by Sven Hassel
Noiselessly we disappeared.
Astonishment was great when we stepped into the bunker. Heide tried to get away, but a kick from Pluto sent him across to Tiny and Porta.
‘We thought you were on your way to Berlin,’ growled Pluto. ‘You’re a good runner. This little mistake is called cowardice in the face of the enemy according to military law. Just you wait.’
Heide was white as a sheet. He shook with fright as he sat between Tiny and Porta. They were eagerly engaged discussing how best to dismember a pig.
The Old Un rose quietly when he had listened to our report. He pointed to Heide.
‘We’ll deal with you later. Let’s get cracking. We’ve to get across that road – and before daybreak.’
I threw the ‘stove-pipe’ at Heide.
‘Here, and don’t lose it!’
In single file we started off. Thorns and climbing plants laced themselves round us as if to keep us back. The rain became a veritable cloud-burst.
The Old Un and Stege got down near the road. The rest of the platoon sought cover a little way behind in the dense undergrowth.
Porta was lying there unconcernedly with his top-hat covering his face. The cat sheltered under his coat. It looked extremely sorry for itself with its drenched fur.
‘It’s no bloody fun being a soldier,’ he mumbled to the cat, ‘is it?’
Tiny sat tailor-wise on the wet ground beside the Little Legionnaire exploring the possibilities of his advent to heaven.
Pluto had hung up his groundsheet and was playing patience.
Two men quarrelled over a cigarette-end. They sounded like Bauer and Krosnika.
Stege came silently across to us.
‘Ready lads? We’re off. We’re going up on the road to march along nicely with Ivan until we can see our way to escape to the other side. The Old Un’s hoping they won’t discover what kind of army we are!’
‘It’ll never come off,’ said Bauer. ‘Marching along hand in hand with Ivan! For heaven’s sake, let’s get away from here.’
The Old Un stood up calmly and signalled us to move.
The gravel crunched under our boots as we marched up on the road.
Barely a yard away from us a Russian infantry company marched past. We hardly dared to look at them. They might read the fright in our faces.
Porta cheekily started whistling a Russian soldier’s song, and invisible forms in the darkness fell in.
Slowly The Old Un edged over to the middle of the road. We were nearly across when a voice shouted:
‘Keep right, keep right!’
We jumped like grasshoppers to the right as a panzer column went racing by.
A figure leaned out of a car and swore at us for marching in the middle of the road.
It spat a puddle of mud at us in farewell.
The Old Un again started to pull us towards the left side and soon we were standing in the undergrowth.
Porta slapped his thighs in delight.
‘That’s a good one! Told off by a Russky colonel for not marching nicely on the side. He’d wet his pants if someone told him who he’d sworn at.’
‘Don’t laugh too soon,’ warned Bauer. ‘We aren’t through yet.’
‘How far is it to Orcha?’ asked Stege.
‘Seventy-five miles,’ answered The Old Un. ‘Through swamps and forests. More like 200 miles of ordinary road.’
At dawn we reached the swamp. Exhausted we threw ourselves down in the mud. We were only half aware of Pluto’s quarrelling with the SS man.
‘You’re a louse!’ shouted Pluto. ‘Fancy volunteering – do you enjoy murder? Nazi-bug, clean my boots.’ He put a dirty boot under his enemy’s nose. ‘Lick the muck off or I’ll choke you!’
‘You dirty vermin,’ cried the SS man and went for Pluto.
He kicked and bit desperately. The great red scar left by Pluto’s amputated ear was opened and the blood welled down his neck and shoulder.
Tiny made short work of the fight by hammering the butt of his machine-pistol on the head of the SS man. Gurgling he fell down with a large wound in his head.
Pluto fought for breath. Tiny kicked the SS man in the groin. With every kick he swore long and sulphurously.
We all looked on with complete indifference.
The Old Un ordered us to march on. Someone asked what to do about the unconscious SS man.
‘Kick his face in,’ Porta said. ‘Or leave him to rot.’
The whole day we waded in water sometimes up to our shoulders or jumped from tuft to tuft in the sagging swamp.
An eighteen-year-old recruit misjudged his jump and landed with a cry in the sticky substance. Only bubbles showed where he had disappeared.
By late afternoon we reached fairly firm ground.
Porta stumbled, and the flame-thrower shot away from him.
A little later The Old Un ordered a rest.
Cross and angry, we threw ourselves down and fell at once into a trance-like sleep. Slowly the rest of the platoon reached us, dragging their feet.
We had been resting for about a couple of hours when Pluto jumped up with his machine-pistol at the ready.
At once we were all alert. Without a sound the ‘stovepipe’ was brought into position and a shell rammed into the breech.
Two figures appeared from among the trees.
To our astonishment we saw the SS man and Krosnika. We dropped our arms and lay down again.
Stege’s voice broke the silent forest darkness.
‘Didn’t you have the mortar with you?’
We half sat up, instantly on guard. There was a threat in the air.
Krosnika breathed heavily.
‘Didn’t you hear the question?’ hissed Porta. ‘Where’s the mortar?’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’ said the Torgau corporal. ‘You aren’t the platoon commander.’
‘Where the hell did you spring from?’ shouted Pluto.
‘Balls to you!’ answered the corporal.
Throaty animal-noises came from the darkness.
‘Stay where you are, Pluto,’ shouted The Old Un sharply. ‘I’m not having any more scrapping. Krosnika, go for the mortar at once and don’t come back without it.’
Krosnika disappeared among the tree-trunks. We lay quietly and listened to his footsteps.
‘We’ll never see him again,’ whispered Bauer.
Nobody bothered to answer.
Three hours later The Old Un ordered us to move on.
The boots hurt. The belts and straps rubbed. Steel-helmets were thrown away, followed by gas-masks and their containers.
From a steep hill we could see an enormous green landscape stretching before us. It looked as if we were in the middle of a huge green ocean.
The Old Un permitted only half-an-hour’s rest. Then we chopped our way through the dense undergrowth with entrenching tools and axes. Our small quantity of rations was soon finished.
Hungry and thirsty we fought our way forward. Wild quarrels took place continually. The smallest remark was regarded as a dirty insult. The Old Un alone was calmly collected. He walked along smoking his antique pipe. His machine-pistol bounced from his shoulder. From time to time he consulted map and compass.
Porta managed to shoot a fox and a big hare. Both were eaten raw. We did not dare to make a fire. The smoke might betray us. The fox-meat was rubbed in onion to take away the nauseating smell. But, smell or no smell, everything was eaten to the last sinew.
Several of the men dropped behind. We tried only cursorily to get them moving, and then went on without looking back at the sobbing friend who implored us for a minute’s rest.
Some caught up with us at our brief resting-places. The Torgau corporal ran beserk when we stopped at a water-hole. He suddenly threw himself at Porta and gave him a long cut in one cheek and a deep wound in the arm.
Tiny and Pluto parted them. Tiny knocked the corporal out. Porta drew his knife and was about to gash the corporal when The Old Un stopped him.
‘Let him be. We’re going.’
Pluto nodded silently, bent over the unconscious man, took his weapons, spat at him and then plunged on.
Stege marked the trees every five hundred yards so that those who were left behind could follow.
On the fourth day we reached a narrow forest road clearly marked by horse-and-cart tracks.
… They stood leaning against a tree. Two small men dressed in brown with machine-pistols hanging by their sides. The wind carried a faint odour of machorka to us.
At once we became killers, twentieth-century cave-men.
Silently we crouched in the grass and snaked along. A small watercourse afforded us much wanted cover.
Nearer, sure of our prey, we crept. Porta winked at Pluto who settled himself in readiness behind a tuft. He bent the grass aside to make a clear field of fire.
The sun broke from behind clouds and lit up the two men. One pushed his cap with the green cross back on his head. A whip – the nagajka – dangled from his wrist.
With a shock we realized the significance of nagajka and green cross. These were NKVD.
The rolling thunder from three machine-pistols rapes the silence. The tearing rat-tat-tat lasts only a few seconds.
Two brown men with green crosses in their caps and Siberian prison-nagajkas at their wrist fold at hip-level and pitch forward. Bloody foam oozes out of mouths and ears. Steel rattles against steel as new magazines are loaded in three German machine-pistols.
The silence of the forest again descends.
Porta whistles like a bird, a long calling note. The birds answer, at first a little timidly but soon in a great chorus.
We lie waiting tense as steel-springs.
The Old Un orders us to fan out silently. The four light machine-guns are sited to cover a wide field of fire.
The Little Legionnaire creeps forward and slinks down in some thick bushes with Heide. They have the ‘stove-pipe’.
‘Ji fob tvoi matj,’ someone whispered in the thicket.
We were able to see only the upper parts of their bodies. The rest was well hidden in the bushes. Silently they moved forward, about thirty soldiers led by a lieutenant.
A loud cry. They stopped and gathered round a sergeant. They had found their comrades.
‘Mjortyvj,’ one said. They looked about. ‘Ubjivat,’ another said.
The Old Un who had raised one hand let it fall with a chopping motion.
Muscles were flexed. The green cross decorated men with the long nagajkas were about to receive their extreme unction.
A long, sharp and terrible cry of revenge rent the air:
‘Allah … ! Allah Akbar … !’
A knife glinted, whined through the air and then buried itself in the lieutenant’s chest.
Machine-guns and machine-pistols spat at the closely grouped Russians who were all but paralysed by the frightful shriek.
Suddenly the firing was stilled. We stormed forward, cut, thrust, and hacked.
Breathlessly we sank down, dipping our faces in the stream and drinking voraciously.
Heide and two others began to collect the pay-books from the fallen Russians.
One feigned death, but a bayonet in his thigh soon got him to his feet.
Stammering, he told us they were a prison-transport detail. The prisoners farther back were guarded by twelve men under a sergeant.
Porta knotted a piece of steel-wire round our prisoner’s neck and made him understand that he would be choked at once if he played us false or failed to lead us to the other party.
Pluto first found the enemy position. Three men were sitting in a tree. Pluto’s machine-pistol rattled, and they dropped like ripe apples. One was still alive but a P.38 did for him.
The Old Un made the platoon spread out. The machine-guns took up their positions as our section advanced.
Porta, who was in front, suddenly cried out sharply:
‘Stoj kto kidatj gjearp!’
He beckoned us forward. We joined him behind a tree. He pointed at ten men in brown uniforms in the open with their hands in the air.
Stege and I remained behind the tree with our machine-guns covering our friends as they went forward.
Porta lifted a knife to the throat of a big sergeant.
‘Where are the prisoners?’
The sergeant answered in a language we did not understand. One of the Russians translated.
‘The prisoners are behind the trucks back in the forest.’
Tiny and the Little Legionnaire went off and a little later returned with a dozen German soldiers and some civilian Russian men and women.
Bauer fetched The Old Un who at once ordered the Russian soldiers to be searched. Then he shrugged his shoulders and nodded to Porta:
‘You know what we’ve got to do. We can’t bring them along and we can’t leave them here to warn the whole battalion.’
Porta smiled wolfishly.
‘I’ll willingly shoot the NKVD lice.’ He waved to Bauer and Tiny. ‘Let’s get them into the forest.’
Pointing with the machine-pistols they made the prisoners march along in front of them.
A German corporal who had been with the prison transport shouted:
‘Give me a machine-pistol. I’ll shoot the swine. Last night they shot a hundred and five of our company. Across there.’ He pointed in a northerly direction. ‘Our company commander Lieutenant Hube had a cartridge-case knocked into his forehead after they had tied him to a tree. And we had an awful lot more civilian Russians when we started off on this trip five days ago.’
Pluto threw him a machine-pistol.
‘Let ’em have it.’
Some whipping volleys echoed through the forest. There were a few cries, then the sounds died away.
Porta dressed himself in a Russian uniform. The Little Legionnaire had to hold up a pocket-mirror in order to let him admire himself.
‘Why don’t you put on the lieutenant’s uniform?’ asked Tiny.
‘By the Holy Peter, you’re right! That’s my only chance of becoming an officer in this war.’
He ran off and a little later came strutting out of the bushes dressed in the NKVD lieutenant’s uniform. The long nagajka swung from his wrist. He hit out after us and shouted:
‘Off with you, filthy bastards. Here comes Super-Comrade Commissar Lieutenant Josephski Portaska!’
‘Stop that nonsense,’ ordered The Old Un.
The civilian Russians humbly made way for the shouting and thrusting Porta.
He tried to mirror himself in the stream.
‘It’s a bloody shame we haven’t a camera,’ he raged. ‘It would make’em sit up in old Weddingen if they got a postcard with Herr J. Porta as a Stalin-SS-Stormführer.’
Tiny also wanted to put on a Russian uniform, but could not find one big enough. He made do with a cap with a green cross.
Trying to do a cossack-dance with a nagajka in each hand, he got himself tangled up in the long whips and rolled into the stream.
In single file we went on with our interrupted march. A mile farther on we found the bodies of the hundred and five troops killed by the NKVD men. They had all been shot in the back of the neck by Nagan-pistols.
Flies and ants now crawled on the twisted bodies.
One sobbing woman among the rescued collapsed and refused to get up. She exhibited her worn, holed felt-boots which barely covered her bloody feet.
With an indifferent shrug we moved on. For a while we heard her crying like a wounded animal. The forest folded round her. The shadows lengthened. The night hid the living and the dead, the forgotten and the deserted.
Deep in the darkness one Russian with a fractured skull crawled about. He stumbled, cried upon God, cursed his country and shouted brokenly for his friends. Another, sobbing, endlessly searched his pockets. Another, dying, clutched a tuft of soft moss and wept quietly for his mother behind the great mountains of Georgia. A Ukrainian peasant-girl ran panic-stricken in circles trying to escape
the darkness which threatened her reason. Twenty-eight German infantrymen and panzer soldiers, with fourteen Russian men and women, fought wearily through the dark forest.
It was early morning when we reached the new frontline area. We stayed the whole day. Tired and worn-out we lay under the bushes half-asleep on top of our weapons. Every sinew and muscle ached.
Some civilians had not been able to keep up with the tough-trained troops who were now lying on the edge of the forest waiting for darkness.
Porta removed his boots. His feet were bloody. Carefully he cut the lacerated skin away with his combat-knife. He sniffed it with interest, nodded with satisfaction and went on cutting.
‘Doesn’t it hurt?’ asked Tiny, who was sitting with his legs outstretched chewing a piece of wood.
The Little Legionnaire lay on his back with his hands folded under his head, sleeping heavily.
Stege and the SS man sat in a tree. They were camouflaged with branches. You saw only the machine-gun peeping menacingly through the leaves.
As darkness fell we broke camp and followed a narrow path. Porta walked in front dressed in the Russian uniform. The long Russian coat fell in folds about his thin body. He had changed his top-hat for a tall Russian fur-cap. His machine-pistol at the ready was under his arm.
Behind and flanking him, the Little Legionnaire and Pluto marched.
A hollow cough made us halt as if hit by lightning. Porta found his wits first. He pushed Stege in front and shouted:
‘Isiso dar?’
A large Russian appeared. He swore at Porta’s shouting, but his voice changed amiably when Porta brayed in Russian:
‘I’ve caught a German!’
The sentry suggested they ought to shoot Stege at once. He cocked his machine-pistol and with the barrel pushed Stege to his knees. He had a little difficulty to get Stege to bow his head properly.
Suddenly the Russian’s arms fanned the air. He dropped his machine-pistol and fell over backwards gurgling hoarsely. Porta lifted him and got his wire-noose free. He had tip-toed up behind the sentry flinging the wire round his neck. In less than two seconds the man had been strangled.
Stege gave a strained laugh.
‘Don’t try tricks like that again, you daft swine!’