‘Pity, only returned empties,’ sighs Tiny, sourly.
A couple of flames shoot up suddenly at each end of the bridge.
‘Primers gone,’ cries Porta, staring expectantly towards the long bridge.
Tiny comes down on the plunger with all his weight.
A single fantastic yellow-red flame shoots towards the sky and spreads into a mushroom-shaped cloud of enormous dimensions. The bridge is lifted up, along the whole of its length, towards the grey, threatening clouds. Both goods trains go with it, without a single wagon tipping over. Then everything bursts into millions of separate parts. A set of bogies crashes down a few yards from us.
The tankers are moving so closely behind one another that they have no possibility of turning. They are whirled up into the air, and flaming streams of petrol pour out over the frozen lake.
Heavy tankers are thrown about like toys. Petrol spurts everywhere, creating new redly glowing bonfires. Then, slightly delayed, the blast hits us with terrible force.
I am thrown many yards across the ice. But everything happens so quickly that I don’t even have time to be frightened.
Tiny, with box and torn-off cables trailing behind him, flies like a bullet right across the lake and disappears in the trees on the far side.
Porta is thrown up into the air in a crooked curve, spins around his own axis several times and lands in a giant snow-drift.
Gregor has disappeared completely. We find him far down the gulley, jammed in a cleft between two storm-twisted trees. We have a lot of trouble freeing him.
‘Holy Barbara,’ cries Porta. ‘Those Lewis bombs certainly make a job of it!’
‘They’ll tear our balls off, if they get hold of us,’ predicts Gregory, ominously, peering around nervously.
‘Ivan’s got other things to think of, just now, than looking for us,’ says Porta, optimistically. ‘That’ll teach ’em to drive their rotten trucks with lights full on, as if we didn’t exist!’
‘Now they know there’s a war on, at any rate,’ says Tiny, with a satisfied grin.
‘Let’s get moving,’ says Porta, decisively. ‘It’s only a few hours to the rendezvous point, and they’re not waiting for anybody! I don’t much like the idea of us four having to make it home on our own!’
They are all there when we arrive, but the action has not been carried out without serious losses. No. 1 Section were ambushed before they reached their target. They were executed on the spot, and their bodies left in the snow for the wolves. No. 2 Section, the Old Man’s, has lost nine men. There are only five men left of No. 3 Section. The rest were killed when the explosives blew prematurely.
‘Blown to dust,’ explains a gefreiter, with expressive gestures.
‘That was a hell of a noise you lot made,’ says the West-phalian. ‘What the devil was it you did?’
‘We took along a couple of tons of their ammo, while we were at it,’ answers Porta cockily.
‘And you weren’t even hurt?’ asks Barcelona, in amazement.
‘Only in our feelin’s,’ answers Tiny, laconically.
Leutnant Blücher has disappeared without trace, together with most of No. 4 Section. Only eight men get back to rendezvous point, and they are in such a state of shock that we can get no proper explanation from them. They babble about security people and torture and they will probably wind up in one of the Army Psychiatric Sections when we get back. The strange sickness which gets soldiers engaged in guerilla warfare behind the enemy lines has got hold of them too.
We lie dug-in in a balka for three days, waiting for the Russian activity to quiet down before moving off. A couple of times we hear their skis squeaking on the snow not very far from where we lie waiting.
We can’t sleep, any of us. The pervitin pills see to that.
Porta shortens the waiting for us by telling us the story of a Gefreiter he met once at the Army Ammunition and Explosives School at Bamberg.
‘He was a mad type, from Dresden,’ he begins. ‘Mad as that Russian who came over to us at Charkow and ate cloth, as if he were some kind of a moth. This Gefreiter from Dresden was a professional glass-eater. Soon as he saw a mirror or any kind of expensive glass, he’d grab it and eat it. Very soon there’s not a mirror left in the company. This glass-eating Gefreiter from Dresden has eaten the lot.
‘The other companies used to come over to us every evening, with mirrors and things, and he’d eat ’em all. They had to pay to see him do it, of course. I was the treasurer. After a bit he’d got through every mirror in the regiment. Eaten every single one of ’em. The price of mirrors increased noticeably.
‘We got round the mirror shortage by hooking mirrors in town, and before very long there wasn’t a mirror left in the whole of Bamberg. Of course the case got to the Kripos.6 At first they laughed at it, and wanted to know who’d be crazy enough to pinch mirrors, and put the chap who reported it in the clink. But when they found out all their mirrors were gone too they soon changed their tune.
‘Soon after this the Gauleiter’s mirror went. Then the Commanding General’s. It was a wonderful business, and I could have gone on with it all the time I was at Bamberg if that crazy glass-eater of a Gefreiter hadn’t gone and asked for a posting to KdF.† The idiot had got delusions of grandeur and persuaded himself he was an artiste and that Adolf might be interested in seeing him eat mirrors. The Director of Army Entertainment at Bamberg, a padre he was, threw him out on his ear.
‘Glass-eating’s not an art,’ he screamed after him, quite worked-up. ‘You’ll hear more of this, you Gefreiter you!’
The watchdogs took him the same evening. The parson had seen to that. I got things moving to get him out again, of course. There was money in the chap. But, unfortunately, he’d hanged himself in his cell. He’d written his last words on the wall:
‘Glass-eating is art! Hell Hitler!’
‘I once knew a bloke as used to eat razor-blades, an’ shit ’em out in little steel bars,’ recounts Tiny. ‘’E used to sell ’em to drunks on the Reeperbahn!’
Early on a grey morning we get back. The dead from the night’s shelling are still lying around. The Russians had shelled the area for about thirty minutes. Revenge when they realised we had managed to get through again.
Trucks pick us up later in the afternoon. We are off-loaded so far behind the front that we can only hear the guns as a muttering in the distance. But for several days we are in a queer state and still go around turning our Mpis on anybody we meet and shouting:
‘Stoi!’7
All in all we haven’t much else in our heads but the rattle of Mpis and the swish of battle-knives, but after a few turns in the sauna, and a bit of fun with the girls in uniform, it slowly goes away. Only No. 4 Section fails to shake off the sickness, but they have it so badly that we have to tie them up with their own belts until they can be taken away to the psychiatric section. We never see them again.
When it is time to move back up, and the holes in the unit have been filled up with new men, we are almost completely well again and have got rid of the continual fear of being killed wherever we go.
When those who, acting in good faith, raise their voices against the reign of terror, themselves are sent to the concentration camps and stamped as slanderers, then something at the very core of this movement must be rotten.
Colonel-General von Fritsch
6th June, 1936.
During the trip back to the forest camp Tiny holds his head out of the window the whole way, in order to let the wind cool the holes he has got in his face after a bitter three hour long bout of catch-as-catch-can wrestling with a giant Finnish woman. The prize for beating her was 1,500 Finnmarks and twelve bottles of vodka.
‘It’s as good as ours,’ said Tiny, as he ducked into the ring.
First she bit off half his nose and chewed on it like a dog with a sausage. Then he lost part of his left ear. When he still wouldn’t give in she broke three fingers on his right hand and tore the little finger off the left
. He didn’t declare himself beaten until she began crushing his balls.
As they were both taken away to the field sanatorium, we wondered why she was walking backwards. We found out later that Tiny had wrenched both her feet round so that they pointed the wrong way.
In the back of the truck some very queer soldiers we have been sent to pick up are screaming and shouting. They talk as if they had a red-hot potato in their mouths. None of them are wearing badges of rank. They belong to a fortification battalion with a high number and carry no weapons. When we sound off at them they laugh as if we had said something funny.
The Old Man is the first to discover that they are mentally deficient. Before the big offensive opens they are chased out, under the command of some SS Dirlewanger people, into a minefield, to set it off. In 1940 the French Army used pigs for that purpose. But, in accordance with the new German racial purity laws, all useless human material is to be eliminated. And so the staff of fortification battalion 999 had conceived this idea, thus making some use of the weak-minded instead of just sending them to Giessen and killing them with an injection. A way of doing things which was called by the rather nice name of ‘euthanasia’.
1 Mpi/Maschinenpistole = machine-pistol.
2 pryshok porokh (livening powder) anti-sleep pills.
3 Heimatschuss =. (Blighty wound).
4 Arschloch = (German) = arsehole.
5 HDV (Heeresdienstvorschrift) = Army Service Regulations.
6 Kriminaldolizei (German) = Criminal Squad.
† KdF (Kraft durch Freude) = Nazi holiday and entertainment organisation.
7 Stoi (Russian) = Halt!
THE BATTLE GROUP
The trees creek with cold. The storm blows powdery snow into frost-bitten faces. We had never imagined it could be so cold. We are living deep-frozen meat. Our bones rattle inside us and our flesh hangs in ribbons. Human parts and bloody entrails dangle from the snow covered bushes.
An MG-42 spews out death, heavy mortars spit out their grenades with a hollow plopping sound. A reindeer falls from the sky, its legs pointing upwards. It screams shrilly as it falls. It hits the hard-frozen snow and splinters into a shower of blood and guts.
Two Russian officers in long fur capes come reeling out of the bushes. Who is supporting who it is impossible to tell. They are splitting their sides with laughter. Are they mad? Or mad with drink? One of them has lost his fur cap. His close-cropped red hair sticks out like the bristles on a pig. The frost has eaten great holes in his face.
The Legionnaire swings the barrel of the MG towards them. Tracer tracks eat their way into the two officers’ stomachs. With arms still round one another’s shoulders they fall into the snow, which rapidly becomes red. Their crazy laughter dies away in a long death rattle. A Stalin organ roars and howls. Rockets tear up trees by the roots, and the snow bubbles like porridge. A poisonous reddish-grey smoke rolls along close to the ground.
Some of us put on gasmasks. The smoke bums in our lungs. Why shouldn’t one of the sides have begun to use gas? All of us have got gas-shells, and we haven’t brought ours along just for fun, have we?
I search for my gasmask and then remember that I threw it away a long time ago. The bag it was in is full of all sorts of other things, but no gasmask. It’s a good place to keep cigarettes dry in. I am not the only who is searching in vain for his gas-mask.
The smoke rolls along concealing everything. We cannot see anything to shoot at but we keep shooting till our weapons are red-hot.
An armoured sledge rushes past us like a ghost, with long tongues of flame spitting from its forward shield. It is so close to us that we need only to reach out to be able to touch the flailing snow-chains.
Porta slings a mine up under the turret. Human parts fly out of the trap-door. A giant yellow-red flame shoots up towards the sky, and a wave of heat sweeps over us like a warm blanket.
‘Hell!’ mumbles Porta, in disgust, throwing a torn-off arm to one side.
Steel clashes against steel and the frozen earth creaks and groans. A sickening stench of blood and hot oil envelops us. From the forest we hear animal-like screams and a horde of fur-clad soldiers storm forward. The breath smokes from their mouths. Machine-pistols snarl until their magazines are empty. Then the fighting continues with battle-knives, bayonets and sharpened infantry-spades. The fighting is so intense in this devilish man-to-man encounter that no one has time for the fear of death.
My eyes are smarting, pain jabs at my heart like a bayonet. My hands are sticky with blood. I swing my spade in front of me like a flail. Above everything I’ve got to keep them at a distance from me.
A flame-thrower roars. There is a stench of burning flesh and hot oil. It’s Porta. Tiny carries the full container. Again and again the horrible flame roars out across the snow.
Human bodies are burning. Trees are burning. Even the snow looks as if it is on fire. The devil himself would be stiff with fright at the sight of a flame-thrower in action. It would be a refinement even for hell.
Fire spurts at eyes. Faces are crushed like eggshells. Bodies are thrown up towards the Arctic sky and fall back into the snow. The dead are killed over and over again.
A Rata8 howls out of the clouds, and rushes hire a comet straight into the ground. It explodes like a giant golden firecracker.
The Northern Lights flash across the heavens like a wild, mad sea of flame. The earth is one huge slaughterhouse, and stinks like a bubbling latrine.
I feel a blow on my shoulder, snatch the MG9 to me and rush forward, panting and coughing. Heide, who is close behind me, stumbles and goes head-over-heels down a slope.
A machine-pistol stammers a long, wicked burst, I spread the supporting legs of the MG, throw myself down behind it and press the butt to my shoulder. Heide guides the long cartridge-belt.
I glimpse them. The MG rumbles, and tracer bullets track between the trees.
A white shape throws up its hands. The Kalashnikov flies up above his head. A long ululating scream. A hand-grenade whirls through the air.
A dull thud and all is silence.
‘Let’s move,’ snarls Heide. He is already on his way.
I wrap the cartridge-belt round the breech, sling the MG on to my shoulder and dash after him. I don’t want to get left on my own.
‘Wait for me,’ I scream.
‘Piss on you,’ he shouts without slackening pace.
There is nothing worse than a retreat. You run for your life with death at your heels.
Porta catches up with me. Passes me in a flurry of snow. Tiny comes struggling along behind with the two heavy flame-thrower containers on his back. He holds on to his light grey bowler with one hand.
I fall, press myself down into the snow. I drop away for a moment into a dream of fear.
‘Up you get,’ roars Gregor, ‘or I’ll kick your arse from here to kingdom come!’
Rage gives me strength. I come to my feet and stagger on through the deep snow.
Back in the depths of the forest we pull ourselves together and make up a battle group. A queer mixture of all kinds of regiments! Gunners without guns, tankmen without tanks, cooks, medical orderlies, drivers, even a couple of sailors. A mixed lot.
An infantry oberst we’ve never seen before takes command. He has a monocle stuck fast in one eye. He knows what he wants.
‘Let’s get out of this as quick as we can,’ says Barcelona, pushing a fresh magazine into his Mpi.10 ‘This lot stinks of heroes and Valhalla!’
‘Where the hell’s Ivan got to?’ asks Porta, wonderingly, peeping over a great wall of snow.
In the course of the night we dig in and build machine-gun posts out of blocks of snow. We make a fire and heat flat stones. These are tied round the locks of the machine-guns with woollen underclothing. Life in the Arctic has taught us a lot of things they didn’t think to teach us in training.
Before we are finished building up the position we have to withdraw again. We have over three hundred wounded with us. We have
nothing to help them with. All our first-aid packs are long since used up, and we use filthy rags of uniforms as bandages. A stench of rot rises from these living corpses. They stretch out skeleton arms to us and plead for help. Some ask for a weapon to end their hell of pain. Others lie quietly and look at us with eyes that beg for mercy.
‘Don’t leave us, comrade,’ whispers a dying Feldwebel, as I pass him with the MG on my shoulder.
‘Don’t leave us to the Russians,’ groans another.
I look straight in front of me, won’t look at them. Luckily the orderlies come and lift them up on to the heaps of branches which serve them as a bed. We take them with us as the Oberst has ordered. Nobody is to be left behind.
We make sledges of thin tree trunks, and lay the wounded on them. When they die we throw them off and go on.
Four days later we reach two odd-looking hills, shaped like sugar-loaves. It has grown so cold that our noses become plugged with ice, and tears harden into icicles. Metal shatters like glass, and trees split with a loud crack.
Gregor looks at his nose. It is lying in his hand. He feels at the hole in his face. Looks at the nose in his hand, perplexedly.
‘What the hell,’ he cries and starts to scream. He throws the nose and his Mpi from him. Only Heide, the super-soldier, keeps his head. Like lightning he has Gregor on his back. The Legionnaire has picked up the nose.
‘Hold him,’ snarls Heide. ‘We’ve got to sew it on again!’
‘Is it worth it?’ grins Porta. ‘It wasn’t a very handsome nose, anyway!’
Taking no notice of Gregor’s babbling, Heide sews the nose on again, takes a bloody bandage from a body and binds it tightly round his face.
‘Wouldn’t it be better to sew it double, so ’e can’t pull it off again?’ suggests Tiny, holding out a reel of heavy thread.
Gregor whines and moans. Despite the anaesthetic effect of the cold it is still terribly painful.
Heide is not exactly a cosmetic surgeon. The needle he uses was given him by a veterinary surgeon who used it to patch up horses.