Authors: Sven Hassel
Meekly, I did so. The Legionnaire wiped sweating hands down the seat of his pants. Porta picked up the key.
'O.K., you lot! Keep your heads down and your fingers up your bums!'
He bent over the mine, humming a casual snatch of song to himself as he did so :
'What will become of us, my sweet?
Shall we be happy or sad?
How shall we end up, my love?
Shall we be sorry or glad?'
Stiff as boards, the Legionnaire and I sat watching him. Unconcerned, Porta held up the mine in both hands.
' There you are!' He grinned at us. 'Harmless as an unhatched chicken.'
He turned and swaggered back to the others, the mine tucked under his arm like a rugger ball. Quite suddenly, he flipped it towards Gregor.
'Here! You have a go! I can't manage the thing! '
Gregor gave a shrill cry of terror and dived earthwards! Porta stood over him, raising his eyebrows.
'What's up, little man? Something frighten you?'
'You stupid sod!' Gregor kicked out at Porta's legs. 'You stupid bleeding bastard!'
'Pack it up,' said the Old Man, wearily. 'I'm in no mood for fun and games. Try to remember we've lost six men so far on this job.'
'My heart bleeds,' said Porta. 'Come on, Sven, hand up the gums. My turn to be a hero.'
He took the boots and moved to his place at the head of the column, but he had gone only a few metres when he stopped, bent down, made his examination and gestured towards the Legionnaire and me, who were the two next in line behind him. We looked at each other. We knew what had happened: Porta had come across a mine wired in relay and he needed a second person to help him Which of us should it be? For a second I wavered, and then the Legionnaire hunched a shoulder and went forward. It would be my turn next, and I immediately wished that I'd gone this time and got it over with.
Porta and the Legionnaire crawled over the ground following the wire. There was a time when they could have cut the damned thing and be done with it, but the enemy had grown wiser since then. They now covered the wire with a thin coating of copper. Touch it with
anything
metallic and the current would pass through it and detonate the mine. It had taken us a while to discover this new trick. The enemy were careful to leave no operating instructions lying about, and we'd lost several men before stumbling on the secret.
This particular little present had been slung up in a tree and was connected to three 10.5 grenades. Porta shouted irritably over his shoulder.
'Come on, for Christ's sake! This isn't a church outing!'
I realized, with a sick-making lurch of the heart, that it was my job to go across with the necessary tools and remove the bloody detonator. No easy task, that. Many a man has come to a bad end while removing detonators, and there was always the added risk that the might have prepared some new little surprise to trip us up.
Porta, half-way up the tree, was holding the four wires that led away from the mine. I edged myself forward, clutching the tools. It was a T mine. The detonator was no larger than a packet of cigarettes, but that was quite large enough for me. On one of the grenades, some joker lad written the message, 'Go to hell, damned Krauts'. It was signed with the simple name of Isaac. Really, you could see the unknown Isaac's point of view. No one with a name like that had any particular reason to love us.
By some miracle, the luck held. We disposed of the T mine and its booby traps and snatched a few moments' rest on the edge of the grave. We sat in a tight semicircle on the ground and smoked cigarettes, a pastime that was, in the circumstances, strictly forbidden.
'I'll tell you what,' said Porta, suddenly. 'I bet if old Adolf had to come and work in a minefield for half an hour he wouldn't be so bleeding cocky... He wouldn't be so keen on fighting the bleeding war, neither! '
This simple reflection put us all in a good humour. We sat there laughing immoderately until the rest of the group came up to join us, led by Lt. Brandt, who was in charge of the operation. Brandt had been with us since the beginning. He had from time to time disappeared on training courses, but he had always returned to us and we tended to look upon him as one of ourselves rather than as an officer, even to the extent of addressing him by his Christian name and treating him with our own particular brand of generally obscene familiarity. He was a true officer of the front line and one of the few men to command our grudgingly given respect.
'Bloody mines,' he grumbled. 'Much more of this sort of thing and we'll all end up together playing oranges and lemons in the nut house.'
'We'll dream of bloody mines,' said Porta, 'when we're back home digging up the vegetable patch. We'll be trying to detonate the bleeding spuds before we know where we are.'
Porta always spoke of 'when'; never of 'if'. On the whole I suppose we all thought in terms of 'when', though most of us were too cautious to say it out loud. But somehow you never could bring yourself to consider that one day it: might be your turn to end up in a ditch with a beer can holding your personal papers. You often thought about death, and broke into a cold sweat, but in your heart of hearts you couldn't seriously believe it would ever happen to you. Quite frequently, before a full-scale attack, we'd helped prepare the communal grave, lined it with hay, stacked up the little wooden crosses. And never once, did you picture your own body flung into it along with all the others, though God knows death was a common enough experience. How many times a day did you hear the sharp whistling sound of a grenade, the heavy thump as it landed, then the explosion, then the shrieks of pain, then the realization that the man standing next to you a second ago was no longer there... How many times had it happened that half the section had been blown up, that all round you men lay dead or dying, and you alone left standing there unharmed? You knew the luck couldn't last for ever, and yet instinctively you felt that your own personal luck was surely inextinguishable.
Porta was eating again. This time it was a case of tinned pineapple he had found in an abandoned American jeep.
'Funny how I never really appreciated pineapple before,' he mused. 'First thing I'm going to do when the war's over is go into a restaurant and stuff myself sick till it runs out of my ears.'
This, of course, was the cue for one of our favourite pastimes: playing the game of 'when the war is over...' We discussed it each time with renewed vigour, and somehow it never lost its appeal, although of us all Heide was the only one who knew definitely what he wanted to do with his life. He was already an N.C.O., and he had long since decided to put in for officer training. To this end he consecrated a part of each day, no matter where we were or what we were doing, to learning ten pages from "the Manual of Military Campaigns. We teased him unmercifully, yet we were, perhaps, just a little jealous of his dogged determination to succeed. We all knew, though none of us would admit it, that we had been soldiers for too long to return to ordinary civilian life. The Old Man declared that only farmers could happily resume their prewar activities, and probably he was right. To me, farmers were a race apart in any case. Only show them a field of potatoes or a row of apple trees and the chances were they would go completely berserk. Many a farmer had turned deserter on account of an apple tree in full blossom. They were nearly all picked up two or three days later and were hauled off to the court-martial muttering feverishly about pigs or plum trees. Unfortunately, no court-martial that I ever knew could understand the sudden compulsion that came over these men upon being brought face to face with a chunk of your actual raw nature, and the outcome was, inevitably, the firing squad.
It was ten hours, now, since we had set out to clear a way through the minefield. Ten hours of tension; ten hours of walking, quite literally, in the path of death; ten hours with virtually no respite, because what's a twenty-minute break here and there when you know the job's not yet even half completed?
But at last it was nearing its end. We had just placed the final white marker indicating a safe passage for tanks, and we should soon be able to relax. I was on the point of driving in the last stake when from the corner of my eye I caught sight of something. I paused and looked up. The others were standing still as statues, their mouths dropping open, their eyes wide and staring. They were all looking in the direction of Lt. Brandt. He was standing rather apart from the main body of men, his legs straddled, his arms held slightly out from his body... I felt the goose pimples of fear break out over my limbs. I knew only too well what that awkward stance indicated: Claus was standing directly over a mine. The slightest move, and it would go off. I could see the wires running from it. Claus must know as surely as the rest of us that his hour had come.
Those nearest to him began slowly to retrace their steps, backing away one foot behind another. They, too, were in grave danger. It was evident from the presence of wires that the mine was linked to others. Only one person showed any desire to rush forward, in a heroic but undoubtedly suicidal attempt to come to the Lieutenant's aid, and that was Little John. We restrained him by brute force, and it took three of us to do it. No sooner had we succeeded in calming Little John than Barcelona was overcome by a fit of madness and began slowly to crawl towards Claus, still straddled over his death-trap,
'Catch the silly bastard! ' yelled Porta.
The Lieutenant's face was a horrible leaden colour. He was one of the bravest men I knew, but even brave men are allowed a certain licence when standing on a live mine. Already we were preparing a syringe full of morphine, laying out the bandages and dressings. If by some miracle he survived, he would need all the dressings available. The Legionnaire had pulled out his revolver. His intention was dear: whatever happened, Claus should not suffer longer than was necessary. Call it murder if you will, but he had been with us for six years, fighting side by side with the men under him in some of the worst encounters of the war. When you know and love and respect someone as we did Claus, you don't bother too much about how the rest of the world is going to feel, you just go ahead and do what has to be done.
To be caught out like that, by a comparatively simple mine, lying there for all to see, was one of the incredible ironies of war that are so hard to bear. And yet, I suppose, it was almost inevitable that something of the kind should happen. After ten hours of concentrated work in the middle of a minefield it's not very surprising if a man's attention should lapse for a second or two. Unhappily, a lapse of even a fraction of a second is only too often fatal in such circumstances.
Porta suddenly cried out to Claus.
'Jump! It's your only chance!'
Claus hesitated--and who should blame him? It was one thing to say it was your only chance; it was quite another thing nerving yourself to take that chance.
Meanwhile, we waited. And death waited none the less patiently, for a prey that was very sure.
After a time--ten minutes? Half an hour? Days, weeks, months? It seemed like eternity--Claus raised his hand to us in a silent, farewell salute, bent his knees, prepared to take his only chance...
I pressed my hands over my ears. Claus remained in position, like a runner waiting for the starting pistol. I suppose we must all have shared the agony of his final thoughts. So long as he remained where he was, he was still a live man; the second he moved, he would probably be a very dead man.
He pressed the tips of his fingers into the earth, preparing for the moment when he must take his chance. And then suddenly he straightened up again.
'Chuck me over your battledresses!'
Ten jackets were instantly thrown across to him. Only three reached him. Little John started up again, but Porta instantly fetched him a blow with a spade. He collapsed with a grunt.
'Tell him thank you from me,' said Claus, gravely.
He wound the three jackets round his body, protecting his stomach and chest as best he could. Then, once again, he raised his hand in salute.
'Jump! For God's sake, jump! '
I heard myself urgently whispering the command, but the sound was drowned in the sudden united pealing of bells all over the country. Bells that were ringing out for the liberation of France. The wind brought us the sound of the jubilant carillons, crying out that France was free. People forgot the horrors of war, the hell of the Normandy landings, the ruined buildings, the devastated countryside. They knew only that once more they were a free people. In the streets, American soldiers danced with French girls. Viva la France! Mort aux Allemands!
Lieutenant Brandt flexed his muscles. And jumped. And an explosion that shattered the eardrums drowned the pealing bells. A leaping tongue of flame... We sprang
forward. Both his legs had
been blown off. One was lying; neatly by
his side;
the other was God knows where. His; entire body was covered in burns, and he was still conscious.
The Old Man at once set to work with the morphine. Porta and I bound tourniquets round the two bleeding stumps of his legs. His uniform was hanging in shreds, there was a smell of roasting flesh. Claus gritted his teeth as long as he could, but then the suffering began in earnest and his screams of pain rang out and mingled with gay carillons.
'More morphine!' roared Little John, who had recovered consciousness after Porta's blow with the spade.
'There isn't any more,' said the Old Man, quietly.
Little John rounded on him.
'What the hell do you mean, there isn't any more?'
A pause.
'What I say,' said the Old Man, throwing away the syringe in a gesture of disgust. 'There is no more morphine.'
What else could we do? Nothing very much. Only sit by the Lieutenant's side and suffer his agonies with him. Someone placed a cigarette between lips that were already turning blue.
'You'll be all right----'