by Sven Hassel
With a quick, determined gesture he whipped open the trap and called down into the cellars.
‘All right, you can come out of there. One at a time with your hands above your heads . . . I’ll give you five minutes, and then you can expect trouble . . .’
We stood round, waiting. The first to emerge was a little old hag, her sticklike arms held trembling above her skull-like head. After her came five other women. One was carrying a small baby in her arms. A pause, and then the men arrived. There were several of them, most of them young. Heide and Barcelona searched each and every one of them, and Tiny demanded plaintively that he be allowed to search the women, which only provoked a fresh outburst of rage from Lt. Ohlsen, whose temper was never at its sweetest when Tiny was around.
‘You lay so much as a finger on any one of them and I’ll shoot you, you great oaf, so help me God I will . . . Are there any more of ’em down there?’
The Russians all solemnly shook their heads. We gazed at them, not sure whether to believe them. Porta jabbed Tiny in the ribs.
‘Why don’t you try your strangling trick on one of ’em? We can at least be sure of getting at the truth that way.’
Tiny, of course, was only too happy to oblige. He stepped up to the nearest Russian and adroitly twisted the wire round his neck. He tightened his grip a moment, then relaxed it. Porta smiled.
‘All right, tovaritch6’ Now you know what’s coming to you if you’re telling whoppers, don’t you? . . . Have you left anyone else down there or haven’t you?’
The man shook his head, eyes bulging and Adam’s apple working frenziedly.
‘Let him go!’ snapped Lt. Ohlsen. ‘How many more times do I have to tell you two that I will not stand for this sort of thing? We’re supposed to be soldiers, for God’s sake, not Gestapo gangsters! He turned back to the prisoners. ‘All right, now let’s have the truth out of you. Is there, or is there not, anyone else left in the cellars?’
A row of heads silently replied in the negative.
‘O.K. . . . Kalb, toss a couple of Molotovs down there!’
The Legionnaire shrugged a shoulder and prepared to do so. Immediately, one of the women gave a harsh cry.
‘Njet, njet!’
The Legionnaire cocked an eyebrow at her.
‘What’s up with you, old woman? Any objections to our blowing up an empty cellar?’
Lt. Ohlsen walked forward to the trap.
‘All right, we know you’re down there . . . you might just as well come up in one piece as be blown to smithereens.’
Two young men came slowly up the steps. The Legionnaire looked at them and nodded.
‘Another three seconds,’ he said, grimly. ‘That’s all it needed.’
Heide and Barcelona ran their hands over the two men, searching for weapons, and Lt. Ohlsen looked sternly at the Russians.
‘I hope that really is the lot, this time?’
It was the Legionnaire and I who went down into the cellar. We crouched for a moment behind some barrels, and hearing no sound we crept forward. We explored the cellar thoroughly. It was a vast place, running the whole width of the house, and there were many places where a man could hide, but we found no one. As we were about to turn back, a sudden noise made us spin round, our fingers twitching neurotically on the trigger.
It was Tiny, beaming all over his large moronic face.
‘Come to see if there was any more birds down here,’ he explained, when the Legionnaire and I had run out of abuse. ‘Thought I’d help you look for ’em.’
‘Well, we don’t need your flaming help,’ hissed the Legionnaire. ‘And in any case, you’ve missed your chance, the place is empty.’
Pushing Tiny before us up the steps, we rejoined the others. Porta had uncovered a fresh cache of bottles, and he was cautiously tasting the contents of each one in turn.
‘Vodka?’ he asked the Russians. ‘Nix Vodka?’
They stared at him, silent and unsmiling.
‘You search the whole place?’ asked the Lieutenant ‘O.K., let’s get going.’
He went outside with the rest of the section, leaving us behind with the Russians. I noticed that Heide was staring at the two young men, the last to emerge from the cellar, with narrowed eyes. Barcelona and Porta, too, seemed to be fascinated by them.
‘What’s up?’I said.
‘That couple there . . .’ Barcelona looked at them and nodded. ‘They’re not babes in arms. They’re professionals, or I’ll eat my hat.’
I looked at them in my turn.
‘Deserters?’ I queried.
‘Deserters, my arse!’ Barcelona spat contemptuously. ‘I know their type. I’ve seen too many of ’em before . . . Only two places you find rats like that: the NKVD or the SS. And people don’t desert from either of them.’
‘So what would they be doing here?’
‘That, of course, is the question . . .’
Tiny bustled up with his steel wire.
‘Shall I finish ’em off?’ he asked, with all his usual eagerness.
Lt. Ohlsen came back at this point. He eyed Tiny sourly.
‘What’s going on here?’
Barcelona turned to Porta.
‘Try them in Russian,’ he suggested. ‘You speak the lingo better than I do.’
‘Feldwebel Blom!’ The Lieutenant strode over to us. ‘Who is in command here? You or I? If there’s any interrogating to be done, I shall give the orders for it. Until that time, perhaps you’ll be good enough to leave these men alone.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Barcelona, between his teeth.
Porta shrugged his shoulders in disgust, picked up his tommy gun and followed us from the room. At the door he turned to look threateningly at the two boys.
‘You’ve got away with it this time, mate, but don’t try chancing your arm again . . . at any rate, not when I’m around, see?’ They stared at him, unblinking. Porta suddenly laughed. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘You can thank your lucky stars we’d got an officer with us. I don’t reckon he understands too well what this here war’s all about . . . but we understand, you and me . . . Panjemajo, tovaritch?’
Outside, we fell into line, single file, behind Lt. Ohlsen.
‘Where the devil’s Tiny got to?’ demanded the Old Man, as we moved off. ‘And the Legionnaire? Where the hell are they?’
No one knew. The last time we had seen them, they had still been in the farmhouse. With foreboding, the Old Man made his report to Ohlsen, who swore long and loud in language totally unbecoming to an officer.
‘For Christ’s sake! Don’t you have any control at all over your section, Beier? Take some men and go back and find them. And don’t take all day about it, we’ve wasted quite enough time as it is. I don’t intend to wait for you, so you’ll just have to try and catch us up.’
The Old Man led us back to the farmhouse.
‘They’ll be down in the cellar, pissed to the eyeballs,’ said Heide, bitterly.
‘If they’ve discovered a secret horde of schnaps and haven’t told me about it, they’ll get the rough edge of my tongue!’ declared Porta.
Just before we reached the farmhouse, we were brought to a halt by a low, warning whistle. The Legionnaire rose out of the shadows before us.
‘Where the blazes have you been?’ snapped the Old Man. ‘Where’s the other stupid sod got to?’
‘Out hunting,’ said the Legionnaire, with a grin. ‘Our two comrades back there thought they’d play a few tricks on us. Only we had other ideas, and we’ve been keeping an eye on them.’
‘Out hunting?’ repeated the Old Man, testily. ‘Hunting what? And by God,’ he added, ‘if he lays a hand on any of those women he’ll be in hot water!’
He pushed past the Legionnaire towards the farmhouse, but the Legionnaire hauled him back.
‘I shouldn’t, if I were you. It’s liable to get pretty hot round here in a minute.’
The words were scarcely out of his mouth before an object came flying th
rough the air towards us. Barcelona acted promptly, caught it as it fell and hurled it back whence it had come.
There was the sound of an explosion, then a flash of light.
‘Amateurs,’ said Barcelona, coolly. ‘Can’t even throw a hand grenade properly.’
The unmistakable, trumpeting voice of Tiny came to our ears. From somewhere nearby, in the darkness of the undergrowth, there were the sounds of a violent struggle. Loud oaths in German and Russian. The noise of snapping twigs, and of steel clashing against steel. Someone choked and gurgled. Then silence. We stood waiting, wondering what the outcome had been.
‘That’s the first one dealt with,’ said Tiny, making a brief appearance before joyously plunging off again.
There came the sound of running footsteps, and then a shot.
‘What’s going on round here?’ demanded Heide, furiously.
‘Better go and take a look . . . spread out and watch your step,’ commanded the Old Man.
In the bushes, we tripped over a corpse. Porta knelt down to inspect it.
‘Strangled,’ he said, briefly.
It was one of the two young Russians. By his side we found a pouch of grenades. Enough to wipe out an entire company.
‘Meant for us, presumably . . . just as well you did stay behind,’ conceded the Old Man. ‘Though, mind you,’ he added, ‘that still doesn’t in any way excuse your behaviour. The Lieutenant’s hopping mad, and I don’t blame him.’
The Legionnaire gave a superior smile.
‘Lieutenants don’t know everything. If I’d relied on lieutenants all my life, I doubt if I should still be here to tell the tale.’
‘Anyway,’ I said to Barcelona, ‘it looks as if you were right about those kids being NKVD.’
‘Course I was right,’ he rejoined, scornfully. ‘I’ve been around a bit. I know a thing or two.’
‘And like he said,’ added Porta, jerking a thumb at the Legionnaire, ‘lieutenants don’t know everything. Not by a long bleeding chalk they don’t.’
We stood in silence a while, straining our ears in the darkness but hearing no further sound from the direction in which Tiny had disappeared, and then the Old Man turned to the Legionnaire with a question which had obviously been troubling him for some time.
‘How did you find out what they had in mind?’
‘Who? The NKVD lads?’ The Legionnaire shrugged. The girl told us. Just before we left.’
The Old Man narrowed his eyes.
‘She told you?’
That’s what I said . . . she told us.’
‘Why? What she do that for? Why’d she want to go and shop her own countrymen?’
The Legionnaire raised a cold eyebrow in the face of the Old Man’s obvious suspicions.
‘Do you know, I didn’t stop to ask her . . . I can only assume she didn’t like the look of them. They weren’t all that pretty.’
Porta laughed, cynically.
‘More likely you held a pistol at her head!’
‘Such things have been known,’ agreed the Legionnaire, smoothly. ‘Only as it happened, in this case it wasn’t necessary. She volunteered the information.’
‘She must be nuts,’ I said. ‘Any of her mates find out and she’ll be for the chopper.’
‘That’s her problem,’ said the Legionnaire, indifferently.
There was the sound of heavy footsteps and of deep breathing somewhere behind us, and we instantly held our rifles at the ready, peering through the darkness and expecting God knows what to burst upon us, a herd of wild animals or an enemy platoon at the very least, but it was only Tiny.
‘Shit got away from me! These flaming fir trees could hide a whole bleeding regiment and you’d never be able to find ’em . . . Anyway, I got his gun off of him. I’m pretty sure I hit him, but he still managed to give me the slip.’
The Old Man took the heavy pistol from Tiny and weighed it thoughtfully in his hand.
‘A Nagan, eh? Well, that smacks of the NKVD if anything does.’
‘What we said right at the start,’ said Porta, in disgust. I tell you, if people only listened to us a bit more than what they do, I reckon this flaming war might be over by now.’
The Old Man handed the Nagan back to Tiny and we set off warily through the night to rejoin the rest of the Company. Barcelona was nagging on about the girl again. She obviously worried him, and I don’t think, at that stage, that any of us were inclined to believe the Legionnaire’s story of her having volunteered the information. It sounded totally unlikely, and for my own part I was pretty certain that Tiny had been at her with his lethal steel wire.
‘Why didn’t you bring her along with you?’ demanded Barcelona. ‘You know bloody well what those bastards are likely to do when they find out. You’ve seen the way they treat people—’
‘That’s no concern of ours,’ said the Old Man. ‘We’re just here to fight the war, not play nursemaid to traitors.’
‘I disagree,’ said Barcelona, hotly. ‘Paid traitors are one thing. People who are forced to be traitors are quite a different matter. You put a pistol to someone’s head and—’
‘Look,’ said the Legionnaire, ‘for the last time, nobody forced that bitch to be a traitor. She chose to. Of her own free will. That howling brat they had back there – that was hers. And you know who the father was? A Scharführer in the bloody SS! That’s the sort of whore she was!’
‘He probably raped her,’ said Barcelona.
‘I don’t give a sod what he did to her,’ said the Legionnaire, coldly. ‘All I know is that on her own admission she’s been busy betraying her own people right, left and bloody centre whenever the opportunity’s arisen. She told us so herself. Seems to think it’s her mission in life. And in my book that’s treachery, and any traitor can go and get stuffed for all I care, whichever side he’s on.’
‘She,’ said Barcelona.
‘She, he, or flaming it,’ retorted the Legionnaire, ‘it’s all one to me.’
‘She probably thinks she’s in love with the bloke—’
‘Christ almighty, a second ago you were saying he raped her!’
‘Anyway, she was a bitch,’ said Tiny, in conclusive tones, ‘and I don’t give a monkey’s crutch piece what happens to her. She shopped her own mother, she told us so. Got her sent off to Siberia, all for nicking a leg of pork . . . I’d have done her in on the spot, except we had more important things to think about.’
It seemed obvious, now, that the girl had indeed volunteered the information. Tiny would have been the last to conceal another victory for his steel wire, and the Legionnaire would have seen no reason to conceal it if the truth had been dragged from her by force. He was never wantonly vicious, but he could be ruthless when the need arose and he never made any secret of the fact. On the whole, therefore, I was now inclined to believe his story, and I accordingly felt little concern for the girl’s probable fate. Barcelona continued to harp on it purely, I think, as a matter of principle.
‘She doesn’t stand a chance,’ he said. ‘They’ll polish her off in no time. You ever seen what they do to traitors in this part of the world? They’re only half civilized, these people. They’re—’
‘Spare us the details,’ said the Old Man. ‘Do you mind?’
Stege suddenly laughed; bitter and reflective.
‘The enemy values treachery yet scorns the traitor . . . Schiller was quite right, apparently.’ .
‘Schiller?’ said Porta, blankly. ‘What the hell’s he got to do with anything? He’s dead, ain’t he?’
‘Oh, long since,’ said Stege. ‘Before you were born . . .’
‘You should have seen the way his tongue came out of his mouth,’ said Tiny, boastfully.
We turned to stare at him, thinking, naturally enough, that he was referring to Schiller. Not a bit of it, however: he was merely reliving his latest moment of glory with the steel wire, when he had strangled the NKVD man.
‘He had his hands round my neck, but I was too strong
for him. He never said a word. Just choked and gurgled and made odd noises. They do that, when you really put the pressure on. They—’
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Heide. That’s all you seem to live for . . . sex and strangulation!’
‘Each to his own,’ said Tiny, pompously. ‘We’re here to kill, so I do it the way I like best. Let’s face it,’ he said, in eminently reasonable tones that forestalled all attempts at argument, ‘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 . . .
1 Siberian knives with a double-edged blade
2 The Führer thanks you
3 Heeresdienstvorschrift – Army Service Regulations
4 Understand
5 Mr.
6 Comrade
The crows objected most strongly when we came along and disturbed their feast. They had settled in a great black cloud on the corpses, and as Porta fired into their midst they rose up in annoyance, circled round our heads in a brief moment of panic and then flew off to the nearest trees, where they set up a harsh chatter of protest. Only one remained behind: it was entangled in a mess of intestines and was unable to free itself. Heide promptly shot it. We dragged the bodies inside and piled them up in heaps. Lt. Ohlsen came to look at our handiwork and began swearing at us. He insisted that we laid them out decently, in neat lines, one next to another.
‘Some people,’ observed Heide to Barcelona, ‘are a bit funny about these things.’
Grumbling, we nevertheless rearranged the bodies as the Lieutenant wished. But as for the officers who had been murdered in their beds, sprawled over the side in their silk pyjamas, with their throats cut, we left them to rot where they were. Dark patches of blood stained the floor, and the flies were already thick on the ground. In one room a radio was still turned on. A persuasive voice was crooning:
‘Liebling, sollen wir traurig oder glücklich sein?’