A young infantryman is thrown into the air. One of his legs hangs by shreds of flesh. Blood spurts from his thigh like water from a burst pipe.
I bend over him, but it’s no use. He dies, thanks to Braun’s stupidity. He should have killed the Russian. Porta says: ‘If we want to stay alive, we’ve got to be even more cruel and treacherous’n they are. There’s just one second between life and death! Hesitate in firing, or throwing a grenade, and you can count yourself a dead man already.’
A skeleton-thin Russian rises to his feet in front of Tiny.
‘Millosstj! Millosstj!’he screams, hysterically, jumping up and down on the spot, as if he were tramping down newly sown vegetables.
‘Good Russians’re dead Russians,’ Tiny grins, triumphantly, and sends a burst as long as eternity into the Russian’s body. He flops back like a rag doll against a burning fence.
Across a wrecked vehicle sprawls the body of a militiaman. The skull is split open and brain mass hangs from one side of it. An old-fashioned steel helmet lies upside down at his feet.
The schoolteacher stops abruptly, as if he had run into a wall. He stares for a few long seconds at the cloven skull. He throws down his carbine, puts his hands to his face and begins to scream like a madman.
‘Split-arsed bleeder!’ roars Tiny, coming on like a tidal wave. ‘Think Adolf’s bleedin’ war’s over, do you, an’ the time for weepin’s come? Pick up that gun an’ your feet or I’ll blow your balls off, I will! If you got any, that is!’
Like a wing-shot crow, the schoolteacher hops, croaking, in front of Tiny, who helps him along with kicks and blows from the butt of his gun.
I hasten after the others with the LMG cradled in my arms. From a narrow alley white-clad figures, with tall fur hats, come rushing. There is a sharp explosion, a hissing and ringing in my ears. Suddenly I’m stone-deaf! I drop the LMG, gripped by panic fear. The next second I feel myself leave the ground as if lifted up by a giant hand. Then I am thrown down again into the snow.
A blinding jet of fire flames upwards. Another, and another. Boots pass over me in long springing strides.
The air whines, crackles and buzzes as if millions of angry wasps were on the move.
I dig down feverishly into the snow. I have only one thought in my head. Get away from this insane hell.
A house lifts into the air, and dissolves into a rain of beams, mortar and glass.
A stove sails past, leaving a trail of sparks behind it.
The Russians at the mouth of the alley are thrown backwards and crushed against the stone walls of the kolchos. An antitank gun comes sliding on its tracks down the village street, crushing two German infantrymen in its path to bloody mincemeat. It crashes its way through a hut.
A Russian SMG7 appears as the wall goes crashing down. Reflexively, I throw a hand-grenade at it.
A crashing explosion and the machine-gun is silenced.
In a few hours time the village has been cleaned out.
Some surrender. They come warily from their holes with arms above their heads and deadly fear showing in their eyes.
Mpi’s chatter wickedly. We take no prisoners. We kill them all. Wounded or not.
The Pioneer company has found an entire company of German infantry, liquidated. Shot in the neck and finished off with the bayonet.
We make a circle and stare at them in silence. Some are apathetic, others internally raging. Some of the dead have been tortured. Bestially!
‘Merde!’ says the Legionnaire. ‘Manure! The military muck-heap! C’est la guerre!’
‘Only wicked men can do that kind of thing,’ says Albert. ‘Very wicked men!’
‘We’ll do the same to them, if they come our way, one o’ these days,’ Tiny laughs, just as wickedly.
‘Rally on the kolchos,’shouts the Old Man, gesturing with his Mpi.
A Panzer-4 comes rumbling down through the village street. Its fat exhaust glows in the grey winter light.
With rattling chains, and kicking up a cloud of snow, it stops in front of Leutnant Braun. A Major-general wrapped in a white bearskin leans out of the open turret.
‘What are you people doing here, Leutnant?’ he trumpets, dangerously.
Leutnant Braun lisps off a reply, nervously, and at such a speed that his words stumble over one another as they pass his lips.
The fur-wrapped Major-general watches him with a wickedly evaluating look.
‘Are you in touch with your company?’ he asks, knocking the ice from his fur glove.
‘Well, General, sir,’ says Leutnant Braun, in a nervous falsetto.
‘The O.C. is at the hunting lodge two kilometres north of Sandova.’
‘Have you been ordered to take up position here?’ asks the Major-general, with an obvious threat in his hoarse voice.
‘No, General, sir!’
‘Then get forward! The road home is by way of Moscow!’
The P-4 disappears in a cloud of snow, and spouting long lances of fire from its exhausts. The General does not acknowledge Leutnant Braun’s salute.
Cursing under his breath, and red in the face as a peony, Braun joins us.
‘We’re going on,’ he says, apologetically, fiddling nervously with his machine-pistol.
‘What are your orders, sir?’ asks the Old Man, pushing tobacco phlegmatically into his silver-lidded pipe.
‘It’s probably best for all of us if you give the orders, Beier,’ the Leutnant gives up, quietly. ‘This isn’t anything like what they taught us at officers’ school!’
‘Pick up your weapons,’ orders the Old Man, brusquely. ‘Fingers out and get out on the sides of the road! Distance between groups! Stop bunching up, for Christ’s sake, so’s one fuckin’ mortar can blow the lot of you away. How often do I have to tell you? Spread out, sod it!’ he shouts furiously at Tiny, who has adopted the schoolteacher and the demoted Oberst as assistants.
‘Easy, Old Man! Me an’ my two German ’eroes ’ere’re goin’ to get us spread all over the whole o’ bleedin’ Russia!’
The winter morning’s deathly grey changes to an ice-cold blue. The storm has stilled. A shot can be heard miles away in the killing winter cold.
Tiredly we march over the broad plain towards the threatening grey heights in the distance.
‘Where the hell’s Ivan arsehole got to again?’ asks Porta, looking searchingly under a heap of hay.’ Just when you think he’s there, down he goes into the earth. Always runnin’ off, that shit is, just so’s he can shoot the rotten German life out of us from behind afterwards!’
‘That’s somethin’ the Russians’ve has a lot of experience with over the years,’ explains Gregor. ‘If kill-crazy, thievin’ enemies like us ain’t after ’em, then their own secret bloody police is burnin’ to send ’em to Siberia an’ shovel snow.’
Late in the afternoon we reach some ruins. They are full of charred bodies, tossed across one another.
After a short, furious discussion we lose interest. Porta finds a frozen pig.
‘Jesus love us all,’ Tiny breaks out, and begins, immediately, to build a fire. The schoolteacher and the demoted Oberst are chased out to find firewood. ‘Dry!’ he howls after them. ‘Or I’ll use you two for firewood!’
The Old Man wants to continue. He shouts and screams, but gives up at last. From bitter experience he knows that only a massive enemy tank attack can get Porta away from an impending orgy of food.
With spades and hand-axes we break up the large, frozen pig.
‘Shouldn’t we thaw it out first?’ asks Leutnant Braun, naively, holding up his hands to avoid being hit by the frozen lumps of meat which are flying all over the place.
‘We ain’t got the time, Leutnant, sir. If we go waitin’ around, our friends over there’ll be over with their old machine balalaikas and shoot our arses off,’ explains Porta, and splits the pig open with the large butcher’s axe.
Albert comes up from the cellar with a sack of potatoes, a whole basket of eggs and a can of frozen milk.
&n
bsp; ‘Jesus’n Mary,’ shouts Porta, his mouth full of quivering pork. He is dipping it in a bowl of sweet Russian schnapps which Albert has found in the cellar with the other supplies. ‘Now I’ll make you some blinis!’
Leutnant Braun is drunk and begins to sing forbidden songs. Now and then he confides to Gregor that he never has liked the Führer and his party.
Heide looks at him, reproachfully. He cannot understand that an officer of the Führer’s army can say such things. He decides never to have anything more to do with Leutnant Braun.
In the cellar Porta finds everything he needs to make blinis. Even smoked salmon. It is rather coarse and a strange colour but absolutely usable.
‘I should use a cast-iron frying pan,’ he explains, ‘preferably without a handle, although that is not so important. I can make acceptable Russian pancakes anyway!’
Whistling happily he begins to mix the dough in a large pot.
‘No beer, I suppose? All right, then, we’ll use vodka instead.’ With a flourish he breaks the eggs into the milk and flour.
Soon the entire ruin is filled with the aroma of blinis. Stacks of Russian pancakes mount up on the long, rickety table. Porta makes them extra thick, the way the Russians know how to. When the last one is finished we begin to eat ourselves into a stupor, as if we were preparing ourselves for seven lean years.
First a smoking hot blini then a slice of smoked salmon and on top of that a slice of pork. Again a blini. There should really be sour cream, but we have to imagine it. Instead we pour sweet schnapps over them. When all the blinis are gone we hardly dare to move for fear our guts will explode.
Porta draws his piccolo from his boot. Lying on his back he gives us an aria from the operetta ‘The Divorced Wife’.
‘Holy Agnes, have I eaten?’groans Gregor, letting off a long, ringing fart, which is closely followed by a double effort from Porta.
‘Next time we find anything eatable I’ll make us some Bortsch,’ he promises with a dreamy look in his eyes. ‘Every Russian’s favourite soup. When we meet a cow we take a chunk of it and hope we meet some pork on the way. Veg’ we can get hold of all right! It’s a soup that’d make the Red Army capitulate on the spot!’
We almost have to crawl to the latrine, which, strangely enough, has avoided the total destruction of the rest of the village.
Porta is a glutton. He takes a piece of pork and a bowl of sweet schnapps with him.
‘A man with his head screwed on properly never moves on the crust of this earth without taking provisions with him,’ he instructs us, taking a huge bite of the pork.
Outside we hear the rattle of weapons and equipment.
‘The company’s arrived,’ Porta states, peering cautiously through a crack in the soot-smeared wall.
‘Up!’ orders the Old Man, nervously. ‘Get your kit! Löwe’ll go bonkers if he finds us here eatin’ ourselves senseless!’
‘Yes. Let’s get out an’ find that ol’ Red Army,’ grins Tiny, stupidly drunk. ‘That’s what we left ’ome for, ain’t it?’
‘Where the hell have you been hiding, Beier?’ asks Oberleutnant Löwe, red in the face, his eyes skewering the Old Man.
‘Here,’ answers the Old Man, waving his hand vaguely in a circle at the surrounding steppe, without knowing quite what he is supposed to answer.
Löwe looks at him suspiciously for a moment. Then he shrugs his shoulders resignedly, and orders:
‘5. Company, single column after me!’
We have no more than got outside the ruined village when a mighty explosion thunders through the dawning day. Instinctively we throw ourselves down into the snow and make ourselves small.
Earth, ice and steel splinters fly through the air. The blast seems to burst our lungs, but the explosion is luckily too far away to do the company much damage. We have only three wounded. But hardly are we on our feet again, and marching, before a whole pack of white-painted T-34’s bursts from the sapling forest with roaring motors and chattering tracks.
‘Tea rooms,’ screams Barcelona, hysterically. ‘Get them storepipes forward!’
Oberleutnant Löwe lifts his hand and signals a rest to allow the anti-tank people to catch up. They are puffing and panting up the slope of the hill.
‘Give us a ’and you rotten lot,’ curses a Feldwebel, lividly. A 75 mm. is stuck in the deep snow.
‘Not our affair, is it?’ answers Porta, lifting one eyebrow.
The Feldwebel begins screaming and waving his arms about, but is stopped by the Old Alan, who tells him to go to the devil and take his bloody cannon with him.
‘I’ll remember you!’ promises the Feldwebel, as he disappears into the snow.
The wicked rumble of tank motors comes closer.
Porta looks carefully over the edge of his hole in the snow.
‘Herr Oberleutnant, sir!’ he shouts to Löwe. ‘God didn’t mean us to get killed here, I’m sure! Let’s beat it!’
‘Stay where you are,’ orders Löwe, angrily. ‘Get your close combat arms ready, and stay in your holes!’
‘Now then!’and me them Molotovs quick as I throw ’em under them Tea rooms,’ Tiny orders the schoolteacher, knocking his Mpi barrel on the top of the man’s steel-helmet as he says it. ‘The devil’n ’is gran’ma ’elp you if you get out o’ rhythm! I’d just as soon throw you’n your pointer under a T-34 as a bleedin’ bomb! Count on it, you alphabet cracker, you!’
Silently raging, the teacher and the demoted Oberst bundle hand-grenades, and pass them to Tiny.
‘’Old on to your tin’ats,’ roars Tiny, swinging a bunch of bombs round his head.
About twenty-five yards in front of him a KW-2 comes bellowing.
‘It’s going to crush us,’ stammers the schoolteacher, in terror, preparing to run.
‘You stay ’ere,’ snarls Tiny, laying a hand the size of a ham on him. ‘I’ll tear your bleedin’ balls off, if you try to run!’
Fifty-three tons of tank come to a halt. The turret turns slowly.
A crashing explosion, and a long flame spurts from the 155 mm. gun. The blast throws Tiny back onto the teacher and the ex-Oberst. The shell falls only thirty yards from their snow hole and throws an avalanche of snow over them.
‘Funny way to open the ball,’ curses Tiny, in dismay, wiping snow and slush from his face.
‘Heavenly God!’ screams the teacher, in panic fear. The giant belly of the tank towers in front of their snow hole.
The ex-Oberst half rises, closes his eyes, and waits for the underside of the tank to come down crushingly on top of them.
‘Up you, Ivan arse’ole,’ roars Tiny, throwing two bundles of bombs in quick succession under the KW-2.
There is a yellowy-white jet of flame, and a column of coal-black smoke shoots up from the tank’s turret and mushrooms out above it.
‘Jesus Christ!’ stammers the Oberst, white with fear.
A terrible explosion breaks the KW-2 up into thousands of bits and pieces.
Tiny rolls away, as the burning remains of the KW-2 tip forward. The ex-Oberst is lying in a snow hole, screaming in terror. Fifteen tons of tank turret have slid straight over him and ripped his coat open right up the back, without otherwise hurting him. Wide-eyed and shaking all over he stares at the roaring, crackling hell of flame which only seconds ago was a deadly dangerous weapon of warfare.
‘Where’s the bleedin’ flamethrower tank?’ asks Tiny, threateningly, staring wickedly at the ex-Oberst, in whose eyes front-line madness flickers. ‘The flamethrower tank, lamebrain!’ he repeats, hitting the man with the butt of his Mpi.
Like a beaten dog the ex-Oberst tries to creep away. Tiny showers curses on him, his Mpi at the ready and his finger on the trigger.
‘I’m gonna spread you all over Russia, you shit, an’ then I’m goin’ to spit on your mother’s grave,’ he shouts, with a grotesque grin. ‘You’ve thrown away German Army property, an’ you don’t do that unpunished, bastard!’
Tracks clank menacingly behind
the curtain of snow, threatening us with death by crushing. A long stone wall cracks open like an eggshell. The blast wave sweeps over us and throws us to the ground. The heat burns the skin, but Tiny seems not to notice the inferno around him. He sends an angry burst of shots into the snow close to the feet of the ex-Oberst.
‘Flamethrower tank!’ he mutters, hoarsely.
‘What’s up?’ asks the Old Man, in his usual steady voice.
‘A flock o’ wild bleedin’ monkeys must’ve been feedin’ on that limppricked bleeder’s arse,’ cackles Tiny, furiously. ‘He’s thrown bleedin’ Adolf’s soddin’ flamethrower tank away! Thinks ’e’s still got ’is bleedin’ pips up p’raps! Never met a shit like ’im, I ain’t!’
‘Where is it?’ asks the Old Man, throwing the ex-Oberst a contemptuous glance.
‘I lost it,’ mumbles the Oberst, in a thick voice.
‘Lost it?’ roars Tiny, scandalised, in a voice loud enough to be heard in both Moscow and Berlin at the same time. ‘’Oly Mary, daughter of Jesus, now I’ve ’eard everythin’! You lyin’ demoted ashcan, you! You threw it away, you did! Threw it away, ’cause you didn’t want to ’ave to carry it, you bastard. An’ a shit like you’s been a officer in the Führer’s army!’
‘Go an’ get it!’ orders the Old Man, brusquely.
‘Are you mad?’ the demoted Oberst protests, angrily. ‘I’ll be killed if I go down and get that tank!’
‘So what?’ grins Tiny, wickedly. ‘You won’t be missed in this unit! Albert’ll be pleased, too. Save ’im breakin’ your ’ead in with ’is knobkerry before ’e makes ’ash with garlic out of you!’
‘Killed!’ the Old Man smiles, jeeringly. ‘When you were in command you “fell for the Führer and the Fatherland”! But you’re right. “Killed” is the right expression. Or “murdered”! Or “crippled”! Or “smashed”!’
‘C’est la guerre,’ smiles the Legionnaire. ‘Come death, come now death . . .’ he hums, softly.
‘Last time of asking! Get that flamethrower tank!’ orders the Old Man, swinging his Mpi, as if unthinkingly, to the ready position.
With bowed head, upright, and weaponless, the ex-Oberst slips and slides down the icy slope.