The Bloody Road To Death (Cassell Military Paperbacks)

by Sven Hassel

  The train rocks through dark mountains, and crosses the border without stopping. It is already two days late. Outside Budapest there is a stop for the entry signal.

  Carl’s eye falls on some military graves with rusty helmets hanging on cheap crosses.

  ‘Poor sods!’ he says in a melancholy voice. ‘The Fatherland doesn’t give the dead heroes much, does it?’

  ‘The Fatherland’s a load of cunning Jewboys!’ states Porta.

  A large gull lands on one of the crosses. It screams a protest when a crow chases it off.

  Inquisitively the crow sticks its beak under the helmet, stops to preen its feathers and then investigates again.

  ‘See him looking,’ says Porta. ‘The black bastard hasn’t forgotten the good times when they let the soldiers’ bodies lie on the ground long enough for the crows to get their favourite delicacy, human eyes.’

  A Rumanian soldier shows them his stump of an arm.

  ‘Bang, crash, Germanos,’ he explains in a strange homemade lingua franca, at the same time gesticulating fiercely with his good hand. ‘Malo koszenep szepen11. Job tvojemadj! Nic hamm nesjov12.’

  The train crawls into the Budapest main station. Three hours to wait. Troop transports have first priority.

  In the dirty station restaurant, which stinks of unwashed soldiers, they try to get some food.

  There is a very elegant menu. They choose chicken soup piquant. If the menu is to be believed it contains: chicken meat, celery, carrots, dried ginger, onions, bean shoots, eggs and sliced lemons. It turns out to be yellow-white water in which the closest inspection shows no trace of even fat on the surface. The piquant chicken soup is also cold.

  ‘This soup is cold!’ says Porta, pointing to his plate.

  The waiter, in his greasy dinner jacket, sticks a finger into the soup to test it, and shakes his head with a smile.

  ‘Is warm, herr German soldier!’

  ‘Is cold, herr Hungarian waiter!’ replies Porta.

  The waiter fetches the cook, a big, fat wicked-looking fellow, who, without a word, takes Porta’s spoon and tastes the soup.

  ‘Warm!’ he grins, showing blackened teeth, and turns on his heel to go.

  Tiny catches him by the back of his collar and pushes his face down into the soup.

  ‘Get drinkin’ then, you gypsy bastard!’ he yells, raging.

  The cook drinks like a thirsty horse to avoid drowning in the soup. They pour the two other plates of soup down inside his trousers, and followed by earnest threats to shoot his head off he bolts into his kitchen.

  When they leave the restaurant with their hunger still unsatisfied, the Rumanian veteran comes running after them.

  ‘Nicn ham13!’ he shouts despairingly.

  The train is more than crowded. There is only room in the first class. There they can put their feet up, whilst everywhere else passengers are packed like sardines. They even have to stand in the toilets, where they laugh at people who want to use them.

  ‘Piss out the window,’ they advise, ’not against the wind, please. Here’s a lady wants to go. Anybody got a rubber pocket?’

  Every Central European uniform is on display. MPs with shiny half-moon badges push their way roughly through the crush. They nod discreetly to leather-coated civilians with pulled-down hat brims. Gestapo. There is always a check on. Let your mouth flap too loosely and you’ll feel a heavy hand on your shoulder as you leave the train:

  ‘Geheime Staatspolizei!’

  Without a ripple another person has disappeared.

  There are three thousand people packed into the long express train, which thunders, without light, through the country on its way to Germany. Germany, lying like a tumour in the guts of Europe, with its barracks, prisons, concentration camps, hospitals, execution squares and cemeteries. A land where tortured millions spend most of their nights sheltering in cellars.

  The engine-driver takes a swig from his thermos of coffee. He has been driving for eighteen hours without a break. Rules say, no more than eight hours, but there is a war on and engine-drivers are in short supply.

  His mate shovels coal into the flaming maw beneath the boiler.

  In the first class carriages people are getting ready for bed. An oberst in long underpants is listening to a major from the secret police.

  ‘In Odessa we used to stand them up on a truck. When we drove away, they were left there hanging,’ laughs the major. ‘It was quite comical to see.’

  The oberst nods silently, and continues to press carefully at a pimple, staring into the mirror.

  Loud sighs can be heard from the next carriage where a Rumanian oil engineer is taking care of a German oberst’s wife. She has been to Bukarest to visit her husband who is seriously wounded. The engineer kisses her and slides his hand over her rounded bottom. She giggles and pushes at him.

  He bends her back on to the plush of the seat, lifts her grey pleated skirt so that a black suspender belt comes to view. He lifts her a little higher up.

  She laughs excitedly as he pushes her legs apart.

  ‘No!’ she whispers. ‘You mustn’t!’

  He catches her around the behind and pulls her towards him. To the rhythm of the train they enjoy the pleasures of love.

  In a carriage a little further down the train a German nurse is lying with her dress up above her hips. An infantry leutnant has his face pushed down between her legs. She twines her legs round his neck and rolls her body, panting pleasurably.

  On the seat across from them a naval officer is pulling a pair of red panties down over the hips of a well-known doctor’s wife from Vienna. Her fingers are tearing at his trouser buttons. She stares in fascination at the couple on the opposite seat.

  Porta has just completed a deal concerning a black pig which will walk on a leash like a dog. Carl and Tiny are shooting dice with two sailors. The boxes hang on the floor which they are using as a table. Between throws Tiny is stroking a Rumanian country girl along the thighs.

  ‘When you get to ’Eyn ’Oyer Strasse, just ask for Crooked Albert. ‘’E’ll ’elp you get a proper job. A bint like you ’adn’t ought to ’ave to burn ’erself out in a bleedin’ factory.’

  ‘What will the Gestapo say?’ asks the girl nervously.

  ‘Keep away from ’em, an’ what the ’ell do you care what they say?’

  Howls and organ-like notes sound in the black night. The engine-driver drops his thermos flask, and springs at the brakes. His mate is at the door, ready to jump.

  The oberst in underpants listens nervously, toothbrush in hand. The major jumps down from the upper berth and begins to hunt feverishly for his uniform.

  ‘Planes!’ he shouts. ‘No peace for the wicked. If it’s not one thing it’s another. It’s about time they discovered that bloody final weapon!’

  ‘What is it?’ asks the nurse who now has her head buried between the leutnant’s legs.

  ‘Listen!’ says the oberst’s wife to her oil engineer. Her naked behind is sticking straight up in the air.

  ‘To hell with it!’ gasps the engineer, who is almost finished. He intends to finish too, even if the entire American Air Force is going to attack the train all at once. He grabs her thighs and presses himself madly into her.

  The naval officer and the doctor’s wife are on the floor. She is on top. They are concentrating so hard on what they are doing that they do not hear the voice of war outside.

  ‘What the ’ell?’ roars Tiny who has just got the drawers off the country girl. ‘Couldn’t those flyin’ bleeders’ve waited ten more bleedin’ minutes?’

  ‘We’re leaving,’ says Porta, tucking the black pig under one arm.

  Carl throws himself on to the floor and holds his hands over his head as protection against what is coming.

  A naked girl runs screaming down the corridor with her lover after her in socks and a brief shirt.

  ‘The German soldier can be made filthy but never is filthy,’ states a Generalmajor proudly. He is speaking to s
ome Hungarian and Rumanian officers in an insulated carriage. They do not hear the Jabo’s14 which come screaming from the clouds, sending tracer tracking down at the railway line.

  The following wave drops bombs. Earth lifts itself in fountains on both sides of the tracks. Stones, earth and mud cascade down over the train.

  On the next sweep they hit the engine. The stoker saves himself by throwing himself off. Head over heels he goes, down the slope, is up like a shot and running towards the woods. It is not the first time he has saved his life like this. He throws himself down into a depression and stares towards the train which is slowly losing speed.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ!’ he gasps. ‘They’re cleanin’ up all right!’

  Automatic cannon hammer. Another carriage ploughs down the slope, rolls over on its side and disappears. A German and a Jugoslavian carriage steeple on end as if in a loving embrace. The bogies smash down on to the rails.

  The oberst in long pants runs sobbing across the track. A tracer burst goes straight through him. Like a slaughtered pig his body rolls down the slope.

  A pair of torn-off wheels run straight across him, cutting his body in two.

  The major of police is running with his black GEKADOS folder under his arm: a folder which contains sentences of death. He falls into a hole but arrives in it together with an aerial bomb. There is nothing left of him or his GEKADOS folder.

  The naked girl has taken cover under an overturned carriage. The blast of a bomb sends the carriage sliding further down the slope. The girl is plastered to its side like butter on to warm bread.

  The nurse and the leutnant come running along the side of the train. Nobody notices she has only stockings and a suspender belt on. They run straight into a burst from a Jabo and never even feel the kiss of death.

  The doctor’s wife from Vienna is thrown through a window. A long pointed piece of glass cuts her body open lengthwise. Her entrails hang in the splintered glass of the window.

  The naval officer has disappeared completely. Only his cap remains lying on the floor of the compartment.

  Most of the passengers are lying strewn about between the tall slender fir trees. Crows flap slowly over the smashed train.

  The bombs have bored their way inside the train and blown the passengers out amongst the trees. Screams and cries arise from the mass of chopped meat, brains, bones and joints.

  The Generalmajor is throwing up over a body. The screams of the injured drown out the sounds he is making. He is usually proud of his toughness. He has seen blood enough in his time, and is used to the sight of mangled bodies. But the sight of bluish-red entrails covered with masses of wet gorged flies has been too much for even a tough German Divisional Commander, who glories in the thought of a hero’s death.

  An SD officer is lying a little way inside the wood. Looking up through a lacework of fir needles and morning light, he sees the remains of a woman transfixed on the point of a tree. The arms are gone. The legs hang to one side like the wings of a bird gliding. A hat with a blue feather is still on her head.

  She must have been hit by blast, he thinks, and cannot pull his eyes away from the grotesque corpse swaying in the tree-tops. He cannot move. A stake has gone straight through him and pinned him to the ground, but he feels no pain.

  Several carriages remain on the track. Inside they are like slaughter-houses. Wounded and dead in a mash of crushed bones and shredded meat.

  A soldier runs shouting down the track. Blood spurts from his shoulder.

  ‘Bastards, bastards, look what they’ve done to me arm!’ He stumbles, falls forward and dies.

  A gefreiter, no more than seventeen, sits on a torn-off carriage door and stares at his legs. They are hanging by shreds of sinew. His face is bloody. Only his eyes are alive. He touches his Iron Cross ist Class. A crumb of payment for lost youth. The Fatherland’s dirty thanks to a betrayed generation.

  A relief train arrives from the opposite direction. It stops just in front of the overturned engine.

  An oberstabsarzt in long shiny riding boots examines the scene of butchery coldly. He barks some orders, and medical orderlies swarm out with tarpaulins under their arms. First wounded German soldiers, then dead German soldiers. Then German civilians, and last of all people from the occupied territories.

  ‘Jesus,’ cries Porta, who is sitting on a windshield between Tiny and Carl. ‘Those bombs can really tidy up! Much more effective than shells!’

  ‘What’s that ’e’s got in ’is ’and?’ asks Tiny, pointing at the body of a dead cavalryman.

  Carl bends over and opens the clenched hand. A hundred mark note and three dice appear.

  ‘Looks as if he’d thrown a six,’ says Carl.

  ‘Holy Mother of Kazan!’ bursts out Tiny, in astonishment.

  ‘Won himself a spot in Heaven, then,’ considers Porta.

  ‘Poor sod. Died with three sixes and a hundred marks up on the game,’ sighs Carl, pulling the cork from a bottle of schnapps. He caught it as it came flying through the air from the restaurant car.

  ‘Your bleedin’ pig’s eatin’ a body,’ grins Tiny.

  ‘Always hungry, that pig,’ says Porta, shaking his head. ‘Been too long with the Germans.’

  Two medical orderlies come past with a dead leutnant on a stretcher. His leg has been blown off and they have laid it across the body. It falls off and rolls down the slope. The long shiny boot is still on it and completely undamaged. The spur winks in the sun.

  Carl picks up the leg and puts it back on the leutnant’s body.

  ‘Sag’ zum Abschied, leise Servus,’ sings Porta after the stretcher with the dead leutnant.

  ‘There’s a few as ’as got it ’ere,’ says Tiny. ‘The Fatherland’s a greedy bastard.’

  ‘Makes you creep to think of all these people killed so quickly,’ says Carl.

  ‘A man who cries over this sort of happening is not a true German, he is gutless.’ says Porta, picking the pig up and placing it under his arm.

  ‘I’m that bleedin’ ’ungry,’ says Tiny. ‘Wonder if they’re goin’ to give us some grub?’

  They stop beside the bodies of two Blitetnädel15.

  ‘Shit!’ cries Porta. ‘What a pair of thighs. The devil knows what he’s doing if that’s what he wants.’

  ‘Army field service mattress, model 39/40,’ grins Tiny, lifting up a skirt inquisitively. There’s them as does it with dead bodies,’ he whispers confidentially.

  ‘Are you mad?’ says Porta. ‘You’d go straight to hell.’

  From a coppice they hear cursing and groans. They push the branches aside and find a dying unteroffizier with an unexploded 20mm shell projecting from his chest.

  ‘Cursing like that and him a dying man,’ says Carl in outrage.

  ‘If God won’t have him the Devil must!’ says Porta the practical.

  Medical orderlies carry him away. A workshops train removes the remains of the shattered express.

  In Vienna their journey is broken for several days. Porta wants to go to Grinzing.

  ‘You can always pick up something there,’ he explains to the other two. ‘You’d have to look like Frankenstein with a hangover to go home without getting it there.’

  In Munich they meet an acquaintance of Porta’s. A gefreiter from the Alpine Jaegers who is celebrating the day his mother almost died, twenty-five years ago. The black pig is invited. It learns how to drink beer at that party.

  It is raining when they leave Munich, a miserable, wet day. The carriage smells of wet clothing and sour bodies.

  Carl is out of humour. He is not in a hurry any more.

  They stand close together in the corridor and stare out at the sad-looking country which rushes past them. Ruins everywhere. They have to wait several hours outside Stuttgart while an air attack is in progress.

  ‘’Ail the ’appy German warrior!’ says Tiny.

  Porta bites thoughtfully into a piece of bread.

  ‘How lucky we were to be born in Germany
,’ sighs Carl despondently.

  ‘Anybody here who thinks I love the Fatherland and the thought of letting myself be killed for it?’ asks Porta, pro-vokingly, in a general question to the other equally miserable-looking passengers.

  Tiny shakes with laughter, and stares at a German peasant who is in the process of pouring a drink from a bottle of schnapps.

  ‘If you was to offer me one, do you think I’d say no?’

  The peasant passes him the bottle grudgingly.

  Tiny takes a huge swig and passes it to Porta and Carl, who almost empty it.

  The peasant looks sorrowfully at the remains, and decides to drink what is left while there is any.

  On a cold rainy Sunday afternoon they arrive at Karlsruhe, where they change to a small local train.

  A cross-looking RTO officer stops them and demands their papers. He looks Carl up and down, sneeringly. Then he points at the black pig which follows Porta on a lead.

  ‘What you got there?’ he hisses.

  ‘My dog!’ answers Porta, clicking his heels.

  ‘That’s a dirty pig,’ protests the major.

  ‘No, sir, it’s clean!’ answers Porta.

  The major shakes his head and marches away with a jingle of spurs.

  They travel only a short way with the local train. The track has been bombed. Fifteen miles or so from Germersheim they decide to walk the last stage. It is pouring with rain. The pig squeals. They cover it with ground-sheets.

  ‘’E’s ’ungry!’ says Tiny.

  ‘If we had some flour we could make pancakes,’ suggests Porta, licking his lips. ‘Pigs like pancakes too.’

  ‘Jesus an’ Mary, pancakes! Pancakes with sugar an’ jam,’ shouts Tiny, excitedly. ‘Maybe there’s rum somewhere about? It’s that lovely it don’t bear thinkin’ about.’

  ‘Be a nice farewell meal for Carl, too, before he moves into Purgatory,’ says Porta. ‘We are bloody well going to have pancakes and rum with sugar and jam. We bloody are!

  ‘Shut it!’ snarls Carl. ‘You lot make me sick!’

  ‘You’re going to have a tip-top meal before we turn you over to those bastards in the pokey!’ promises Porta solemnly.

  ‘We’ll get it with our bleedin’ grease-guns,’ shouts Tiny. ‘Then they’ll know – these bleedin’ sausage-eatin’ stay-at-’ome bastards there’s visitors come in from the bleedin’ east.’