Authors: Sven Hassel
The Old Man and the company commander come crawling over to us. ‘What the devil are you waiting for?’ asks Moser. ‘Get on, you lazy sacks! There’s not a minute to waste.’ He is about to get up when Tiny restrains him.
‘’Arf-a-mo, sir, or I’m afraid we’ll be parted from another before even
you’d
like! A black cat’s walked through them sheds.’
‘What do you mean, a black cat?’ asks the Oberleutnant uncertainly, crawling further under cover.
‘I don’t know,’ answers Tiny, thoughtfully, ‘but there’s been one in there.’
Some rear echelon soldiers come racing up from the hedgerows. We don’t even know their names. We found them, almost dead from terror, in a pill-box three days ago.
‘Get
down
!’ shouts the Old Man, warningly. Ignoring the shout they rush madly on seemingly crazed with fear, shouting:
‘
Tovaritsch, tovaritsch, nicht schiessen!
’
12
They seem to think we are Russians. With hands held high above their heads they run straight for the huts.
‘Holy Mother of Kazan,’ mutters Porta. ‘You think a Siberian commissar was gnawing at their arses the way they run!’
‘Get down! Halt! shouts Moser, signalling to them with both arms.
‘
Nicht schiessen, nicht schiessen, tovaritsch!
’ is the only answer he gets.
The first of them has reached the huts and is about to kick open the door.
‘Heads down!’ cries Porta, terrified.
A volcano breaks loose. The huts disappear and a series of explosions follow on the first.
There is nothing left at all of the frightened soldiers.
‘God save us,’ cries Moser in amazement. ‘What in the world was that?’
‘A present from Stalin,’ grins Porta, happily. ‘When those Supplies heroes opened the door they set off the lot!’
‘Jesus, what a bleedin’ bang,’ says Tiny, happily. ‘I was right, about that cat. Ivan ain’t bad at ’andin’ out them Stalin Prizes! The echelon boys drop in every time. I can’t for the life o’ me understand ’ow anybody in ’is right mind’d dare go into a place like that. It’s just made for Ivan to ’ave ’is little bit o’ fun in.’
‘Well, let’s get on,’ says Moser, shortly, pushing his Mpi under his arm.
‘Let’s just take another little breather for a minute, Herr Oberleutnant,’ says Porta. ‘Ivan’s coming to see who it was took the Stalin Prize this time.’
‘And ’ere’s the winner, boys!’ grits Tiny, opening up with his machine-gun.
A party of Russians fall screaming under the hail of bullets.
‘Move!’ shouts Porta, and off we go as fast as we can through the deep, powdery snow.
The Russian soldiers lie bleeding amongst the trees. One of them looks down in astonishment at his ripped body and moans softly to himself.
The company closes up. Moser orders a count of heads. Fourteen men missing. Only seventy-three of us left. Over three hundred lie dead behind us.
The company commander seems almost to be losing heart. His hand plays, thoughtfully, over his Mauser.
Tiny tries to roll a cigarette out of the fluff in his pocket, and manages to get a cigarette out of it. He takes a deep drag, holding the smoke in his mouth for a long time. Then he hands it on to Porta. There’s a draw for all of us in
No. 2. Artillery thunders and shells whistle through the air towards the German positions. The whole of the western sky is a dancing sea of flames. At the horizon everything seems to be on fire.
‘Who said the Red Army was beaten?’ asks Porta, sarcastically.
‘Oh cut it out,’ growls the Old Man, irritably. ‘It makes me sick to think of it.’
‘If it’s going to take much longer to get through,’ continues Porta, ‘you can scratch Joseph Porta, by the Grace of God, Obergefreiter, off the Greater German Army List.’
The Professor is completely beaten, and lies weeping in a snowhole. Tiny bends over him.
‘It was bad shit for you gettin’ into this lousy, bleedin’ war, my son! But now you
are
in it I’d advise you to cork your life away, see? Keep close to me. I’ll see you get back to your bleedin’ mountains again.’ He pushes half a pear into the Professor’s mouth.
‘Chew that slow, an’ swallow the juice. It’s as good as puttin’ pepper up the backside of a lazy ‘orse. Makes it want to run away from its own arsehole!’
Several times I get stuck in deep snowdrifts, and the others have to come back to pull me out. The soft, powdery snow is hellish stuff. At last I’m so worn out that I beg them to leave me where I lie. I cry, as the Professor cried before. For most of us, our supply of nervous energy is stretched to the breaking-point.
We go straight through a wide patch of thorny brush, which tears our skin and uniforms to ribbons. Blood streams down our faces, mingling with the sweat.
Slowly it stops snowing. A full moon shines through the clouds. The sky becomes almost clear. We can see a long way in front, and won’t run into the enemy by accident, but it’s easier for the Russians to see us, too. Our footsteps become strangely hollow. We stop fearfully and listen. It sounds as if we were walking on hollow tree-trunks.
‘Bong! Bong!’ it sounds at every step.
‘Faster!’ the Old Man is chasing us. ‘Don’t piss yourselves, my sons. We’re only walking over a swamp. Lucky it’s frozen.’ Man-high reeds and swamp rushes hide us. This thick forest of swamp plants makes us feel safe. Suddenly we are in the middle of a village.
We go down by the nearest huts like lightning.
‘
Stoi kto!
’
13
comes from the darkness. A submachine-gun spits tongues of flame. The burst smashes the face of Befreiter Böhle.
‘Forward!’ roars Moser. ‘Fire at will!’
The sentries are swept away as every weapon speaks. We storm forward, throwing grenades through windows, kicking open doors, emptying magazines into sleeping soldiers. We go to cover behind great stacks of ammunition.
Thoughtlessly Porta slings a mine in amongst the boxes. The resulting explosion literally blasts us out of the village. In a second the whole place becomes a thunderous hell of flames, with explosion following on explosion.
‘You are the biggest, stupidest idiot I have ever met in the whole of my life,’ shouts Moser as he gets up cautiously, with blood streaming down his face.
‘Nice little bang,’ grins Porta, unworriedly. ‘Ivan must’ve shit a new commissar when that went up.’
We have been marching some time down a narrow road churned up by tank tracks, when Tiny suddenly sinks to the ground.
‘Panzers!’ he whispers, pointing to a long row of T-34s waiting in readiness in between the trees.
‘Got anything we can use for the Last Supper?’ whispers Porta. ‘Wish I’d been a better imitation of the Virgin Mary’s Son!’
‘’E wasn’t unlucky enough to get mixed up in a World War,’ sighs Tiny, tiredly.
We make a wide detour round the T-34s, work our way through a wood consisting solely of saplings, and come out
again on a wide, open plain. In front of us are some hills which we will have to cross.
A long column of Russian lorries with blue black-out lights is moving slowly towards the west. Flares are going up everywhere. Klockdorf and the Old Man climb up to the top of the heights, while the remainder of the company stays under cover.
‘We’ll have to pass through a Russian position at the foot of those hills,’ explains the Old Man, when they return.
‘Move!’ orders Moser sharply, changing the magazine on his Mpi. The company spreads out and moves crouching-over towards the heights. A phosphorus flare hangs, like a lamp without a wire, over the terrain, lighting it up with its ghostly illumination. We can see the lines of trenches and pill-boxes clearly.
Tracer bullets draw dotted lines across the uneven ground. We lie still in the snow for a moment to pull ourselves together. The Oberleutnant nudges the Old Man in the side. ‘The last fence, Beier! Let’s see that finishing post! Keep contact, for Heaven’s sake!’
‘The wounded?’ asks the Old Man, carefully.
‘Each man must make his own decision,’ answers Moser, looking away.
We work our way in towards the positions. If they notice us, our chance of getting through will be zero.
‘Where the devil
is
Ivan?’ whispers Porta, amazed, when we reach the Russian positions and can see down the whole length of the trenches. There is no sign of a living creature anywhere.
‘The position
must
be manned,’ whispers Klockdorf nervously, clutching a potato-masher in his hand.
‘The German lines are over there at the edge of the forest,’ explains Moser quietly.
‘Then Ivan can’t be far away,’ whispers Tiny. ‘’E’s onto the arse of everythin’ German!’
‘Everybody here?’ whispers Moser over his shoulder.
‘All got your tickets ready to be handed over at the
entrance?’ grins Porta, in a whisper, ‘any of you try to sneak in you’ll get fined heavily.’
Silently we crawl closer to the trench. Porta points with his Mpi.
‘There’s our old pal, Ivan. I was afraid for a minute there that he’d got tired of fighting us and gone off home by train.’
‘Wouldn’t seem like the same war,’ whispers Tiny. ‘Ivan wouldn’t never do that to us.’
A group of Soviet troops is sitting right up against the edge of the trench, half covered with white camouflage tarpaulins. There are hundreds of them. It’s incredible that they haven’t seen us.
‘Hand grenades,’ whispers the Oberleutnant. ‘All together?’ Working quickly we screw the caps off the grenades.
‘Throw!’ orders Moser, softly.
Grenades whirl through the air and land with the effectiveness of artillery in the narrow trench.
The surprise is complete. Panic breaks out in the position. Expertly we roll up the trench and break through into no-man’s-land.
A couple of mines explode. Human bodies are flung into the air on the tip of the explosion flame. Fire eating into their eyes. Skulls crushed like seashells under the wheels of a tractor. Porta and Barcelona cut the wire. We run straight into the arms of a Rusian spotter who immediately opens fire on us. In a giant spring Tiny is on him and garrottes him. He took five of us with him, though.
Porta and I are pulling Stege after us on a tarpaulin. He screams dreadfully as we pull him through and over the wire. He is one of the few wounded we still have with us. All the rest have been abandoned.
The Russians have got over the first shock of our attack. Shouts of command can be heard. Grenades whirl towards us and machine-guns sing their chattering song. Hundreds of flares hang in the sky above us.
With hands and feet we dig our way down into the snow.
It would be certain death to keep moving in this sea of light. How long do we lie there? Years? Months? Days? Hours? We’d be amazed if anybody were to tell us it was only minutes. Bullets whistle and snarl over our heads. Explosive shells bore into the snow and rip great holes in the frozen fields. We hug the ground desperately. I turn to the man beside me to find that all that is left of him is a great lump of quivering flesh. He made a joke just now when he saved me from a shell. I can hear they’re using 80 mm mortars. Firing
katuschkas
which throw up earth like a breastwork in front of and behind us.
Moser makes a rush forward. The Legionnaire goes after him, but is thrown back by a burst of flame. He screams, pressing both hands to his face. Blood is pouring from between his fingers. I grasp his feet and pull him back under cover. One side of his face is gone completely. I bandage him as well as I can.
‘I can’t see!’ he mumbles. ‘I’m blinded! Give me my gun!’
‘Balls, there’s nothing wrong with your eyes. It’s the bandage covering them, that’s all,’ I reply. ‘Your left cheek’s gone, nothing more. It’ll give you at least three months at the rear. What the devil, Desert-rat, you’re lucky!’
He doesn’t believe me.
I have to lift the bandage carefully away from his eyes. He screams with joy when he finds he can see but I take his pistol from him anyway, for safety’s sake. People with head wounds can get the craziest ideas. I take him by the hand when we continue our flight.
The Professor runs alongside me. He has lost his Mpi and is scared stiff of getting a court-martial.
I hear it coming. A deadly, whining whistle. I just manage to push the Legionnaire into a shell-hole and follow him myself. The Professor is worrying so much about his lost Mpi that he doesn’t hear the shell until it strikes in front of him. His arm flies high into the air and falls beside him. Astonishedly he picks it up, and can’t understand how it can be his. Blood streams from his shoulder. I try to
staunch it. Make a tourniquet from the strap of his gasmask. He can’t feel anything, he says. I powder the wound with sulfanilimide and try to call the others. Nobody hears me. Now I’ve two to look after. Let’s hope I don’t run into a Russian patrol. I have to carry my Mpi slung around my neck. Before I could ever get it into firing position I’d have been dead ten times over.
Suddenly the Professor begins to scream. The impact anaesthesia effect has worked off. He will soon be moving in a hell of pain. It hurts hellishly to have your arm torn off, but now, at least, his war worries are over. If they ask where his Mpi is he can say it went with his arm. Even the toughest of courts martial couldn’t turn that one down, though I’ve no doubt some of them would like to be able to require both the limb and the weapon to be handed in to QM stores. Porta thinks it won’t be long before loss of an arm will be regarded in the same way as equipment shortage, a form of sabotage. A soldier who has lost his arm cannot be used over again. Loss of a leg isn’t so serious for the Army. After training in the use of an artificial leg the soldier can be utilized again in the Quartermaster branch. A man can be taught to march with a false leg. The Prussians have drill instructors – Feldwebels – who can turn almost complete invalids into acrobats.