‘This business of killing is quite an ordinary thing,’ explains the Old Man slowly. ‘Every time one of the enemy gets killed there’s one less to knock us on the head. Some even say war’s needed, to maintain the balance between birth and death rates.’
All through the night the air shakes with the noise of engines from the other side.
‘Ivan’s warming up his T-34s,’ says Porta, laconically.
‘They’ll be coming in a couple of hours time,’ says the Old Man pulling thoughtfully at his spud-nose. He recommends us to get hold of all the mines and magnetic bombs we can scrape together.
A short violent bout of Russian artillery fire drops behind our lines and silences our guns.
They come up over the rise at full speed, their broad tracks throwing up the snow behind them in great clouds. The gun-muzzles flash incessantly and high explosive shells crash into the thinly-manned German line.
‘Steady!’ the Old Man warns us. ‘Stay down and let ’em roll over you! then go at ’em with mines and magnetic bombs!’ The German positions are quickly flattened and the tanks penetrate far behind the lines. An 88 mm flak battery wheezes, on the other side of the river, as it sinks into position for anti-tank fire.
Eighteen T-34s go up in flames. The charred bodies of their crews lie around them. Their supporting infantry is cut down by the concentrated defensive fire of our automatics. The remaining tanks retire, breaking through where our line is weakest.
Russian troops have got through at countless points and are behind the front. T-34s supported by camouflaged ski-troops roll furiously towards the west, flattening the German reserve positions. The ski-troops mop up after the tanks.
In Schalamowo a Divisional HQ is packing up. Long columns of vehicles are ready to move off. The Divisional Commander, in his long fur coat, gives his Chief-of-Staff the order to take over.
‘The position is to be held to the last man and the last bullet. This attack is the enemy writhing in his death throes,’ the Commander explains to his Chief-of-Staff, a young major straight from the War Academy.
‘Very good, Herr General, I understand. An elastic withdrawal to tempt the enemy into a trap where we will divide him into small pockets and destroy him! A genial move,’ adds the young General Staff officer with enthusiasm.
‘Exactly,’ answers the general, buttoning his fur coat. ‘I trust you to look after things in my absence. You must be hard with the men, or discipline will break down. They’ve sent us a lot of bad material lately. Do the job well and you’ll soon make Oberst-Leutnant!’
‘Thank you very much, Herr General!’
They shake hands solemnly. The young major feels in fine fettle, and decides to make a visit to the front line when the general has left. It will make a good impression on the fighting forces.
The general drives away bravely in his fur coat and his three-axled Mercedes.
‘Auf Wiedersehen, Herr General!’ shouts the major, saluting stiffly.
‘I certainly hope not,’ mumbles the general to himself. The major would be an unpleasant witness to have around should his sudden departure ever be investigated.
A couple of miles further on, in a thickly-wooded area, the general makes a halt. Through his artillery glasses he examines, with professional interest, a group of T-34s attacking the chateau, which the major is obviously defending. With a crooked smile he makes the sign to resume the march. He takes a pick-me-up from his built-in bar and smiles to himself. This is the third division he has lost, fighting bravely, of course. They’ll have to give him the Knight’s Cross now. It will look nice alongside ‘Blaue Max’,6 which he picked up as Chief-of-Staff of an infantry division in Flanders in 1917.
The Divisional Field Police have gone in advance. They are commanded by the toughest Watchdog major in the whole of the German Army. If he cannot clear the road for the Divisional Commander’s Mercedes then nobody can.
The Adjutant, a womanish Rittmeister with a voice as soft as boiled asparagus, turns with a servile air from his seat by the driver:
‘Herr General, we left perhaps too early? If you will excuse me saying so we could have used our divisional reserves to make some excellent antitank blocks at the crossroads.’
The general does not reply, but notes somewhere in the recesses of his mind a resolve to kick this young homosexual puppy up into an antitank command as soon as the opportunity arises. Adjutants who are capable of thinking are dangerous to have around. They should obey orders and otherwise keep their mouths shut. He lights a cigar, but stiffens at the first pull. The village they are approaching is on fire.
‘Stop!’ he orders, sharply, and gets out and goes a little way up the road. The adjutant hands him the glasses. In cold silence he observes the T-34s down by the village, and reads, with a jeering smile on his lips, the inscription chalked on the turrets: ‘Kill the invaders, the Fascist plague!’ He lowers the glasses.
‘Give me your submachine-gun, Rittmeister. Seems to be German tanks. Must belong to our neighbours, 2 PD. Take the car and go and see what’s happening. Obergefreiter Stolz will stay with me! You drive. And hurry back!’
‘Very good, Herr General,’ replies the Adjutant, clicking his heels together.
The driver, an active old Obergefreiter, gets out of the Mercedes with a grin on his face. He knows the tanks are not German but says nothing. If the officers want to do away with one another it’s not his business. Silently he picks up a bundle of hand-grenades.
‘What do you want with those?’ asks the Rittmeister in his high voice.
‘Throw them at Ivan,’ the Obergefreiter grins broadly.
‘I’ll remember you, Obergefreiter,’ pipes the Rittmeister. ‘You’ve been the longest time on HQ staff!’
‘So have you, Miss Rittmeister,’ thinks the Obergefreiter jumping spryly across the ditch with an LMG under his arm. Before he became the general’s driver, he was a top-class machine-gunner. He won’t move without an LMG. From the ditch he watches the general, standing thoughtfully up on the road.
‘That fat, cowardly little bastard ought to be court-martialled if anybody ought. But they can’t touch him or the whole lot’d collapse. He’s a general. When he deserts it’s called making a tactical withdrawal and he gets decorated for it,’ he thinks, and spits, grinning, against the wind.
The Mercedes is flattened by a T-34 a mile up the road, but the adjutant dies happy. He thinks he is falling like a German hero.
The general is promoted to General-Leutnant, the Obergefreiter is left in the ditch, and watches the various units marching past.
He waits patiently until a wagon train from a Corps Supplies Depot passes. With a unit like that you can buy your way across Europe, if necessary.
He lies down to sleep on a butcher’s wagon. The only thing that can wake him now is a stopped motor. During a retreat a vehicle which is not moving is a dangerous thing to be in.
Twenty-two days later he meets his general again. These two understand one another. The Obergefreiter makes a long well-considered report of fighting with enemy ski-troops. The general gets his longed-for Knight’s Cross and the Obergefreiter, who according to his report has shown great bravery during the tactical withdrawal, gets an EK.I.7 They get a new division, this time Panzer Grenadiers.
The general is promoted to General-leutenant, the Obergefreiter gets another stripe and they drive round in a new three-axled Mercedes planning new elastic withdrawals. They have got a new Chief-of-Staff and a new adjutant, and they enjoy their war in a new chateau where the noise of the guns is too far away to disturb their sleep.
‘War’s not so bad. You just have to know how to manage things,’ the Obergefreiter explains to a friend. ‘Only stupid people get in the way of bullets!’
At Lokotnja T-34s surprise the entire HQ staff of 78 ID packing up. Before the staff realize what is happening everything is turned to a heap of scrap-iron and corpses.
The T-34s roll on through the back areas killing everything in their path.
At L-of-C units far behind the lines you hear the cry: ‘Ivan’s broken through! The T-34s have reached the motorroads!’ One battery commander from 252 ID stands his ground. He collects the scared stragglers and makes them dig in around his 105 mm gun battery. With dropped muzzles he fires high explosive shells into the advancing masses of infantry. He retreats, the soldiers pulling the guns themselves.
Muscles and sinews tear under the inhuman strain. At the edge of a forest the artillery Oberleutnant brings his guns into position for the last time.
‘Load three,’ he orders, ‘Five in salvoes!’
Breeches close! The guns roar! Carriages hop and shudder! Shells ring into the breeches again. Again and again the muzzles spout flame.
The battery fires for over an hour. Then the ammunition runs out. The crews roll their guns over in front of the infantry positions but cannot stop the T-34s for more than a few minutes.
Blood and crushed bodies and equipment making a blot on the snow, mark the end of the Oberleutnant’s battery. The Russian Panzer Infantry sit on the rear shielding of the T-34s. The Otto engines roar at top speed, and the tracks whine a triumphant song of victory.
A horse depot is rolled over and wounded horses fly into the forest with entrails hanging from their bellies, until they go rolling head over heels. Ski-troops cut fresh collops of meat from the horses’ bodies and swallow them raw in Eskimo fashion. They grin happily with bloody mouths. On a full belly you can fight on. Raw meat gives a man strength.
Over a hundred miles behind the German front the T-34s drive through the 243rd Reserve Field Hospital. Nurses go around here in crisp white uniforms. Everything is quiet here, the Reds will never come back. Without warning the T-34s arrive.
From the tank turrets leatherclad tank commanders watch the murderous attack.
A bloody nurse’s cape flies from the wireless antenna of the command vehicle. The ski-troops, following up, kill everything the T-34s have missed. Enthusiastically they gulp down medical alcohol, eat as much as they can from the Supplies Depot and urinate on what they have to leave, before racing on.
On that terrible night of 5 December 1941, the German steel ring around Moscow is broken. In the streets of Moscow, Russian battle units lie in readiness. Endless rows of T-34s, the paint on them scarcely dry, wait with motors running. Behind thousands of guns, from the smallest to the largest calibre, mountains of shells lie stacked. The gunners stand ready, lanyard in hand, as the second-hands of watches tick rapidly round.
The gun commanders raise their arms, and as they fall hundreds of guns roar out simultaneously, with a crash the world has never heard the equal of.
More artillery has been brought together on this front than the armies of all the countries engaged in the whole of the First World War were in possession of. Chalk falls from the ceilings of every house in Moscow. The bulbed domes of the Kremlim shake. Even the Communist leaders shake with fear. This terrific noise would frighten the very Devil in hell himself. The night becomes as light as the clearest day. Flames flash from every gun-muzzle. At dawn the battle planes come. They come in swarms, flying so low they nearly take Moscow’s chimney-pots with them. Nobody cheers. Nobody shouts hurrah. People turn to one another with a fearful question in their eyes.
‘If we don’t kill all the Germanskijs now, tonight, what will they do to us in reprisal?’
At 10.30, on the morning of 5 December, one and a half million Russian infantry men are ready for the attack. A sea of men. One and a half million against six hundred thousand German infantry.
Three hours later a quarter of them have fallen.
The windows of Moscow rattle to the roaring of tank motors. The heat from countless exhausts can be felt several miles away. With ruthless speed they move forward. The roads are slippery with mashed bodies. Bloody doll-rags of humanity hang from the sides of every vehicle.
On 2 Panzer Division’s sector of the front, twenty-three T-34s are destroyed in twenty minutes. But the German Panzer Division pays for it with 90 percent casualties and every single one of its tanks.
On other sectors the T-34s break through the German lines almost without resistance, and drive into the L-of-C area. Divisional HQs are simply rolled over and flattened.
Everywhere is heard the frightened cry. ‘Panzer, Panzer!’
Padres, cooks, quartermasters, medical officers, supplies troops, clerks, to whom until now the front line has only been a distant rumble of artillery in the east, mill about in a confusion bordering on madness.
Like lightning they pack up, fill their vehicles with petrol, and drive madly towards the west.
‘Panzer!’ The cry paralyses the rear echelon. Hardly one of them has ever seen a T-34 and never expected to do so, at least not manned with a Russian crew.
Even faster than the steel noses of the T-34s can poke themselves into German affairs, runs rumour, spreading fear and terror.
Highly-placed officers go amok. They are the kind of people who have talked a lot about a war they had never really taken part in. Many break down and have to be carried to their cars by their faithful batmen. None of them has less than two.
They order their men to their posts, and make a moving speech to these brave soldiers before leaving, to get help, as they say. A high-ranking officer must go himself, for another high-ranking officer to be convinced that help is really needed. A Leutnant could never convince an Oberst. You must have an Oberst to do that.
Others put their Walthers theatrically into their mouths and pull the trigger. But not before the T-34’s Ottos can be heard on the outskirts of the village and there is no chance of retreating.
On the desk the obligatory farewell letter. ‘My Führer I have done my duty! Heil Hitler!’
The letter seldom reaches the Führer. Usually some Russian soldier uses it to wipe his backside on.
‘All hell’s broken loose. The front line is simply dissolving!’ report others.
‘50 Army Corps has been liquidated,’ whispers an Oberst confidentially to a General-Major, who immediately begins to prepare for a rapid move westwards.
The survivors of an Artillery Regiment state confidently that there isn’t a German soldier left between them and the Kremlin.
Panic spreads with the speed of fire on the steppe. Very soon there are no German troops anywhere within a hundred miles of the front.
Every man capable of moving at all is on his way towards the west. The wounded have to take care of themselves. Blind soldiers carry wounded comrades on their backs. The blind using the eyes of the legless. Madmen stand by the side of the road shouting ‘Heil!’ with raised arm every time the car of a red-tabbed General flashes past.
Nobody worries about the front-line troops standing far to the east at the gates of Moscow. All lines of communication are broken. The line-units re-equip themselves with Russian leavings. Very soon only Russian arms and ammunition are to be seen. Front-line units battle on in pockets surrounded by a sea of enemy.
‘Can’t raise a damned thing!’ says Oberleutnant Moser furiously, banging the telephone down viciously.
‘No, Herr Oberleutnant,’ answers the Signals Feldwebel. ‘The line is intact, but there is no one there to take the call.’
Porta throws six sixes.
Tiny cries out, shaken. He has lost fifty gold teeth and says he is cleaned out. Porta knows he has two more bags of them hidden away under his shirt. It’s not long before Tiny ‘accidentally’ discovers a couple more teeth.
The Signals Feldwebel tries to get through to battalion again.
‘They’ve made a run for it!’ says Porta, without looking round. ‘Goodnight Amalia. The money’s on the window-sill and your maidenhead’s hanging on a nail!’
‘You’re insulting the honour of the German officer class,’ screams Heide furiously. ‘A German battalion commander doesn’t run from Soviet untermensch. He destroys them. Herr Oberleutnant, I wish to report Obergefreiter Porta!’
‘Try to keep your mouth sh
ut, just for a moment, Unteroffizier Heide. ‘You make me more nervous than the Russian infantry. Go out and check the sentries!’
‘Herr Oberleutnant! Order received and noted! Unteroffizier Heide to check sentries!’
‘Would you mind putting your head in the way of a Russian lead pill, while you’re up there?’ grins Porta, pointedly.
‘Do you want it to be understood that you would like to see a German unteroffizier murdered?’ asks Heide from the doorway, as he adjusts his belt to the regimentally correct tautness.
‘No!’ grins Porta. ‘I’m protecting us against the plague!’
‘Not understood,’ mumbles Heide, blankly, and disappears.
‘What did you mean by that?’ asks Tiny scratching his broad rump. ‘Julius got somethin’ catchin’?’
‘Yes, brown plague!’ answers Porta, with a broad grin.
‘Oh, that!’ says Tiny, looking wise, but still not understanding a word. ‘Is it dangerous?’ he asks after a lengthy silence.
‘Quiet down there!’ comes sharply from Oberleutnant Moser. ‘I won’t have you always on the back of Unteroffizier Heide. He can’t help being one of the faithful.’
‘Gawd! Is ’e a bleedin’ missionary?’ shouts Tiny incredulously. ‘I never knew that. I thought ’e was only Nazi bleedin’ barmy.’
‘That’s right,’ smiles Porta condescendingly. ‘Don’t try to think. You’ll get a headache at both ends!’
‘But it must be awful for Julius with two kinds o’ barminess. One lot for Adolf an’ the other lot for Jesus,’ considers Tiny sympathetically. ‘I’d go to a bleedin’ trick cyclist an’ get ’im to give me some pills against it if I was ’im.’
Between two violent bursts of shelling a breathless runner tumbles in on us. ‘Report, Herr Oberleutnant, Battalion Commander fallen with entire staff. Battalion consists of only 160 men! Orders from Regiment: Company to retreat to new front line. New orders on arrival at Nifgorod!’ with a click of his heels the runner concludes his report and continues on to No. 3 Battalion. He runs from shell-hole to shell-hole, literally dodging between the shells.