Just inside the door the heavy Maxim MG has been placed. Nobody thinks of the fact that the water-coolant has frozen to solid ice. Even if it cannot be fired at the moment it is a wicked looking gun, and there is plenty of ammunition for it.
‘Is there still a state of emergency?’ asks Shenja, when they demand vodka and beer at the expense of the state.
‘What do you think?’ asks Gregorij, sarcastically. ‘Even a stupid woman like you should be able to see that fighting will soon commence!’
‘No skin off my nose,’ she gives in, sourly, and fills the glasses to the brim.
‘Neither the Germans nor the Finns’ll take us alive,’ roars Mikhail, happily, as he empties his fifth mug.
‘They say that in war it is the best who die first,’ shouts Bazar above the terrific din. ‘What d’you say to that, Yorgi, you’ve been in it?’
‘Nonsense,’ states Yorgi. ‘You can see I’m alive! War is natural to human beings, and a clever man can easily fool death. In the 809th Infantry Regiment, where I was a corporal, we had a sergeant who often warned the section of danger, as if he were an astrologer who could read tea-leaves: “Boys, don’t enter that field! There are mines in it will blow your piles up into your throats!”
‘But there were some clever ones in the section, who wouldn’t believe what he said, and walked straight into the grass. Bang! Up go the mines, taking earth and shit with ’em. That sergeant taught us not to believe that everything was predestined, for example walking on a mine or stopping a fascist bullet with your own body. “If everything’s gone wrong,” said this sergeant, “and the enemy’s boys are pulling your arsehole up over your ears, just bash on like a crazy man. Above all never hold back. Grab hold of your feet in your hands and keep going!”’
‘When the Germans come,’ decides Gregorij, ‘you take the lead. You have the experience, and the rest of us can learn from you!’
Yorgi strikes his chest proudly, and swings the machine-pistol above his head, so that half a magazine goes off into the ceiling.
‘You pay for what you break,’ shouts Shenja, angrily.
She gets up on a chair to examine the beams.
‘I only hope this war piss doesn’t cause too much damage,’ she sighs, worriedly, as the steps down from the chair.
By now the whole village is inside ‘The Red Angel’. Everybody is talking at the same time, stifling their fears with words. None of the women scold their husbands for being drunk again.
A party is learning how to load and arm the LMG by the window. The unavoidable occurs. A whole magazine rips through the wall and across the kitchen, where Shenja and Sofija come close to getting killed.
‘The Germans, the Germans,’ comes a howl from the coal-bunkers, where some have taken cover.
Gregorij throws a hand-grenade out of the window. Mikhail sends a hail of machine-pistol bullets into the snowdrift on the far side of the road. Shenja fires her shotgun off, and hits the stuffed bear. She strikes out blindly with the butt, and knocks it over on top of Fjedor, who is lying behind the MG.
‘Holy Raphael,’ he screams, in terror, putting up his hands. ‘I surrender! It was Gregorij, that Bolshevik swine, who made us shoot at you! Don’t kill me, tovaritsch germanski!’
A little later things have quietened down and they begin to quarrel.
Nobody will speak to Fjedor who is still sitting, talking to himself in his own version of the Finnish language.
‘You pointed me out to the enemy,’ shouts Gregorij, incensed. ‘You’ll answer for that in Murmansk when the war’s over.’
‘I was only joking,’ Fjedor excuses himself, laughing forcedly. ‘Can’t you take a joke, any more?’
Five snow-covered Lapps come noisily into the room, together with their even noisier dogs.
‘The Germans are here,’ they announce, with grins.
‘Where?’ screams Gregorij, terrified, throwing himself to the floor.
‘Outside,’ says the Lapp hunter, Ilmi.
‘Put out the lights,’ shouts Mikhail, blowing out the nearest.
‘Damnation, there they are,’ screams Yorgi, excitedly, firing single shots with the LMG.
The lights are extinguished quickly, and everything goes black as a coal-cellar.
Cautiously they peer out through the windows, but only the storm howls out there.
‘Can’t you be mistaken?’ asks Gregorij, with hope in his voice.
‘No chance,’ answers the Lapp hunter, Ilmi, insulted. We were so close to them we could feel them breathing down our necks. They are coming in a long column from the north. NKVD troops we have also met. They are looking for some Germans who have blown the roof from over their heads in some place to the east, where no ordinary people who are born of women may go. I think it is these Germans we have met. Well, we just dropped in. We are going now, and if we were you we would go too!’
‘When d’you think they’ll get here?’ asks Gregorij, his voice shaking.
‘They cannot be far away, since we are here,’ says Ilmi, with crafty logic.
‘You stay here,’ orders Gregorij, firmly. ‘Every man and woman who enters this district belongs to my battle group!’
‘Can’t you find anything to talk about but your battle group?’ jeers Fjedor. ‘I’ll be sick if I hear that word again. All the senile chaps in the country with a couple of celluloid stars on their shoulders are runnin’ round these days making up battle groups, God help us!’
‘What do you want me to call us?’ asks Gregorij, looking lost. ‘We’re not enough for a company, and a section doesn’t sound like much if the Germans get to hear of it. Those devils’ll eat a section, like a Lapp woman swallows a herring!’
‘Let’s call it “The Red Banner’s Barricade”,’ suggests Sofija, proudly.
A shot splits the darkness.
‘I got him!’ screams Pavelov, and fires again. ‘God dammit, I knocked the bastard over!’
‘Where’s he lying?’ whispers Gregorij and Mickhail, in chorus, peering cautiously out of the broken window.
‘Can’t you see! There he is over by the shed!’
A little later they discover it is one of the dogs which has been shot. To make things worse, a lead dog, Fear turns to anger. Everybody has a go at Pavelov.
Somewhere out in the snow a machine-gun stammers.
Terrified, they stop fighting. The sound comes to them in short, wicked bursts, like somebody hitting a bucket.
Sofija begins to scream, wildly and hysterically. Mickhail strikes her across the mouth with the back of his hand.
The distant machine-gun goes quiet again.
‘Put that lamp out,’ scolds Gregorij, as Shenja enters with a lamp swinging in her hand. ‘The Germans’ll think we’re asking to get shot!’
For a while they remain lying on the floor, listening tensely to the howl of the storm.
‘You’ll see, our boys’ve found those Germans they were out looking for,’ says Mikhail, who is the first to get to his feet again.
‘And killed ’em all in one long burst,’ says Shenja, crawling out from behind the bar with the shotgun in her hand. She lights a carbide-lamp and pours herself a respectable-sized mug. She tips the contents down her throat in one long swallow.
‘Come and get it,’ she shouts, filling up glasses convivially.
Slowly they creep from cover, convinced that the Germans are lying dead, somewhere out there in the storm-whipped snow.
Under no circumstances must any general or private soldier consider the thought of voluntarily giving up a position. To counter such foul thinking we have the Courts Martial. It is my order that such defeatist schweinhunde shall be liquidated.
Adolf Hitler, August, 1944,
‘It’s nothing to laugh at,’ the Finnish corporal admonished us, looking at us in annoyance. But we kept on laughing. It was the funniest looking body we had ever seen and we had seen more than a few. It was really two bodies, locked so closely together that we thought at first they were
one.
‘Stop laughing,’ shouts the corporal, furiously. ‘There’s really nothing to laugh at!’
‘If that’s not something to die laughing at,’ shouts Porta, half-choking with laughter, ‘then I don’t know what is!’
‘Think on it! There ’e is, lyin’ in bed in the middle of ‘avin’ a lovely bang, an’ just when ’e’s ready to let go, a bleedin’ flyin’-bomb comes ’n’ blows ’im straight out of bed,’ grins Tiny.
An Unteroffizier from the motor cycle squadron tries to force them apart, but the girl’s legs are locked so rigidly around the man’s hips that he gives up.
‘He was the only man I ever loved,’ says the girl standing amongst us. There are tears in her voice.
‘Bloody shame he had to die just when he was making love to somebody else!’ says Gregor.
‘And a German trollop too,’ says the girl, breaking into a burst of sobbing.
54 rabotschij (Russian) = worker.
† Molinija (Russian) = The Light.
55 kalorshnik (Russian) = Criminal.
56 polittruk (Russian) political commissar.
57 Sampolit (Russian) = Regimental commissar.
58 garadovoj (Russian) = police officer.
† spjaetsyalniyi stamtsyja (Russian) = special station for vagrants.
59 babuschka (Russian) = grandmother.
THE WAR DOGS
The cold air strikes us, with all the violence of a battering ram, and sucks every vestige of warmth out of our bodies.
‘Breathe slowly,’ Heide advises me, as I go into a violent spasm of coughing. ‘If you get frost in your lungs you’ve had it!’
I bury my face in my fur gloves, draw breath only cautiously, and fight the cough which tears at my chest. Even through the thick layers of fur, and the heavy camouflage cape, the icy air feels like glowing iron. The still air turns our breath immediately to ice, if we stop moving for only a moment. We could be choked by our own breath.
The moon shines brightly, and the stars are brilliant in the night sky. The air as icily cold and dry. The tundra takes on a strange, ghostly appearance, terrible, and yet, at the same time, beautiful.
To the north-east dances a great curtain of light, colours shifting and shimmering through the spectrum. In sheer fascination we stare at the electronic streamers, as they move across the heavens.
‘Did you know, it’s one of the great holidays today?’ asks Porta. ‘All the war-extenders are in church today singing hymns. And here we are, rushing around in the snow, and knocking in one another’s heads!’
‘It’s one of the great German feast days,’ Heide tells us, proudly.
‘Yes indeed! A thousand years ago our German forefathers consumed a lot of crisp wild-pig on this day!’ grins Porta, clicking his tongue.
‘Is it redly Christmas Eve?’ says the Old Man, staring up at the flashing iridescence of the Northern Lights.
‘Think the war’ll be over by next Christmas?’ asks Gregor.
Nobody cares to answer. We’ve said the same thing every Christmas, and the war is still going on when the next Christmas comes.
‘Come on! Up you get, you weary sacks,’ shouts the Old Man, cheeringly. ‘Only a little way now, and we’re home and dry!’
‘We’ll never get through,’ groans Gregor, pointing at the huge clouds of snow whirling in front of us. A new storm is blowing up.
An Mpi rattles, out in the whirling snow, and we hear the long, high scream of a woman. The Mpi rattles again.
‘Down!’ orders the Old Man, diving behind a great wall of snow.
A flare goes up, bathing the unbelievable whiteness of the snow with ghostly light. The flare hangs in the air, swinging slowly, for a few minutes. In its light our faces look like those of corpses.
‘I’ve knocked off one of the neighbours,’ shouts Tiny, above the noise of the storm. It is racing across the tundra in a series of roaring blasts. ‘The shit walked straight into my arms carry-in’ a big bag of Christmas presents with ’im!’
Another flare goes up, and explodes with a hollow thump.
‘Wish they’d stop doing that,’ scolds the Old Man. ‘Up their arses with their flares! Where’s the body?’ he hisses, pushing Tiny.
‘Out there! Dead as a nit!’ replies Tiny, pointing to a dark patch on the snow.
‘It’s a woman!’ cries Porta, in surprise, when he reaches the body. ‘A bloody woman! Got a kid with her too! We only need the husband now! Then we’ve got the whole family!’
In curiosity we bend over the body. She was a pretty, young woman. The child was not hit by Tiny’s bullets, but appears to have frozen to death.
‘Did you have to knock her over straight away?’ asks the Old Man, reproachfully, looking at Tiny.
‘Dammit man, I thought it was one o’ them Soviet chaps comin’ after us!’ Tiny excuses himself.
‘What a dope you are!’ says Barcelona.
‘You can’t see no difference ’tween a feller’n a bint this weather,’ shouts Tiny, angrily. ‘Anyway what’s she doin’ steppin’ around in the snow in the middle of a war with a kid on ’er arm?’
‘She was a pretty girl,’ says the Old Man, quietly, getting to his feet.
‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ grumbles Tiny, swinging his Mpi on to his shoulder. ‘Always after me you lot are! I’ll be off soon, though, an’ then you can win your own bleedin’ war any way you like!’
‘Hell, you big dope,’ the Old Man explodes, in a thick voice, ‘one more trick like that and I’ll shoot you on the spot! Now you bury those two, and put a cross on the grave. Where’ll you get the wood for it? I couldn’t care less! But a cross she gets!’
‘Mad,’ Tiny defends himself. Why should they ’ave a cross? They’re Commies ain’t they? They don’t believe any of what the parsons preach about!’
‘I said they get a cross,’ roars the Old Man, furiously, throwing himself down into a hollow in the snow, and pulling his hood up over his head to get a little sleep.
Tiny digs a hole, and pushes the bodies into it. He hammers something into the snow, which might, with plenty of imagination, be taken for a cross.
The Old Man ought to go shit in ’is ’at,’ he confides to Porta. ‘’E’s ’ard to get on with ain’t’e? Next time I meet one of the neighbours’ boys I’ll ask him to stand there an’ wait while I go back and ask the Old Man if ’e minds me shootin’ ’im!’
‘Shut your face,’ growls the Old Man, from down in his hole.
‘Bloody Army,’ sighs Tiny, jostling down by the side of Porta. ‘Can’t even talk any more, an’ special permission needed to blow the Commie breath out of one of the neighbours’ shit-’oles. Life’s that sad, it ain’t worth livin’ it.’
We feel as if it’s only been a few minutes when the Old Man starts shouting.
‘Come on,’ he chases us, impatiently, ‘pick up your shit, get your arses moving, before Ivan comes and cuts ’em off!’
‘Can’t the bloody Army ever give anybody any peace?’ shouts Porta. ‘When, sometime in the future, I become a civilian, I just want to see the bloke that’ll ever order me out of bed again!’
‘We’ve only marched a few miles, when we are stopped by wild shooting from up on a high wall of snow.
At the sound of the first shot I drop down into the snow and sight at a figure on top of the snowbank, but the Mpi sticks. The lock is frozen. I hammer at it, viciously, and the bolt comes loose. I fire off a whole magazine, and the figure disappears from sight.
‘Back, back, get back!’ booms the Old Man’s commanding voice.
A rain of bullets falls around us, throwing the snow into the air.
‘Covering fire, damn you,’ shouts the Old Man, furiously, as the section retreats in disorder. ‘You cowardly sods! I didn’t give you the order to retreat!’
Heide comes running. He is hopping like a wounded hare. The SMG opens up. We work our way, in short one-man spurts through the deep, powdery snow.
The Russian firing, fr
om the hill-top, grows weaker, and soon stops altogether.
Gasping, groaning and angry, we get up to them. Despite the Arctic cold we are sweating as if we were inside a sauna.
There are only four of them left, and one of these is at the point of death. The two others put up their hands, and do their best to tell us how they have longed for the arrival of the German liberators.
‘Where’s the rest of ’em?’ asks the Old Man, looking around him.
‘Taken it on the lam to Moscow,’ grins Porta, pointing to the tracks in the snow.
‘Seems they don’t all want to be liberated,’ laughs Gregor.
Tiny presses the muzzle of his Mpi against the neck of the nearest prisoner and pretends that he is about to liquidate him.
‘Njet Bolsjevik,’ cries the prisoner, falling to his knees in fear.
‘Bloody tovaritsch commissars, that’s what you are!’ shouts Tiny, accusingly, pushing the prisoner roughly so that he falls on his face.
‘Njet commissar,’ they assure him, all talking together. ‘Polittruken is hiding in “The Red Angel”. You can find him there.’
With the two converted Nazis guiding them they march into the village. It is literally buried in snow. We move carefully, from house to house, kicking open the doors and sending an Mpi salvo into the dark rooms. If there is a cry we keep firing until there is silence.
A herd of reindeer come galloping, terrified, down the main street. Snow flies about our ears.
Close to one of the houses lies a man wearing an armlet. He is dying. He stares at us wide-eyed and begins to try to crawl away from us. His fur coat is filthy with blood. He mumbles something incomprehensible, and continues to crawl away from us. He is like a man lying on a beach and withdrawing all the time from the tide, which continues to approach him, mercilessly.
‘He’s mad with fear,’ says Gregor, poking him with his Mpi.
‘To be expected,’ says Barcelona. ‘They’ve probably told him some good stories about us!’
‘Let’s let the wind out of ’im,’ suggests Tiny. ‘It’s cruelty to animals lettin’ ’im lie there sufferin’ like that!’