Wheels of Terror

by Sven Hassel

  They were not like that in the beginning, but time, tyrants and war made them what they were.

  Rest Camp

  ‘You see, lads,’ announced Porta, ‘once again our guild has escaped from the Russian riflemen. D’you know what it proves?’

  Tiny looked at him and blinked his eyes.

  ‘It proves we are lucky.’

  ‘God help you, you tart-expert, what else would we expect from you!’

  ‘Are you being fresh?’ said Tiny belligerently.

  ‘Yes,’ said Porta, ‘which is more than you are.’ He pointed at him with an accusing finger and said: ‘Lie down, big mongrel, or Ivan’ll come and bite you. No, it proves I’m a smart and courageous warrior. You lousy Prussian dogs! Can you honestly believe you could cope with Ivan without my help? No, you stinking skunks, this war is finished when I, Joseph Porta, Corporal by God’s grace, am pensioned off – or is it post-war credits they call it?’

  ‘If it’s post-war credits,’ laughed The Old Un, ‘I’ve waited nearly ten years, but don’t be scared, Porta, you’ll get neither pension nor post-war credits when this war is over. At best you’ll get a kick out of the army or into that concentration camp they fetched you out of to fight nicely and properly for Herr Hitler.’

  ‘God knows what’ll happen when the war is over,’ said Bauer dreamily. ‘I wonder if it’ll be possible to be normal again?’

  ‘Not for you,’ screamed Porta. ‘You’ve never been normal since you were an infant at the breast and drank all that Nazi science from your National-Socialist mother. It’s different for me. I’m Red, and I’ve got papers to prove it. Got ’em before you were able to pick your nose. Not one of you dim-wits has ever been normal. You are and will remain cattle. Your horizon stops at becoming section-leaders in this path-finder society. Do yourselves and the world the service of falling for our beloved Adolf-Führer and the Third Reich in a nice regulation manner. Then the victors will be free of the duty of punishing you.’

  ‘Oh, put a sock in it, you clown,’ stuttered Pluto. ‘I’m an honest, dutiful thief from Hamburg, and that’s just as good as a Red from Berlin. But I’m only asking—’

  ‘You heard!’ shouted Tiny, ‘I’m also a nice and polite thief who’ll be sorely needed when the war is over.’

  Pluto leant forward on his straw bed, which stank of damp and mildew, while he bobbed his coal-black naked toes up and down in front of Porta’s nose.

  ‘You see, Porta, you don’t understand what community-spirit is. But I’ll give you a little instruction, you red-haired bull. When this thirty years’ war has ended in a nice and decent way with the whole caboose in ruins to the satisfaction of the generals, the community will have to be rebuilt. That means they’ll throw out the gang now sitting in the chair and biting his nails, for a new gang just like the one we have now. They’ll take their seats on the big sofa, put up new wall-paper to suit their tastes and make a few new laws. New laws – that’s all poppy-cock. It’ll be all the old paragraphs, and it’ll stay just the same. Keeping inside the law, they’ll keep on stealing from those who are fools enough to let it happen. So they’ll need the help of smart chaps like Tiny and me while Red dogs like you’ll be in the back-seat.’

  ‘Shut up, you big bastard,’ cried Porta and threw an empty shell-case at Pluto who quickly ducked.

  Tiny asked naïvely:

  ‘Is it true that you’ve done some crooked business, Porta?’

  ‘No, by God, I haven’t.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you have,’ chuckled Pluto, ‘you stole from the goods you brought from the shops when you were an errand-boy in Bornholmerstrasse.’

  ‘Put your vodka-stinking snout away,’ threatened Porta, ‘or else the Children’s Society will come and fetch you away! What is this peculiar stink in here?’

  Stege was completely convulsed with laughter at Porta’s wonderful appearance. He sat there with his monocle and top-hat sniffing the air.

  Porta grabbed his cat by the neck-fur and dipping its nose in a saucerful of vodka said menacingly:

  ‘Drink, you red cat-pig!’

  Pluto bobbed his black toes a little nearer and whispered sweetly:

  ‘Put your conk a little nearer to the ground and you’ll soon discover the source of this wonderful fragrance!’

  Porta stared down and discovered Pluto’s toes.

  ‘Shame, filthy fellow! Aren’t you going to wash your toes? They’re still full of muck from Caucasia and of old dry goat’s shit into the bargain.’

  Tiny leaned forward the better to study Pluto’s feet.

  ‘Well, they’re a bit dusty. You can’t visit your tart like that.’

  ‘Well, what’s the matter with that? Maybe I keep my boots on, like you,’ said Pluto.

  The Old Un sucked furiously at his pipe.

  ‘Well, well, children. You always talk about the end of the war, and who can blame you? To-day I’ll bet the whole world talks of nothing else. The children say they’ll have new clothes. Where they haven’t felt the hammering of war people say: “When the war’s over we’ll see all the places where battles raged and air-raids happened!” Others say: “When the war’s over rationing will end!” The front-soldier just says: “When the war’s over we’re going home to eat ourselves silly and sleep!”’

  ‘Yes, and make revolution,’ said Porta, grinning and pushing his top-hat a little forward.

  ‘By God, yes, and first and foremost whoring,’ burst out Tiny radiantly.

  ‘Didn’t you get enough the last time you embraced a tart?’ asked the Little Legionnaire.

  ‘Enough? Why ask? Tiny never gets enough. I could keep twenty well-stocked harems fully occupied!’

  ‘Well, if you fancy you’re so good at it,’ said the Little Legionnaire, ‘I’ll give you a life-membership card for all the Moroccan brothels I intend to open once the war’s over.’

  Porta screwed his monocle into his eye and leaning forward to the Little Legionnaire said:

  ‘Tell me, desert-wanderer, is a Moroccan bird all that good?’

  Before the Little Legionnaire was able to answer The Old Un broke in:

  ‘I wish you’d shut up for a few minutes, Porta!’

  Porta put his hand to his lips and shushed at The Old Un.

  ‘One question at a time, dear friend. Well, desert-wanderer, are those Moroccan parcels good?’

  The Little Legionnaire laughed quietly.

  ‘Yes, you can lose all reason when they wiggle their bottoms.’

  ‘That sounds good,’ said Porta. ‘Get me the timetable for the trains leaving for Morocco.’

  Tiny started howling with laughter.

  ‘Me too. Those Morocco tarts’ll make me sign on for seven years with the Legion.’

  ‘Oh shut up, can’t you!’ The Old Un said with real determination.

  ‘Is that an order, dear Old Un?’ asked Porta. ‘Since you’re a sergeant why can’t you say in a nice and military fashion: ‘I order Obergefreiter Joseph Porta to shut his mouth!’

  ‘By God then, it’s an order! Shut up, will you!’

  ‘Now, don’t get fresh, you Unteroffizier-crap. When you speak to me you’re kindly asked to do so in the regulation army manner addressing me in third person. Full stop.’

  ‘All right. I, Unteroffizier Willy Beier, 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment order Obergefreiter Joseph Porta to shut up!’

  ‘And I, Obergefreiter by God’s grace in the Nazi army, Joseph Porta, who’s beaten the world record in obstacleracing, am completely indifferent to the Herr Unteroffizier’s orders. Amen.’

  ‘What did you want to tell us, Old Un?’ asked Stege.

  ‘Oh, about our eternal natterings about the end of the war. First, it’ll be a long time yet. Second, I doubt very much if any of us’ll live to see it. Shouldn’t we try to live together without always speaking of the future? It’s only got horrible things in store for us. We’ll have to learn to understand that the only thing which matters to us is the present and that all we possess
is a noisy loneliness where important and less important things have no value. We curse the Nazis and we curse the Communists: the snow, the frost, the gales; the summer with its intolerable dust and heat and mosquitoes. We swear at the mud in the spring and autumn; we are furious when Christmas comes because we’re here. We damn the “lame ducks” when they drop their bombs over us. How many oaths and damnations haven’t we blown off at the Russians? Children, children, we’re once and for all at war and we’ll have to put up with it. I don’t think one of us’ll get home now. The 27th Regiment was grey and unknown when the war started. It’ll burn to grey ash before it’s over. Just think of all those in the 27th who’ve disappeared. At Stalingrad 5,000 went to hell. At Kubaner bridge-head another 3,500. At Kertsch 2,800. Here in Cherkassy we’ve already lost at least 2,500. In ’41 in the Mediterranean 4,000 were lost. Then add every small battle and scrap we’ve taken part in. What’s the cost in dead? Do you really believe we’ll get away with it? We’ve got to live, live all the time, every minute. To have taken part in the swine-war to surpass all swine-wars is also living. To sit in the doctor’s surgery after a spell in hospital and to be declared fit for war is also living; to curl up in a heap of straw after having eaten your fill of stolen grub is also living. Yes, even cleaning your rifle is an enjoyable life. It should be done with slow movements without thinking of why you do it or of how many hours you’ve wasted doing it. Everything has beauty in nature, and as we are nature’s beings we have to search unceasingly to find what is beautiful in it or else we’ll crack up.’

  A violent sobbing shook him. He fell forward on the table shaken by an almost paralysing weeping.

  We were completely taken aback at his reaction to his own, and to us his extraordinary, speech.

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ burst out Porta. Stege stood up and went across to the sobbing Old Un and patted his back.

  ‘Take it easy, Old Un. It had to come, even to you. Pull yourself together, old friend. It’ll sort itself out.’

  The Old Un straightened himself slowly, stroked both his hands over his face and said quietly:

  ‘Sorry, it’s my nerves. I try to forget there’s something called Berlin where the bombs fall every night and where a woman lives who’s the mother of my children. But it didn’t come off.’

  He banged both his fists down with such violence that the old table creaked, and cried out, completely uncontrolled:

  ‘To hell with it all. I’ll run away. I’ll spit at their court-martial and damned head hunters. I’ll manage. I don’t want to die here in Russia for the lies of Hitler and Goebbels!’

  He cried wildly and violently, but later calmed down.

  We sat quietly, each absorbed in his own thoughts. This at least we had learned: to sit quietly with our thoughts and each other without filling the empty space with obscenities at the wrong moment.

  It is cold. We freeze, despite the heat from the big stove in the hut, but not bodily; only in our souls. We can kill and kill willingly. What have they made of us?

  Now even the calmest of us has broken down weeping because he thinks too deeply about his wife and children in bomb-ridden Berlin.

  We drink noisily. Not that we shout and clown. We drink deeply of the vodka and the grain-liquor. The bottle is passed round. We drink as long as we can without taking the bottle from our mouths and we are masters at it.

  Then we are quiet again while watching another man who is carefully binding his dirty feet in foot-rags; or we catch lice which we throw in the Hindenburg candle where they explode.

  We talk with slow, low voices as if we are afraid someone is listening. We quarrel too. We rage at each other, shout the most terrible things, swear and threaten while hugging our combat-knives or machine-pistols as if we were about to murder our best friends.

  But just as fast and violently as it starts it dies down.

  Outside in the darkness a flaming, roaring explosion sounds. Instinctively Stege ducks his head. Pluto laughs loudly:

  ‘Can’t you learn not to put your skull down when you hear a few bangs?’

  ‘Some people never can and I belong to them,’ says Stege. ‘Perhaps you’re used to the idea of getting a bullet in your skull one fine day?’

  ‘They’ll miss, my treasure!’ replied Pluto with conviction. Pulling out a bullet from his pocket, he held it between two fingers above his head for us to see. ‘This funny thing was fired at your father by a fellow in France. If I had stayed put where I was lying and I was lying bloody comfortably, this would have hit me smack between the eyes; but I stood up and bang the thing got me in the hind-leg. That was my death bullet, but it gave me a miss. So you see I’m going to get away with it.’

  Outside, the impact of the huge shells shook the ground again.

  ‘It’s starting again,’ said The Old Un.

  ‘Well, we haven’t got to wait long now before we’re playing fire-brigade for the division again,’ Möller observed.

  ‘This waiting drives me mad!’ burst out Bauer. ‘You wait and wait and wait!’

  It is really quite comical how much time a soldier wastes just waiting. In the depot you wait to be sent to the front. At the front you wait for the softening-up firing to stop so that you can attack, or you wait to get into battle.

  When you are wounded you wait to be operated on. You wait for the healing of the body’s wounds, for the health of your soul is passed forever. We await death with patience. We await the peace with time to watch the birds migrate and the children at play without thinking that we have no time.

  Even if we are a noisy community in a big war, we ourselves remain a small and sometimes gay community: we are only eleven friends or you might say: eleven brothers with different parents, our bond of union being that we are each condemned to death. We are really moody. One minute we are up in the clouds, the next down in the dumps. Our wishes for the future are peculiar. As Stege once said:

  ‘I long for the day when I can scratch a pig’s ear without my mouth watering at the thought of how such a noble animal tastes when cooked with windfall apples.’

  Many of our conversations were about women, not only those we met in brothels, or the too-willing Russian girls or the nurses and telephone girls who served us behind the lines, but the unobtainable ideal girls who to us were incomprehensible but fragrant, reminding us of living spring flowers. Women who gave us a friendly smile and nothing more, or comforted us with words and perhaps a single caress which meant so much – these were the girls we dreamt of marrying.

  The Old Un was quite different from us. As just now when he had wept. It often happened when he got letters from home. It was really The Old Un who led the company even if Captain von Barring was the company commander. The Old Un decided most things for us. His word was law. What The Old Un said was sense. The Old Un was our father. When something serious happened we sought comfort and advice from him. He brooded with his half-shut blue eyes, and sucked heavily on his antique pipe before he answered. If it was especially difficult, he would take the pipe out of his mouth, dry it carefully and then answer. If we were on exhausting route marches The Old Un always decided when it was time for a rest. Von Barring always asked his advice. The Old Un saw to it that our newly-appointed section-leaders and tank-commanders were experienced NCOs. It didn’t matter if someone from the officer colleges wanted front-line experience. The inexperienced meant death and mutilation to our tight-knit body of friends. They did no regulation training with us. The war and the front-line saw to that. When The Old Un said a man was good then he was good.

  When The Old Un and Porta took a man to the medical sergeant you could bank on it that someone next day would get orders to see the doctor and that man would go to hospital with a temperature. How it was managed nobody asked. The whole regiment knew that Porta was a law unto himself. Nobody believed he was honour personified or even a street boy with a newcleansed soul, but no bishop could have found any basic fault in him if he had analysed the particular so
ul that was Porta’s.

  As he sits, grossly dirty, with his top-hat and monocle, drinking and belching, he radiates the exact opposite of reliability. He is a soldier, a vagabond, a perfectly trained killer who without winking pushes his long combat-knife into the guts of his enemy, afterwards drying off the blood on his sleeve with a grin. With deliberation he files his bullets down to dum-dum shape, hoping they are destined for a hated officer such as Captain Meier. He coolly kills for a piece of bread. In addition, he would, without a single qualm, send a whole bunkerful of people sky-high if he had orders to do so.

  Who has made him into this human savage? His mother? His friends? His school? No. Totalitarian government, the barracks mixing-machine, the military fanatics with their bloated ideas of fighting and Fatherland. Porta has learned the slogan that was dinned into his head as well as ours. ‘You may do as you like, but never be caught. If you are you’ve had it. You must be tough and cynical, or else you will be trampled to death. There are thousands behind you ready to crush you if you become soft. There is only one way to get through: Be tough and brutal. If you give in to humanitarian ideas you are finished.’

  Thus was Porta moulded. It is not the Nazi Prussian military creed only. It exists everywhere where totalitarianism reigns.

  Get in behind the barrack-gates, use your eyes and you will grow pale with shame. Try for once to study the military disciples objectively. Imagine them with their unnatural broom-stick bodies, their comical chest-swellings, their staccato speech, lipless faces with a couple of stupid reptilian eyes. Imagine this bunch dressed in striped prison-uniforms being inspected by a psychiatrist. What label would the unwilling scientist have to hang on most of these sinister apprentices to the military trade? I know because I have spent many years among men who passed their apprenticeship.

  15

  They had crushed all that was human in us. We knew only retaliation with the murderous weapons they had pressed into our hands.