Blood and Ice (15 page)

‘Of course, I do, you stupid bastard!’ Schulze yelled back, beside himself with rage, not caring any longer. ‘Flank attack. What good will that do? We’re finished –
kaput
!’ He swallowed hard. ‘Let them surrender, run away, disperse, do any goddamn thing they like.’ He indicated the men dug in all around with a furious sweep of his big hand. ‘But don’t make them die – NOW!’

Habicht’s fingers fumbled with the flap of the holster, but the big NCO did not allow him to complete the movement. His boot lashed out and the pistol went flying from Habicht’s hand. He yelped with pain and cried, ‘This is mutiny, Schulze!’

‘Of course it is. You have had your day, Habicht. Let them go. If you want to die – then die.’ He extended his hand towards the Russian positions.

‘
Die?
’ Habicht echoed the words, his face completely mad now. ‘Of course –
die.’

Words died on Schulze’s lips as Habicht pushed by him and ran down the slope towards the Russians. The enemy reacted at once. Bullets whined all around the running man, but he seemed to bear a charmed life. Nothing seemed able to touch him. He kept running and screaming that one final word ‘
die…die…die…
’ Suddenly he faltered. A burst of Russian tommy-gun had ripped his skinny chest open. He struggled on a few more paces. Another burst slammed cruelly into his stomach. Still he staggered on, his legs giving beneath him. ‘DIE!’ he screamed one last time in a voice that made the hairs on Schulze’s neck rise in terror. And then he slumped face forward on to the pitted snow without another sound.

For one long moment an echoing silence seemed to descend upon the battlefield. Even the Russians seemed to hesitate, as if awed by the manner of the Hawk’s death. Then Schulze pulled himself together, clapped his big hands around his mouth, and cried to the young volunteers crouching around him, ‘Bugger off, lads! It’s all over. Go home while you’ve still got a chance.’

The boys in their holes did not move.

‘Bugger off, I say, get back to your mothers, you stupid young sods!’ Schulze yelled, his eyes wild with rage.

Still they did not move. Schulze could not wait any longer. He had his own plans. He fired a furious burst at the
Europa
regimental flag still flying proudly over the CP. The pole splintered. Slowly the flag began to descend to the ground.

It did the trick. The survivors of
SS Regiment Europa
broke. Screaming and shouting in half a dozen languages, they fled, fighting and clawing at each other in sudden panic, running desperately from the men in earth-coloured blouses who were now beginning to advance on their abandoned positions. The great ‘European’ dream was dead.

Schulze doubled up the hill towards the ruined tram shed in which he had positioned the men he was taking with him. The floor of the shabby blue tram was lined with sandbags and the windows covered with corrugated iron sheeting, with slits cut in it for their weapons.

Schulze took it all in in a glance. ‘All right, Cheesehead, get in.’ The big Dutchman swung himself up into the cab and grabbed the twin brass steering handles in his big paws.

‘Are you ready, the rest of you!’ Schulze yelled above the hoarse triumphant cries of the advancing Russians.

‘Ready!’ the men, waiting to push the tram out of the wrecked shed cried back.

‘
Now!
’ Schulze bellowed and jumped in, Schmeisser at the ready.

The young men heaved. The train started to move. ‘More!’ Schulze bellowed.

The men shoved with all their strength. The tram edged out of the shed. Ahead of it stretched the steep twisting cobbled street, packed with advancing Russians. The men to the rear gave one last shove and scrambled hastily to swing themselves aboard. The old tram started to gather speed. The Russians were not slow to react. Bullets howled off the metal sideplates. At the driver’s side, Schulze swung his Schmeisser from side to side, hosing the Russians with lead. A group of soldiers caught unawares went flying out of the way, save one. The tram lurched unpleasantly and for one awful moment Schulze thought it was going to stop. But it continued its crazy progress, leaving behind it a dead Russian on the tracks, his head and legs grotesquely amputated.

They swung round another bend and before them loomed a hill which Schulze knew they would never get up. But they were through the Russians by now and the nearest entrance to the sewer system was only fifty metres or so away. It was time to go. As the tram began to lose speed, Schulze slung his machine-pistol and yelled, ‘All right, it’s time to abandon ship. Come on Chink, let’s go.’ Two minutes later the whole bunch of them were entering the sewers.

Note

1.
  Also known as Castle Hill.

Budapest was dying in flames, but the anxious group of middle-aged Jewish men and women had no eyes now for the city in which they had been born and spent half their lives. Budapest was the past. They saw only the future, symbolized by the ugly black armoured behemoth steaming in front of them on the siding.

‘Well?’ Janosz demanded, obviously proud of his achievement, ‘what do you think, Sergeant-Major?’

Schulze took a long look at the locomotive, the three coaches and the little guards van at the back, which would be occupied by the SS. It looked good. The locomotive had three-centimetre thick armour and a heavy iron reinforced prow to cut through any obstruction. The coaches were similarly armoured, with slits and gun-ports running their length, while the guards van, armoured too, had a raised towerlike structure on its roof, in which a machine-gunner and a look-out could be posted to cover the length of the coaches’ roofs. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘But with all that armour, it’s going to be slow, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ a guttural Magyar voice answered the question for him, ‘at the most thirty kilometres an hour.’

Schulze swung round. A squat man in greasy overalls stood there, wiping his oily hands in a piece of cotton waste.

‘Attila Pal, the driver,’ the Jew said.

‘Christ, what next?’ Schulze exclaimed. ‘Now we’ve got Attila the Hun on board too.’

We’ll hit plenty of snow and more than likely get stuck,’ the driver grumbled. ‘Then the switches will be frozen up and we’ll have to thaw them out before we can go on. And I don’t know if I’ve enough sand in the sandbox to scatter under the driving wheels on a slippery slope. And God on high only knows what would happen if the fire in the firebox went out, the pipes would freeze and burst.’ He shook his dark head sadly. ‘It’s not going to be easy at all.’

Schulze looked at him in awe, impressed by such unremitting pessimism. ‘Christ! what do you do for laughs – go and visit the cemetery? Get into that cab of yours and raise steam; we’d better get out of here before some nosey Popov comes checking up.’

Janosz hurried the last of his ‘flock’ into the coaches and followed up the steps himself. In front the locomotive, shuddered as it let off steam. ‘Well, my friend, we’re ready to go. Palestine ahead.’ He smiled at Schulze. ‘We’ve done it.’

Schulze shook his head. ‘Palestine ahead, what would the Führer say?’

Five minutes later the train left the dying city behind. Budapest was finished.

On the hill the battle entered its final stages. As the Russians swarmed into the old castle, General Pfeffer-Wildenbruch ordered the sweating radio-operator to send the
9th SS Mountain Corps
’ last message.

It read: ‘After fifty-two days of heroic battle, the Armed SS must end the fight this day. Peoples of Europe whom we once defended against the attacks of the Asiatic barbarians listen to the alarm bells now ringing in Budapest. It will be your turn next.’

There was a burst of automatic fire from the next room and someone screamed out in agony. The radio operator’s finger hesitated on the key wet with his own blood.

‘Carry on,’ the drunken Corps Commander ordered, drawing his pistol.

The radio operator completed the message: ‘Remember us Europe, for we have died for you.’

The next moment the door caved in and a horde of firing soldiers poured through. Far away in Berlin, the operator who had picked up the message heard a long continuous buzz.

Then there was only silence.

During the night the train had left the plain surrounding Budapest unnoticed by the Russians, and was climbing slowly into the mountains, chugging gently through a long, fir-wooded valley. Snow was falling, not too many kilometres ahead.

In the firecab, Attila the Hun, assisted by a fireman called ‘Gypsy’, divided his attention between the controls and the weather. He did not want to be caught on an ascent in new snow. ‘More coal,’ he barked to the fireman. ‘Move your lazy Gypsy ass!’

‘Cracking the whip again?’ Schulze said cheerfully, dropping down on the swaying cinder-littered metal floor of the cab from the tender. ‘How we doing?’

‘Lousy.’

‘What’s wrong now?’

‘That’s wrong.’ Attila pointed to the grey sky ahead. ‘If that lot comes down on us while we’re on a gradient like this, with the weight we’ve got to pull, then we could be in trouble. There are still a hundred kilometres to go before we’re out of Russian-held territory.’

Schulze swung himself back on to the tender and began to pick his way over the heaped-up coal towards the first coach. The refugees had just finished eating their breakfasts when Schulze flung open the door for an instant and let in the freezing air. They raised their heads with the look of alarm common to the persecuted.

‘Anything wrong, Schulze?’ Janosz asked.

‘Not much, but that happy-go-lucky Magyar at the wheel seems to think its going to snow again soon – and that’s bad according to him.’

Janosz nodded his understanding. ‘Please sit down, Schulze, I’d like to show you something.’ Schulze sat down at the table opposite him and Janosz pulled out a map from his robe and spread it on the tables Western Hungary is occupied up to here, beyond Stuhlweissenburg, by the Russians, though your people are back in charge in the town itself I am informed. Now, if we continue as present we shall run to the north of Stuhlweissenburg, along the northern bank of Lake Balaton to where the main Russian frontline is located – here at Hidekut. Or so my informant at Russian HQ tells me.’

‘Another recipient of Christian charity?’ Schulze said mockingly, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together.

‘Problem number one is to get there quickly before Marshal Tolbuchin finds out that we have gone westwards and not eastwards. Problem number two will be how to get through the front. But we’ll worry about that one when –’

His words were drowned by a screeching, banging clamour as the train started to slow down, the bumpers banging into each other.

‘Shit, what’s up now?’ Schulze cried and grabbing his machine pistol, he doubled out and dropped on to the snow at the side of the train, as the coaches came to a stop. ‘All out there,’ he yelled at the men peering out of the door of the guards van. ‘Gunners man the turrets.’ The big NCO ran through the deep snow to the locomotive. What’s wrong, sunshine?’ he cried up at the driver, who was fumbling with the controls.

‘The steam regulator,’ Attila called down. ‘Perhaps the retainer nut has come off.’

Anxiously Schulze looked up at him. ‘Is it serious?’

‘Five or ten minutes. But we’d better get it started before the snow starts. On this slope and with this weight, it could be damned difficult to get it started otherwise.’

MAP 2: The escape route from Budapest – February, 1945

Schulze ran back to the van, where the men not manning the turret were assembled, shivering a little in the icy air after the pleasant hothouse fug of the van. ‘You Frogs!’ he rapped, ‘get yourselves up to the front of the train and keep guard over that Magyar maniac at the controls. At the double now! Pat and Patichon,’ Schulze said to the two Danes, ‘you follow me.’

Together the three of them, weapons at the ready, swung round to the other side, conscious of the scared eyes watching them everywhere from the coaches as they headed for the thick fir forest which fringed the track. Down below there was a heavy silence, broken only by the steady whack of Attila’s hammer. The men split up, on the look-out for partisans.

In spite of his confident grin, Schulze was worried. Attila had been right. Any moment now, it would start snowing and that would spell disaster.

Pat the Dane was caught off his guard. He had just rested his Schmeisser between his knees when a sudden slither of snow dislodged from one of the firs alerted him to the danger. Less than three metres away, a bearded, wolfish face under a shaggy black fur cap was smiling at him cruelly. The partisan had a knife, raised ready to throw, in his hand. There was no time to level his Schmeisser. The Dane acted instinctively. His right hand grabbed a handful of the frozen snow and in that same instant, flung it at the partisan’s wolfish evil face. It caught him off balance. The knife aimed for the unsuspecting sentry’s heart struck him in the shoulder. He yelped with sudden agony, but the searing pain did not stop him diving forward. His good shoulder thumped hard into the attacker’s stomach.