by Sven Hassel
The applause would not stop.
‘Heil! Heil! Heil!’
‘I greet, and bow my head in respect, to the brave soldiers and officers of the great German Wehrmacht who now take up position for the greatest attack in all history. I promise you, my faithful comrades, that in three months, at the latest, this war will be over. By Christmas our mobilized forces will be sent home and it will be a thousand years before another war comes. If it ever comes.’
The applause seemed enough to make the loudspeakers fall from the walls.
‘Sieg! Heil! Prosit! Sieg! Heil! Prosit!’
A wave of enthusiasm swept through the great beer-halls of Münich. Millions of Germans heard this fateful speech. Everyone had his own opinions on the matter, but nobody dared to express them. It was too easy to say the wrong thing in the day of the Third Reich. SS-Overgruppenführer Heydrich’s Gestapo was everywhere, even in the marriage bed.
‘Now we will give our infamous enemy the death-blow,’ roared Hitler in a wild transport of ecstasy.
Sweat ran down his face. His blood-shot eyes were glassy and he hammered on the speaker’s desk with clenched fists. His tie was crooked. The buttons of his shirt had burst open. ‘Never more shall Stalin’s hordes arise from this defeat! If they offer to capitulate we will not accept their offer! This is a Holy War! I swear to you that we will continue it until the Bolshevik monster is totally eradicated!’
General von Hünersdorff walked the floor listening to Hitler’s words. The fantastic boastings of a sick man. Not one soldier in the German Wehrmacht undervalued the Russian opponent as did Adolf Hitler. Nobody seriously believed that this mighty enemy was beaten. The future held terrible things in store.
Von Hünersdorff took a document from the table and read half-aloud to his Chief-of-Staff, Oberst Laut: ‘Every soldier, irrespective of rank, who, in opposition to my orders, retreats, will be court-martialled immediately and sentenced to death!’
The General’s thoughts went irresistibly to the great Moltke: No operation can be constructed without reference to the weather. The time of year must be taken into consideration! And Hitler’s operation TAIFUN is constructed without reference to the autumn, he thought, and saw defeat looming already on the horizon.
5 | The Tepluschka
The terrible November storms sweep over the Russian steppe driving great blankets of white snow before them.
Winter has arrived in all its might and majesty. The first snows on 10 October. Particularly early this year. All the powers of nature seem to be on the side of the godless.
The German armies are less than 90 miles from Moscow. If the weather had not broken we would have been there within twelve days. Now the battered Russian divisions gain time to pull themselves together and regroup. They are issued with brand-new winter equipment. We don’t even get mittens and have to make shift with cloths cut from the uniforms of the dead. Instead of furs we use newspaper wadded next to the skin. A wisp of straw to put in your boots is an expensive commodity.
The General Staff says winter has surprised us, but the Russians, strangely enough, seem to have been informed well in advance of its arrival. If the gentlemen with the red tabs had studied the Russian people before attacking them they would have been warned against the winter. As soon as the grey-blue clouds appear on the eastern horizon and the waters of the rivers grow wilder, Ivan the peasant begins to pack the eaves of his hut with logs in readiness for the cruel winter which can come in the course of a single night. The Babuschka begins to cover the windows with paper, from ‘New Russia’ which is distributed free of charge and which every Russian citizen is wise to have lying about when the District Soviet comes visiting.
After only two days of winter, trees begin to split in the iron frost with a sound like a 75 mm field gun, and wolf packs trail about the skirts of the advancing German army. There are always stragglers to provide them with a meal. The first few days we shoot at them and kill some but after a while we lose interest. They keep away as long as we are marching in column but it doesn’t do to go off alone even armed with a 98 carbine. The pack is on top of a man before he can get his second shot away.
The cold worsens hourly. Frozen bodies of men and animals lie everywhere. It is as if the whole of nature is moving into a state of frozen suspension to await the arrival of spring.
But who can think of spring at 50° below zero, with the storms driving crystals of ice cuttingly across the Russian steppe. Supplies fail to get through. The ersatz coffee freezes to ice in the containers. The German armies are short of everything needed to conduct a winter war. No anti-freeze lubricant for the weapons and ordinary oil freezes the working parts fast. Whole motorized columns stand abandoned at the wayside. Frost! After two hours standing idle, the motors are ruined.
‘If Napoleon got a real beating from the Russian winter our Adolf’s going to get a bigger one!’ Porta tells the company loudly.
‘Porta says your Führer’s lost ‘is war, Julius,’ shouts Tiny. ‘Get protestin’ mate!’
Julius Heide looks at him with dead eyes which seem to have become even bluer and colder in the biting frost.
‘Say somethin’, Julius,’ shouts Tiny stubbornly. ’E says Adolf the Great’s fell on ’is arse on the bleedin’ ice!’
‘Reporting for duty,’ groans Heide from somewhere far down in his chest.
‘Holy Mother of Kazan be thanked,’ shouts Stege relieved. ‘We’re not completely lost. The old warriors can still open their traps!’
‘Give him a swastika on rye. It’s good for his beliefs!’ suggests Barcelona. ‘Straight vitamins for old Nazis!’
‘Sing!’ comes a command from the flank.
‘Striped pig!’ crows Porta disrespectfully. ‘Come over here and I’ll knock the frozen shit out from between your ears, you dried-up dwarf!’
A General-Major comes rushing angrily down the column demanding to know who shouted.
‘Don’t get across me, you men!’ he shouts furiously into the storm.
‘Wouldn’t fancy it,’ mumbles Porta half-aloud.
‘I require your company to sing,’ the General-Major turns on Oberleutnant Moser. ‘They’re to sing so loud the Kremlin can hear we’re coming!’
‘A song,’ commands Moser tiredly. ‘Form in a column of threes! Space off!’
Unwillingly we extend our left arms to take our distance.
Weit ist der Weg zurück ins Heimatland, so weit, so weit!
Dort wo die Sterne stehn am Waldesrand, blüht die neue Zeit.
ja, neue Zeit.
Jeder brave Grenadier sehnt heimlich sich nach dir,
ja, weit ist der Weg zurück ins Heimatland, so weit, so weit!
Die Wolken ziehn dahin, daher, sie ziehn wohl übers Meer.
Der Mensch lebt nur einmal und dann nicht mehr!1
We had to do it four times before the Herr General-Major was satisfied.
Then he drives us in amongst the trees where the wolves get the shock of their lives and take off to parts where there are no song-happy German General-Majors to worry them.
After an hour the great man tires of his fun, and disappears in his Kübel surrounded by his Military Police escort. We spit after him and in loud tones wish him a slow death at Kolyma. The German armies have turned into a long grey-green snake, made up of dead souls, dragging itself towards the north-east. Moscow is the magnet that still draws us. The heart and soul of Russia.
With faces covered in a mask of rime we stare at the back of the man in front of us. As long as he keeps moving we do. Two thousand paces is a kilometer and we are 140 of these from Moscow. Nothing to speak of in the normal way but in the Russian winter it’s a stretch of unbelievable hell. If you invited the Devil on a trip like this he’d drop his tail between his legs and run for it merely at the thought. The few German soldiers who live through operation TAIFUN are frozen right through to their backbones and will never thaw out.
When we rest and put out sentries we have to relieve them ever
y fifteen minutes. Otherwise we’d just be relieving corpses frozen into caricatures of humanity.
As the cold grows deeper we lost faith both in God and in Hitler.
‘Hell’s front yard,’ says Porta swallowing a piece of frozen fish.
‘Think of bein’ with the partisans, an’ ’avin’ summer all the year long like in Spain or Africa,’ Tiny dreams aloud.
‘We should’ve stayed with them,’ says Porta. ‘It was dangerous but it was a wonderful time. The planes came over like motorized Father Christmases dropping supplies bang on the minute.’
‘Think if we was to get just a little bit of all the good luck as is goin’ round loose all over the world, an’ got sent to the Kola peninsula,’ says Tiny enthusiastically. ‘We could fish for pearls in the breaks in the fighin’ an’ when the war was over we’d be off to ’Amburg with a bag-full of pearls enough to buy a nice little boozer. One with a long, long, bleedin’ bar where all the boys could stand up at the same time with one foot on the brass rail an’ a beer in their fists. Jesus Christ!’ he adds after a pause. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a place like that, stinkin’ somethin’ lovely of ’ores scent, tobacco, ’n fresh-pulled wobble!’
‘Are there pearls in the Kola river?’ asks Stege wonderingly. He wasn’t with us in ’39–40 when we, German soldiers in Finnish uniforms, were operating behind the enemy lines under the command of the Lapp, Lieutenant Guri, in Russian uniforms. We changed uniforms so often we had a hard time remembering whose side we were really on.
‘There aren’t many in the Kola,’ explains Porta. ‘But there’s more than a few in the Umba. They’re bloody beautiful, oval with a kind of waist-belt. Some of them are almost blue. The Lapps have a special name for them, some word only a Lapp could get his tongue round. They’ve got tongues like reindeer up north there. We fetched these mussels up in ice and cold and almost forgot what we were really supposed to be doing on the Kola peninsula until the other lot started trying to ventilate us.’
‘Yes, we had a lovely time in Finland,’ says the Old Man with a happy sigh.
‘In the evening we ate trout we’d caught on bent fishing rods. Guri the Lapp taught us how.’
‘But the best was when we got back from a trip,’ shouts Porta gleefully. ‘If we weren’t as bang on time as a crack express train those Goddamn Finns’d shoot us down.’
‘Stoi!’ they yelled if we were too late and banged away immediately whether we halted or not. But if God was on our side and we got back dead on time and were allowed through we were picked up in lorries and driven to the sauna so that all the enemy dirt could be steamed out of us. In the sauna we drank skimmed milk just like the Finns. But God how cold it was jumping into the lake. Your old pennywinkle’d disappear like a shot in the icy-cold water and the nurses used to ask us if we’d pawned him with Uncle Joe.’
‘An’ the cookies from the other units treated us like we was Obersts with coloured ribbons all over our ’ole bodies,’ grins Tiny glowing. ‘We was that tough we laughed at the infantry boys’ job. That was a real bleedin’ army, the Finnish! They even ’ad uniforms as fitted me.’
‘Wonder what happened to Guri,’ says the Old Man thoughtfully.
‘Called up again I’d reckon and working with a new lot behind the enemy lines,’ suggests Barcelona. ‘Probably a captain by now.’
‘Think we could get posted up there again?’ asks Tiny. ‘It’s supposed to be a bit of all right in the summer. They fatten up on grouse. I ’eard it off a corporal in the reindeers.’
‘And they take it out on the girls who bathe naked in the lakes,’ interjects Porta with a lustful laugh. ‘Call me a liar if I couldn’t fancy a couple of hundred pounds of woman wobbling past right now. I’d fix her on the spot in the middle of a snowdrift and risk me old tovaritsch prick freezing to an icicle straight after.’
Many drop off in the snow as we march. We see them go with indifference. Even before the column is out of sight they are covered in light powdery snow. Very soon they are dead. Freezing to death isn’t so bad. It’s worst being saved. You don’t know what pain is if you’ve never experienced frost gangrene. The stink is like a rotten tumour. Nothing smells quite like frost gangrene.
We halt in a ruined village. It must have been a small rail junction before the war. Everything is burnt out. We try to make something eatable out of the burnt maize in one of the granaries. We give up when Tiny breaks a tooth. It’s like chewing on granite.
We find a row of tepluschka on a siding and wonder how they have avoided being burnt like everything else. We walk round them carefully. The sliding doors are heavily padlocked.
Porta tests one of the locks with the butt of his Mpi but it is a heavy railway type lock and won’t give way. He scratches thoughtfully at his tousled red thatch.
‘There must be something of value in those boxes since they’re so carefully locked. Maybe the Kremlin gold’s inside,’ he whispers with anticipation in his eyes. ‘All my life I’ve wanted a real gold bar. Have you ever thought what you could buy for a lump of gold like that?’
‘You could buy yourself a piece of cunt,’ shouts Tiny lecherously and scratches himself in the crutch with the handle of a grenade.
‘You could buy the whole knocking-shop and bang away till dust comes out of your ears,’ grins Porta.
‘I hope there’s food inside,’ mumbles Stege through the strap he’s chewing away at. ‘I’m hungry enough to eat a tree!’
‘Look around you,’ says Barcelona. ‘There’s enough of ’em here to keep you going if you live to be a thousand.’
We crowd round Porta. Our imaginations run riot. There’s no end to what we can imagine the tepluschka to be loaded with.
Tiny suggests deep-frozen whores only requiring to be thawed out before use.
‘Maybe they’re filled with balanda,’ shouts Porta. ‘Holy Mother of Kazan, we’ll be shitting a whole field of oats for the next three months!’
None of us is quite ready to shoot the locks off. Tepluschka should be treated with care.
There have been tepluschka in Russia for as long as there have been railways. They were, in fact, built for military purposes originally. They are large, solidly constructed, goods wagons, built of Siberian wood. In the middle of the floor there is a small iron stove with a pipe going up through the roof. Next to the stove is a hole in the floor, a WC without the W. Practical and simple like everything else in Russia. The wagons are reckoned to take 30 soldiers or 12 horses or 70 prisoners destined for Kolyma, Novosibirst, Chila or elsewhere; terminals for people not in agreement with the big fellows in the Kremlin. When soldiers were being carried backwards and forwards across the great, wonderfully beautiful but cruel reaches of Russia the tepluschka would smell of hay and straw. When prisoners were being carried the tepluschka stank of excrement. The pipe from the floor toilet soon froze solid and the fish soup which was the prisoners staple diet gave them diarrhoea. They died like flies. They were kicked, beaten, jabbed with bayonets, by everyone who wanted to demonstrate that he of all people was the last to sympathize with these lunatics. That’s how it’s always been in Russia and that’s how it’ll always be.
Tepluschka carried the soldiers, and the prisoners, of the Czars all over the Empire. What the Czar ordered was right, until one dark October day in 1917. Now it was the free men of yesterday who had to take their turn in the tepluschka. The Czarist eagle was replaced by the Red Star. All the tepluschka had one thing in common: Those inside them were destined to die for the Fatherland; either on the field of battle or in the lead mines.
Porta smashes the butt of his weapon down on the lock. With lifting-bars we prize away at the sliding doors.
‘I’ll eat my tin ’at if there ain’t frozen meat in there,’ shouts Tiny, licking his frost-cracked lips hungrily.
We’ve had nothing to eat for five days. The Russians blow their storehouses up as they retreat. It’s an old Russian tactic. Withdraw fighting and burn everything behind you.
Slowly the doors give way. We jump back in alarm as a frozen corpse rolls out.
‘It was frozen meat,’ mumbles Tiny disappointedly. ‘Pity we ain’t bleedin’ cannibals.’
Apathetically we squat in the snow and share out the remainder of the iron rations. In the woods a machine-gun barks wickedly. It’s one of the new kind that sounds like a racing car-engine. Barcelona has quite lost his spirits at the disappointment with the tepluschka. He is crying silently. Tears are dangerous. If they turn to ice it can mean blindness. In the beginning ice and snowblind casualties were sent back to the advance medical stations, but now the orderlies don’t even bother examining them. A man’s finished if his friends don’t take him in tow. Wherever you look your eye meets an endless field of white and you walk in circles as if dead drunk. A man without friends is pushed from the column and forgotten as quickly as the dead lying in the snow-drifts.
If he has any energy left he staggers on until he ends in a drift with the others. They say that 100,000 German soldiers lie frozen along the road to Moscow. The Führer’s orders are that German casualties are not to be counted. Only cowards die. A German soldier will not allow himself to die. That one causes quite a lot of merriment.
The Professor, who keeps a diary, can’t resist keeping count. We warn him. If the NSFO hears of it it will cost him his head, and informers are everywhere; people who are forced to inform. Nobody is safe from them. Particularly dangerous are the ones who have family members in the concentration camps. Hostages have been taken and used since 1933. When the Professor came to No. 5 Company he believed every word the National Socialists had told him. Now, like many others, he is cured. He believes only what he sees.
‘With a tepluschka like these, a man could go anywhere, if only he had a red star on his cap,’ groans the Old Man, dropping tiredly to the snow. He tries to get his ancient silver-lidded pipe alight.
‘We’d fill up the wagon with beautiful straw and set a bubbling pot of Kascha over on the stove.’ He closes his frost-rimmed eyes dreamily. ‘Scalding hot Kascha! The Russians look after their slaves better. Have you ever met a moujik who didn’t have something in his duffle?’ With an angry movement the Old Man turns his inside out showing the white lining. ‘And what’ve the Prussian heroes got? Five hundred pages of propaganda piss with golden promises of how good we’re going to have it when we’ve won the war – and fuck-all else!’ He manages to get his pipe going finally, blows out smoke with satisfaction, takes it out of his mouth and points the stem at us.