Monte Cassino

  The first tank appeared on the hairpin bend: first, the flashguard on the long muzzle of the cannon. It was a Tiger II, our latest model, the one with the turret at the side. The hatch was open and in it we could see a black uniformed figure. But they had made a bad mistake in sending them out as commando men. The tank commander in the turret was wearing a Tyrolean cap, which no German panzer man has worn since the beginning of 1942. It was the headgear you stealthily took on leave with you in order to give yourself airs.

  Heavy, broad, enormous, the Tiger came lumbering up the serpentine road, another close behind.

  Porta remained standing in the middle of the road. He put up a hand to halt the steel monster towering in front of him. He peered into the muzzle of its 8.8 cm cannon and smiled to the commander, who was leaning over the turret.

  "Welcome to our joint," he called.

  The tank commander had a typical Dresden accent:

  "Gruss Gott! We've had a job finding you. I suppose you're No. 5 Squadron of the 27th Special Duties Regiment? I'm Oberfeldwebel Brandt from No. 2 Squadron. We have to report to you. We've the new flame-thrower tanks. Have you been told about us?"

  Porta took a draught of his rice spirit and kissed the back of the cat's head.

  "He's good, isn't he, Stalin? Bloody good. He could do a fine circus act!"

  Tiny began fumbling with the cap of a grenade.

  "His arse is going to be hot."

  The Old Man shoved Porta and Tiny aside. With heavy tread and swinging arms he went up to the great tank:

  "Hallo, chum. What about the password, just to do things properly?"

  "Scharnhorst," the other answered with a broad grin.

  Marlow nudged Heide.

  "Do you see? The pale turd's got SS death's heads on his lapels? If this is Mike's marines, I'll bring up."

  "C'est le bordel," the Legionnaire murmured. "They're putting their feet right in it."

  The first tank was directed forward to the road block, where the eight T-mines hung. We climbed up onto it.

  The man in the turret grew nervous, when he caught sight of our Molotov cocktails.

  "Like a cigar?" Porta asked, holding out a stick grenade, its porcelain ring dangling dangerously from the opening.

  The next tank, a Tiger I, came lumbering up the road and halted right behind the first, which was a dangerous tactical error. We couldn't believe our eyes, when the other four did the same. .

  "Have you any cunt here," the commander of the first tank asked.

  "We've weapons," Porta smiled.

  "Have you come from Rome?" Marlow asked tossing a hand grenade into the air like a juggler with a burning hoop.

  "Why have you got mixed tanks?" Porta asked inquisitively.

  "Why are you bringing them to us? We're a training regiment. We know the I's. We got rid of them three months ago. Where were you a recruit?"

  "With Panzer 2 in Eisenach."

  The Old Man shoved me forward.

  "Here's one of yours then."

  I smiled.

  "I don't remember you. What squadron were you in?"

  "No. 4."

  "Ah, yes. Hauptmann Krajewski was your boss. Who was the CO.?"

  "Major von Strachwitz."

  He was well informed. The panzer count was the unit's commander.

  The Old Man nudged me, but I did not quite know what he meant.

  "Can you remember the name of the adjutant," I asked. "I always forget it."

  "Oberleutnant von Kleist," grinned the Oberfeldwebel with the Dresden accent.

  "When did you leave the regiment," I asked.

  "Just after Ratibor."

  "Do you know where Hyazinth Graf von Strachwitz is now?" I asked.

  The man could scarcely conceal his nervousness.

  "What the hell is this cross-examination?" he exclaimed irritably. "Open that barrier and let us in. We have to report." He held out various documents and pointed to a stamp. "As you see, we've come straight from Army Command. So up with that boom."

  "Steady on now," Porta grinned. "This campaign's no express affair. One should never go out onto thin ice. Hop out of those tanks and we'll drive them in. Major Mike prefers to see familiar faces in the turrets."

  "Is that the major who was with the US marines?"

  "Yes, brother. Shuffield Barracks. Hawaii."

  The other gulped.

  Tiny went travelling on the cannon's barrel. He put a grenade in the muzzle and toyed casually with the porcelain ring.

  "What the hell do you think you're up to?" called the Oberfeldwebel. He said something to the crew inside that we didn't catch, but we saw the evil eye of the flamethrower begin to move.

  The Legionnaire who had got himself upon the rear hatch, peered into the turret with interest.

  "On lui coupe les couilles!" He turned his thumb down and at the same moment his pistol roared.

  The man in the turret fell forward, riddled. Molotov cocktails went sailing through the open turret hatches. Wolf swung his arm back and with a masterly throw landed a T-mine under the turret ring of the third Tiger.

  There was an ear-splitting explosion and fifteen tons of steel soared upwards. An 8.8 cm long-barrel cannon went sailing into the pine wood, and bits of bodies were scattered on all sides. Burning petrol spurted round us, and explosion followed explosion, like a volcano erupting.

  In the middle of this inferno stood the swaying figure of the young doctor holding his first aid bag. He called something unintelligible, his face covered with blood and half his nose missing.

  The heat struck us like a clenched fist. Burning oil, petrol and the nauseating stench of burned flesh.

  All six tanks were in flames.

  "Traitors," muttered the doctor and flung himself down beside Porta.

  "German-Americans," Porta corrected. "There are no rules in this war. All foul play and dirty tricks. If these amateurs had tried it on a squadron that had had tanks being repaired and not chosen a Special Service Regiment, it would have come off."

  "They should have taken the trouble to get regulation death's heads for their lapels," Tiny muttered. "Everyone knows there are no SS-panzers down here."

  Porta got to his feet, glanced indifferently at the blazing tanks.

  "Now I want a fuck!" he announced.

  We put up 42 birchwood crosses in the pine wood with the names of American tankmen. Each got his deserts.

  V

  Monte Cassino, a name, a monastery, a half-forgotten place south of Rome? No, a hell so indescribable that even the most imaginative would not be able to describe its horrors. It was a place, where the dead died five times over. A place of hunger and thirst.

  A graveyard for young men between twenty and thirty.

  The trenches were piled high with bodies. There were so many of them. We stopped trying to clear them away. We trod on them and started back, rigid with horror, when they uttered their 'E-e-e-eh!' and then 'E-e-eh!' Sorry, chum, I thought you were dead.

  And they were dead. The cry came from wide open mouths when you trod on their gas-filled bellies.

  Which was worst? The drum fire? The hunger? The thirst? The glinting bayonets? The burning oil of the flame-throwers? Or the naked rats, the size of cats? I don't know. But one thing that neither I nor any other soldier who was there will ever forget, was the stench. The sweet stench of corpses mixed with chlorine. It clung to the wounded in hospital for months afterwards, nauseating doctors and nurses. Their uniforms had been taken and burned, but the stench had permeated them to the bone. The stench of Monte Cassino.

  Nine out of the ten supply columns remained in the gorge of death, unrecognisable bloody lumps. You can eat bark, leaves, even earth to help your hunger, but thirst! We fought like wild animals over a puddle. We discovered a shell hole full of water out in no-man's-land. A horde of rats was drinking avidly at it. We flung a hand grenade at them, then heedless of the bursting shells, we flung ourselves down there and drank, drank, drank!

  By th
e afternoon bursting shells had emptied the hole. On the bottom were some distended corpses. They had been there a long time. We spewed our guts up. But the next day, we found another shell hole and drank again.

  That was Monte Cassino, the holy mountain.

  SECRET MISSION

  The crest of the ridge was veiled in dense, blue mist. We kept marching into patches of low mist. A flock of crows wheeled down delightedly upon a forgotten corpse. A big herring gull drove them away.

  We were bad-tempered and tired after a night's digging that had cost us twelve men.

  The first shells fell. They were evil 10.5's. They sounded like a huge door being slammed. Fortunately for us, they were not fitted with contact fuses. If they had, most of us would have been done for there and then.

  Porta and I were unrolling a coil of barbed wire, when they started coming over. For the next two hours we lay out there in no-man's land. Then they attacked. Shoals of infantry. We had only light arms with us, as we were digging, and so we had to use barbed wire and stanchions as weapons. One of our pointed steel stanchions was just as good as a bayonet. Most of our losses were incurred when we returned after the attack, for our own infantry shot at us, firing low, thinking we were the English. When we reached their positions, Mike hit the company commander in the trench and knocked him out, and Leutnant Ludwig collapsed at the feet of his CO. with half his guts hanging out of a gaping hole in his belly. Ludwig was only eighteen and that was his first action. The CO. vomited.

  Trenching and wiring was not reckoned as anything. It was on a par with guard duty. Nobody was particularly keen for it, but it had to be done. There were always casualties. It was the units in rest positions, who were given the job.

  We could hear violent gunfire in the North. It sounded as though something were going to start at Forti. But we didn't care. It never moved us, when we heard of a whole division being wiped out. They weren't people we knew. We were out-and-out egoists. War had made us indifferent to other peoples' pain.

  When we reached the road, where the trucks should have been waiting for us, there were none. We flung our helmets on the ground angrily and cursed the service corps to hell and back again. We couldn't stand them and regarded them as spongers, like the cookhouse men.

  Leutnant Frick emerged from the mist together with two strange Luftwaffe officers. They walked slowly along the squadron picking out various people, who were told to fall in on the lefthand side of the road.

  The Old Man nodded: "More dirty work in the offing. This stinks of special mission."

  Almost all of No. 2 Troop were selected. Seventeen in all.

  "La merde aux yeux," cursed the Legionnaire, shuddering with cold. "There goes our morning coffee."

  Leutnant Frick beckoned to the Old Man. They whispered together. Then Gregor Martin and Marlow were called out and sent across to us.

  "So you couldn't do without us," Marlow said, grinning, as he sat down beside the Legionnaire.

  The Luftwaffe officers had a good look at each of us. Some trucks came jolting up.

  "No. 5 Company, board. Those picked out to the left," Mike ordered.

  The delighted lucky ones clambered up on to the tracks and waved to us. We spat at them. That wasn't enough for Tiny. He threw a great stone at them.

  "Pick up your arms. Single file. Follow me!" ordered Leutnant Frick.

  Luftwaffe trucks drove us to Teano. There we lay all day behind the station, waiting. Half of a soldier's time is spent waiting.

  We played pontoon. When dinner time came we broke into a supply wagon standing on a siding. Two cases of cognac made us take a somewhat brighter view of life. Porta found four sucking pigs which we roasted on a spit.

  "That's plundering," the Old Man muttered. "You could be hanged for that."

  Porta said: "At least I'd go out with a full belly."

  It was midnight when they woke us and marched us to a thick wood, where fifteen SS trucks stood waiting. That was a surprise. The trucks all belonged to the 20th SS Grenadiers, a division that consisted largely of men from the border states. We had met the division once, in White Russia. In the trucks, at the back, were SS greatcoats and helmets.

  "What the hell's this?" the Old Man growled, amazed. "Are they going to try and shove us into the SS?"

  Barcelona and Tiny were already delightedly trying on greatcoats. Tiny had put on an unterscharfuhrer's and was walking around in it, showing off. He pointed contemptuously at the Old Man, who gaped at him.

  "Pull your old bones together, you antique, when an Unterscharfuhrer passes! Or would you like a spell in a concentration camp to learn manners? I'm a big wig. I once kissed the Fuhrer's arse. Remember that!"

  Leutnant Frick appeared from behind one of the trucks.

  "Take that greatcoat off, Creutzfeldt, and keep your mouth shut!"

  "Jawohl, Untersturmfuhrer, SS Unterscharfuhrer Creutzfeldt begs to report his departure." He chucked the greatcoat and helmet into the depths of the truck, walked up to Leutnant Frick again, banged his heels together. "Herr Leutnant, Obergefreiter Creutzfeldt, reporting back."

  Leutnant Frick waved him away with a gesture of irritation.

  "Get into the back of that truck and do me the favour of going to sleep there."

  Shortly before daybreak we swung into the open space in front of the monastery of Monte Cassino, where a number of heavy Luftwaffe trucks were already standing. Some young officers from the Hermann Goring Panzerdivision were bustling about. They ordered us to camouflage our trucks and take cover. Some men were already obliterating our trucks' tracks.

  Tiny could not contain himself. He again put on a SS greatcoat and helmet. A Luftwaffe major ticked him off roundly and threatened all sorts of disasters, if he let himself be seen in that uniform again.

  We waited all morning without anything else happening, but Allied bombers flying overhead leaving vapour trails in the sky. We had had the foresight to supply ourselves from the railway truck and Porta had a quarter of a sucking pig in the pocket of his greatcoat.

  "We've to blow the whole shitting place up," Tiny told us, his face beaming.

  "Blast them," Porta exclaimed angrily. "They could let the engineers do that. This is gala night at Palid Ida's. She's got a lot of fine tarts coming from Rome, all fragrant with rose water."

  Tiny let his prurient imagination have full rein. He dribbled at the mouth.

  "There are nuns in this holy building."

  Heide's eyes narrowed.

  "Freedom to loot would suit you nicely, wouldn't it?"

  Tiny swallowed, then licked his lips.

  "Don't talk about it. I'm almost bursting out of my trousers."

  Porta took a mouthful of sucking pig. His face glistened with fat.

  "Have I ever told you about the time I was gardener to a nunnery?"

  We laughed and edged closer together under the lorry, settled our gasmasks comfortably under our heads.

  "Was that down on the river Dubovila?" the Old Man asked.

  "No, no! It was when I was on loan to the 2nd Panzer Regiment."

  "I certainly don't remember you being that," laughed the Old Man with a sideways glance at us.

  "Your memory has never been anything to boast of," retorted Porta. "But we, No. 2 Regiment and I, that is, were somewhere down among the Black Sea farmers. I was wandering about on my own looking for something important."

  "Cunt?" Tiny asked, suddenly interested.

  "That's the only idea you've got in that thick head of yours," Porta said. "I was looking for defeat."

  "Was it supposed to be found round the Black Sea?" the Old Man asked, amazed.

  "I had just heard that morning on the Tommy radio that defeat was imminent. The fighting in the Struma valley was going to be decisive. So I was searching with my magnifying glass behind every stone. All at once, I heard women screaming. Aha, I thought, there are some who have found defeat. But judging by the sounds it was knickers rather than flags that were being hauled down. The screams
came from a nunnery. I swung myself up onto the wall and stuck my tomato inside. Imagine what I saw. Our faithful allies were busy helping the nuns. I can't remember what I said to them, but they withdrew at some considerable speed. I landed in a bed of tulips and received an excellent reception."

  Porta's absorbing tale was here interrupted by Leutnant Frick ordering us to fall in.

  An Oberleutnant with the white collar tabs of the Hermann Goring Panzerdivision, looked us over.

  An observer 'plane was circling over the monastery.

  "Artillery observer," Heide said. "If he catches sight of us ..."

  Some monks brought us hot tea. We tipped half of it away and filled the cups up with rum. We still did not know what we were there for. We could hear hammering and sawing inside the monastery and in the distance the gunfire was unceasing.

  "They're hard at it beyond the hills there," said the Old Man thoughtfully. "There's something brewing. I can feel it in my bones."

  Whenever the Old Man said that, it was so. He was an old sweat and as such could smell dirty work a mile away.

  "What are we here for?" Heide asked, addressing himself to no one in particular, and gave himself a shake.

  "No idea," muttered the Old Man, giving his nose a tug. "I don't like all these people with the white tabs and the SS uniforms in the trucks. It stinks of hanky-panky.

  They've threatened us a hundred times with God knows what, if we go near the monastery, and now here we are at it, and armed to the teeth. I wonder if the Catholic hunt hasn't perhaps started?"

  "God preserve us, if that's the case," Barcelona said. "We'll be wading up to our chins in blood, if it is."

  The Old Man slowly lit his pipe.

  When night sank over the mountains hiding them, we backed the trucks to the monastery door. No lights were to be used in any circumstances. An elderly Luftwaffe leutnant ordered us to put our weapons in the driver's cab. No one was to enter the monastery armed. Somewhat reluctant, we chucked our automatic pistols into the cab. We felt naked without our arms.

  "Take off your equipment and arms," the strange leutnant ordered heatedly.

  Tiny tried to dart inside with a P. 3 8 sticking out of his trousers pocket. The leutnant called to him hectoringly: