Authors: Sven Hassel
Every hour the cold becomes more terrible. 52 degrees below zero. We have no frost oil for our automatic weapons. We tie hot stones around the locks to prevent them freezing. Our lives depend on our light and heavy machine-guns.
Coffee-grinders, old biplanes with small bombs attached to the fuselage, come out as soon as darkness falls. We can hear them coming and as long as their motors bang and cough there is no danger. When they stop we take cover. A rushing in the air, a shadow flitting over the snow, and soon after an explosion followed by the cries of the wounded.
Porta shot one down the other night. The pilot killed three of ours before shooting himself, so now we are cured of approaching shot-down Russian pilots. We light a large fire. It’s dangerous but the cold is insupportable and we must have hot stones for the machine-guns.
A few moments after our fire flames up the small, devilish 75 mms are on to us. The Russian forward artillery spotters can’t help seeing the fire, and where there’s fire there’s us.
‘My marrow’s freezing to fucking ice!’ moans Porta pushing a hot stone inside his greatcoat.
‘Jesus, it’s cold,’ Stege cries despairingly, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘Gimme a wound and let me get out of this. I’d give a leg for a warm hospital bed.’
Barcelona rubs his face carefully, thinking of his nose which is already going dangerously white.
‘Not so rough, or you’ll lose your strawberry!’ Porta warns
him. ‘Rub it with snow! It’s the only way to thaw out a frozen horn!’
Barcelona wouldn’t be the first to lose his nose. Suddenly it’s in your hand and all you’ve got left is a hole.
‘Bloody
lice
!’ shouts Porta scratching madly away like a flea-ridden dog. ‘They won’t leave you alone until there’s icicles hanging from your bollocks. Soon as you get warm again and roll up to get a bit of shuteye they’re running and fucking about all over you again!’
‘
C’est la guerre
,’ answer the Legionnaire. ‘Even the red lice are against us!’
I push a hot stone in under my uniform. As soon as it touches my skin I begin to itch. The lice go for the heat, too.
‘These minipartisans have been told about Stalin’s orders,’ explains Barcelona. ‘Don’t give the Fascist invader a second’s peace!’
‘Then they shouldn’t be bothering
me
,’ comments Porta. ‘I’ve never been a Fascist! Tell ’em to march on over to Julius! He’s pissfull of rich brown Nazi blood!’
‘It feels queer getting to Moscow,’ says Stege. ‘Six months ago none of us would’ve believed it. Now we’ve just got to get into the town,’ he continues, ‘and we’ll have peace inside fourteen days. Stalin’ll go soft when we march into the Red Square!’
‘The Kremlin’s farther off than you think,’ says Porta, clapping his hands vigorously.
‘We can
see
the bloody place,’ protests Stege angrily.
‘We could see England, too,’ answers Porta drily, ‘but did we ever get there? The Party and the Generals boasted a blue streak. The lords would be put to work as shepherds and whatnot. Buckingham Palace’d be turned into an officers’ knocker. We Germans suffer from an incurable case of swollen head complex. “God punish England,” said the Kaiser when he found he couldn’t do it himself. Now Adolf’s searching for Moses’ rod to part the waters, but it’s kept in a glass case in the British Museum in London! It’s my modest belief that he’s gonna get a shellacking like nobody’s business
here at Moscow. Haven’t you ever noticed what a funny lot these house painters are? Quite a lot of them are ring-snatchers. Look at Luetnant Prick on the gun section. His firm in Berlin are house painters. We got at cross purposes with one another the other day.
‘“We’ll meet at Canossa,” he shouts after me. “You’ll get to know me better!”
‘Not on your bloody life he won’t! Everybody’s knows “Canossa”, that little homo’ bar on Gendarmenmarkt. Nobody from over there dares to go into “the Crooked Dog” on the other side. If Leutnant Prick were to drop in to “the Dog” they’d have a whole whitewash brush up his arse crossways quicker’n shit.
And
it’d be one of the cheap ones that leave stripes on the ceiling.’
‘Victory is just around the corner,’ shouts Barcelona confidently. ‘Tomorrow night we’ll be stuffing the Moscow whores, and in a week’s time we’ll be off on leave!’
‘You’ll get wiser,’ Porta grins a disillusioned grin. ‘Adolf’s Travel Bureau’ll give us all enough sleepless nights yet to last us the rest of our lives.’
When we’re relieved the Russians begin to cover the area with mortars and field artillery.
The concussions follow one another without pause and great craters open in the snow-covered terrain. Russian infantry swarm out of the forest.
‘
Uhraeh, Stalino, uhraeh, Stalino!
’ comes in an animal roar.
Worn-out German units emerge from the ruins. Flares whistle skywards and illuminate the attacking hordes streaming endlessly from amongst the trees.
With feverish haste we bring our machine-guns into position. Bayonets wink in the ghostly illumination from countless explosions. Grenades are armed and lie ready to hand on the breastwork with porcelain rings dangling. If they get through it’s all up with us. There aren’t enough of us left to win a hand-to-hand fight. There are only a few remaining of those who formed up for the attack on 22 June. The others make a pathway of bodies from Brest-Litovsk via
Minsk to Kiev and from Kiev to Moscow. Thousands of them are floating as corpses in the Volga and Dnieper. Greater Germany, and the Führer’s, honoured dead!
Out of the red-black mist comes an infantryman laughing madly. With a scream he throws his carbine away and creeps along close to the ground like a wounded animal. A steel rain of shells whips up the earth around him. Nobody tries to stop him. It’s no business of ours. Even the Watchdogs can see he’s out of his mind. Those piercing screams are unmistakable. They can’t be simulated. The Watchdogs might take him to a field hospital but they
might
also shoot him through the back of the neck with a P-38 just to get rid of him.
Hundreds of MGs spit tracer across the terrain. Rank by rank the Russians fall to the deadly fire and are replaced by others who pick up their weapons and continue the advance. Every armed rank is followed by two ranks without weapons. A swaying forest of men in khaki.
The commissars are easy to recognize. They’re the ones who wear fur caps with a gilt hammer and sickle in the star and the green cross, symbol of ruthless power. God help the Soviet soldier who hesitates to go forward. The commissars look after him.
Hand grenades whirl through the air. Our rearward lines of communication have been destroyed by Russian commandos. We are cut off and have to use runners to maintain contact. To be sent out as a runner is almost certain death.
The Russians attack in close order with bayonets at the ready. Automatic weapons hammer tracer incessantly into their closed ranks.
‘At this rate we’re going to kill the entire Russian Army,’ says Heide. ‘Their leaders must be insane!’
‘Are they hell!’ answers Porta. ‘They’re cool as the Russian winter. To them men are cheaper than ammunition. Before we’ve killed the half of them we’ll have nothing left to shoot
with
. We’re not the first who’ve tried. Russia cannot be conquered.’
‘That’s Russian Communist shit,’ shouts Heide indignantly. ‘I ought to set the MPs on you!’
‘And I ought to put my foot up your arse!’ replies Porta sending a long burst away at a dangerous-looking Russian group.
Two Russians appear suddenly amongst us. Oberleutnant Moser and the Old Man are close to being bayoneted; then Tiny grabs the two militia-men by their throats and strangles them. One-handed!
We are about to leave our position when a section of combat artillery rolls up. They stop and fire and trundle on. The shells drop amongst the attacking mass of infantry. The artillery are using incendiaries and instantly the waving forest of soldiers is a roaring sea of flame.
The attackers sway back. Their commissars shoot into them but without effect. They begin to withdraw in panic flight.
A soldier here and there, then a whole column. Suddenly the battlefield is empty.
Stacks of corpses are left behind. Parts of bodies hang on the frozen bushes. Bloody entrails flap in the wind.
We clean our weapons and refill magazines. We are feverishly busy. Nobody knows how soon they’ll be back.
Motor sleds from Supplies come buzzing out of the forest towards us. We help them off-load ammunition. They are older men who were with the infantry in the last war. To protect them they have been put into Supplies. There they only have mines and the partisans to worry about. To our eyes they seem like old, old men who have stopped talking about girls and sit writing letters to some worn-out wife at home who has the air-raids to worry about. Many of them have sons our age among the fighting troops.
Just after darkness falls the enemy attack again but the artillery unit is still with us and takes a heavy toll of their infantry as they march forward in close column, shoulder to shoulder. The butcher’s work continues all night, the fighting swaying back and forth over the open ground. We crawl over
ever-growing heaps of bodies; pull ourselves up by stiffened arms which point accusingly to the heavens.
Towards morning the Russians manage to force their way through our automatic fire and we prepare for the final battle. Unexpectedly the weather comes to our aid. A howling storm sweeps across the river and drowns everything in driving snow which makes it impossible to tell friend and enemy apart. We feel our way forward, shout for the password. If the answer doesn’t come quickly enough a bayonet rips into the shadowy figure in front. The fastest talker lives longest.
Quite often you find your bayonet opening up a comrade’s guts, but this doesn’t worry you. The main object is to stay alive. They didn’t teach this kind of war in training school.
We’re not human anymore but a kind of arctic animal, killing to stay alive. Whenever we get a break we spend it sharpening our combat weapons. They are keen enough by now to shave with. We have cloths wound around our faces, so that only our eyes show, as protection against the cold. The oil in the locks of our weapons freezes in a few seconds, and all the MGs are out of commission. In the fearful battle which now ensues our best weapons are sharpened out spades. We use those taken from the bodies of the Russian infantry. They are stiffer, and considerably better for the job than the German collapsible spade. A German spade, in a hand like Tiny’s, breaks at the first stroke whilst the stouter Russian job stands up well to this kind of work. Catch them right, just under the ear, and off goes a head with one stroke. Be careful, above all, not to aim at the collar, since the stroke will be partially stopped by thick uniform material.
We fight hand-to-hand, with spade in one hand and pistol in the other. Run quickly from shell-hole to shell-hole, crouch on one knee like beasts of prey, ready to spring again as soon as we’ve got our wind and our blood has stopped pounding in our veins. The heavy artillery lays down a close barrage. Even the Corps Commanders far in the rear have
discovered that they are in serious danger. That’s why we get artillery support.
Clouds of smoke and flame rise from the forest. Trees are cut down as if with a giant scythe. the Russians take cover behind their own dead. A body gives as good protection as a sand-bag. In war you learn to use whatever is ready to hand. At the front nobody has time for moral tenets. But the soldiers aren’t to be blamed for that. Let the blame fall on the politicians who have led them down the road to ruin.
The firing and the pressure of the attack, dies away. The screams of the wounded can be heard now. One of them is lying right in front of us. He screams all through the morning and we get so desperate that we send rifle grenades out towards where we think he is, but every time the snow spurts up and we think we’ve finished him there he is again with his longdrawn, heartbreaking wail. The Old Man thinks he must have got an explosive bullet in the gut. That kind of wound takes a long time to kill a man. It can’t be a lung wound. He’d have been suffocated long since. A lung wound hurts terribly but means a quick death. The best wound is a piece of shrapnel in the thigh. All he blood has run out of you before you even realize you’re going to die. Stomach and head wounds are the worst. They take a long time to kill a man. Even if we risk a couple of lives and bring him in the hospital can’t save him. We get nervous, scream, and shout curses at him. We begin to discuss him. What sort of a chap is he? He’s a German we know. ‘
Mutti, Mutti, hilf mir!
he’s shouting all the time. If it was one of
their
boys he’d have been shouting: ‘
Matj!
’ He must be young or he wouldn’t be calling for his mother. The older ones call for their wives.
Just before darkness falls the Old Man asks for volunteers to go out and pick him up.
Nobody steps forward.
‘Bastards!’ snarls the Old Man, swinging a stretcher up onto his shoulder.
Moser tries to stop him.
The Old Man hits out insubordinately at the Oberleutnant.
‘Shit!’ rasps Porta tearing the stretcher away from him. ‘Come on Tiny, we’ll bring that bloody opera singer in! And when we get him here we’ll break his skull. He might be a volunteer who thinks war’s just a nice rough game for men.’
Bent-backed they run forward through no-man’s-land. Tiny is waving a white flag. The enemy have had enough of the screaming, just as we have.