Forced March

by Leo Kessler

  ‘Schulze?’ he called.

  ‘Yes, monkey’s turd.’

  ‘I’m going up over there – at two o’clock. You see that hole in the road?’

  ‘Got it!’

  ‘All right, then hold tight. Here we go!’ Matz rammed home high gear and revved the engine. The tank started to increase speed, its deck vibrating wildly. On top the young corporal and Schulze grabbed for a hand hole and watched the verge.

  ‘If you believe in the Big Man up there in a white shirt sitting on a cloud, you’d better start praying, son,’ Schulze cracked, but there was no warmth in his eyes; he knew what would happen to them if Matz failed to make it. The tank hit the verge. The gear lever shook crazily as the tracks took the slope. It rose and seemed to fill the whole driving compartment. With a quick, impatient gesture, Matz wiped the sweat off his brow and slowly counted five. The engine sounded as if it were on its last legs. Matz lunged forward and grabbed the lever with a hand that was soaked with sweat. Then he crashed the great metal clutch down hard, once, twice. With a grunt he threw the gear lever right across the bar into bottom gear.

  For one frightening moment nothing happened. The tank seemed to teeter there, and he could hear nothing except his own harsh anxious breathing. Then all at once the engine broke into its full-throated roar and the tracks began to grip. He had traction. She was going up.

  ‘That’s the way, you son-of-bitch,’ he cried enthusiastically, a huge grin over his wrinkled face. ‘Come on, take it … take it!’

  The Mark IV lurched over the edge of the road. Matz changed up, sliding effortlessly through the tank’s score of gears, simultaneously crashing his foot down hard on the accelerator. As it shot forward a machine-gun opened up somewhere. Slugs pattered against the metal sides, but Matz had no ears for them.

  ‘That’s it, you son-of-bitch,’ he yelled, recognising the right note immediately. ‘Here we go – and you’d better get us down right, or you’ll have the toe of my dicebeaker up your beautiful tin arse!’

  The Mark IV lurched forward alarmingly. The gear lever began to tremble violently once again. An anxious sweat bathed Matz’s body and soaked his shirt black. A thrill of fear went through him, for the tank was beginning to slide. He could feel the see-sawing motion and knew that he was losing traction.

  ‘Whore!’ he screamed. ‘Shitting, slack-cunted bitch of a whore … please, please come!’

  Almost delicately, he eased the right tiller bar back like a doctor touching a woman’s breast. Outside he could hear the right track begin to whirl aimlessly and realised that they were definitely slipping.

  Mouthing terrible obscenities, Matz continued his delicate pressure on the rod which braked the track and enabled the tank to swing to left or right. Still nothing happened. He eased his foot off the clutch. It was a dangerous move that could bring disaster. But he was not going to allow himself to slide into the ditch without a fight. He exerted a little more pressure on the tiller bar.

  It seemed like a miracle when the tank responded, and the right track braked and started to grip again. Matz released the pressure immediately and the Mark IV rolled forward in a straight course, taking the rest of the verge easily.

  ‘What the hell were you doing down there just then, you shitty cripple,’ Schulze’s voice flooded his ears. ‘You’ve gone and made me wet me skivvies! And laddo next to me is giving off green smoke.’

  ‘Aw, go and piss up your sleeve,’ Matz snarled, as he rammed home a higher gear and they rumbled forward once more.

  They took the first hole without any trouble. Instead of breaking for safety, the suicide squad men decided to stay where they were and let the tank roll over them. It was standard operating procedure, but they didn’t know the veterans of Wotan, trained in the brutal, merciless fighting of the Eastern Front. Instead of just rolling over the hole, Matz jerked back his left tiller bar and swung the tank round right on the edge of the cunningly concealed dug-out. He could imagine what the men below him were feeling, their lungs filled with the stench of diesel, their eardrums threatening to burst with the roar, faces seared by the heat from the exhausts, eyes closed like children. But there was no room for mercy. He swung the big tank round once again and the side of the pit started to crumble, eventually giving way altogether. The Mark IV lurched to one side, its tracks’ still running, churning the bodies of the men below into a bloody pulp.

  A group of Maquis tried to make a break for it. Schulze’s machine gun chattered. Remorsely the metal monster rumbled over their twitching bodies.

  ‘Look out!’ Matz shouted a sudden warning.

  ‘What is it, Matzi?’

  ‘Soft stuff ahead. Three o’clock next to the tree – and there’s a hole with Frogs in it right in the middle.’

  ‘Got it, Matzi,’ Schulze answered, identifying the pit in the middle of the marshy grass. ‘I’ll leave it to you. Let’s give the murderous bastards a taste of our special stuff.’

  Cautiously Matz drove the tank towards the hole. The ashen-faced men, sensing the terrible death that lay ahead for them, poured a furious hail of fire at the tank. Schulze and the corporal ducked behind the turret and listened to the slugs careen off the Mark IV’s thick armour. The firing stopped. The terrified Frenchmen ducked, for the monster was almost upon them, its squat metal shape blotting out the blood-red sun, filling the whole world, throwing everything into a hot, diesel-stinking darkness.

  Carefully Matz positioned his tank above the hole. But this time he did not hurl the vehicle round and round in fury until the sides of the pit caved in. Instead, making sure that his tracks were resting on firm ground, he took his foot off the clutch and began to rev the engine.

  ‘What’s he doing, sir?’ asked the corporal curiously.

  ‘You a country-boy?’

  ‘Yes, from Bavaria.’

  ‘What do you do then, hayseed, when you want to get rid of rats in the farmyard?’ Schulze snapped, as Matz raced his engines louder.

  ‘You gas them, sir.’

  ‘Yes,’ Schulze said, his face grim at the thought of what was happening to the men below.

  ‘Jesus, Maria, Joseph!’ the boy gasped, crossing himself in the Bavarian fashion as he realised why Schulze had hammered the exhausts downwards.

  Five minutes later they had cleared the last pit in the same fashion, leaving the Maquis in it sprawled out in the gestures of mortally terrified men, their hands turned to claws of fear, their faces green, their mouths filled with vomit, and were signalling the two tanks hidden in the trees that the road to Belleville was clear at last!

  ‘What now, sir?’ the corporal asked, not daring to look back at the men who had died so horribly.

  ‘We’re not risking the road again and those verges,’ Schulze said firmly. ‘We’ll leave that to the other two.’ He surveyed the smoke-shrouded village with narrowed eyes. ‘You see that track up there?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘We’ll make for that. It looks as if it’ll get on to the parallel road to the main road.’

  ‘And then, sir?’

  ‘Then, laddie,’ Schulze answered with more confidence than he felt, ‘we looks for Major von Dodenburg and those wet-tails of the First Company!’

  Note

  1 See Leo Kessler Death’s Head.

  SEVEN

  Major von Dodenburg, helmetless, his face streaked with sweat and dirt, raged inwardly. Half his company of Hitler Youth volunteers lay sprawled dead on the bloody cobbles outside; his contact with the Vulture, wherever he might be, was completely cut off, and the shaken, scared survivors of his Company dared not even venture into the centre of ground floors to which they clung with desperate tenacity lest a Maquis shot them through the thinly plastered ceiling.

  Von Dodenburg cast around desperately for some way out, his back pressed against the dirty kitchen wall. It was no use attempting to assault the primitive wooden stairs that led to the upper floor packed with Maquis gunmen. These were barricaded and they would have been sho
t down mercilessly before they had set foot on the first rung. Nor was it any good attempting the street again. At periodic intervals the Maquis swept it with their English machine-guns and any attempt at a breakout would have attracted the whole weight of the enemy fire.

  In the end von Dodenburg realised that there was only one way out of the trap in which they found themselves: they would have to apply the standard street-fighting procedure, despite the fact that his handful of scared survivors were completely untrained in the technique.

  He leaned forward and said more confidently than he felt, ‘Now listen you Hitler Youth heroes, we’re in a mess. But we can get out of it, if we keep our heads and move systematically. Do you understand?’

  Hesitantly they nodded, the light of hope beginning to dawn in their eyes.

  ‘We’re in a house at the end of the row, and this wall behind me is not covered by any of the enemy. In essence it is in dead ground as far as they are concerned,’ he lied hopefully. ‘You get it?’

  They nodded again.

  ‘So we are going to use that dead ground to our advantage. We’re going to burrow through that wall and if there are no windows to give us away on this side, we’ll head for the roof. Once there, we’ll take off a few tiles and work our way downwards again. Then the tables will be reversed –’

  ‘And we’ll be shitting on them and not them on us,’ one boy interjected.

  ‘Correct. And once we’ve got this place cleared of the rats, we’ll move on to the roof of the next house and do the same thing all over again. It’ll be a damn long-winded procedure, but there is no other way. Are you with me?’

  ‘Yes, we’re with you, sir,’ came back the chorus of eager replies.

  ‘All right, the men on this side of the wall get your entrenching tools out and start hacking away – here. You lot over there begin firing up into the ceiling to cover their noise. I don’t want the Frogs to get wise to what we’re about. Let them think they’ve got us nice and trapped down here until we’re in position to give them the worse headache they’ve ever had in their lives.’

  * * *

  Von Dodenburg wriggled cautiously through the rubble and rose to his feet carefully, machine-pistol in hand. Behind him in the street the Maquis gunfire was still going on, but the alley in which he now found himself was silent and empty. He looked up at the side of the house and breathed a sigh of relief. It was bare of windows right up to the yellow leaves of tobacco hanging under the eaves to dry. Swiftly he slung his machine-pistol around his neck.

  ‘As quietly as you can,’ he whispered to the men waiting tensely behind him in the acrid, smoke-filled room, their shoulders covered with flakes of plaster from the bullet-riddled ceiling. ‘I’m going up; you follow. Once we’re up there, we’re in business.’

  Von Dodenburg stretched to his full height and caught hold of the edge of the blackened roof-beam which stuck through the whitened stone above his head. Hardly daring to breathe, he pulled himself upwards. For a moment he balanced, slim body pressed tight against the outer wall of the upper storey. Only the thin stone wall separated him from the Maquis. If they heard him now, nothing could stop their bullets from tearing his defenceless body to pieces.

  He reached up once again, seized hold of the eaves. A piece of rotten wood gave way in his hand and for a moment he thought the whole structure was going to come apart. But then it held. Slowly he began to heave himself upwards. His nose filled with the bitter fragrance of the drying tobacco leaves and suddenly he was dragging himself up and over the eaves on to the tiles themselves.

  For a moment he lay there on the warm tiles, catching his breath and listening keenly to discover if he had been spotted from below, then sat up, peeled off his boots and crept on stockinged feet to the chimney where he left them.

  The first man had appeared over the edge of the eaves. Von Dodenburg helped him up and signed to him to remove his boots too.

  As soon as there were four of them crouched on the red roof, von Dodenburg raised one of the red tiles and placed it carefully to one side. Together they peeled off the tiles until they had uncovered over a square metre of roof. The musty stench of a century of neglect rose to meet them.

  Von Dodenburg wrinkled his nose disgustedly, and bending his head, peered carefully below. He could see the usual blackened roof joists and beams, and below them a thin plaster ceiling through which he glimpsed the thin strips of wood that supported the ceiling. They were old and brittle and he knew that a swift kick would send the whole ceiling crashing down.

  He signalled the men to close up and whispered to one, ‘Get your grenade. As soon as I kick a hole in that ceiling, lob it in. Then we all count to four and go in firing.’ Von Dodenburg knew the danger of carrying out this type of operation with untrained men, but there was no other way. ‘Make sure,’ he added warningly, ‘that we all go in back to back. That way,’ he forced a smile, ‘we kill the Frogs and not each other!’

  ‘All right, stand back.’ He rose to his full height and jabbed his stockinged heel through the lathes. They crumbled at once, almost dragging him with them. A jagged hole appeared. There was a surprised ‘les Boches!’ from below. The boy dropped his stick grenade into the hole carefully. Together they counted four. Below the room was rent by a great explosion. A wave of blast slapped von Dodenburg in the face like a blow. A moment later all four of them dropped through the roof, firing wildly.

  The interior of the upper room was an incredible shambles. Dead and dying Maquis lay groaning everywhere, caught completely by surprise. One of them tried to stagger to his feet, sten-gun in his bloody hands. With almost careless brutality von Dodenburg let him have the butt of his Schmeisser in the face. Next to him, the boy who had lobbed the grenade put his rifle to the base of the Frenchman’s skull and pulled the trigger.

  ‘All right, that’s enough!’ von Dodenburg ordered harshly turning over the body of the man nearest him with his toe. Most of the man’s face had gone, torn off by the full force of the grenade. He was dead all right, as were the rest of the Frenchmen crumpled in the bloody mess. ‘You,’ von Dodenburg ordered the boy, ‘get our boots down. The rest of you help to get rid of this barricade.’ He bent down and grabbed at the heavy plank of wood wedged between an ancient farmer’s chest, which had been used to bar the stairs. ‘We want the rest of them up here at the double. We’ve got a damnably long job in front of us if we’re ever going to clear this street and get to that battery!’

  * * *

  But von Dodenburg was mistaken. Ten minutes later, after having cleared the second house, as he was making a personal reconnaissance of the roof of the third house, he heard the unmistakable rattle of tank tracks. He raised himself carefully and peered over his shoulder. His heart leaped as he recognised the squat silhouette of the Mark IV and watched it making its way cautiously down a little track from the fields into the village. The Maquis had already spotted it and were directing a steady stream of tracer at it, but the bullets were bouncing off its thick armoured glacis plate as if they were ping-pong balls.

  Von Dodenburg bit his bottom lip thoughtfully. Although the Mark IV was buttoned up for action and he couldn’t see the crew, he knew instinctively that only two men could have managed to barrel through the Maquis traps set for the Germans on the coastal road – the big Hamburger Schulze and his little mate Matz. Von Dodenburg’s dirt-streaked, bloody face lit up with a smile as if he had just spotted the whole weight of the Bodyguard Division with Sepp Dietrich in personal charge coming to their rescue.

  Squirming round on to his back, he fumbled for his signal pistol. He loaded it swiftly and fired two hasty shots into the air. The first flare exploded and bathed the confused melee below a sickly green. An instant later there was a spurt of silver light as the second exploded. The Mark IV changed direction almost at once and von Dodenburg scuttled hastily for the safety of the second house as the angry Maquis fire turned on him, and the slugs whined off the tiles all around.

  * * *

&nb
sp; ‘It’s the First!’ Schulze cried excitedly, recognising von Dodenburg’s green and white signal flares. ‘Over there to the left!’ He swung his machine-gun round and fired another short burst at the Maquis hidden in the sheds surrounding them.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Matz cried angrily, ‘I’m not shitting well blind you know.’ He pulled back the left tiller bar and jerked the Mark IV violently round, sending Schulze caareening against the hull. His mouth filled with salt-tasting blood.

  ‘By the Great Whore of Buxtehude,’ Schulze roared, ‘watch what yer about, you perverted little banana sucker, or I’ll rip off yer wooden leg and beat the porridge out of yer brains with it!’

  Matz wasn’t listening. Two hundred metres away a Maquis had flopped down directly in their path, a strange cumbersome object clasped to his shoulder. ‘What’s he up to, Schulze?’ he cried.

  ‘It’s a Piat – a Tommy Piat!’ Schulze yelled, recognising the primitive British bazooka immediately. ‘If he gets that up our knickers, we won’t be virgins any more!’ Hastily he pressed the 75mm’s pedal. The twin triangles of the sight met on the lone figure. He snatched at the firing lever. The 75mm erupted with a roar. The blast whipped back and filled the closed turret with hot acrid smoke. The HE1 struck the ground just in front of the Piat-gunner. When the smoke had vanished, all that was left was a blackened, smoking hole in the ground where the gunner had been.

  ‘What yer trying to do, Schulze,’ Matz sneered, ‘knocking out individual stubble-hoppers with a 75mm shell? Don’t yer know those things cost twenty marks each?’

  ‘Concentrate on pushing this pram or I’ll stick the next one up your –’ A group of Maquis burst from a shed, carrying sticky bombs. Schulze let them have a burst with his twin Spandaus. At 800 rounds a minute they didn’t have a chance. A moment later the Mark IV rolled over them, its tracks cutting their bodies to pieces and flinging them out on either side like chopped beef.