The Commissar

  ‘You’ve got to be a Siberian, to think like that,’ explains the Commissar, and sends Kostia a wicked look. ‘These slit-eyed monsters come into the world through Satan’s arsehole!’

  Kostia laughs long and loud, and does not appear the slightest bit insulted.

  ‘It’s snowing like all get-out,’ says Barcelona, looking out of the window. ‘We’re not going to get any further. Those snowdrifts are thirty feet tall!’

  ‘I’ll get a snowplough,’ promises the Commissar, shrugging into his long fur coat. He slings his Kalashnikov across his chest, and waves to Kostia who follows him with a Siberian grin.

  ‘Snowplough!’ jeers Heide, who is sitting by the stove, looking insulted.

  ‘He doesn’t mean an ordinary snowplough,’ says ‘Whorecatcher’. ‘He means a snoweater!’

  ‘Never heard of such a thing,’ says Porta, shuffling the cards deftly. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a machine which swallows tons of snow a minute,’ explains ‘Whorecatcher’. ‘If you let a couple of ’em loose at the North Pole there soon wouldn’t be a North Pole any more!’

  ‘And he’s going to find one of them in this hole in the ground?’ Porta screams with laughter. ‘What a bloody optimist!’

  ‘He’s a three-star commissar!’ says ‘Whorecatcher’, and does not feel that any further explanation is needed.

  After some time the Commissar and Kostia return.

  ‘Get ready,’ snaps the Commissar. ‘The snowplough’s here, and we have to follow close up behind it. T-34 first, Panther behind!’

  ‘Tell me,’ says Porta, blowing smoke in his face, ‘you always want me in the rear! Don’t you trust me?’

  The Commissar gives out a long, long laugh.

  ‘You’re a funny bloody chap,’ he says, between bursts of laughter. ‘Anybody who trusts you ought to be kept in a padded cell! You don’t mean to tell me that the thought of doing us all in the eye hasn’t even crossed your mind!’

  ‘Oh, well! There’s a lot of things a fellow can meditate on.’ Porta forces a smile.

  The snowplough is an enormous machine which really does ‘eat’ snow, as ‘Whorecatcher’ has told us We have never seen anything like it. The tallest of drifts disappears in minutes when it starts work on it. But shortly after we have passed by new mountains of snow lie behind us. making the road completely impassable.

  ‘Makes us safe from possible pursuers,’ grins the Commissar, with satisfaction. ‘This was the only snowplough in town. If anyone wants another they’ll have to get it from Irgorsk, and that’s where we’re going!’

  ‘Smart, smart!’ Porta admits. ‘A man doesn’t even have to pretend to be thinking about it to be able to see we’re home and dry!’

  A militia man shouts at us halfway inside Irgorsk. The Commissar waves him off in a manner which only people who are in a position of power can permit themselves.

  ‘He was scared of our red-painted faces,’ grins Porta, exaltedly.

  A row of searchlights send their rays up into the pitchblack night. They cross one another and play nervously over the dark clouds.

  ‘What the devil!’ cries Porta, in amazement. ‘An air raid? Who the hell’d bomb this place? Must be some mistake!’

  The thundering roll of an explosion makes the air shake.

  ‘That a mistake too?’ asks Gregor. ‘Sounds real enough to me!’

  An enormous column of fire goes up, sending a sea of white-hot sparks out over the whole town. Battalions of flames dance whirling along the rooftops. Melted lead drips into the streets, and whistles and bubbles in the snow. The heavy rafters of the large buildings begin to sink down, cracking and splintering. Gargoyles, cut in granite, fall from on high, smashing everything they land on. A granite head with a long tongue hanging from its mouth rolls along the street and ends up with a ringing sound against the Panther’s tracks. An old-fashioned fire-waggon with solid rubber tyres breaks up under the rain of bricks. Firemen sitting along the sides of it do not even realize what is happening.

  We stare, in fascination, at a concrete wall. The building is expanding like a balloon, slowly being blown up. The huge flat roof falls down through the inside of the house, which is one seething bonfire. Sparks fly hundreds of yards up into the air; steel girders bend as if they were made of soft rubber.

  Two screaming girls come running down the street, with their hair and clothes in flames. A fireman aims his hose at them. They are thrown back down the street, and stick to the boiling, bubbling asphalt.

  ‘Get on! Hell, let’s get out of here,’ shouts the Old Man, hysterically. ‘That’s all we needed! To get killed by our own air force!’

  A container full of incendiaries splashes up alongside us. Phosphorus splashes on to the sides of the tanks and begins to burn. Paint ignites and bubbles on the sides of the vehicles.

  ‘Don’t touch it!’ the Old Man warns over the radio. ‘It can only put itself out!’

  We swing up a broad boulevard, and see a row of corpses lying at a cellar entrance. They have been burnt to the size of tiny dolls, and are curled up in the strange positions which burnt bodies always assume.

  A General of Infantry, his cape blowing out behind him, roars commands, and rages threats at us when we ignore his orders.

  ‘Job tvojemadj!’ grins Igor, grimly. ‘Let him burn! Poor soldiers can’t expect anything of rich generals!’

  The general runs after us, shouting and gesticulating. He stops and jumps to one side to avoid being crushed by Kostia’s T-34, which rushes at him at top speed. He falls into a large puddle. When he gets to his feet again his boots are burning. There was phosphorus at the bottom of the puddle and it ignites as soon as air gets to it. Desperately, he rubs his boots on the cement. It is apparently the first time he has encountered phosphorus. Otherwise he would have removed his boots immediately. Now he is spreading the phosphorus, and making it burn even more furiously. He stumbles backwards into the pool. Gripped by panic he crawls out of it, and finds himself in a worse position than ever. Tiny blue flames dance all over his back. His cloak crisps rapidly. In only a few minutes he lies on the street, a heap of flaming rags!

  ‘That phosphorus can get anybody,’ mumbles Porta, staring at the bubbling heap which was once a general. ‘I’ve heard they’ve gone over to using it down in hell. It’s more effective than old-fashioned coal!’

  A Stuka is hit, and explodes in a ball of fire. Shrapnel and red-hot metal parts shower down, and rattle on the steel sides of the tanks.

  AA-guns bang. Wherever one looks something is exploding. It is as if an umbrella of blue-red-yellow fire had been opened above the town.

  Some elderly firemen with an old-fashioned fire-engine work like mad things at the handles of their pump. Not much water comes out of it, but they still keep working.

  A little further on, a fat man in a green uniform stands staring, paralysed with astonishment, at his arm. It is burning and bubbling. He was foolish enough to handle an incendiary.

  Fleeing people run around him. They keep well away. Nobody helps him. A heavy air attack makes everyone insensitive. They all have enough to do to look after themselves and their nearest relatives.

  The fat man falls on his knees, and burns up, apathetically, in a sea of blue flame.

  The infernal howling of the dive-bombing Stukas tears at one’s nerves. People are gripped by panic and rush round like terror-stricken hens.

  ‘Not a bad idea, those sirens on the Stukas,’ says Porta, holding his hands over his ears. ‘That howling could make a lamb take part in a steeplechase!’

  Soon the whole town has become a roaring inferno. Now the big Heinkel machines roar over and drop their high explosive bombs into the sea of flames.

  A heavy lorry is thrown high into the air. Soldiers fall from it like confetti, and a few moments later they too are burning, down on the bubbling asphalt.

  Automatic weapons begin to go off on their own. Bullets ricochet in all directions, like rice scattered over a brid
al couple.

  On the great ring boulevard in the expensive quarter of the town two ambulances stand across the road, in a blaze of dancing flames. Stretchers hang out of them and unrecognizable bodies burn in a mixed-up, soot-blackened heap.

  Porta has a moment of panic when a tall concrete building collapses. The outer walls crash out across the boulevard and block the street. At the same time the street behind us breaks out in a hellish sea of phosphorus flames, at the new influx of oxygen.

  Confused commands stream from the radio.

  ‘Turn that bloody thing off,’ snarls the Old Man desperately. He pulls out the plug to the chest-receiver, and the communicator goes dead. ‘Come on Porta! Quite slowly, back! Cool down and do exactly as I say! If we start going into a spin, we’ll never make it!’

  Finally, Porta gets the heavy tank moving, and backs. He goes straight through a baker’s shop. Glass shelves, bread, and paper bags fly everywhere. In a cloud of flour the tank goes through a partition wall and finally breaks through the outer wall in a shower of bricks.

  ‘The tracks are burnin’,’ shouts Tiny, in alarm. ‘Bleedin’ ’ell they are! An’ stinkin’ like ’ell too!’

  ‘It’s phosphorus!’ says the Old Man despairingly. ‘We’ve got to get it scraped off before the whole blasted waggon goes up, and us with it!’

  He chases us. We leap out through the hatches, and begin to scrape away feverishly at the burning tracks and rollers.

  ‘Watch out,’ shouts the Old Man, warningly. ‘Get that stuff on you and you’re finished!’

  He does not need to warn us. We know only too well what war-phosphorus is like. That frightful substance which attaches itself to everything and blazes more fiercely the more air it gets. The more you scrape, the more it burns!

  The heat around us is terrible. Our hair singes and curls up, our skin burns. Incendiaries throw out their white magnesium glare wherever they strike.

  An OGPU officer in a half-burnt uniform, but with a new, shiny Kalashnikov bumping across his chest, comes rushing from a side street, stops, and spits a hail of curses at us.

  The Commissar comes running up like a vicious Dobermann, swells himself up in front of the OGPU officer, and lets off a stream of invective at him which makes him completely lose his breath.

  The OGPU lieutenant is about to slink off, but changes his mind when a whole group of OGPU soldiers turn the corner with Kalashnikovs at the ready. One of them grabs Gregor and pushes his mpi barrel into his neck.

  The first salvo goes over our heads and has an unexpected effect on the gun-crazy OGPU lieutenant. He is thrown a good way up into the air with his arms spread out like wings. The battle-happy officer is hit in the chest and it is as if the tracer bullets go straight through him. He manages to give out a rattling scream, before he is thrown backwards on to a burning lump of phosphorus. It flames up immediately.

  Four machine-pistols spit fire at us.

  Heide is in cover behind the Panther, shooting from between its burning tracks.

  The OGPU men go down with crushed kneecaps. Heide has to shoot low from his position. He gets to his feet, and walks coldly towards the groaning OGPU soldiers. With a crooked smile, and a merciless coldness in his blue eyes, he clicks his mpi to single shots and puts a bullet into each of the pleading faces.

  ‘Why the hell did you do that?’ protests the Old Man, furiously. ‘I’ve had enough of you!’

  ‘The situation required it,’ barks Heide arrogantly, changing magazines.

  ‘Julius is nothing but a twisted caricature of his own beliefs,’ sneers Porta. ‘He stinks of dead bodies like all his swastika mates!’

  ‘The day is not far off when I’m going to take care of you quite specially,’ promises Heide, sending Porta a wicked look.

  A jet of flame several hundred yards high shoots up into the air, and a long, rolling explosion sounds over the burning town.

  Boris, the T-34’s turret gunner, is thrown along the street and spitted on the machine-cannon mounted on the tank. He spins like a paper windmill, the long barrel of the gun projecting from his middle.

  It was the city gasworks which had blown up. Everything has become an indescribable inferno. Brickwork splinters like glass. Iron rods expand and contort. Roofs are lifted from houses, as the blast flame sweeps across the town like a glowing fire-storm.

  A JU-88 comes roaring in above the roofs with flames streaming from its wings. It sways and rolls from side to side, and crashes into a house. It explodes in a blinding red ball of fire.

  A Willy’s jeep comes towards us at a mad speed. The driver is hanging lifeless over the low metal door. With a crunching sound it hits the T-34 and is mashed to scrap under its tracks.

  A long, sliding, scratching sound, like a sack of coke rolling down a ramp, sends us diving to cover. The strange sound ends in a thundering explosion, which makes our ears hurt, and almost blows the sense out of our heads. A large bomb has fallen a couple of hundred yards from us. It blows away everything standing, and leaves only shaved earth around the spot where it has fallen.

  ‘Christ on the cross,’ groans Porta, putting his hands to his head. ‘Devil take the rotten Luftwaffe!’

  One of the T-34s is burning. Black, oily smoke goes up towards the sky. Shortly afterwards the ammunition in the tank explodes and splits it to pieces.

  ‘Take cover!’ shouts the Commissar, as a coloured marker sinks down, throwing out a cascade of green fire all around it. High explosive bombs rain down. Dancing flames shoot up from the streets, like an army of flamethrowers.

  ‘It’s the gas pipes,’ says Heide, importantly.

  ‘You stupid bastard,’ hisses Tiny, with a sneer. ‘The gasworks has gone up long since!’

  ‘Idiot!’ snarls Heide, ‘there’s gas other places!’

  The sky sparkles red, suddenly. A new bomber wave is closing in. The threatening thunder of the motors grows by the second. Markers fall, making a large square of light. We are right in the middle of it.

  The first two thousand-pounders go off around us. It is like a volcano in eruption, and throws steel and fire many yards up into the air. The road surface cracks and piles up in heaps, and the huge artillery barracks behind us is pulverized. It seems as if the broad boulevard is thrown up towards the sky. Trees in the middle of it fly through the air like arrows from a bow, and the night becomes as light as the clearest day.

  The Legionnaire and I come to ourselves out on the barrack square amongst broken guns, artillery tractors and corpses.

  The motor-sledge has been turned upside down, its turret forced down into the softened asphalt. The motor hangs out, half off its mounting.

  The Commissar curses, viciously, when he realizes the motor-sledge has been turned into scrap.

  A fifty-pound incendiary bomb falls a couple of yards from the Panther, which is immediately wrapped in a roaring curtain of flames.

  We go at the incendiary sticks with the fire-fighting equipment we have. Without the Panther we are never going to get back alive. Desperately we throw earth and sand over the red and white magnesium blobs, which burn all over the tank. The heat is unbearable. Time and again we are forced back by it.

  The red paint we have been covered with begins to bubble up, but this has the advantage of thinning it. It begins to run away from our faces. Soon we only look as if we were suffering from measles.

  We drive the vehicles under cover on the far side of the barracks, where there is a park adjoining the woods.

  ‘I’ll try to get hold of a lorry in place of the one that broke down,’ says the Commissar. ‘Kostia! You come with me! Grab a couple of grenades! You never know what kind of regulations-crazy fools we might run into!’

  Half an hour later he is back with a brand-new Studebaker.

  ‘What d’you say to that?’ he asks, throwing out his arms proudly.

  ‘The Soviet’s going to suffer a great loss, when you leave it!’ Porta grins in acknowledgement.

  A thousand-pound bomb drop
s in the middle of a flock of sheep. Torn-off limbs are thrown along the street, and a heavy rain of blood spatters down on us, again turning us red. The stench makes us retch.

  When we swing off the road to take what we think is a short cut, there is a deafening explosion, and white clouds of steam come hissing up out of the earth.

  ‘Must be steampipes,’ says ‘Whorecatcher’. ‘They’ll be goin’ off before we know where we are! Let’s get to hell out of here fast!’

  ‘Get back!’ shouts the Commissar, waving with both arms from the T-34’s turret. ‘Hell, get back! If it’s what I think it is, all hell’s loose!’

  The road begins to sink down, as if it were being sucked away by invisible forces. Houses on both sides of the road crumble and disappear into the hole, which closes after them with a horrible, sucking sound.

  ‘Good Lord above,’ cries the Old Man, in horror. ‘That’s got to be more than burst pipes!’

  ‘Too true,’ shouts the Commissar furiously, ‘but let’s get out of here quick as all hell. I’ll explain later!’

  On the far side of the boulevard the road bulges up into a huge mound. It is as if the world were turning inside out. Houses fall down in whole rows, as if the earth were sucking them down into itself.

  ‘This is bleedin’ nasty,’ mumbles Tiny. ‘Seems like the devil’s on ’is way up to ’ave a look at what’s goin’ on!’

  In the middle of the park we are stopped by an OGPU patrol, which has driven two armoured sledges across the road.

  ‘Get ready,’ growls the Commissar viciously. ‘Nothing’s going to stop us now! Not the whole bloody Kremlin!’

  Two nasty-looking OGPU men, dressed entirely in black leather, and with Kalashnikovs at the ready, stand in the middle of the road waving us down like policemen.

  The Commissar jumps down from the T-34, puffs himself up and marches towards them. He shouts loudly and waves his fist in the air. A polittruk* comes out from behind the road-block. He too seems to have puffed himself up. His broad, Slavic face promises us no good.

  ‘Necker!’ says Porta, world-wise. ‘It’d be clever of us to shoot his balls off!’

  ‘Propusk!’ shouts the polittruk, holding out his hand in true policeman style.