad?’ protests Heide furiously.

‘Well, now you ask. Your being a PG’s
⁷
enough. Membership’s the first step up the suicide ladder.’

‘Stop
talking
about that blasted Party. Save it for after the war,’ snarls the Old Man impatiently. ‘Get
on
, Porta! It’s bloody Moscow we’re after now! Take position at the third pillar! Sven you’ll help him. You can throw hand-grenades
from there!’ He throws a sack of grenades at me. A present from the Oberleutnant with the black patch.

We edge our way carefully along an iron girder. It’s covered with ice and several times we almost fall off. Besides the grenades I have both ammunition bags to carry.

‘Should’ve joined the bicycle dragoons,’ grins Porta, ‘we’d have pedalled over in no time on the Wehrmacht model 1903 with turned-up handlebars and valuable improvements such as the free wheel, pneumatic tyres and adjustable shithouse.’

A machine-gun spits tracer at us from the opposite bank.

‘A nice welcome,’ shouts Porta, raising his top-hat to them politely. At last we reach the pillar and take up position.

With unbelievable slowness Porta inserts the belt and pours half a bottle of Russian frost oil over the lock.

‘The greasier, the easier,’ he grins. ‘I learnt that from a Chinese wholesaler dealing in cunt in the year 1937. He handed out two pounds of vaseline to his workers every Saturday morning so they didn’t feel the pistons going in and out.’

There is a heavy bump above our heads. It’s Tiny throwing himself down with the SMG.

‘’Ere we are then, my sons, ‘ow d’you like the view?
Some
people’d pay money for it!’

‘
Hombre
,’ groans Barcelona. ‘It’s just like old times when we were pissing about on the Ebro trying to take the spaghettis in the black shirts.’

A mortar bomb explodes close in front of us and blows half the pillar away.

Two of the section get hit and disappear into the unbelievably filthy waters of the river. A 20 mm automatic cannon begins to jolt away from the far bank. It’s a wicked weapon. The small shells tear great jagged shards from the concrete and send them flying like shrapnel around our ears. Two heavy Maxims sight in on us.

‘Think I’ll go home,’ says Porta rolling his eyes skywards. ‘There’s too much going on here for a peace-loving Berliner.’

‘Retire,’ orders the Old Man with a taut expression on his face.

We begin to run back, but the patch-eyed Oberleutnant appears and fires on us with his submachine-gun. We decide to stay where we are.

‘Hold on, boys!’ shouts a voice from the bank. ‘The flamethrowers are on the way.’

‘I’ll ‘old on to ‘is bollocks for ‘im, if I ever get close enough,’ promises Tiny, and sprays the far side where the 20 mm gunner seems to be going mad.

But the flamethrowers
do
come. Flamethrowers and explosive charges. They shoot across the river on strange machines which seem to be a cross between battle pontoons and self-propelled sleds.

We follow them and storm the forward pill-boxes, where the Russians fight back more fiercely than we’ve ever experienced before. They’re komsomols from the industrial areas.

I’ve been given a sack of the new grenade type. The Pioneer-Leutnant warns me solemnly. ‘A little of that liquid on your hands and the flesh is gone. We tried it on a dog once and couldn’t believe our own eyes. Three somersaults and a long howl, and a skeleton was all that was left.’

I’m all alone with my sack. The others keep well away from me. Together with two pioneers I press forward towards the nearest pill-box. It’s one of the big ones with a lift in it.

The weapons dome rises up like a mole-hill and a snugnosed gun spews flame. The dome sinks back into the ground. When it appears again I throw two of the red cross grenades at it.

The heavy steel seems to melt away. We feel the fumes biting at our lungs and eyes, even though we are wearing the new Czech gasmasks. ‘I’m off!’ says one of the Pioneers laconically. ‘This is sheer insanity!’

‘Stay where you are,’ wheezes the other holding the nozzle of the flamethrower against his chest. ‘Don’t forget you’re a
penal posting! They ought to have liquidated you in Germersheim, you lousy traitor! The Führer sent you here to tighten your ring. You’ll never see Moscow!’

I keep out of it. It’s none of my business if a busted Leutnant gets a punishment posting to Combat Pioneers. Far as I’m concerned they can liquidate him, or do what they like with him.

I run forward to the next shell hole, throw two red cross grenades and press myself down into the crater.

The pioneers catch up with me. One of them lifts his flamethrower and sends a long hissing burst of fire at the pill-box.

At the same time the former Leutnant vaults up out of the crater and runs towards the Russians with lifted arms.

‘Give him a grenade!’ howls the other.

‘Get fucked!’ I answer. ‘If he’s going to get killed it won’t be by me!’

‘
Tovaritsch, tovaritsch, nicht schiessen
,’ shouts the Pioneer desperately, only a few yards from the Russian position.

I will him to get away with it. If he comes back it will be to a horrible death in solitary at Germersheim. Not many people know what happens in Germersheim, but No. 5 Company was guard company there just after the French campaign. The chief of the Special Section, Oberfeldwebel Schön, wasn’t a good man to get across. He once came close to breaking Tiny’s back for throwing an oak desk at him. Tiny’s still a little crooked in the spine as a result of that comradely pat on the back. They called it that to avoid having to make a report to the Commandant of the prison. Oberstleutnant Ratcliffe. A more hated officer never lived. The permanent staff, the guard company
and
the prisoners were in complete agreement about that. In every other respect we weren’t. Germersheim was the scene of a merciless three-sided war, and of the three sides the guard company was best-off. No company stayed on duty there for more than three months. The permanent staff had it worst. They were life prisoners – with keys. None of them dared to move
outside the prison alone, for fear of running across a former prisoner back in rank and using his leave to revisit the military prison.

Porta and I met a Leutnant once who had so many medal-ribbons he looked like a walking advertisement for a paint and colour shop. One night, far behind the Russian lines, he told us that he intended to go back to Germersheim to square accounts with three Feldwebels on the permanent staff.

‘I’ll make him hit me first,’ he grinned revengefully.

‘Yes indeed,’ says Porta, ‘I can see very well without glasses. You intend to meet the Feldwebels in a private’s rig. It’s an expensive game striking an officer. Even when you don’t know he
is
one.’ But the Leutnant never made Germersheim. The very same night the ski-troops got him.

It’s funny how torturers almost always get away with it. They commit one legal murder after another, and every day they make more and more enemies who want to kill them, but it happens very infrequently. In their seventies you can run across them as jolly old pensioners with grandchildren on their knees.

The Pioneer-Gefreiter lifts his flamethrower, sights carefully in on the former Leutnant who is now very close to the Russian position.

‘Ten times damned bloody traitor,’ he snarls, his voice sounding hollow and far away inside the gasmask. His finger presses down on the trigger.

Like a blowlamp at full pressure the flame licks out over the uneven ground.

Small oily flames bob and flicker in front of the Russian position. They’re all that’s left of the Leutnant. Two seconds more and he would have made it.

I don’t pity him. He’s been a fool. Leaving the German Wehrmacht is an operation which needs careful planning. The Leutnant got no more than he deserved. He had been in Germersheim under the care of Oberfeldwebel Schön and should have known he was under observation. The attack rolls on. We fight our way through a whole world of nothing
but pill-boxes. The outer defences of Moscow. Villages are blown up time and again. We have to fight for every yard of ground. New bridges are thrown over the river and tanks, field artillery, special units, heavy artillery go rolling over them in long columns towards the Moscow skyline clearly visible in the distance.

We fight through the night against broken armies which refuse to give up. We have to literally liquidate each unit. There is nothing left of the buildings. The Russians employ scorched earth tactics in retreat. They would rather destroy everything than leave it for us.