Blitzfreeze (Cassell Military Paperbacks)

  Porta raps him on the knuckles with his bayonet.

  ‘There are ninety million people in Greater Germany, Adolf says, and this section can’t feed them all! Ring to your Führer and tell him you’re hungry!’

  ‘West,’ mumbles Stege, tiredly. ‘You don’t hear anything else these days. Before it was always East.’

  ‘You’ll get used to marching West,’ says Tiny, letting go a gigantic fart. ‘Maybe Adolf’ll want us to liberate the Berliners and get the Party some lebensraum on the bleedin’ Rhine!’ He bends over whooping madly, one shout of laughter following the other, as if he’ll never stop. The threat of defeat seems comical to him.

  The company marches on, through frozen swamps, over heights and through thick forests. Sniper groups and partisan units are met and beaten off.

  ‘We’ll get through,’ says the Old Man to Oberleutnant Moser, during a short break. ‘Long as we’ve got ammunition, we’ll use our guns for all they’re worth!’

  ‘An’ when we’ve banged off all our powder then we’ll tear Ivan’s ring out an’ pull it down over ‘is bleedin’ napper,’ remarks Tiny from the darkness.

  ‘What about surrendering?’ asks Wachtmeister Bloch.

  ‘I’d rather pull the devil by the tail!’ says Porta.

  ‘Gawd but was I lucky to get into this bleedin’ Army,’ grins Tiny. ‘Even though I ’ave got to be Obergefreiter you mustn’t think I’ve gone militarist!’

  ‘We don’t!’ laughs Porta.

  ‘Come on, move!’ orders Moser, sharply. ‘Close up! Keep touch with the man behind you! Keep alert up in front!’

  ‘That man’s a bloody sadist,’ grumbles Stege. ‘The warmad bastard never gives us a second’s peace.’

  A patrol comes panting back. ‘Three miles on there’s a village where a tank regiment has gone into quarters,’ reports Unteroffizier Basel.

  ‘Hell and damnation!’ curses Oberleutnant Moser. ‘What’s on the other side of the village?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ answers Basel.

  ‘What the hell do you think I sent you out on patrol for, man?’ Moser flares up hysterically.

  ‘Herr Oberleutnant, I believe the forest ends a mile further on. Two T-34s are guarding the village on this side.’

  ‘Why, then, do you tell me you don’t know where they are?’ thunders Oberleutnant Moser, his face going a dark red.

  ‘Goin’ on for evenin’ we come to this one-night-stand ‘otel, where you can rent a bed for an hour at a time,’ Tiny is explaining to a circle of listeners. ‘Well, we’d organized a white Mercedes on the Reeperbahn, so we were travellin’ in style. The first thing me bleedin’ eye falls on when I wakes up in the mornin’ is a bunch o’ light-coloured parsley tucked away between a couple o’ fat thighs. What the ’ell, I think, ’ave you gone to sleep in a knocker? So I feels about, cautious-like, to see if it really was a bit of crumpet I was parked alongside of, an’ who should pop up out of the bedclothes but “Strauss Waltzes” from Kastanien Alleé. ’Er, you know, as bangs the old joanna to death in “Passaten”.

  ‘“Mornin’, ’ubby,” she says, fresh as you please.

  ‘“Morning, pedal-pusher,” says I, listenin’ fascinated to the blackbirds singin’ in the pear tree outside the window.

  ‘“Bein’ married is lovely,” she says a bit later.

  ‘“Don’t know,” I says, “Never tried it!”

  ‘She starts off again, chewin’ away at me old bonce, and we take another trip in the gondola while the kettle’s boilin’ for coffee.

  ‘“What’s all this talk about marriage? ’Ave you gone an’ got yourself ’itched up some whacked-up womb-snatcher or other?”

  ‘“You’re funny,” she says, clickin’ ’er loose teeth at me. “Don’t you tell me you’ve no memory of us two bein’ chained together in ’oly matrimony yesterday night? Cause if you ’ave then Mum ’ere’s got a few nasty tricks to show you, as some Japanese wrestlers I once knew give me a rough ol’ knowledge of.”

  ‘“Chained together?” I yell. “You got softenin’ o’ the brain, or somethin’ girl? I don’t need no bleedin’ contract to get ’old o’ my ration o’ crumpet. I’d never dream of it.”

  ‘A slave of the bleedin’ silver salver in a white nanny jacket turns up then bearin’ a couple o’ jugs o’ niggerpiss on a tray.

  ‘“Congratulations, dear guests,” the silly bitch whinnies at us. “This must be the most wonderful mass-wedding ever known to ’istory. The entire village got absolutely stinko, and they’re all still stewed as newts. The landlord is in bed with Otto, our prize boar. ’E’s just said goodbye to friends and family with a bottle of ‘Dead Man’s Chest’, best Jamaica. Never even felt Otto eatin’ the trousers off ’im!”

  ‘Slow but sure the ol’ memory starts to go retro. The mayor, a little ol’ fat feller, kept on askin’ us if we was really serious about goin’ in for this one man one cunt business, an’ in my condition at the time I wasn’t to be talked out of it. Nobody as knows ’ow to think with ’is shoes off could ever even dream o’ gettin’ spliced to ol’ “Strauss Waltzes”.

  ‘“Any more been slipped into booster gear?” I asks.

  ‘“The lot!” she says an’ laughs that much she drops ’er bottom set into one o’ these jugs o’ niggerpiss.”

  ‘“Emil the Pusher, too?” I asks, for that at least ought to be an impossibility. ’E was the eagerest ’emmorhoid-buster in the ’ole of ’Amburg and ’id ’imself every time ’e see a pair of womens drawers ’angin out to dry.’

  ‘“Emil too,” smiles Ruth an’ pushes ’er bottoms into place with a sound like a ’ippopotamus shittin’ in choppy water.

  ‘Now the ’umour of it ’its me. All us bridegrooms get together down in the sawdust bar and discuss things, an’ agree on ’ow we’re goin’ to get out of it. We give the key o’ the Mercedes to “Ida the Rider” an’ tell ’er to drive straight to the Commerzbank on Kaiser Platz in Darmstadt an’ wait for us there.

  ‘All the sheet-workers are in that car like lightnin’ when they ’ear the name Commerzbank. They reckon we’re goin’ to pick up some change. They’re off as if the Vice Squad’s on their tails.

  ‘Emil grins like a poof while ’e’s ringin’ up the Schupo’s to tell ’em a bunch o’ crook amazons is on the way in a white ol’ Mercedes, to wring out the Commerzbank on Kaiser Platz. What a reception them brides got. It was worthy of Mexican bleedin’ general.’

  ‘Pick up your weapons! On your feet!’ Moser chases us impatiently.

  ‘If we have to bite out the throat of every single Soviet soldier we meet we’ve got to get through!’

  ‘Good appetite,’ grins Porta, ‘I’ve had my dinner, thankyou very much!’

  ‘In Bernhard Nocht Strasse there was a big bleeder as bit a pro’s throat out,’ says Tiny, excitedly. ‘All the bleedin’ pimps got together an’ was goin’ to lynch ’im.’

  ‘Shut it!’ shouts the Old Man irritably. ‘Your blasted voice can be heard for miles! Try taking a deep breath!’

  Soon after, the forest begins to thin out. The trees are small and bent. A forest fire must have raged here. An ominous silence is all around us. We feel as if every bush and tree has eyes. With nerves at full stretch we sneak forward with weapons at the ready.

  ‘A village,’ whispers Stege fearfully, throwing himself down behind a snow bank.

  Everything seems deserted, but the wind carries the sound of diesels and the rattle of tank tracks to us.

  The fog comes billowing in shroud-like waves. In places only the tops of the trees can be seen.

  ‘No good,’ whispers the Old Man, examining the village through the glasses. ‘They’ll mow us down if we go closer.’

  ‘It’s our only chance,’ says the CO drily. ‘We’ve got good cover from the fog.’ He looks back at the company which is spread about in small groups in the snow. He raises a clenched fist, the sign for ‘Forward march!’.

  We get up slowly, creaking in every bone. Moser and
the Old Man are already off. Their steps creak in the snow, and their weapons knock against their helmets. The small noises sound loud in the silence.

  The fog closes in. The lead-men disappear now and then in the clammy veil.

  ‘Getting into this man’s shit army’s like shootin’ a double six,’ whispers Porta, sourly. ‘God if I’d only been born without a prick!’

  The noise of the tanks increases. It sounds quite close now.

  ‘Christ!’ whispers Barcelona. ‘Must be how it feels before the head cashier drops his bloody chopper for the last shave.’ We move forward in single file in a long column, going as fast as we can in the deep powdery snow.

  ‘Gawd!’ growls Tiny, shocked. ‘We’re runnin’ straight into the arms of the bleedin enemy!’

  ‘Keep a little more to the right,’ whispers the Old Man, hoarsely. Oberleutnant Moser is bent almost double. His breath whistles through his nostrils. It takes all your strength to march in deep, loose snow. Every time you lift your foot to take a fresh step you think it’s your last. You weep, beg to be allowed to lie where you drop. The snow-drifts seem bottomless.

  A row of ski-troops flashes past with capes flapping. They’re so close to us that they shower us with loose snow. ‘Sheeee! Sheeee!’ whisper the skis and then they are gone, almost before we realize they were there at all.

  Without a sound the company drops down in the snow, ready for battle.

  ‘I don’t think they saw us,’ whispers the Legionnaire, trying to conceal his uneasiness.

  ‘Can’t be certain,’ says the Old Man, pulling at his spud of a nose, and taking a new bite of his plug.

  ‘Why the hell’d they pass so close?’ asks Porta thoughtfully. ‘They’ve got something cooking for us!’

  ‘They know what they’re up to,’ answers the Old Man, wisely. ‘Half the company nearly died of fright just at the sight of them!’

  ‘Forward,’ orders Moser, raising his fist above his head. ‘As long as we aren’t attacked, we keep going forward.’

  The Command Group takes the lead. They have the SMG mounted on a small sled. It’s easier that way.

  ‘We must reach the new front line before long,’ considers Oberleutnant Moser.

  ‘You never know,’ says Porta, sceptically. ‘When an army, with generals and all, gets on the move, it’s like a railway wagon, rolling down-hill by its own weight. It’s not easy to stop. They may even take up the new front before Berlin. That’d be pleasant. We could take the train home to Bornholmer Strasse in the breaks. It’s mad running a war miles from home when you could have it just as well on your own doorstep. You’d never think of going all the way to Hamburg just to give a bloke a black eye if you lived in Berlin.’

  ‘I’m piss-scared,’ whispers Barcelona.

  ‘Those ski-bastards are waiting in ambush somewhere near here. They saw us all right! Hell, they weren’t a yard away from us. Soldiers can be slow on the uptake, but nobody could be that slow!’

  As we cross the top of a height, tracer spits at us from the hedge-rows where the ski troops have taken up position.

  ‘I’ll take the bastards on the flank!’ shouts the Signals Feldwebel. ‘4 Section follow me! Move! Move!’

  ‘Feldwebel Beier! Attack the middle with No. 2 Section,’ orders Moser. ‘I’ll take the rest of the company over the hills! Fix bayonets! Forward march! March!’

  Porta covers us with the LMG. His well-directed fire keeps the heads of the ski-troopers down.

  We use grenades to force our way through the hedge. Half-a-score bodies are lying there in pools of blood. We tear the white camouflage hoods from the bodies. We need them badly.

  ‘Quick, let’s get on!’ cries Oberleutnant Moser. ‘We’ve got to be a long way from here by the time they get back!’

  Our own dead lie in the snow, staring unseeingly up at the cold grey heavens.

  With a muffled thud a shell explodes in front of us. We dig ourselves feverishly into the snow. Loose snow is good cover against both infantry fire and shell splinters.

  A T-34 waddles out of the fog, making straight for us. Even the snow cannot deaden the scream of its tracks. It stops with a jerk and fires. A lightning bolt of flame shoots from the muzzle opening. Even before we hear the report the shell explodes immediately behind us. Gefreiter Lolik screams horribly. The sound of the scream tells us that his lungs are hanging out of his body. His whole back must have been shot away.

  ‘It’s all over,’ groans the Professor, resignedly, wiping the heavy glass of his spectacles. Tears freeze to ice as they run down his cheeks.

  ‘You must ’ave got snow in your whistle,’ says Tiny. ‘It ain’t over, until our bleedin’ ’emorrhoids are ’angin’ on a cloud. Go back an’ fetch that magnetic mine, an’ I’ll show you ’ow the English knock the top off a egg.’

  ‘You don’t want me to go back now?’ asks the Professor, terrified.

  ‘Believe you me, I do!’ grins Tiny, wickedly. ‘Get goin’, you Norwegian sild, you, or I’ll drop one o’ your own bleedin’ mountains on the back o’ your neck, so you’ll shit gravel. Get movin’. Want your prick to get frozen over with Ivan? Never ’eard of Kolyma, son?’

  ‘Good God, I could get killed!’ protests the Professor, with horrified eyes.

  ‘Of course, what d’you think you’re ’ere for? If there ain’t a lot o’ bleedin’ casualties in a war then it ain’t been a good war!’

  The Professor crawls back, his teeth chattering, to fetch the mine. Looking more than ever like some terrible prehistoric monster, the tank fires again. The shell bursts violently in front of us.

  Slowly the steel monster crawls nearer. Its forward machine-guns send their tracer into the snow in front of us.

  The professor comes panting back with two mines. He wouldn’t want to make that trip again.

  ‘We-e-e-ll!’ rumbles Tiny satisfied. ‘One mine’s enough for me, but maybe you’d like to take a T-34 yourself, so you can go back to your bleedin’ mountains with cunt magnets on your chest?’

  ‘No never!’ moans the Professor. ‘I was the biggest idiot the world’s ever seen ever to get myself into your shit army.’

  ‘Now you mention it,’ smiles Tiny, ‘I can’t understand what you wanted to get in with the Prussians for. They don’t give a fuck for people like you! To a Prussian anythin’ as ain’t Prussian’s just shit!’

  ‘They can all fuck me,’ says the Professor, coarsely.

  ‘Tain’t likely!’ says Tiny.

  The T-34 closes in and sends a stream of explosive shells into the hills.

  ‘Make yourself as little as a fly in a cow’s arse,’ advises Tiny.

  ‘Don’t run. That’s all them Soviet boys in that tin-can are waitin’ for. Then they’ve got you.’

  The gun roars again and a deep blackened hole opens in the hill. Tiny pulls his feet up under him, and presses the T-mine to his body. Tight as a steel spring he waits patiently until he is within the tank’s blind area. With the mine under his arm he springs forward through the deep snow.

  The T-34 throws large chunks of ice up into the air. The frozen earth shakes. Machine-gun bullets buzz over the spot where Tiny lies ready for the next spring.

  ‘Cover him,’ I shout desperately.

  ‘Got a PAK-gun in your back pocket?’ asks Porta drily. ‘Think a T-34’ll notice this poxed-up peashooter?’ he kicks the LMG viciously. ‘A tank like that works on Tiny like a bowl of fresh cream does on a hungry tom-cat.’

  ‘God, turn me to a mouse,’ prays the Professor. His teeth chatter like castanets in his mouth.

  ‘An ant’d be better,’ I reply, pressing myself deeper into the snow.

  ‘What about a lump of shit?’ asks Porta. ‘Fit us to a T.’

  ‘Humans are too big to have a chance,’ says the Professor. ‘We’ve only got to move our eyes and those fellows in the tank can see it.’

  Bullets buzz around us and hop over the snow. I press my hands to my ears. The scream of the tracks is driving me cr
azy. Inexorably the tank comes closer. Its infernal thunder is like a song of death. I want to dig down into the ground with teeth and hands like a mole, but dare not. The slightest movement and ice-cold eyes behind the T-34’s viewing-slots will discover us.

  Porta pulls a magnetic charge over to him and makes it ready.

  ‘Where the devil’s Tiny?’ asks Stege, worried.

  ‘Taking a bloody nap,’ grins Porta. ‘He’s the kind that would, too!’

  But Tiny isn’t asleep. He is lying in wait for the steel colossus waddling towards him. Calmly he looks at the huge turret and the grey cement-covered steel sides. From the viewing slits MG-fire blazes. Broad and low-slung the tank rolls up over the last hill.

  I can feel the broad tracks catching and crushing me into the snow. I have to take a firm hold on myself to fight the urge to get up and run.

  Tiny pulls his legs up under him ready to spring up on to the grey monster. Who would think it was a bum from the Reeperbahn, one of those they call a social loser, lying there about to perform a deed of heroism which generals would recoil from in fear. Poor boys make the best soldiers.

  Now the tank is only eight yards away.

  Tiny crawls towards it. The heavy T-mine leaves a broad track in the snow behind him.

  Every man in the company is following him tensely. He is pulling the mine after him on a rope. With a long cat-like spring he is up and moving fast towards the roaring tank. Now he is inside the six yard zone within which the T-34 is blind. He swings the mine above his head like a discus thrower. No other man in the company has his strength. The mine flies through the air, with the rope trailing after it, and hits the tank directly below the turret. Tiny lifts his bowler and disappears into a hole in the snow.

  The tank stops with a jerk, as if it had run into an invisible wall. A hurricane of fire lifts towards the sky and a terrific explosion throws twisted fragments of metal far out into the forest. A black mushroom of smoke blooms above the flaming column. Russian tank infantry run heavily forward through the snow in an attempt to get up to us.

  Tiny’s SMG chatters. He knocks his bowler further down over his eyes.

  The Russians go down like nine-pins. The wounded try to crawl away, but are killed by our concentrated fire.