Wheels of Terror

by Sven Hassel

  The Old Un was told off violently by Tiny and threatened with a beating when we found they were both girls, as The Old Un held them out to common inspection and proof.

  ‘Hell’s bells, you can’t treat young women like that,’ growled Tiny. He had suddenly become surprisingly prudish.

  A couple of machine-guns barked in the night and reminded us of our whereabouts. Rapidly we started gathering our stuff together. Porta carried the infants to the tank and handed them to the Little Legionnaire who improvised a bed for them behind the driver’s seat. Here the tank had a hatch in the side which meant we could quickly get the mother and her babies out if we were hit and set on fire.

  The Old Un didn’t want us to drive on. We protested violently.

  ‘The after-birth’s got to come first,’ decided The Old Un shortly and started to massage the woman’s abdomen.

  When the after-birth came Tiny cried out in fright. He thought a third baby was on the way.

  The Old Un examined the after-birth with a skilled eye and nodded satisfied. He then gave orders to leave. We carried the woman to the tank and placed her beside her babies. The hatch was shut.

  With the darkness covering us we rolled westwards surrounded by hostile vehicles on all sides.

  ‘This’ll never do!’ complained the Little Legionnaire. ‘I wish I was in the desert! That was child’s play compared with this rotten war.’

  Porta laughed loudly:

  ‘Got enough, eh, desert-nomad? You’re not only a desert-nomad, but you’re a fascist pimp and a stupid swine, and now you’re a midwife.’

  ‘Allah is great. Nobody’s greater than Allah,’ mumbled the Little Legionnaire and stroked his pockmarked face.

  A column of Russian infantry appeared. The Little Legionnaire cocked his machine-gun.

  ‘Nervous, desert-nomad?’ grinned Porta and speeded up the tank.

  ‘Not at all. I enjoy it,’ the Little Legionnaire sneered.

  Porta whistled:

  ‘Wer soll das bezahlen?

  Wer hat das bestellt?’

  He smiled at the woman behind him.

  ‘What a labour-ward this old sledge has become. The twins’ friends will envy them their birth certificates at school.’

  ‘I wish you’d shut up,’ the Little Legionnaire said.

  ‘Careful now, dear desert-nomad, or your face will have a few more decorations.’

  ‘And who’d do that?’ the Little Legionnaire drawled as he sucked in a sinister way at a hollow tooth.

  ‘This one,’ answered Porta and held his combat-knife out. ‘Don’t forget it, you Arab!’

  The Little Legionnaire raised a blond eyebrow, slowly lit a cigarette and grinned his evil smile:

  ‘Great man, very great man! As courageous as a big pig! But I—’

  He got no further. Tiny who had been sitting half-asleep bent forward and hit him on the head with the handle of his bayonet. The Little Legionnaire promptly slid down unconscious.

  ‘You uncouth new boy! I’ll teach you to speak badly about Tiny when he’s napping!’

  He was just about to kick the helpless Legionnaire’s head when The Old Un and I charged in and managed to calm him down.

  Porta laughed loudly and heartily:

  ‘That poor desert-nomad has a lot to learn. It must have been a sort of Sunday-school down there among the date-palms. He doesn’t know any nice tricks. Fancy Tiny bashing his head in with that stupid bayonet. Allah is truly great, only he hasn’t got eyes in the back of his head.’

  The twins started crying. The mother was restless. The restlessness was contagious. Porta handed her a bottle of vodka. She pushed his hand away with revulsion and mumbled something.

  Porta shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘God protect me! I shan’t annoy you, madame. My name is Joseph Porta, Corporal by the Grace of God, and midwife!’

  The Little Legionnaire groaned and put his hands to his head. He sat up, lit a cigarette and bent his head back to glare at Tiny.

  ‘Clever, eh? Don’t forget to look behind you, big fellow. Maybe you’ll get a quiet thump on the back of the neck.’

  ‘Hey!’ shouted Tiny and started to swing his gorilla-like arms. ‘I’ll make mincemeat of you so that even the Arab tarts won’t recognize you!’

  The Old Un slid down from the turret.

  ‘Enough of that,’ he ordered. ‘If you must fight, jump out of the tank and do it quick. There are hundreds of our colleagues trotting along beside us and you’ll soon have your fill.’

  Tiny turned angrily to The Old Un.

  ‘What the hell! That’s no way to speak to us. Who do you think you are?’ He bent forward, shook his enormous fist under The Old Un’s nose, cursed and threatened.

  The Old Un looked calmly at him.

  ‘Don’t get into a state now! Nobody’s going to do anything to you.’

  ‘Do something to me,’ bellowed Tiny. ‘Do something to Tiny? Let me see the bastard who’d do Tiny!’ He bent sideways to the Little Legionnaire and nearly knotted himself in order to look the little fellow in the face. ‘You wouldn’t do anything to Tiny?’

  ‘No,’ the Little Legionnaire laughed. ‘Unless of course you were tied up. Then I might cut your throat!’

  Tiny was clearly relaxed at the word ‘tied’. But still he questioned each one of us.

  Porta cursed, and accelerated so abruptly that we beat our heads against the hull.

  Machine-cannons and guns hammered at us. The bullets crashed into the steel flank of the tank. A road-block was forced and a few S-mines exploded under us without harming the tank.

  One Russian infantryman tried to mount it but he misjudged his jump and was flung under the rollers.

  Hand-grenades kept being lobbed at us. The Little Legionnaire fired some quick sweeping bursts with his machine-gun. Through the sighting mechanism I saw some confused Russian infantrymen running about. They took cover by the wayside. On the road in front stood a tank firing at us with its 2-cm. machine-cannon.

  The turret engine purred. Figures danced in the sighting mechanism. The points met. A couple of quick orders. A thundering detonation. The 8.8-cm. shell tore the tank to pieces. Our flame-thrower cleared the road. Rapidly we disappeared into the darkness, leaving behind us for our remembrance a burning Russian panzer tank.

  22

  Instead of a fortnight’s rest, each of us got two ounces of water-cheese from the quartermaster and orders to go back into the line. When all the cheese had been distributed we were given a coloured photo of Hitler. Then, we were marched to our fighting position without either rest or cheese.

  But first Porta had a big job to do. He used five of the Führer’s photographs as toilet paper.

  The Refugees

  The grey ghostly light of day emerged over the horizon.

  Porta turned the tank in on a narrow forest-road. Everyone sat half-asleep. The woman cried. The children coughed and cried with pain caused by the sharp acid fumes from our guns.

  Porta braked the tank. Frightened, we peeped out through the observation-slits. In front of us some vaguely-seen figures were running about. A truck had been put across the road. It looked like a road-block.

  The Little Legionnaire swore and cocked his machine-gun.

  ‘Take it easy, easy,’ The Old Un soothed. A shot rang out. Panic took hold of us when we saw a ‘stove-pipe’ trained on us. The figures in the sighting-mechanism swirled in front of my eyes.

  ‘Ready, guns clear,’ came Tiny’s automatic report.

  A click. The little red lamp inside the tank blinked evilly. The cannon and the turret machine-gun were cleared for action. The 8.8-cm. explosive shell lay poker-still in the chamber. A knot of people sat straight in front of our sights. Our fingers tightened on the triggers.

  ‘Tac-tac-tac!’ rattled the machine-gun. The rolling death echoed through the wood.

  A lot of them tried to find cover in the wood. Screams and cries reached us.

  ‘Don’t let them get into
the forest,’ warned The Old Un. ‘Then they’ll get us! They’ll smash us before we can wink an eye.’

  The turret swung round, the points on the sighting-mirror met.

  ‘Rummmun …! ’ thundered the guns and sent a rushing fountain of fire, earth and bloody limbs skywards as the 8.8-cm. high-explosive shell exploded in the middle of the clump of people.

  Two machine-guns, Mark 42, pumped ammunition into the scrub. The engine’s growl rose to a roar as we rolled towards what had been a road-block.

  Were we shocked when the truth in all its horror dawned on us? I don’t think so. Rather relieved. Maybe a little uneasy.

  The ‘road-block’ was a cart which had broken down. The hostile ‘gunners’ were refugees, women, children, old men, sick and exhausted. The ‘stove-pipe’ was the shaft of the cart.

  The hatches were carefully opened. Inflamed eyes registered the destruction. Five pairs of tank-soldiers’ ears listened to the death-rattle of the dying. Five noses sniffed the sharp stink of cordite. Steel rattled against steel as the hatches were made fast. Rocking on its tracks the large killer-apparatus curtsied to the dead and dying.

  A tank with a handful of soldiers, a Russian woman and her new-born twins disappeared, cursed by the dying.

  We sucked up petrol with the aid of a rubber hose. Three lonely Russian gunners had been killed before they knew what came growling up behind them.

  In the distance we heard the rumbling of a heavy artillery barrage. We smeared the swastikas on each side of the turret with mud until they became indistinguishable.

  The woman had a temperature. She talked wildly. The Old Un shook his head.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s dying.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ asked the Little Legionnaire in despair, and twisted his hands.

  The Old Un looked at him for a long time before he answered:

  ‘You’re a funny lot. By God, you’re funny. You fire without blinking at everything which moves, and yet you fear for the life of an unknown woman just because she lies beside you and breathes in the same rotten stale air.’

  Nobody answered.

  It was almost dark when we halted. In the distance we saw a fire.

  ‘It looks like a large town going up in flames,’ Porta said. ‘Maybe Oscha?’

  ‘Are you mad?’ replied The Old Un. ‘Oscha is far behind us. No, more likely it’s Brodny or Lemberg.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter two hoots which it is,’ decided the Little Legionnaire. ‘It’s burning. A good thing we’re not there!’

  … Tiny saw them first. Two large diesel-trucks. Proper ‘soldier-sledges’. They were German air force lorries. A dozen air force personnel were lying about sleeping. Farther away and half-hidden in the bushes lay about a hundred women and children.

  We climbed out.

  They jumped up panic-stricken as we approached them soundlessly in our black tank-uniforms. They stared paralysed at Porta’s top-hat with its red-painted bands.

  There were two German nurses among them. The hospital they had been at had been surprised and occupied by Russians. These were the only two who had got away alive. All the wounded had been liquidated in their beds or in the corridors. A large Russian infantry unit had come to the village where they had sought shelter. But they had been friendly and warned them to get away as those who were following them were really brutal.

  The whole village except a few old people had run away. Day after day they had dragged themselves along. Other refugees had joined them, Polish, German, Russian, Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian. People from the Balkans, yes from all directions, had joined in the refugees’ wretched caravan. They had forgotten racial and regional emotions in their common terror: the rapidly rolling Russian tanks.

  The air force men had brought them here. They had been fired at several times. Some had died and been thrown off. New refugees had fought for the spare places in the trucks.

  When they had left the forest they had been fired at again. The soldiers had raced on and stopped where we now met them.

  The air force men would not go on. They had quite simply given up: full of apathy they had laid down to sleep.

  They stared indifferently at us with our machine-pistols under our arms. A sergeant lay on his back with his hands folded under his head. He grinned mockingly at us.

  ‘Well, heroes, still racing for victory? Why not call Ivan, then you’d be able to use your pop-guns? Bah, fascist-dirt!’

  ‘Hell’s bells!’ Tiny fumed. ‘Are you fresh, my sparrow? Shall I let him have it, Old Un?’

  ‘Quiet Tiny,’ answered The Old Un and studied the sergeant through half-closed eyes.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  The sergeant shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Wait for the colleagues, and shake their hands.’

  ‘And the women?’ The Old Un wanted to know and indicated the women and children with a jerk of his head.

  ‘Give the lot to Ivan. That is, if you don’t wish to take ’em along on your victory-chase. I’ve had enough and I’m thinking of myself. I don’t care a scrap about what becomes of that lot. Can you swallow that, black brother?’

  A terrible quarrel began between The Old Un and the apathetic sergeant. Several others interfered.

  ‘Do you think we want to get away from Ivan just to be hanged by our own “head-hunters”?’ asked the sergeant.

  Suddenly the Little Legionnaire pushed himself forward with his machine-pistol ready. He pointed the muzzle at the sergeant and his men.

  ‘You cowardly filthy dogs! What a lot of damned collar-and-tie soldiers! The whole war you’ve been sitting on an aerodrome far behind the front-line, and now when you hear a few bangs you’re scared stiff. I’ll shoot the lot of you if you don’t take the women along!’

  For a moment there was deathly silence.

  We withdrew from the Little Legionnaire. He stood with splayed legs, his machine-pistol ready, his body tensed.

  One of the air force men grinned.

  ‘Well then, shoot. Why don’t you shoot, you black monster? Did Goebbels teach you fat words? We’re tired of waiting!’

  Several others started to jeer at the Little Legionnaire.

  ‘Careful now,’ whispered The Old Un. ‘Something’s going to happen.’

  Slowly we spread out with our machine-pistols ready.

  ‘Will you drive?’ hissed the Little Legionnaire. His cigarette bounced in his mouth and sparks dropped on his chest. ‘For the last time. Will you drive the girls?’

  ‘You’re a hero,’ laughed one of the air force men. ‘A big hero from the steppes of Ukrania! Woman-Liberator! They’ll put up a statue of this mannikin on top of the wash-house!’

  Roars of laughter reverberated. Evil flames burst from the Little Legionnaire’s blue-black weapon. The Little Legionnaire swayed with the recoil. The laughter changed into a rattle. Grey soldiers twisted about on the ground. One crawled on all fours to us shrieking like a lunatic.

  Again the machine-pistol barked. Dead bodies trembled under the burst of steel.

  Only three got away with their lives. They were pushed into the drivers’ cabs of the three lorries with the help of machine-pistols. Muzzles at the ready.

  Dumb and with dead eyes, the refugees crawled into the trucks.

  With the tanks bringing up the rear we drove north-west. Away from a heap of bloody corpses in grey uniforms. Men who had given up hope, and so had been killed by their own.

  The war rolled on.

  Small groups of soldiers were dragging themselves along the road. One voice started to cry desperately:

  ‘Comrade, take us along!’

  But our comrades disappeared in a breath of petrol fumes. One truck collapsed. Its load of people fled on foot along the road.

  In Velenski, a village like thousands of others in Ukrania and Poland, a river of people had stopped marching for a little rest and warmth.

  ‘Hurry up!’ The shout was repeated ceaselessly, but it was not neces
sary. The threatened collapse of the 3rd Panzer Army and the rapidly rolling Russian tank columns which crushed every living thing were more than enough to make the refugees race on.

  German grenadiers and Russian prisoners ran about like confused chickens among the swarm of civilians. They flocked round our tank. Everyone asked the same question:

  ‘Where is the Red Army?’

  For days, disrupted military units and wretched civilians had travelled through Velenski. Panic had taken a strangle-hold on everyone from the youngest to the oldest. The terror of the Russians racing behind. The shock of the total collapse of the front. Horror of the T34s which loomed up and crushed a whole column of refugees in a moment. The frightfulness of the ‘butchers’ and Jabos which made the road a sea of flames in a split second.

  In addition came fatigue, hunger, gales, frost and rain.

  Invocations to God rose to heaven in many tongues, but nothing helped. The tank-tracks ground along the blood-soaked earth of Ukrania and Poland.

  One of the nurses had some morphia which we gave to the mother of the twins. We got hold of some milk and made ready to drive on. They stood round us, hundreds of them. Imploring hands were stretched to us:

  ‘Take us. Don’t leave us to die!’

  They offered the most unbelievable things in exchange for a small corner in the tank. They sat on the turret, at the back and in the front. They hung by their arms from the gun-ports. Many sat on the long barrel of the cannon, tightly packed shoulder to shoulder.

  We cursed and swore and threatened them with our machine-pistols to get them off the muzzles of the guns and flame-thrower, but they did not care.

  The Old Un shook his head in despair.

  ‘Heaven help us! If we get into a scrap, they’ll go to hell, the lot of them!’

  We took some children into the tank before we made the hatches fast. Then our death-march began.

  A few miles on we met four more tanks. They belonged to No. 2 Panzer Regiment and like us they had lost contact with headquarters.

  A lieutenant, 18 years old, took command of all our five tanks. He ordered all the refugees to get down, but not one obeyed. On the contary, more refugees plus some German stragglers crawled on.