by Sven Hassel
A young Leutnant who is only slightly wounded, but completely exhausted by dysentery, begs and pleads to be taken along. He offers a wrist-watch and a valuable gold cigarette case in payment.
An Obergefreiter weighs it thoughtfully in his hand, then puts it in his pocket. He and another man get hold of the Leutnant and drag him along between them like a sack of potatoes.
‘God, but how he can shit,’ says the Obergefreiter, with disgust, as yellow liquid, streaked with blood, spurts from the Leutnant.
‘Stinks like Hell’s own shithouse,’ whines the other soldier.
‘Won’t ’urt you two, then!’ grins Tiny. ‘You’re nothin’ but a coupla walking shit’ouses yourselves!’
‘This catchin’ is it?’ asks the Obergefreiter, who has been smeared with bloody excrement.
‘Believe you me it is,’ says Porta, enthusiastically. ‘I’d give you two weeks at the outside before you’re dead of typhus and dysentery! Terrible death it is!’
‘You bastard!’ curses the Obergefreiter furiously, as a great flow of excrement leaves the young officer. He is now unconscious and his breath rattles in his throat like that of a dying man.
‘Can’t we get him emptied out in some smart way or other?’ asks his pal, looking shiftily around.
‘Let’s knock him up against a tree?’ says the Obergefreiter, stopping thoughtfully. ‘That ought to send it through him!’
‘We can try it,’ grins the other, cynically. ‘Kill or cure sometimes works. Empty him out and he’ll likely feel better.’
They swing the unconscious officer’s body several times up against a tree.
‘You two dirty bastards’ll pay for that,’ shouts the Old Man, furiously.
‘Shut your trap,’ warns the Obergefreiter, sending the Old Man a look of hatred. Scowling, they go on after the column with the Leutnant hanging between them. They have not gone far before they discover he is dead.
Carelessly, they sling the body into a ditch and saunter over to the Oberfeldwebel who is marching at the head of the party.
‘Leutnant’s shit himself to death,’ reports the Obergefreiter, shamefacedly. ‘He’s up there now in the Heavenly Mess, playin’ casino with Saint Peter!’
‘I should think he is dead,’ shouts the Oberfeldwebel, angrily. ‘Anybody’d be dead the way you treated him. Try that sort of thing again and I’ll have your heads for it! Understand!’
They drop us outside the Field Dressing Station, where many are lying already. They don’t even bother to report us in.
The short day turns to night. Units of different kinds pass by continually. Three white-camouflaged P-4’s come noisily sliding and slipping down the icy road. A frozen body smashes like glass under the tracks of the leading tank.
‘Take us with you,’ shouts Porta, waving wildly at them. ‘Take us with you. We’re from 6 PD.’ He has seen the 7. Panzer Division tactical sign on the tanks. An elongated Y in yellow.
They go past without stopping. The commanders are up in their turrets, swathed in leather. They don’t even glance at us. They are too busy racing for safety while there is still time.
‘And that’s our sister division,’ says Porta, bitterly. ‘Mates, take it easy! I’m going to get help!’
‘They’re shutting up shop,’ comments the Old Man. ‘The neighbours’ll be here soon and clean up the remaining stock.’
‘Good-night. Mary. Your maiden’ead’s ’angin’ on the nail!’ coughs Tiny, contemptuously.
It is late at night, before a worn-out assistant doctor, followed by a couple of Sanitäts-Unteroffiziere, staggers down the long rows of wounded and dying. Every now and then he stops and bends over a stretcher, adjusts a bandage, and shrugs his shoulders resignedly.
A Sanitäts-Feldwebel pushes a hypodermic into each of us. He works like an automaton.
‘Tetanus,’ he mumbles, as he moves on to the next.
‘Where’s the sawbones then?’ asks Tiny. ‘Ain’t they goin’ to operate? I got ‘alf the second world war’s steel in me, I ’ave!’
‘Operate? No chance!’ grins a medical orderly. ‘We’ll have to leave that to the neighbours. They won’t be long!’
‘Shit-eater! German swine!’ Tiny shouts, furiously, throwing a large piece of ice after him.
A General-major, with his whole face wound about with bandages, comes from one of the long buildings. He presses a Staff doctor’s hand solemnly. They salute one another and click their heels. The General edges into a Kübel, which disappears in a cloud of snow, barely avoiding running over some of the wounded.
‘The good generals know the way to safety,’ grins Porta, sneeringly. He slaps the inside of his elbow, lifting his fist at the same time. The international sign for ‘up you!’.
Some medical officers in thick fur coats, and with suitcases in their hands, leave the long buildings at a run. They tumble into ambulances with the Red Cross emblem, which are waiting with motors turning over.
‘What about the wounded?’ asks a Sanitäts-Feldwebel uncertainly, saluting foolishly.
‘You can stay with them if you wish,’ suggests a white-haired medical officer, with a cynical grin, jumping into a Red Cross Kübel.
The columns of soldiers, hastening past us as if the devil were at their heels, begin to thin out.
Three field MP’s, with the headhunter badge on their chests stop their heavy BMW motorcycles. The machine-gun in each sidecar seems to point, as if accidentally, at us. A Stabsfeld-webel, with a head which reminds one of a mad Alsatian dog, looks at us with cold, considering eyes from under the brim of his steel-helmet.
‘What the hell are you wet sacks lying around here for?’ he barks, showing tobacco-yellowed teeth in a snarl. ‘On your feet, you lazy swine, or I’ll see you swing!’ He points his machine-pistol at the nearest man, who is lying on a bed of branches. ‘Get on your feet!’ he hisses, ‘or I’ll blow your brains out for you!’
‘Blow the breath outa that lousy watchdog,’ roars an Obergefreiter in a blood-stained uniform.
Two shots ring but. Loudly and viciously.
The well-fed MP springs backwards, and sweeps his Mpi barrel round in a searching half-circle.
A new series of shots kick up snow and ice in front of him.
‘Are you all mad?’ he protests, in a hoarse voice, taking cover behind a motorcycle. ‘You can’t shoot at us!’
‘Don’t you bleedin’ believe it,’ roars Tiny, snatching the Mpi.
‘Kill ’em! Murder the bastards!’ comes in a mighty chorus from the wounded.
A fusillade from all kinds of hand weapon smashes at the heavy motorcycle. It explodes in a burst of flame. The Staff Feldwebel rolls burning in the snow. He rolls himself into a ball like a piece of charred paper.
‘Sounds like an overweight sow sizzling on a hot plate,’ grins Porta, pleasedly.
The two other MP’s attempt to run. Five or six hand-grenades go whirling after them and explode hollowly. They fall into a snowdrift already packed with dead, frozen bodies.
Like a gift from heaven a convoy of heavy lorries stops beside us. Swearing supply soldiers jump from the backs of the lorries and protestingly begin to pack us into them.
‘Only the living,’ orders a Rittmeister. He chases the supply soldiers impatiently. ‘Come on! Come on! We must get on!’ he cackles, slashing impatiently at his long fur boots with his whip.
‘Gawd but I’m goin’ to kick your bleedin’ piles up into your throat when I get well again,’ Tiny promises a supply soldier who has dropped him twice on the way to the lorries.
‘If you don’t shut up,’ answers the supplies man, a giant as big as Tiny, ‘I’ll let you lie here an’ get your head blown loose! Ivan’ll take anybody as ain’t Russki. Count on that!’
‘We gotta take that black untermensch with us too?’ asks an Unteroffizier, pointing with a grin at Albert, who is lying in the snow grinding his teeth.
‘Now I’ve seen everything,’ shouts a Feldwebel, in surprise. ‘A can
nibal in German uniform! Are you a secret, or does the Führer know about you?’
‘Shut your arse, man. You ain’t that funny,’ sneers Albert, contemptuously. ‘I’d ten times rather be me than I’d be a stinking sausage-eating white German like you!’
‘Watch your tongue, you abnormal Zulu, you! Or back you go to the trees with the other apes!’ the Feldwebel warns him, with a sinister look on his face.
‘We takin’ him?’ repeats the Unteroffizier impatiently, looking as if what he’d most like to do was give Albert a kick in the backside.
‘We’d better,’ answers the Feldwebel. ‘If Ivan finds him here he’ll use it as propaganda, and say we’ve called up the monkeys from the Zoo. But put him at the open end of the lorry, so’s we can tip him off at the first muck-heap we come to on the way.’
‘That’s it!’ shouts the Rittmeister, ‘off we go. We’ve no more time. Let the rest lie where they are! The Russians’ll have to look after them!’
A shout of protest goes up from the wounded who are left. Those who can do so, get to their feet and hobble after the lorries.
‘Move! Move!’ shouts the Rittmeister, jumping up into the leading lorry.
Many hang on to the lorries, and allow themselves to be dragged after them. Fear of the Russians gives them the strength of despair.
We manage to pull some of them up into the lorries, but most of them fall off and end under the wheels of the lorry behind. The drivers have no chance of avoiding them on the icy roads.
‘A good example of how much the life of an ordinary soldier is worth,’ says the Old Man, bitterly.
‘No more than the shit a plumber rakes out of a stopped-up sewer,’ snarls Porta, lighting a cigarette.
‘Shit on the army muck-heap,’ confirms the Legionnaire. ‘C’est la guerre!’
‘Look at the fat fellow there,’ the Old Man breaks out, pointing with the stem of his pipe at a dying ski-soldier. ‘He has a wife at home twisting floorcloths, and a big nest of snotty-nosed kids. And the kids’ll end up on the shit-heap just like their father. Queer we still take this sort of thing!’
‘We ain’t worth any better, man,’ philosophises Albert. ‘I’ve often thought about what we’re really doing in the Army. Why don’t we quit and leave it all to the owners. To the officers and the fat-gutted civilians at home. The ones who need us to protect their riches, so they can sit fartin’ in their soft armchairs!’
‘Now you keep your black trap shut,’ shouts Heide, trembling with rage. ‘You talk like a fucking Communist!’
A stream of tracer spits from the forest, and stops all discussion. A lorry crashes down a slope. The wounded are thrown about in wild confusion. At the bottom of the slope the lorry explodes, and disappears in a burst of yellow and red flame.
‘Get on! Get on!’ shouts the Rittmeister, hysterically, waving his Mpi. ‘Don’t stop!’
Another lorry rolls over and bursts into flames. It burns out, together with its load of sick and wounded.
‘Hell but it stinks here,’ curses Barcelona. ‘Worse’n a Chinese shithouse after an orgy of spring rolls.’
‘It’s them five sods in the corner lyin’ there shittin’ their bleedin’ typhoid germs all over us,’ shouts Tiny, red in the face. He kicks out at a moaning heap of sick humanity in the corner.
‘Throw ’em off,’ suggests an artillery Unteroffizier. ‘Let ’em shit their typhoid on the fuckin’ neighbours!’
‘Are you crazy, we can’t do that,’ protests Porta, ‘they’d accuse us of starting bacteriological warfare, and we’ve not gone that far yet, despite everything.’
‘Any of you believe in this new wonder-weapon?’ asks a Gefreiter with sharp mousey features.
‘Now I’ve seen you I do,’ answers Porta, bending double in laughter.
We rumble on all night. At a reckless speed we roar through a village where a row of hanged shapes dangle from the telegraph poles.
‘Partisans,’ mumbles Heide, his face crumpling in rage.
‘Think so?’ jeers Porta. ‘More likely some murderous sod who’s finally got the chance to show his power. Partisans don’t come out and ask to be hanged. They’re like snakes. A quick strike and out again like lightning.’
Our lorry goes into a deep hole and gets stuck fast. A tank motor roars out in the darkness. Tank tracks rattle ominously.
Panic spreads amongst us. Those who can, jump from the lorries, and take cover behind snowdrifts.
A VW-Kübel comes struggling up the hill, and smashes with a crunching sound into the wall of a house. Four soldiers hang from it like lifeless puppets. It begins to burn. Small, dancing flames spring up.
Three grey-white T-34’s push out from the forest. Trees snap like matchsticks. There is an earsplitting report, followed by a long, thundering noise, as if a goods train were rushing over a steel bridge. The leading T-34 rolls across the ice with its turret blown off, like a bucket somebody has given a kick. There is a new fearful explosion. A tank gun going off. A giant, orange-coloured bolt of lightning, and a thunderous explosion. A glowing fireball lights up the scene.
The other T-34 stops short and bursts into flames. The commander in his black leather equipment, tries to escape from the turret at the last moment. His left leg is torn off at the knee and whirls, spinning, up above the tongues of flame.
A Panther appears on the top of a rise. Its long gun swings towards the last T-34. A jet of flame shoots from the muzzle and two terrific explosions make our ears ring. The T-34 has fired at the same second as the Panther. Flames and black smoke pour from both tanks.
Two crew members jump from the turret of the Panther. Coughing, and fighting for breath, they roll in the snow.
Three of the crew of the T-34 are thrown from it, burning like torches as they fly through the air. The classic death of the tank soldier.
‘Keep your heads down, lads,’ warns the Old Man. ‘They’ll blow up any minute now.’
Some shapes run around the burning tanks, spectrally illuminated by the light of the flaming inferno.
‘Ivan,’ says Tiny, pointing. ‘Some lamebrain commissar must be kickin’ their arses.’
‘They are, perhaps, tired of life,’ grins Porta, unsmilingly. ‘When the ammo’ goes it’ll make a bang’n a blast that’d lift a one-legged monk’s backside up high enough to shit the devil in the face!’
The next second the burning tanks explode. The terrific blast wave tears up trees by the roots and sends them, like javelins, through the air. Nothing remains of the inquisitive Russians.
‘Gone with the wind,’ cries Gregor, throwing out his arms, ‘just simply gone!’
‘They’ve been blown to the other side of Kolyma, and can discuss how they got there with a couple of elks,’ comments Porta, making himself comfortable in the snow. ‘Be kind enough to wake me, please, before I die!’
‘Hell, man, haven’t you got any nerves at all?’ Barcelona rages. ‘You can’t just go off to sleep and wait for the neighbours to come an’ knock you off!’
‘What do you think I ought to do, then?’ asks Porta, hotly, lifting his steel helmet. ‘Don’t imagine Ivan’s boys are ready for a cosy chat just now. You can count on it they’ve been given a powerful Ilya Ehrenburg injection of propaganda piss. Kill the Germanski, tear them from their mothers’ wombs, crush the skulls of the capitalist plague rats of the west!’
A P-3, with its long 75 mm gun angled up towards the skies, comes to a rattling stop alongside us.
‘Want any help?’ asks the commander, leaning out of the open turret.
‘Yes, mate. Specially if you got a couple o’ thousand spare parts with you. ’Uman spare parts, that is!’ comes Tiny’s voice from a deep hole in the snow. ‘We’re short of everythin’ from arse’oles to elbows!’
The commander, an Oberfeldwebel, jumps down from the tank, together with the loader.
‘Give us a hand with the wires,’ he shouts.
‘We can’t manage it,’ answers Porta, ‘we’re all wounded
. We can hardly crack a fart without help!’
‘Forget you’re wounded,’ says the tank commander, pulling feverishly at the frozen towing cables. ‘We’re in a hurry. Ivan’s right on our heels.’
Cursing with pain some of us get on our feet to help out with the recalcitrant towing gear. Finally we make them fast and the P-3 begins to pull.
‘Slow’n easy does it,’ warns the commander. ‘We don’t want it to break. Steel’s brittle as glass at these temperatures!’
Quite slowly the lorry begins to move. For a moment it looks as if it is going to fall over on its side. The front part of it balances on the edge of the hole, with wheels in the air. With a crash, and a great creaking of springs, it rocks forward, remaining, by some miracle, on the road. The towing cable snaps and whistles through the air, taking off the face of an infantryman who did not manage to duck in time.
A tongue of flame comes from the hill-top, and the characteristic sound of a tank gun going off throws echoes back from the forest.
The P-3 begins to burn immediately. Black, oily smoke mushrooms above the trees. With uniforms on fire the crew jumps from the open hatches. Screaming they roll in the snow, slowly blackening in the violent flames. Nothing can be done. We cannot help them. They are drenched in petrol from the two large fuel tanks, which are poorly protected in the P-3.
Our lorry roars at breakneck speed along the icy road. It slides sideways down a steep hill and smashes an amphibian in which are two SS riflemen. At a bend we whirl round three times in our own length. Three telegraph poles go down with a splintering sound. Four men are thrown out over the tail-flap, but we drive on. The driver is afraid to stop. It would probably be impossible to get the vehicle started again. We must keep going all the time.
Well into the night, we stop at a medical unit, which seems to be getting ready to move out. A long row of ambulances are standing waiting with engines running. They are not only being loaded with wounded, but also with boxes and suitcases.
After an eternity of waiting a nervous assistant M.O. appears. He examines the closest of us superficially. We soon realise that there are only two categories of patient. Those who can be moved, and those who cannot. He examines only the dressings. Too much blood and pus, and you are out. He disappears as suddenly as he appeared.