by Sven Hassel
‘Each to his own,’ said Tiny pompously. ‘We’re here to kill, so I do it the way I like best. Everyone’s got their favourite way of doing it.’
It was true, I suppose. We each had our own preferred methods. The Legionnaire was a devotee of the knife, while Porta was a crack shot with a rifle. Heide liked playing about with flame throwers, while for myself I was accounted pretty hot stuff with a hand grenade. Tiny just happened to enjoy strangling people . . .
By Sven Hassel
Wheels of Terror
Monte Cassino
SS General
Legion of the Damned
Blitzfreeze
Comrades of War
Reign of Hell
Liquidate Paris
Assignment Gestapo
March Battalion
Court Martial
The Bloody Road to Death
The Commissar
Ogpu Prison
ASSIGNMENT
GESTAPO
Translated by Jean Ure
CASSELL
A WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON EBOOK
First published by in Great Britain in 1971 by Corgi
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books
Copyright © Presses de la Cité 1965
Translation copyright Transworld Publishers Ltd. 1971
The right of Sven Hassel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 2978 5731 0
This ebook produced by Jouve, France
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Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
About the Author
By Sven Hassel
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Born in 1917 in Fredensborg, Denmark, Sven Hassel joined the merchant navy at the age of 14. He did his compulsory year’s military service in the Danish forces in 1936 and then, facing unemployment, joined the German army. He served throughout World War II on all fronts except North Africa. Wounded eight times, he ended the war in a Russian prison camp. He wrote LEGION OF THE DAMNED while being transferred between American, British and Danish prisons before making a new life for himself in Spain. His world war books have sold over 53 million copies worldwide.
From somewhere behind us came the sounds of men shouting and of a general uproar. Tiny and the Legionnaire had stayed to guard the rear, while the rest of us pressed on. They were lying in wait amongst the thick undergrowth of the copse.
Four Russian soldiers appeared, hurrying through the trees. They wore the green insignia of the NKVD. They were still very young, very keen; still eager to chase and to kill.
They came charging round the bend in the path. The Legionnaire silently turned down a thumb, and Tiny grinned in anticipation. Their sub-machine guns cracked into the silence almost simultaneously.
Tiny had jumped to his feet and was firing from a standing position, the gun jammed hard against his hip. The whole of his massive frame shook under the recoil.
The Legionnaire, calm and collected as always in moments of action, was gently singing one of his interminable songs of death.
The Russians plunged forward, head first, on the damp earth. Only two of them still showed signs of life by the time the bombardment had ceased, and Tiny stepped forward to put the finishing touches to their handiwork. It was a necessary precaution, in these days of war: never mind about not hitting a man when he was down, even the mortally wounded are capable of picking up a gun and firing it.
‘Sorry, chum!’ Tiny looked down dispassionately at the dead soldiers. ‘We just can’t take any chances, however much we love you!’
‘Too bloody right’ muttered the Legionnaire. ‘They’d put a bullet through our backsides as soon as look at us.’
The platoon had been taken by surprise when in the midst of a drunken debauch – celebrating Porta’s birthday in the only way we knew how. We had been in no fit state to welcome the Russian patrol which had burst so unexpectedly upon us. The first we knew about them was when the windows blew in upon our faces and we found ourselves staring into the gaping black mouths of four powerful PMs. Our instinctive reaction was to hurl ourselves to the floor and cover our heads. The Legionnaire and Porta had retained sufficient presence of mind to lob a series of hand grenades through the shattered windows, but how we escaped with our lives was nobody’s business. We were still reeling and weak-kneed from the shock.
We met up again at the far end of the wood. Eight men were missing.
‘I saw two of ’em go down,’ volunteered Porta.
We wondered, briefly, what had happened to the others.
When Tiny reappeared, he was dragging with him an unwilling Russian lieutenant. The Old Man said firmly that we should have to take him along as a prisoner.
Shortly before we reached the mine field, we heard the lieutenant give a cry. We heard Tiny laugh, and the Old Man swore violently. Seconds later, Tiny emerged from the bushes . . . alone.
‘Shit tried to get away from me,’ he explained, cheerfully. ‘He asked for it, didn’t he?’
We remained silent. We could see, hanging from Tiny’s pocket, the length of steel wire that had come in so useful on so many occasions; whenever a quick, silent death was required . . .
‘Did you strangle the poor bastard?’ asked the Old Man, disbelievingly.
Tiny shrugged.
‘I told you,’ he muttered, ‘he tried to get away . . .’
‘In other words, you murdered him,’ said Stege.
CHAPTER ONE
The Informer
ALL of us that remained of the Fifth Company were stretched out on our bellies beneath the apple trees, watching dispassionately as the reserve troops came up. We had been waiting for those troops for the last four days, and by now we were past caring whether they sent them or not. They arrived in trucks, moving slowly up the road in a double column. Their uniforms and their arms were still brand new, smart and shining and almost unbelievably virginal.
We watched them come with jaded eyes. No comments had been passed, and none was necessary: the approaching troops spoke for themselves. It was obvious to us that we could have nothing in common. We were soldiers, while they were only dilettantes. It showed in the careful way they carried their equipment; it showed in their stiff and shining boots. So beautifully polished and so utterly useless! No one could march very far in boots of such uncompromising newness. They had yet to be rubbed with their baptismal urine, which was the best treatment we knew for softening up and at the same time preserving the leather. Take Porta’s boots, for an ideal example of a soldier’s footwear: so supple that you could see every movement of his toes inside them. And if they gave off an almost overpowering stench of urine, that seemed a small price to pay fo
r comfort.
‘You stink like a thousand pisshouses!’ Porta was once told, rather sharply, during the course of a parade.
That was our Colonel, sometimes irreverently known as Wall Eye, on account of the black patch he wore over one empty socket. It seemed to me significant that in spite of his testy observation on the subject of urine, he never put a stop to our habit of pissing on our boots. He’d been in the Army long enough to know that it’s the feet that make the soldier. You got bad feet and you’re worse than useless.
Tiny, still watching the arrival of the reserve force, suddenly nudged the Legionnaire in the ribs.
‘Where.d’you reckon they dug that lot up from? Jesus Christ, it’s enough to make a cat laugh! The Ruskies’ll mop them up before they’ve even found out what they’re supposed to be doing here . . .’ He nodded importantly at the Legionnaire. ‘If it weren’t for people like you and me, mate, we’d have lost this perishing war years ago.’
The Old Man laughed. He was trying to shelter from the pouring rain beneath a rather pathetic bush.
‘High time they gave you the Knight’s Cross . . . a hero like you!’
Tiny turned and spat.
‘Knight’s Cross! You know where they can stick that, don’t you? Right up their bleeding arses . . . I wouldn’t give you tuppence for it!’
There were sounds of cries and curses from the officers at the front of the approaching column. One of the privates, a little frail creature who looked older than God, had lost his tin helmet. It had rolled to the side of the road with a noise like a hundred tin cans collapsing, and the old chap had instinctively scrambled off the truck and gone toddling after it.
‘Get back into line!’ roared an Oberfeldwebel, outraged. ‘What the bleeding hell do you think you’re bleeding playing at?’
The old boy hesitated, looking from his precious helmet to the apoplectic Oberfeldwebel. He scuttled back into the ranks and marched on, and the Oberfeldwebel nodded grimly and remained where he was, blowing his whistle and every so often shouting his lungs out, intent on hustling these raw amateurs on their way to certain death.
As I watched the column advancing, I could see that the little old man was already near to breaking point; both physically and mentally, I guessed. The loss of his tin helmet had probably been the final straw.
Lt. Ohlsen, our Company Commander, was standing to one side chatting to his counterpart, the lieutenant who had led the reserve troops up here. Neither of them had noticed the incident, neither of them had noticed that one of their men was on the point of cracking. And even if they did, what could they do about it? At this stage of the war, it was a commonplace occurrence.
The old chap suddenly fell to his knees, began crawling down the hill on all fours. His fellow soldiers looked at him nervously. The Oberfeldwebel came running up, bellowing.
‘Stand up, that man there! What do you think this is, a bleeding tea party?’
But the old man never moved. Just lay on the ground, sobbing fit to break your heart. He wouldn’t have moved if he’d been threatened with a court martial; he couldn’t have. He didn’t have the strength left, and he didn’t have the will any more, either. The Oberfeldwebel walked up to him, stood over him chewing at his lower lip.
‘All right . . . all right, if that’s the way you want to play it, I’ll go along with you . . . You’ve got to learn a thing or two, I can see that . . . You think you’re exhausted, eh? Well, just you wait till you’ve got a load of screaming Ruskies coming at you, you’ll move fast enough!’ He suddenly stepped back and rapped out an order. ‘Pick up that spade and get digging! At the double, if you don’t want to get mown down!’
Obediently, the little old chap groped for his spade, which had fallen from his pack. He began trying to dig. It was comical and pathetic. The rate he was going, it would take him the next thousand years to dig a hole for himself. According to regulations, it should take a man no more than 11½ minutes from the time he got the spade in his hand. And God help anyone who took a second longer! Of course, when you’d been in the front line as long as we had you learnt to do it in even less time – you had to, if you wanted to survive. And we’d had enough practice to put us in the champions’ class. The holes we’d dug stretched in a practically unbroken line from the Spanish frontier to the summit of Elbroux in the Caucasus. And we’d dug them in every conceivable sort of terrain. Sand, snow, clay, mud, ice – you name it, we’d dug holes in it. Tiny was particularly gifted in that direction. He could provide himself with a dug-out in 6 minutes 15 seconds flat, and he boasted that he could do it even quicker if he really put himself out. He probably could have, only he was never put to the test because no one ever set up a new record for him to aim at.
The Oberfeldwebel stretched out a foot and pushed at his victim.
‘Come on, grandfather, you’re not building sandcastles! At this rate we’ll all be dead and buried before you’ve even scraped away the first layer!’
Grandfather suddenly expired. Just lay down and died, just like that, without even asking permission. The Oberfeldwebel seemed genuinely astonished. It was a good few seconds before he turned round and bellowed to the two nearest men to come and pick up the body.
‘Call themselves bloody soldiers,’ he muttered. ‘God help Germany if this is what’s being used to protect her . . . but just you wait, you innocent load of bastards! I’ll get you licked into shape before you’re very much older!’
Oberfeldwebel Huhn, the terror of Bielefeldt, rubbed his hands together in anticipation. There weren’t many men he couldn’t lick into shape, once he’d set his mind to it.
And perhaps, after all, his treatment of the old man had had its effect: certainly none of the others dared to collapse.
‘What a callous bastard,’ said Porta, carelessly; and he stuffed his mouth with a mutton sausage rifled from a dead Russian artilleryman.
We were all eating mutton sausages. They were stale and salty and hard as stone, yet they tasted pretty good for all that. I looked at my half-eaten sausage, and I remembered the occasion when we had acquired them: only five days ago, and it seemed five months.
It was on our way back through a vast tract of thickly wooded land that we had stumbled upon the Russian field battery. As usual, it was the Legionnaire who had first spotted them. We attacked with more speed and stealth than even Fenimore Cooper’s Indian braves, cutting them down silently with our kandras.1 By the time we’d finished it looked as if a heavy shell had exploded in their midst. We had come upon them quite out of the blue. They had been lying in a clearing, sleeping, sunbathing, relaxing, totally unprepared for any sort of attack. Their chief had been drawn out of his hut by the sounds of the struggle. We heard him calling out to a lieutenant, his second-in-command, just before he appeared.
‘Drunken bloody swine! They’ve been at the vodka again!’
Those were his last words. As he appeared at the entrance of the hut, his head was severed from his shoulders by one well-aimed blow, and two spouts of hot blood burst from his body like geysers. The lieutenant, who was behind him, didn’t stop to inquire what was going on. He turned and plunged into the undergrowth, but Heide was on him almost immediately with his kandra. The lieutenant fell like a stone.
We were horrible to look upon by the time the massacre was over. And the scene of the carnage was like some nightmare from a butcher’s shop. Several of us vomited as we surveyed it. The spilt blood and the trailing intestines smelt disgusting, and there were thick black knots of flies already settled on every juicy morsel. I don’t think any of us really liked the kandra, it was too primitive, too messy – but, on the other hand, it was an excellent weapon in certain circumstances. The Legionnaire and Barcelona had taught us how to use it.
We sat down on the ammunition boxes and the shells, with our backs to the corpses. We were not so squeamish that we denied ourselves the pleasure of eating Russian sausages and drinking Russian vodka. Only Hugo Stege seemed to have no appetite. We all used to m
ake fun of Stege on account of he’d had a good education and was reputed to be brainy. Something of an intellectual. And also because no one had ever heard him swear. That in itself seemed to us totally abnormal, but even more incredible behaviour came to light when Tiny discovered that Stege always, and assiduously, washed his hands before eating!
The Old Man regarded the store of sausages and the crate of vodka.
‘Might as well take them with us,’ he decided. ‘Those poor devils won’t be needing them any more.’
They had an easier death than many,’ remarked the Legion-naire. They never really knew a thing about it.’ He ran a finger down the razor-sharp edges of his kandra. ‘Nothing brings death as quickly as one of these.’
‘I find them disgusting,’ said Stege, and vomited for about the third time.
‘Look, they asked for it,’ argued Porta, fiercely. ‘Lazing about with their thumbs up their bums and their brains in neutral . . . there is a war on, you know! It could just as easy be us lying down there with our heads hacked off.’
‘That doesn’t make it any better,’ muttered Stege.
‘So.what are we supposed to do about it?’ Porta turned on him, furious. ‘You think I enjoy ripping people’s guts out? You think I like this sort of life? Did anyone ever bother to ask you, when they dragged you into the flaming Army – they ever bother to ask you if you wanted to go round killing people?’
Stege shook his head, wearily.
‘Spare us your home spun philosophies,’ he begged.
‘Why?’ said the Legionnaire, rolling his cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘It may be simple, but it’s none the less true . . . we’re here to kill, whether we like it or not. It’s the job we’ve been given and it’s the job we’re expected to do.’
‘Besides,’ added Porta, beating wildly at a cloud of flies that was trying to get up his nose, ‘I don’t remember you being particularly backward when it came to clobbering people . . . and what about when you took the thing in the first place?’ He jerked a thumb at Stege’s kandra. ‘What about when you nicked it off that dead Rusky? What was the point of taking it if you didn’t intend to use it? You didn’t want it for cleaning your nails, did you? You took it in case you needed it to stick in somebody, just like the rest of us.’