Wheels of Terror

by Sven Hassel

  Carefully she unlocked the door, and made sure the black-out curtains fitted before she put on the light. Just a small lamp with a yellow-shade, it seemed to radiate warmth.

  I put my arms round her and kissed her violently, almost brutally. Passion started burning in her. She wildly answered my kisses and bored her slim body into mine. Heavily we fell on the sofa without our lips parting.

  My hands followed the seam in her stocking, searching her lithe body. Her skin was cool, smooth, dry and smelling of woman. I forgot the depot, the gloomy armoury, reeking oil, beer and damp uniforms, sweating men, old socks – the ruined city with its barracks, hobnailed boots, bawdy songs, brothels, huge graves filled with corpses. I was with an expensively dressed woman, a woman fragrant with the perfume from the slopes of Southern France, with female legs, slim with one shoe on, the other off, black suede shoes with high heels, and round, dimpling knees in light grey silk stockings. The skirt was so narrow it had to be pushed up over firm thighs to make it comfortable. A fur coat on the floor, Persian lamb, beaver or calf? Women would have known it was Persian lamb, black as night, a symbol of wealth and luxury.

  Buttons in the pink blouse have burst open under the soldier’s battle-clumsy grip. A breast is made prisoner and examined, not roughly by the soldier but by the eternal lover’s tender hand. The nipple smiles into love-hungered blue eyes which have wept and laughed, stared across the snowy wastes of Russian Steppes, searched for a mother, a woman, a lover like her.

  She detached herself gently from my embrace.

  ‘Shall I tell you what I think?’ I asked.

  She lit a cigarette and answered as she put another into my mouth:

  ‘I know what you are thinking, my friend. You wish you were far away in a country behind the blue hills, a Shangri-La without barracks and shouts of command, away from a society of rubber-stamping civil servants, a place without the smell of leather and printing-ink, a land of wine, women and green trees.’

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking.’

  I picked up a photograph from a table beside the sofa. A man in uniform. A handsome man with fine features. A man wearing the insignia of a staff-officer. In one corner he had written ‘Your Horst, 1942.’

  ‘Your husband?’ I asked.

  She took the photograph, put it carefully on the shelf behind the sofa and pressed her mouth against mine. I kissed her pulsating temples, let my lips brush over her firm breasts, bit her cleft chin, and pulled her head backwards by her dark hair.

  She groaned with pain, passion and need.

  ‘Oh, Sven, let us find our Shangri-La!’

  From the wall a painting of a woman looked forbiddingly down on us. She was wearing a blouse with a high-necked lace collar. Her grey eyes had never dreamed of Shangri-La, but then she had never seen a city in ruins and women with their souls torn to shreds by screeching bombs.

  To hell with morals. To-morrow you are dead.

  Our half-open mouths were pressed together. Our tongues met like snakes in their mating-dance. We stiffened and relaxed in endless desire. Every frustration was sublimated. The cup of love overflowed. Our lips found themselves again and again in hungry longing. Her breasts were bare. Her turquoise coloured brassiere and slip lay on the floor. She was both an overwhelming need and a shining fulfilment as she lay naked, yet clothed. A completely naked woman disappoints a man. He always wishes for a tiny, fluffy fragment to remove.

  A button became a frustration. She lifted her fevered hands to help. Her fingers played over my back, warm, soft, yet hard and wildly demanding.

  The sirens hooted, but we were far away from war. We had crossed the last threshold. We gave ourselves to the age-old love’s contest, the embrace which calls for eternity. We were insatiable. Heavy sleep overcame us. The sofa seemed too small. We slept on the thick carpet.

  When we woke, we were tired but content. We had had a night which would have to last a long time. She dressed and kissed me as only a woman in love can kiss.

  ‘Stay, Sven, stay. Nobody will look for you here. Oh, stay.’

  She burst into tears.

  ‘The war will soon be over, it’s madness to go back!’

  I freed myself from her clinging embrace.

  ‘No, that sort of thing is done only once. Don’t forget him in France. He too will be back. And then where do I go? Torgau – Fagen – Buchenwald – Gross Rosen – Lengries? No, call me a coward, I dare not.’

  ‘Sven, if you stay, I’ll divorce him. I’ll get you false papers!’

  I shook my head and wrote my field postal number on a piece of paper: 23645. She pressed the scrap of paper against her breast. Dumbly her stare followed me as I left. Quickly, without turning, I disappeared from her eyes into the morning mist.

  8

  We stopped at many stations. We stood for many hours queueing to get a little thin soup, made of nettles.

  Many times we sat crouched by the railway trucks in rain and snow to ease our bowels.

  The journey was slow. For twenty-six days we trundled along, and were far into Russia when we left our cattle-trucks.

  Return to the Eastern Front

  For fourteen days we limped along in a troop-transport train of thirty or so cattle-trucks for the troops and two old-fashioned third-class passenger carriages for the officers. In front of the engine we pushed an open goods-truck filled with sand in case the partisans had laid mines on the track.

  Our troops could easily have been trailed by the excrement we left between the rails at the stations where we stopped.

  On the long journey between Poland and the Ukraine many peculiar events befell us before we were unloaded on the dilapidated station at Roslavl.

  We were marched along dusty, sandy roads rutted by thousands of heavy vehicles to reach the 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment’s positions at Branovaskaja. Here we were received like long-lost friends by Captain von Barring. He looked deathly pale and exhausted. Rumours had it he suffered from an incurable stomach disease. He had spent a short time in hospital, but they had quickly bundled him off to the front again cured, at any rate on paper. Then followed jaundice and that did not improve matters.

  It cut us to the quick to see our beloved company commander in such a state.

  If it hadn’t been for Porta and Pluto and the former Foreign Legionnaire who had joined us, we would still have been sitting safely back at the depot. As it was, these three had made life impossible for one and all in a mile’s radius.

  It had started really with the fight between Tiny and the legionnaire in the canteen. The former landed in our mixed marching company, a fact which did not please him. But it was Porta who tipped the balance by going to town illegally in civilian clothes. He, of course, became drunk, and all but raped a girl he had stumbled on in the back-room of the ‘Red Cat’. We could hear him bawl:

  ‘Now, my fine miss, you’ll see who has arrived here!’

  The girl cried with fear and drink. When we hurried in, Porta had peeled off most of her clothes and she lay in a most inviting position. Porta had only his shirt on.

  Pluto christened them by pouring a bottle of beer over them:

  ‘I tell thee, thou art created to increase!’

  Then we withdrew satisfied, but next day when the girl had sobered up she wondered what had happened. It seemed to her that some private soldiers had been present at the love-making. So it was rape and everything belonging to it. She told her story to her father, a reservist and, to make matters worse, a quartermaster in the auxiliary battalion. He hurried to Colonel von Weisshagen, and, even if Von Weisshagen did not exactly love reservist quartermasters, the mill started to grind. Pluto was recognized, Porta, too, when the girl innocently marched past the paraded company. So the glasshouse again opened its hospitable gates.

  But Pluto almost surpassed Porta. One day he invited us for a trip in a training tank, which is a tank with the turret hatches removed. It resembled a bathtub on tracks. He whizzed about the garage area at a speed of 40 kilomet
res per hour, even though the speed-limit was 15 km.p.h. for all vehicles.

  When we had completed four or five circuits with roaring engine and rattling chains, Pluto let go of the steering rods and turning to us in our bathtub said:

  ‘I’ll bloody well show you that the old jalopy can do more than forty.’

  Covered in a huge cloud of dust, with a roar we jumped out on the road. Then like a jack-in-the-box a little Opel appeared. What followed happened in a flash. We hit the car with a bang and it flew across the ditch and landed on the parade ground. There it turned over three or four times. Two wheels were torn off and careered desperately along to be stopped by the wall of the dining-hall.

  ‘Thank you very much, Pluto,’ said Porta with admiration. ‘Blimey, what a kiss you gave that pram. You don’t do anything by halves, do you!’

  ‘Now we’ll see who’ll win the slanging match, the master-driver Pluto or that chump in the Opel,’ said Pluto calmly.

  To our horror our adjutant crawled out of the smashed car with his uniform in shreds. When he reached our training-tank he swore furiously at the dumbstruck Pluto.

  That joy-ride cost Pluto fourteen days in a dark cell and the rest of us our trip to Russia. Maybe it was cheap at the price.

  In anger Porta threw down his equipment on the floor of the cottage we were billeted in. He shouted at the old Russian who sat in the corner by the stove scratching his lousy back against the wall:

  ‘Joseph Porta has arrived. You’ve got plenty lice, dear Soviet citizen?’

  The Russian grinned without understanding a word so Porta went on in Russian:

  ‘You see, comrade, Joseph Porta and his followers have arrived on the Eastern Front again. Even if I’m a damned good soldier the whole Germanski war apparatus will soon turn west to the good city of Berlin. Your very red brothers will soon be here to set you free, and make you happy and content with lots of dialectics before they hang you.’

  The Russian stared and stuttered:

  ‘Germanski go? Bolshevik soldiers come?’

  ‘That’s it, comrade,’ Porta grinned.

  Porta’s prophecies took immediate effect and the nine civilian Russians in the cottage held a whispered conference in the stinking room. One made off, presumably to spread the rumour in the sad, grey village. Some of them secretly packed their belongings into bundles. Porta made them start by shouting:

  ‘Don’t forget your victory flags!’

  Pluto was on his knees fixing his bedding on the floor but Porta’s commentaries made him collapse with laughter.

  When he recovered he picked up his machine-pistol, patted it significantly and announced in broken Russian:

  ‘When tovarich commissar come, you dead quick because you not partisans. Hurry up and be partisans!’

  The old Russian went across to him and said with an odd dignity:

  ‘You not funny, Herr soldier.’

  With our gas-mask containers serving as pillows and wrapped in our greatcoats we tried to snatch some sleep before moving into our battle positions. Rumour had it we were to serve as infantry. We had heard that the 19th Panzer had been wiped out by our Russian colleagues. All our own tanks were lost too.

  ‘We’ve landed in a real muck-pot,’ said Stege. ‘But, of course, we’re the whipping-boy for all Hitler’s army!’

  ‘You’ve said it,’ said Möller, ‘a chap from the regimental staff told me that the whole of the 52nd Army Corps had run for it with Ivan at their heels.’

  ‘God help us,’ Pluto burst out. ‘If that’s right we’re going to get it bloody hot. But those beauties in the 52nd were always ready enough to run.’

  ‘They’ve mostly got mountain-monkeys,’ said Stege, ‘I never could stand those hill-billies with their imbecile Edelweiss on their caps and sleeves. Looked like a bunch of wreaths when they were on the march.’

  Slowly peace fell over the room. The last speech we heard was the Little Legionnaire swearing in German, French and Arabic at the biting lice. Soon an orchestra of snores was the only sound.

  It was still dark when a foot kicked us awake and a voice whispered: ‘Alert!’

  Porta, half-asleep, muttered angrily:

  ‘What are you whispering for? Do you think Ivan’s out there with his ear stuck to the keyhole? Get out of it, you sod, or I’ll bash your skull in!’

  Slowly we got up and collected our equipment. We crossed to the assembly area swearing and stumbling in the night. There we joined the rest of No. 5 Company. We were all dirty and frowsty with sleep.

  Flash-lamps blinked as papers and maps were studied. Low-voiced commands, the clicking of steel against steel filled the wet night. Tiny gave off abuse, threatening to fight anyone who came near.

  Von Barring who came along in his long coat with a hood attached – the kind privates wear on guard-duty – was without shoulder-tabs or badges. He quickly interrupted the talk between Sergeant-Major Edel and the section-leaders:

  ‘Good morning, Company! Ready to march?’

  Without waiting for an answer he ordered:

  ‘Company, attention! Rifles will be slung. Automatic weapons will be carried as most comfortable. No. 5 Company right turn. Follow me. March!’

  Both Porta and the Legionnaire were cheekily smoking. Several more followed their example. We marched in a lumpy confusion. Friends sought friends as a protection against fright and darkness. Porta put an egg-grenade in my hand and said:

  ‘I’ve no room for this muck, you take it!’

  Without a word I put it in my pocket.

  The equipment rattled and jingled. Everyone was jittery. The rain ran off the steel-helmet down the back of the neck. We went through a spinney and then across a trampled field of sun-flowers.

  Tiny, all the time quarrelling with the others, was getting very loud. A fight was imminent.

  Von Barring stopped and let the company pass by. Lieutenant Harder was alone in front swinging his machine-pistol by the leather strap.

  When Tiny came past von Barring we heard the captain say in his gentle but firm manner:

  ‘You, I’ve seen your papers and heard about you. I warn you. We don’t stand any form of provocation. You’re in a decent company. We treat everybody properly. But don’t forget we have our methods with scoundrels and rascals and we’re not afraid to use them!’

  Von Barring marched up to his position beside Lieutenant Harder again. He wore an officer’s cap. From his right shoulder dangled his machine-pistol. On his way up he hit Porta on the shoulder and said:

  ‘Hey, you red-haired monkey!’

  ‘Same to you, sir,’ responded Porta familiarly. He turned to The Old Un and me and announced loudly: ‘Barring is one of the few officers I know who isn’t a complete swine.’

  ‘Shut up, Porta,’ von Barring’s voice came through the darkness. ‘Or else there’ll be extra parades when we get back.’

  ‘I report, sir, that Corporal Joseph Porta has corns and is flat-footed. The doc has exempted him from extra parades.’

  A quiet laugh came from von Barring.

  The artillery-fire was not heavy. Rather dispersed and desultory shooting came from both flanks. Now and again machine-guns barked. It was easy to tell the Russian ones from ours. Da-da-da said the Russian, our MG 38 sounded more like tik-tik, and the new fast-firing MG 42 was one long evil snarl.

  Round about tracer-bullets opened up and sank to the ground in a blinding white light. Stege started to laugh hysterically:

  ‘I once read a book about a soldier: “He was a solider and feared nothing. He was big and brave. Death was his friend and helper. He behaved with sureness and confidence as only the brave do”! The writer-sod who wrote that should see us now as we march the steppes, shaking with fear.’

  ‘Shut up, Stege,’ said The Old Un.

  He was walking slightly bent smoking his ancient pipe. He had put the hand-grenades in his long boots, and his fists were buried deep in the pockets of his greatcoat.

  A short distance in f
ront of us a whining shell fell in a field and exploded with a bang.

  ‘15.5,’ said The Old Un, and pulled his head even lower between his shoulders.

  Some of our new men threw themselves into shelter. Porta started jeering.

  ‘The depot-stallions like the smell of the Russian earth!’

  ‘Do you mean me?’ snarled Tiny behind us. He too had thrown himself down.

  ‘Does the cap fit?’ asked Pluto.

  Tiny shovelled his way through the ranks and grabbed Pluto. Porta jerked his sniper’s rifle forward and hit Tiny a colossal smack in the face with the butt.

  ‘Be off, you fat pig,’ he hissed threateningly.

  Half-stunned, Tiny whirled round, waltzed out of the ranks and fell to his knees with blood spurting from his nose.

  Quietly The Old Un stepped out of the column and with the barrel of his pistol pointing at the kneeling giant said calmly:

  ‘Get up and join the ranks where you belong, or we’ll kill you. If you’re not in place in ten seconds, I shoot!’

  Tiny stood shakily up and growled, but a well-timed thrust from the muzzle of The Old Un’s pistol silenced him.

  ‘Split up,’ von Barring’s voice came out of the darkness. ‘Put the fags out.’

  Whee! Crump! exploded a new 15.5. Da-da-da stuttered a heavy machine-gun.

  Porta laughed a little.

  ‘Just like coming home again. Good morning, pisspots,’ he greeted a couple of panzer grenadiers crouched under a tree. ‘Corporal Joseph Porta, graduated State-murderer, humbly reports back to the Eastern Front “slaughter-house”.’

  ‘Look out, when you get to the ruin in front there,’ said one of the grenadiers mechanically and without rancour. ‘Ivan can spot you there. When you walk through the trench you’ll come to a place where there’s a dead Russian lying. Get down flat there. Ivan is using him as an aiming-mark for his machine-guns. We lost nine men there yesterday, so you’re likely to have a few crosses among you, too!’

  ‘God, you’re cheerful,’ said Porta coolly.

  Pluto and the Little Legionnaire looked at each other.