‘You lazy pig. Letting me do all the work.’ He rips his pistol from its holster, and points it at me with outstretched arms, like a film actor. ‘Get up, you cardboard soldier, or I’ll shoot your head off!’
At that moment I hate him so much it hurts, the puffed-up shit. How annoyingly pompous he looks, standing there tall and slim, with lips so thin they are almost invisible, and icy-cold, blue eyes. Not even the newest war-mad recruit could be so regimentally correctly dressed as Julius. When it came to it what did he know more than a recruit does? Nothing!
Raging I climb back onto my feet, murderous thoughts whirling through my brain. I know Heide is crazy enough to really shoot me if I don’t get up quickly. And worst of all he would get away with it.
The Maybachs howl in top output, and the wire is drawn tight as a violin-string. After several attempts the logs begin to roll. We jump like madmen to avoid being crushed by them.
A Russian MG sweeps the road with a short burst. Bullets ricochet, howling, from the steel sides of the tank. It sounds as if a group of drummers have suddenly run amuck on their instruments.
We have almost finished clearing the road-block, and look forward to getting back to the safety of the tank when Heide gives a yell, and goes down into the ditch in one long spring. He slides like a bulldozer through the gruel of ice and water in its bottom.
‘Mines!’ he screams.
I stand gaping, out on the road between two enormous logs, without understanding a word. I see a large grey-red box with Cyrillic lettering on it. A lever sticks up vertically into the air. The mine is armed and ready to explode. For a moment I am completely paralysed.
Our tank is rolling backwards at full speed. Porta has obviously also seen the wicked piece of machinery which is waiting to spread death and destruction on all sides.
Suddenly I am on my own in the middle of a tangle of great tree-trunks and wrecked trucks. I stare, as if hypnotized, at the flat grey-red instrument of death. Then I come alive again.
‘Mines!’ I yell, ‘mines!’ As if they didn’t know it. When the lead vehicle runs into mines, the news travels back fast.
I throw myself face-down into a large, half-frozen puddle, and hardly notice the water running down into my felt boots. Soon it will turn to ice and my feet will begin to burn like fire.
‘God help me,’ I pray. ‘Help me! Don’t leave me to die here!’
There is complete silence. Even the heavy Maxims have ceased firing. It seems as if the whole world has stopped dead. As if the war is holding its breath and waiting for the mine to go off.
An eternity goes by, and still nothing happens. It should have exploded long ago. A count of five is usually enough. I have already counted to thirty-five.
The turret hatch opens slowly, and the Old Man’s head appears.
‘Get off your arses, you weary warriors. Get rid of that mine.’
‘You must be off your rocker,’ Heide shouts back furiously. ‘You can see the bastard’s got delayed-action fuses.’
‘Shut up, and obey my order,’ shouts the Old Man, impatiently. ‘Get that thing out of our way, and I mean now. I don’t care if it’s got ten delayed-action fuses. I want it out of the way! D’you think they’ll stop the war just because you lot trip over a mine?’
Porta peers cautiously through the driver’s observation slit.
‘What’re you playin’ at? Don’t you want to get your heroic names on the big porous stone in front of the barracks at Paderborn? Very big honour that is, let me tell you. A great, national reward!’
I lift my head and take a look at the strange menacing thing. The lever points up in the air like a warning finger. I take a grip on the insulated pliers in my pocket, and ready myself to crawl over to the mine and dismantle it. It is at times like this that a man feels he never should have taken that bomb-disposal course.
The next moment everything disappears in a roaring jet of flame. Pieces of logs whirl through the air and rain down everywhere. I am totally deaf for several minutes, and feel as if my insides have been squeezed by a giant hand. Two minutes later and there would not have been a shred of me left. But the road-block has gone.
We jump up onto the tank as it comes rattling past.
‘Nice job you did, there,’ the Old Man praises us, with an approving smile. ‘Speed up, Porta, give it more gas. We’ve a long way to go yet!’
‘Yes, if it’s China we’re headed for that is a bit of a way off,’ grins-Porta, exuberantly.
‘China?’ mumbles Tiny, racking shells in the ammunition locker. ‘Ain’t that the place where they eat with sticks an’ fatten up on rice? Let’s get movin’. I can’t think of anythin’ better’n boiled rice with tiny ’errings.’
‘I can give you the address of a good eating-house in Pekin,’ grins Porta, putting on speed.
The armoured division rolls relentlessly on, pushing deeply into the Ukraine. Many fall, more are mutilated. The landscape is grim. The grey coldness of a Russian winter is approaching. Tanks rattle and roar through sooty-black villages, plough past huge piles of coal. We do not see a single tree. Vegetation, grass, all green things are gone. Not the least trace, even, of the much vaunted sunflower fields is left. The wild madness of war has eaten up everything in its path. Omnivorously.
The company halts for an hour before a middle-sized provincial town. We have never heard the name of it before. A Russian armoured division has taken it over and turned the town into a hedgehog defensive position. Then our Stukas come roaring out of the grey, snow-filled clouds with sirens howling relentlessly’. Heavy bombs whirl down through the air. One swarm of dive-bombers follows the other. The town disappears from the face of the earth – ausradiert as they say in the propaganda programmes.
Then the tanks pass over what is left of it, killing everything left alive and crushing the dead to pulp under their tracks.
When we reach the next town the Stukas have already visited it, and prepared it for the taking. The dust of pulverized bricks and mortar hangs like a red-grey cloud in the air. Artillery and Cossack horses lie in the shattered streets, stiff-legged and with swollen bodies. Guns lying on their side, wrecked lorries and mountains of tangled equipment, are scattered amongst heaps of bodies. Dead and wounded Russian soldiers lie against walls, or hang from gaping window openings.
Dispassionately we stare at the bloody scene. It has become an everyday sight. In the beginning we puked and felt sick to our stomachs. It is a long time since any of us puked.
‘That’s the way to take a town,’ shouts Julius Heide, enthusiastically. He leans triumphantly out of the forward hatch. With a jeering smile he stares at a Russian soldier sitting up against a wall and looking blankly at his crushed legs.
‘You’re wearin’ the wrong uniform,’ says Porta. ‘You talk like those puffed-up arseholes in the shit-brown uniforms, an’ the yellow leather equipment to hold their fat guts in. You’re a shit of shits, you are, Julius! You’re blinded by your crazy belief in the Führer. I really think you’d be glad if one of the shit-brown sods knocked on your mother’s door one day an’ screamed: “Heil Hitler, Frau Heide! Your son, Unteroffizier Julius Heide, has fallen for the Führer and Greater Germany! We feel for you in your proud sorrow, Frau Heide! The Führer thanks you!’”
‘Old Man, you are my witness,’ explodes Heide, in a rage. ‘This is an insult. I will not stand for it!’
‘Sit down then,’ says the Old Man, indifferently. ‘There’s a lot of things I won’t stand for. Come on, Panzer Marsch! And keep your traps shut, too! I can’t stand the sound of your voices. And you, Porta, stop insulting Adolf!’
The night is dark. Snow and rain fall at the same time. It is cold on the way to Nikolajev.
We stop in the middle of a huge factory. It is Porta, of course, who discovers it to be a vodka distillery. Half an hour later we are stoned out of our minds. We reel around, falling over one another, pour vodka over our own heads and lick it into our mouths like cats lapping up cream. We dip our
bread in vodka, and become more drunk than ever.
A Feldwebel dies of alcohol shock. A Gefreiter sets fire to himself, to convince a friend that vodka can be ignited just as easily as petrol. We try to put it out by throwing more vodka on him, and laugh foolishly at his screams of pain.
Some of 3 Section come along, dragging four women with them. They throw them across a packing table.
An infantry Feldwebel threatens them with a court-martial. Even in the madness of war there has to be some order and discipline. The punishment for rape is hanging. This is the case in every reasonably civilized army. Nobody listens to him. He is pushed to one side, and drunken soldiers threaten to cut his throat.
‘Pricks at the ready!’ orders an Obergefreiter with a bloodstained bandage round his head. He throws himself lustfully on top of a half-naked screaming woman, old enough to be his great-grandmother. ‘Cunt!’ he roars, and collapses, helplessly drunk, between her thrashing legs. Others pull him away from her and fight to take his place.
We wake up next morning depressed, and with the most horrible, hangovers. Soon the military police arrive with their shiny helmets, and the crescent emblem dangling on their chests.
The court-martial is over in four and a half minutes. Eight soldiers dangle, each at the end of his rope. The whole battalion is paraded to see the show. The dead men hang there, with strangely elongated necks, wearing only their uniform trousers. Greatcoats and boots have been taken from them. There is a shortage of such things. They hang there still, turning and swinging on the end of their ropes, as we rattle past, mud churning up from our clattering tracks, on the way to Nikolajev.
‘C’est la guerre! Come death, come sweet death,’ hums the Legionnaire, sardonically, from the turret of his vehicle.
‘A dear fuck that was,’ sighs Porta. ‘Better to pay for it in coin of the realm, if they won’t do it for love.’
‘There’s more’n you’d think get it for takin’ cunt what ain’t theirs,’ growls Tiny, looking thoughtfully at the hanged men.
Raindrops spatter on the armoured sides of the tanks. It is a cold and miserable day. The air reeks with death, and stinks of wet clothing and leather. The clouds are dirty grey. They seem to be rushing towards the west, away from the melancholy Russian day. It is no longer really day. More a kind of twilight.
The little Colonel-general is standing on a thrown-up mound of earth, observing his 4th Tank Army. As usual he is wearing his battered silk field-cap, with its short peak pulled well down on his forehead. Beneath it his eagle nose juts out like a beak from the middle of his narrow skull of a face. His boots seem unbelievably long on his short legs. He stands, stiff as a statue, with his map-case under his arm. A hugh pair of binoculars dangle from his neck, partly covering the red tabs on his cloak. To look at this tiny man, with the oversized binoculars and the almost comically high-topped riding boots, you would never dream that he is the greatest tank general who has ever lived.
The Old Man gives the Army Commander a regimental eyes right.
‘If only the neighbours’d send a 150 mm down on his napper,’ Porta wishes, with an abrupt laugh, ‘an’ send him up to give the angels a big smackin’ kiss on the arse.’
‘We’d only get another of the same sort,’ says the Old Man, tiredly, ‘and most likely one worse’n little short-arse there!’
‘He’s standing right on top of a busted shithouse,’ laughs Gregor Martin, who is now back with us. He is turret-gunner on Barcelona’s Puma.
‘Wish ’e’d drop down through the top an’ fall into it,’ growls Tiny, ‘so ’im an’ ’is fancy silk cap’d get drowned together in Russian shit.’
Barcelona both salutes and gives the eyes right at the same time. The sight of the Army Commander has made him nervous.
Colonel-general Hoth lifts his hand an inch or two.
‘Who’s that fool?’ he asks his Adjutant, who is standing to attention at his elbow as usual.
‘I will find out, sir,’ barks the Adjutant, smartly.
‘Don’t you know your men?’ asks the General, irritably. ‘My Adjutant ought to know every man in my army.’
‘Mad bastard,’ thinks the Adjutant. ‘There’s 80,000 men in 4th Panzer. I don’t know every silly sod on the staff, even.’ He is, however, an old hand. He barks out the first name to come into his head.
‘Oberfeldwebel Stollmann, sir!’
‘Charge him,’ snarls the General. ‘He can be punished for unregimental saluting. I’ve never seen anything like it! Saluting! As if the fool was on parade. I want you to look after that man. Properly, understand!’
‘Very good, sir!’ replies the Adjutant, scribbling in his notebook.
As Barcelona’s Puma swings round at the entrance to the long connecting road, the General catches sight of Albert’s black face in the open driving hatch.
‘Why’s that man’s face black?’ he asks the Adjutant.
‘Black, sir?’ mumbles the Adjutant, in surprise. He puts his glasses to his eyes, to get a closer look at Albert. ‘Looks like a negro, sir!’ he says, doubtfully.
The entire staff put up their binoculars. For a moment 4th Panzer is forgotten, and all interest is concentrated on Albert in the clean-up waggon’s driving-seat.
‘A negro?’ snarls the General, irritably. ‘What nonsense! Germany’s had no colonies for the last twenty years.’
‘Twenty-five, sir,’ the Chief-of-Staff corrects him, ‘and the last of the colonial troops were retired years ago.’
‘Charge that man for having blackened his face without orders,’ snaps the General, brusquely. ‘I don’t want my army turned into a lot of circus clowns!’
The Adjutant writes feverishly: Driver in Puma 524 to be punished for blackening face. He adds, on his own initiative: and for laughing.
In the course of the day we push on through stretched-out villages lining the sides of the roads. White sheets hang from every window as a sign of capitulation.
The inhabitants stand pressed up against the walls of their houses, unsmilingly, faces marked by the fear of the future.
Late in the afternoon we make a halt. We refuel, ammunition is issued, and benzedrine tablets are handed out to each man. There is still no time to waste on sleeping.
Porta and Tiny are long since inside the houses, ransacking boxes and cupboards. They do not really know what they are looking for, but are just sniffing around like inquisitive dogs.
‘Funny things they drink out of in this country,’ says Tiny, gazing in astonishment at a large pink irrigator and holding it up. ‘Couldn’t empty that bleeder very often ’fore your bleedin’ brains blew out through yourear’oles. What’s the tube in it for though?’
‘Anybody can see that,’ answers Porta. ‘Ivan’s a practical feller. He lies on his back when he drinks, so he doesn’t hurt himself when he falls down. We Germans can learn a lot here in Russia.’
‘I gotta try that,’ says Tiny, enthusiastically, hanging the irrigator from his belt like a second gasmask pouch. ‘Think o’ lyin’ flat on your bleedin’ back an’ gettin’ the biggest drunk on the world’s ever ’eard of! Maybe a bloke ought to turn Russki an’ forget all about old Germany?’
‘Holy Virgin Mary’s Mother,’ cries Porta, in surprise. ‘Here’s a dead woman, and she’s wearing a hunting cap with a feather in it. Going travellin’ perhaps when she died. Did go too, only a bit longer trip than she’d reckoned on.’
‘Smells like murder,’ he murmurs, after taking a closer look at the body. ‘Took one in the guts, she did. Can’t have been an execution, or she’d have got the pill in her neck. That’s how they do it in this country.’
‘’Ow dreadful!’ says Tiny, turning up his eyes. ‘Such wicked bleeders ought to be put in jail!’
‘Here’s her handbag, ‘Porta goes on. He picks up a lady’s bag made of reindeer skin. He shoves his nose right into it, and rummages round.
‘Out of here immediately! That’s an order!’ yells Heide in his best NCO’s voice. He positio
ns himself in the doorway with his hands on his hips and bobs up and down on his toes.
‘Up you, Moses,’ says Tiny, unimpressed.
The blood flashes up into Heide’s arrogant Teutonic face.
‘I’m warning you, Obergefreiter Creutzfeldt, call me Moses one more time and I’ll shoot you! It’s dishonouring!’
‘Dis’onourin’? Gettin’ shot?’ laughs Tiny, swinging his Nagan.
‘Moses! You look like the feller as falls on ’is arse at the village fair.’
Heide fumbles furiously for his pistol, but luckily for Tiny it sticks in its holster and he has to use both hands to get it out.
‘Moses! You’ll never get to be a big cowboy star in the pictures, ’Tiny screams with laughter. ‘The bleedin’ rustlers’d’ve shot you fulla ’oles ’fore you knew what was goin’ on!’
A salvo of howling rockets from a Stalin organ drops in the next street, and sends a wall crashing down across the roadway.
‘Jesus’n Mary,’ cries Tiny, throwing himself down into cover close by the wall. ‘Ain’t them barmy bleedin’ neighbours ever goin’ to get tired of shootin’ at us?’
A German SMG begins to bark in wild, hysterical bursts.
‘Hell man, stop that!’ the Old Man’s voice rings through the noise. ‘The tracer’ll tell ’em our position!’
‘Julius ’as ’ad it,’ shouts Tiny, pointing with the muzzle of his mpi at Heide’s body stretched out on the floor.
‘The Führer lost a faithful soldier there,’ says Porta, sadly.
‘Hold his forehead while I take his three gold teeth. I’ve had my eye on ’em for a long time now!’
‘You gonna do that?’ E is a kind of a mate when all’s said an’ done!’ says Tiny, suddenly turning moralist.
‘How’s he to know what’s happening? Dead isn’t he?’ answers Porta, bending over Heide. He is just about to take a grip on one of the teeth with his forceps when Heide comes to with a shout. ‘Damnation!’ cries Porta, in astonishment, ‘I thought you were dead!’