Wheels of Terror

by Sven Hassel

  Every time we arranged a row of corpses, we threw a thin layer of earth on top and then a new layer of bodies. Because there was little room in the mass graves we had to tread the bodies down. The gas from the corpses stank to heaven, and Porta balancing precariously on the edge of the grave cried:

  ‘What backside cyclones! It stinks worse than you, Pluto, when you’ve been eating yellow peas. And that’s saying something!’

  When we had filled a grave we put on top of it a notice fastened to a pole for the information of those who later would be erecting crosses and gravestones.

  Four hundred and fifty unknown. Seven hundred unknown. Two hundred and eighty unknown. Always a figure. Everything had to be in order. Prussian bureaucracy insisted on it.

  As the days went by the corpses slipped out of our grip. Rats and dogs made off with great chunks of flesh. We were vomiting continually, but orders had to be carried out. Even Porta became subdued and silent. We growled and swore at each other, and sometimes fights developed.

  One time, when Porta was about to bury a half-naked woman with her legs grotesquely drawn up, he tried to straighten them. The storm hanging over us was released by Pluto’s impatient question:

  ‘What the hell are you wasting time for? It’s all the same to you, you don’t know her.’

  Porta, whose uniform like the rest, was covered in a greenish slime, frowned drunkenly at the huge docker:

  ‘I do what I bloody well like without your permission.’ He hiccupped loudly and raised the bottle of schnapps: ‘Here’s to you, you shower of undertakers!’

  He held the bottle away from his mouth, bent his head backwards and we saw how the schnapps poured down his throat. When he had finished, he burped prodigiously and spat in a high arc to hit the newly emptied charnal-cart.

  ‘Stop that, Porta!’ Lieutenant Harder shouted in sudden rage, his fists clenched.

  ‘Certainly, sir, certainly. But if you, sir, would yourself look at the girl, you would agree she can’t be buried like this.’

  ‘Get it over with.’

  ‘What, sir?’ asked Porta and eyed Harder malevolently. ‘With straightening out the legs, or what?’

  ‘Porta, I order you to shut up!’

  ‘My God, I won’t. Do you think I’m scared of you, you louse, because you have silver on your shoulders? And not so much Porta. I’m Corporal Porta to you.’

  In one leap Harder was round the grave and down with Porta among the corpses, hitting him in the face.

  Then Pluto and Bauer, who were the first to get over their astonishment, parted them. They hit each a terrific blow, so that both the lieutenant and the corporal tumbled back into the slush. We got them out and dumped them on their backs.

  They rose scowling, and under our watchful eyes drank deeply from the bottle of schnapps. Porta turned quickly and went back to the grave, but Harder followed, put one hand on Porta’s shoulder while offering his other hand and said:

  ‘Sorry, chum, nerves. But you are a shocking talker. I know you don’t mean anything. Let’s forget it.’

  Porta opened his ugly face in a broad grin, his only front tooth shining benevolently at Harder:

  ‘Fine, sir. Old Porta, Corporal by the grace of God in the Nazi army, doesn’t bear grudges. But it was a real one you hit me. Where I’m damned if I know. I’ve only known one officer who could fight, my highly honoured old field commander Colonel Hinka. But watch that big swine Pluto there. He’ll kill you or me one day if he gets a chance to butt in every time we have a fight. He’s got a punch like a kick from a stallion.’

  We got steadily more and more drunk. Several times one of us would fall on top of the bodies in the grave and make ridiculous apologies to the dead. From the middle of the grave among the beautiful churchyard willows and poplars, Porta suddenly bawled:

  ‘He, he, he! Here’s a bloody tart, card and all, and to beat the lot I know her!’

  Still shaking with laughter he threw a yellow card at The Old Un.

  ‘It’s Gertrude! By Christ, it’s Gertrude from the Wilhelm-strasse. So she’s kicked the bucket! It’s not eight days since I was in bed with her, and now she’s bought it.’

  Porta bent and examined the dead Gertrude with keen interest. With a great show of expert knowledge he said:

  ‘It’s an air mine. That’s clear enough. Lungs burst. Otherwise intact though. Fancy her getting it, a first-class tart. Real value for twenty marks!’

  Soon afterwards we heaved the body of a man dressed in a well-tailored suit down to Porta and Pluto.

  ‘You’re going to have posh company, Gertrude,’ said Porta. ‘Not just a front-line dog like me. There you are, boys, everything ends well. If I had told her eight days ago she was going to be buried with a gentleman in patent leather shoes and white spats she’d have thrown me out.’

  Lieutenant Harder squinted over to the long row of waiting carts which ceaselessly rolled up filled with bodies.

  ‘Hell, will it never end?’ he said wearily. ‘And we aren’t the only burial party.’

  ‘It seems like two new corpses come in for each one we load,’ said a sergeant-major from No. 5 Company. ‘Several other burial parties have broken down. We’ve had to get new troops.’

  ‘Kids still wet round the ears,’ snapped Harder and returned to his lists.

  A little later we were sitting on some fallen grave-stones. Porta was going to tell us a story from his eventful life, but when he started describing his favourite dish of brown beans and pork we had to stop him. Even half-drunk we couldn’t abide the subject of food.

  We buried people for days. In our drunkenness we made the filthiest jokes about our horrible work. They kept us from insanity. For in spite of the impersonality of mass death each single person had gone through his own life and death agony. Mothers and fathers had worried about their children. They had had money-troubles, drunk beer from large tankards or wine from tall glasses, danced, had fun, slaved in factories or offices, wandered in sun and rain; enjoyed a warm bath or a quiet evening with friends talking confidentially about the end of the war and better days when they would have great times together. Instead, full stop. Brutally, evilly, violently, death had come. It may have lasted a fraction of a second, minutes or hours, to end by being buried by tipsy soldiers from a penal regiment, who spewed foul jokes as the only epitaph for men and women who had once striven and hoped.

  Our last job was to go down into cellars where there was no chance of getting the bodies out. We, the Ghouls’ Squad, in our black tank uniforms, with the laughing skull flash on the collar, used flame-throwers to destroy the last slimy remains of what had once been human beings. Where we advanced the living ran in terror.

  Everything turned to ash where the red hissing tongue of the flame-thrower licked along. The air trembled when our detonators were set off. In thick dust clouds the last remnants of houses crumpled. The only message from the army about this hell ran laconically: ‘Several cities in North-West Germany have sustained terror attacks from enemy aircraft. Among others Cologne and Hanover were heavily attacked. Numerous enemy bombers were shot down by our flak and fighters. Retaliation will rapidly follow.’

  3

  A soldier’s weapons are given him to be used. That’s laid down in the regulations, and these a soldier must obey.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Weisshagen loved regulations. He constantly reminded everyone: ‘You learn only from regulations and by example.’

  He was taught that despite regulations it is uncomfortable to get your cap shot off.

  A Shot in the Night

  For eight days we had trained with new tanks. We had returned to barracks from the infamous Sennelager, near Paderborn, the most hated of all Germany’s hated training grounds.

  The soldiers said that Sennelager had been created by God in his ugliest mood. Personally I thought there was something in that. Its equal for uncomfortable terrain with sand and bog, thick bush and impenetrable thorns, would be hard to find. It was surely more desolat
e and depressing than the Gobi desert. It had been cursed by the thousands who had trained on it in the Kaiser’s time and who were later to fall in the 1914–18 war. The volunteers in the hundred-thousand strong Reichwehr, who had chosen the soldier’s trade to escape from unemployment, came to long for the grey hopelessness of civilian unemployment rather than face daily the hell that was Sennelager. We, the Third Reich’s soldier-slaves, got it tougher than any of them, and the legendary ‘Unteroffizier Himmelstoss’ in the Kaiser’s time had nothing on our officers and NCOs when it came to the routine of military sadism. He was only a baby.

  Many people condemned to death by court-martial in the Rhine-Westfalen command were executed here. But as The Old Un once put it, when you were brought here to die, death must be a blessed release if only to escape looking at the incredibly depressing soul-destroying stretch of country that was Sennelager.

  Pluto and I were chosen for guard-duty the first night. We had to stand with our steel-helmets and rifles and stare enviously at our lucky friends who went to town, there to rinse away the taste of the training-ground with beer and schnapps.

  Porta fairly danced past us, laughing his head off. We could count the last three teeth in his huge gob. The army had given him sets of dentures for the upper and lower jaws, but he carried them in his pocket, well wrapped in a piece of grubby cloth which he used to clean his rifle before parades. When he was eating he solemnly unwrapped the teeth and placed a set on each side of his plate. When he had stuffed himself with his own food and any leftovers he could scrounge, he would polish the teeth with his rifle-rag, wrap them conscientiously in the rag and put them back in his pocket.

  ‘Mind you keep the gates wide open when Father comes home,’ he grinned. ‘I’m bound to be drunker than you’ve seen me for a long time, and my well-trained male organ’s scared stiff already with all the work I’ve got cut out for him. Cheerio, soldier boys, and take great care of the Prussian barracks.’

  ‘That stupid red-haired bastard!’ Pluto growled. ‘Off on the spree, and the best we can hope for is a game of pontoon with the snot-nosed recruits.’

  Very lonely we sat in the canteen and ate our nettle soup – the eternal Eintopf which always made us slightly sick.

  A few recruits were also there playing grown-ups because they wore uniform. A great deal of their self-confidence would vanish when they got their marching orders, and landed in a battle unit on the eastern front.

  Sergeant-Major Paust was also present with some of the NCOs. He drank beer in his own special grunting, guzzling way. When he saw us in our guard-order eating the deadly Eintopf he guffawed and shouted in his barracks slang:

  ‘You two sucking-pigs, do you like guard-duty? It’s Daddy here who looked after that. I fancied you needed a little rest. Tomorrow you’ll thank me for not having a hang-over like the others.’

  As we didn’t answer, he half-stood up, leaning on his huge fists and sticking out his massive Prussian jaw:

  ‘Answer me! The regulations lay down, that men must answer their officers! Not front-line manners. We still have lawful and civilized order here. Remember that, you cows!’

  Reluctantly we stood up and answered:

  ‘Yes, Herr Feldwebel, we like guard-duty.’

  ‘Heavy in the seat, what, you swine? I’ll bloody soon see to that. Either in ‘Senne’ or on the parade-ground!’

  He threw out his hand and bawled:

  ‘You are dismissed!’

  We sat down slowly and I whispered to Pluto:

  ‘Is there any lower form of life than a man with a rank who’s everything with it and nothing without it?’

  Pluto glowered at me across the nettle soup:

  ‘It’s the training officer. He’s got to use the scrapings of the gutter to do his job for him. Let’s get out quick before I puke.’

  We stood up again quickly, but just as we reached the door Paust roared:

  ‘Here, you tired heroes! Never heard of the regulation which tells you to salute your senior ranks when you enter or leave a room? Don’t try to get away with anything, you bog-lice!’

  Shaking with frustrated fury we went up to his table, clicked our heels together and stretched our hands along the seats of our trousers. Pluto roared out, insultingly loud:

  ‘Obergefreiter Gustav Eicken and Fahnenjunkergefreiter Hassel humbly beg you, Herr Feldwebel, for permission to leave the room, then to proceed to the guard-room by gate number four, where we will execute our duty as commanded!’

  Paust nodded condescendingly, at the same time lifting a huge tankard to his broad, sweating face.

  ‘Dismissed!’

  With a terrific bang of our heels we about-turned and marched noisily out of the steam and stink of the canteen.

  Outside, Pluto stood cursing obscenely. He finished by lifting one leg and venting an enormous fart in the direction of the closed canteen door.

  ‘I wish to God we were back at the front. If we stay here much longer I’m bound to screw the neck off Paust and pack him together so that he’ll be able to wink at his own tail!’

  Dully, we sat in the guard-room and played pontoon, but were soon fed up and packed it up. We threw ourselves back into high-backed guard-room chairs. Here we sat mooning over some strongly pornographic magazines, which Porta had lent us:

  ‘What a fanny she’s got!’ Pluto grinned and pointed to a girl in my magazine. ‘If only I could meet a lass like that I’d really show her what I’m made of. I want thighs I can embrace with both arms. How would you go for a great cow like that on a table with only her chemise on?’

  ‘Not much,’ I answered. ‘I go for what you’d call the skinny ones. Now, look, that’s something. If I had one like that turned over every six months I could last out a thirty years war.’

  The guard commander, Sergeant Reinhardt, came across and leaned over our shoulders. He was drooling:

  ‘Well! What do you know! Where do you get magazines like that?’

  ‘Where do you think?’ Pluto answered insolently. ‘Every Wednesday the YMCA distributes them. Ask the girl in the reception. She’s got a load under the issue-bibles.’

  ‘Don’t get fresh, Corporal, or you’ll have me after you,’ Reinhardt said angrily as Pluto burst out laughing. But in a moment he was mollified. His eyes bulged as he thumbed through pictures of the most fantastically unnatural erotic positions. Even Casanova might have gaped.

  ‘No, by God,’ breathed Reinhardt. ‘As soon as duty’s over I’m off to find a bit of frippet. This gives you an appetite. That’s a bloody good one, I must try with Grete tomorrow.’

  ‘Blimey. That’s nothing,’ said Pluto condescendingly. ‘Just look here,’ and he pointed to a picture showing a completely insane situation. ‘I knew that one already when I was fourteen.’

  The lower jaw in Reinhardt’s peasant’s face dropped in gaping astonishment, and he stared with admiration at the big Hamberger:

  ‘When you were fourteen? That’s a lie. When did you begin?’

  ‘When I was eight-and-a-half. With a married bitch while her husband was out selling fruit. It was a sort of tip because I had got her eggs from the grocer in the Bremerstrasse.’

  ‘Hell, stop making me randy,’ Reinhardt groaned.

  ‘Here, can you get me a married woman? You must know a lot of them.’

  ‘Sure I can, man, but it’ll cost ten opium-fags and a bottle of rum or cognac in advance. And when you’ve had your tart another ten opium-fags and another bottle – from France, none of that German stuff.’

  ‘It’s yours,’ said Reinhardt eagerly, ‘but God forgive you if you cheat.’

  ‘To hell, if you don’t trust me, get your tart yourself,’ answered Pluto and turned the pages of his magazine indifferently. Not by as much as a glance did he betray how badly he wanted the opium-cigarettes and schnapps. He knew Reinhardt could get hold of them.

  The sergeant was walking excitedly up and down the guard-room. He kicked the kit belonging to one of the recruits into a
corner and then proceeded to reprimand the poor devil for his unsoldierly behaviour on duty. Then he came across and put his arm in a friendly way round Pluto’s shoulders and mine.

  ‘Never mind, my friends, I didn’t mean it like that. One gets a little suspicious. All these depot stallions are nothing but a bunch of crooks and swindlers. It’s different with you lads from the front. You understand the meaning of friendship.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you stick around here when you hate it so much,’ said Pluto, blowing his nose in the old-fashioned way and flicking some of the snot on Reinhardt’s chair. This Reinhardt chose to ignore. ‘Come along with us where it bangs.’

  ‘Good idea, I might at that,’ replied Reinhardt. ‘Soon it’ll be unbearable in this town, unless you’ve got front-decorations up. Even old hags give you the bird. But what about this tart, can you fix one up, chum?’

  ‘In next to no time, but first an advance,’ answered Pluto and stuck out his palm.

  The outstretched hand gave Reinhardt nervous twitches in his face.

  ‘I swear you’ll have ten fags to-morrow when duty is finished, and the cognac is yours as soon as I have been to town to see the bloke who lays it on for me. But can you raise the other thing for to-morrow evening?’

  Pluto answered in a chilly tone:

  ‘You’ll get your tart, and it’ll be to-morrow evening.’

  The recruits, most of whom were not yet eighteen, glanced blushingly and shyly across at us. This kind of talk was every day speech to us. We would have stared completely uncomprehendingly at anyone who suggested it was immoral. The deal Pluto and Reinhardt had just made was to us just as normal as an execution was in Sennelager. We had learnt new values in the great mass production factory called the army.

  At last darkness enveloped the huge barracks and its scattered outbuildings. Here and there behind the blacked-out windows lay a recruit who had fallen asleep crying soundlessly. Home-sickness, fright and many other things had broken him down and made him behave like the child he was despite the weapons and the uniform.