by Sven Hassel
Another time, I remember, we captured a Russian motorcyclist and his pet rat. A big, black water rat which behaved like a dog and followed the Russian everywhere he went. They used to eat their meals together out of the same mess tin and sleep in the same sleeping bag. We let them both escape, in the end. It was the only way to save the rat from falling into alien hands and turning up in the evening stew pot. It would have broken the Russian’s heart.
After the tortoiseshell cat had been withdrawn from the card we began having trouble with the punters. The big piebald tom beat the mangy grey favourite three times in succession and a cry went up that the grey was being fixed. Someone claimed to have seen Tiny giving it a puff on a grifa1 behind the statue of Napoleon. They were probably quite right, and it was on the whole most fortunate that at that point the race meeting was broken up by a sudden burst of enemy gunfire, which sliced the head off Napoleon and sent the mangy grey flying out of Tiny’s arms and running for its life. It undoubtedly saved us from being lynched.
An amusing interlude had come to an end. The lull was over, and it was back once again to the realities of war. We were on fatigue duty that same night, gathering up the wounded and burying the dead. The wounded we carried to the field hospitals set up in the Sadyba quarter of the town. The dead were laid out in neat rows in communal graves. Some of the bodies were scarcely any longer recognisable as having once been human. Some had been gnawed by rats. Some were minus head and limbs. We had erected a ramp and the bodies were rolled down it into the ditch, where we all took a turn at the receiving end. The worst cases were not those which were still warm, or still wet with fresh blood, but those which had lain undiscovered for a period of days in cellars and basements and were now green and bloated. If you were wise, you manipulated them with the very greatest of care. One incautious move, one impatient moment of rough handling, and the swollen skin would burst like an over-ripe plum, its contents flooding out. And any man caught in the path of such a flood of putrefaction would carry the smell with him for days and even weeks – it would cling to his hair, lodge under his nails, bury itself deep down in the pores of his skin.
We were relieved shortly after dawn, but even now there was to be no sleep. We sat a while on a crumbling bridge in the pale autumn sunlight, listening to the usual early-morning sounds of gunfire and shells, watching the water as it flowed underneath us with its complement of corpses. A few yards further on, an elderly Lieutenant-Colonel from the Medical Corps was leaning far out over the parapet, gazing upstream with vacant blue eyes.
‘Stupid old goat,’ said Porta. ‘He’ll get his bleeding head blown off if he’s not careful.’
Even as he spoke a shot rang out, and a bullet went thudding into the side of the bridge. The Colonel shifted his position very slightly as a grudging concession to the enemy snipers.
‘Hey, you!’ shouted Porta, from the safety of his shelter beneath the rusty iron parapet. ‘If you want to commit suicide, do you mind going somewhere else and doing it? I’ve seen enough dead bodies for one night.’
Slowly, the Colonel turned his head. He stared at Porta in undisguised astonishment.
‘Are you by any chance addressing me, my good man?’
‘That’s right,’ said Porta.
The Colonel straightened up in best Prussian military manner, shoulders pulled back and chest inflated.
‘Do you normally address officers in that fashion?’ he said, chillingly.
Porta looked at his white hairs and his pink-rimmed eyes, and seemed suddenly to take pity on him.
‘Listen, Grandpa,’ he said. ‘It’s for your own good. Just move away from the edge before you get your brains blown out. OK? It would make us all a helluva lot happier. We’ve been shoving the stiffs underground all night long and we’ve had a real bellyful. So just be a good little Grandpa and do what I ask.’
‘This is outrageous!’ snapped the Colonel. ‘I never heard such insolence in all my life! Has the world run mad?’
He took a step towards Porta, and as he did so a second shot rang out. The Colonel gave a sharp cry and staggered back against the parapet. Before we could reach him, he had fallen over the edge and gone crashing down into the turbulent waters of the Vistula below. One more body in the sea of bobbing corpses. Porta shook his head.
‘Daft old bugger,’ he said.
The Colonel’s body disappeared slowly downstream. The sniper retired, satisfied. We settled down again behind the parapet.
We were not left long in peace. The battle of Warsaw had not yet finished for us. The Fifth Company was sent back into the flames at Wola, where the corpses lay heaped in the gutters and from every tree and every lamp-post hung shreds of human flesh.
Early next morning the Germans launched a full-scale attack against the remaining Polish strongholds, which extended from the Rue Kasimira to the Place Wilson. A rain of fire fell upon the old quarter of the town. Twenty-eight batteries were kept in constant action for over five hours. Three regiments of tanks were sent through the Rue Mickiewicz towards the Place Wilson. The last of the Polish resistance was drowned beneath an ocean of blood, and that same evening General Bor-Komorovski knew that the time had come when he must bow to the inevitable. The German forces far out-numbered him. He had few men and even fewer weapons. Warsaw had been abandoned by both Britain and Russia. No help was coming and he must capitulate.
He drove to the Château Ozarow in a Mercedes that was flying a white flag, and there he negotiated the terms of the surrender. There the Germans agreed that all prisoners of war should be treated according to the rules laid down by the Geneva Convention.
On the morning of 3rd October, at eight-thirty precisely, the battle of Warsaw came to an end. A sudden curtain of silence fell over the burning city. All that could be heard was the steady crackling of the flames, and now and then the sound of falling masonry as yet another building collapsed. The Place Wilson, recently filled with tanks and soldiers, was now deserted. Not a man, not a dog, not a living soul. The streets were empty. A sheet of paper was tossed high into the air above a burning house. It hung a moment, suspended, then fluttered back into the furnace and was caught by a licking tongue of flame. The shrivelled fragments fell gently to rest on the burnt-out hulk of a tank, where an obscene travesty of skin and bones, which had once been a German soldier, still sprawled in its death agony half in and half out of the turret.
Down in our basement, where we had spent the night, we crouched in terror as the wall of silence was built up round the city. We could understand the sounds of warfare but silence filled us with a terrible fear of the unknown.
‘It can’t be the end,’ I whispered. ‘It can’t be the end . . .’
No one contradicted me. The end had to come, but surely this could not be it? This silence, this emptiness, this total sense of nothing . . . Was this what men had meant when they talked of the end?
‘Things will start up again in a minute,’ said the Old Man, confidently. ‘We’d best stay here and wait for orders.’
Things would start up again in a minute. It was a comforting thought. Things would start up again, and we should be back to normal. Meanwhile, we would stay here and wait for orders. That was always best. There must be someone, somewhere, who knew what was happening.
‘It can’t be the end,’ I said. ‘It surely can’t be the end . . .’
‘It’s a trap,’ said Tiny. ‘They’re trying to trick us into thinking it’s all over.’
Another half hour passed. Another hour. The street was still as the grave. The silence, very slowly, was being filled with half-remembered sounds from a long-forgotten past. The creaking of wood, the singing of birds, the ticking of a watch – all the little, insignificant sounds that for so long had been drowned in the chaos of war.
The sudden collapsing of a roof on the opposite side of the street scared us almost into an apoplexy. Tiny let loose a burst of machine-gun fire, and Gregor vomited all over the floor. He wiped his mouth with a trembling hand.
‘Jesus, I can’t take any more of this,’ he said. ‘I’m going outside to have a gander. I’m not staying down here to be caught like a rat in a trap.’
‘It’s a trick,’ said Tiny. ‘That’s exactly what they want you to do.’
Gregor walked to the steps.
‘It’s exactly what I’m going to do.’
The Old Man made no move to stop him. We remained where we were, every muscle tensed for instant action.
‘We’ll give him five minutes,’ said the Old Man. He ran his tongue over his lips. I had never seen him so nervous. ‘Five minutes, and then we’ll follow him up.’
Before we could follow him, Gregor had returned. We heard him coming along the street, raving and shouting like a madman. He capered down the cellar steps, followed by Uule and his Finns. It seemed to me that they were all drunk.
‘Well?’ said the Old Man. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Peace!’ shouted Gregor, and fell headfirst down the last six steps.
‘Peace!’ shouted Uule, raising a bottle of vodka to his lips.
We stared at them, and said nothing at all. Uule came down into the cellar and held out the vodka bottle to the Old Man.
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘They signed the surrender at eight-thirty this morning. It’s all over.’
‘All over?’ I said. For a moment I felt almost a sense of loss. Suddenly they had taken away my reason for living and I was a man without a purpose. ‘All over?’ I said. ‘But it can’t be! It can’t be! Not after all this time . . . It can’t be!’
But apparently it was. Peace had come at last, and I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand why Tiny and Porta were suddenly wrapping their arms round each other and yelling and hooting at the tops of their voices. I couldn’t understand why everyone was suddenly hell bent on throwing down their weapons, tearing off their badges, kicking their helmets across the floor.
‘It’s over!’ shouted the Old Man. He turned and punched me in the ribs. ‘It’s all over!’ he said, and the Finns joined in with a chorus of ‘Miri, miri!’ From further down the street we heard voices calling out in Polish and in German:
‘It’s over! It’s all over!’
‘Spokoj! Spokoj!’
And now I, too, was caught up in the general rejoicing and went surging up the steps behind Uule and his Finns, out into the daylight. Heide was still obstinately clutching his rifle, and Uule had his knife pushed down the side of his boot. Other than that, we were unarmed. We had no means of defending ourselves. I felt as if I were walking stark naked through the town.
‘Miri, miri!’ shouted Uule, but there was unrest in the streets, and I wondered again if the war had really ended.
We seemed the only creatures who had ventured out. There was still no sound, save for the steady crackling of flames from burning buildings. If the Poles came out now from their hiding-places, the Fifth Company would be at their mercy. What a way to end a war.
‘Eh, Stanislas!’ called Porta. He put his hands to his mouth and shouted, and his voice went echoing through the empty streets. ‘Eh, Polaks! Come out and show yourselves! The fighting’s all over!’
From a group of ruins twenty yards further on, three Polish soldiers wearing French helmets rose cautiously to their feet and stood waiting for us. Two of them were clutching automatic rifles. Porta gestured with his hands. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then they dropped the rifles to the ground and came running and laughing towards us. Suddenly the town was alive with people. They came swarming up from every cellar and every basement, soldiers and civilians, men, women and children, laughing, crying, dancing in the streets. Pole and German alike had laid down their arms, and I saw many uniforms stripped of their Nazi eagles. Of the Fifth Company, only Heide appeared to see no reason for rejoicing. He perched moodily on the edge of the burnt-out tank, with a charred mummy that was lying half in and half out of the turret. He still kept a tight hold on his rifle, and he watched in grim silence as old enemies joined hands and laughed together in the streets of Warsaw.
And suddenly, in the midst of it all, came the sound of an explosion. A hail of grenades fell around us. The tank was blown to pieces, and Heide was flung across the road. Women and children ran screaming for cover. Men who only seconds ago had been embracing each other as brothers now broke apart, cursing themselves for their naïveté.
Tiny came hurtling across the street towards me, and together we dived down the steps of the nearest cellar.
‘I told you so!’ he panted. ‘I told you it was a trick!’
We thought at first that it must be the German artillery who were firing. It was some time before we realised that it was the Russians. They kept up their bombardment of the stricken town for over an hour, in an attempt to finish off Germans and Poles alike. They succeeded that day in slaughtering many thousands of people.
The Fifth Company re-grouped and was pulled out of the area. Uule and his Finns had disappeared, and we never saw them again. The following day we were sent to the Rue Kransinski to supervise the Polish surrender and check that all fire-arms and other weapons were duly handed over. We felt no jubilation as the long line of soldiers passed silently before us on their way to captivity. They had fought a good fight, and we bore them no ill will.
And so, at last, had it really all come to an end? Not quite. Not yet. The psychopaths of the Dirlewanger and Kaminski Brigades still had one last ritualistic orgy of blood-letting to perform.
That same evening, the executions began. Friend turned against friend, neighbour against neighbour, in frenzied attempts to save their own skins. This man was a Communist, that man was a Jew; this woman had slept with a Russian officer, that woman was known to have Soviet sympathies. One word was sufficient to condemn a person. The executioners were not concerned with evidence.
The terms of surrender had extended only to soldiers of the regular Polish Army. The thousands of others who had taken up arms against the German invader were treated according to Himmler’s instructions – they were outside the law and had no right of appeal. They were therefore shot without trial.
What little remained of the civilian population after the night’s massacres was rounded up and cattle-herded into an immense concentration camp situated to the north-west of Warsaw. There they were kept without food and water, with no proper sanitary arrangements, with no provision for the sick or the elderly, until transport could be arranged to take them to Germany. Considerable numbers of them died en route.
Meanwhile, companies of Pioneers were sent in to begin the task of the wholesale destruction ordered by Himmler. It was not until the end of January that the ruins of Warsaw were finally left alone to die in peace. There was nothing left to burn, nothing left to demolish. The people had all been murdered, the buildings had all been destroyed. Himmler’s command had been carried out with typical Prussian thoroughness. Every man, woman and child; every dog and every cat; every street and every building . . .
It had finally been achieved. Warsaw had been wiped off the face of the map.
THE END
1 Opium cigarette.
A WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON EBOOK
First published by in Great Britain in 1973 by Corgi
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books
Copyright © Sven Hassel 1970
Translation copyright Transworld Publishers Ltd. 1985
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 avai
lable from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 2978 6578 0
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