The Bloody Road To Death (Cassell Military Paperbacks)

by Sven Hassel

  Porta washes his mouth out with a half bottle of Crimean champagne, to which he helps himself without being asked.

  ‘Who said anything about Fords? I’m talking about Caterpillars. What do you say to that?’

  ‘You’re lyin’,’ comes from Wolf before he remembers the first rule of buying: show no interest in what is being offered.

  Porta opens a tin of beef, without asking permission, and shovels the contents down his throat with his bayonet.

  ‘Where you keepin’ these Caterpillars?’

  Porta finishes off the tin before replying and is obviously enjoying Wolf’s impatience.

  ‘I haven’t got ’em. I just happen to know where they’re at just now.’

  ‘We’re wasting one another’s time,’ decides Wolf, brusquely. ‘You can’t sell something you haven’t got.’

  ‘You do it all the time, Wolf,’ laughs Porta, craftily. ‘Do we get coffee to fill up on after that modest lunch?’

  ‘I’ll move the bloody shithouse in here for you, if you like!’ snarls Wolf. ‘Get your stinking feet off the table, you bastard. You’ll never learn culture, you! Stickin’ your feet up alongside your host’s plate ain’t gonna make you popular. I did think of offerin’ you a job when we finish the war, but it’d be like lettin’ a ravening pig loose on the unfortunate rest of the world.’

  ‘Mocca!’ Wolf orders his servant, a former Russian sergeant, to bring coffee, but unwillingly.

  ‘The man said coffee!’ shouts Porta after the Russian.

  ‘Since getting to know you I’ve been converted to the Tory party, an’ boy how I do hate the socialist gutter proletariat,’ rumbles Wolf, sourly.

  ‘I drink only Java,’ roars Porta, without feeling himself insulted in the slightest.

  ‘Java? Where in the hell do you think I’d be able to get Java from?’ lies Wolf.

  ‘Get the shit out of your ears, Wolf,’ laughs Porta, confidently. ‘You picked up three sacks of Java a month ago. You can fool the entire German army all the time but me you can never fool, chum!’

  ‘Ain’t Santos good enough for you? The poor, persecuted German people’d give their bollocks for one cup of Santos. There’s some of thé Herrenvolk who ain’t ever even tasted Santos.’

  ‘You’re a really wicked man, you are, Wolf!’ Porta smiles winningly. ‘In the first place I am not one of the poor, persecuted Germans you mentioned before. Between you, me and the gatepost they can all get fucked as far as I’m concerned. I’d sell them, the Fatherland and all it contains, including flags, to neighbour Ivan tomorrow. I don’t want your bitter Santos shit. I want Java. And, friend, if I don’t get it now, you won’t have any left in stock tomorrow!’

  Wolf turns his head and roars after the Russian sergeant.

  ‘Igor, Java! Blend B!’

  ‘Blend A, friend!’ Porta corrects him.

  A beautiful aroma fills the whole stores. They eat cheese tart with their coffee.

  ‘I’ve got ten pounds of tea,’ says Porta, after the fourth cup of coffee. ‘Darjeeling with a little green in it,’ he adds. ‘Grand stuff, it is. Make a Chinese mandarin shoot up in the air with his bollock’s rattlin’ the Radetzsky March all the while he was on his way up!’

  ‘Bullshit!’ says Wolf. ‘Tea’s unobtainable today. I ought to know. I’ve tried. China’s big enough and it’s covered with tea. My China boys tell me there’s enough for ’em to be able to drown themselves in it if they wanted. But we’re not in China!’

  ‘Connections,’ boasts Porta, superciliously. ‘I’ve got the lot. Fancy a camel train with a full harem and some Arabian bum-boys, or an English submarine complete with shells an’ torpedoes? Easy meat! Scotland Yard’s breathin’ down the neck of the engineer, so he goes with it. You can cruise to your heart’s content, Wolf!’

  ‘Piss!’ growls Wolf unimpressed. ‘Camels I’ve got. Who wants camels nowadays? It’s wheels they’re after! What you want for it?’

  ‘What’ll you pay?’ asks Porta, picking his teeth with his combat knife.

  ‘Ten thousand marks,’ offers Wolf, with a covetous look in his eyes.

  Porta throws himself back in his chair, roaring with laughter.;

  ‘I ain’t short of shithouse paper, Wolf!’

  Wolf rises without a word and goes into an adjoining room. He runs his fingers along the wall. It opens and a safe comes into view. He unclips several leads and opens the safe. Anyone else opening it would get himself blown to pieces.

  When he gets back Porta is sitting on the table teasing the wolf-hounds which snarl and snap at him in rage. Wolf laughs heartily.

  ‘Stop trying to feed my dogs, young son!’ He kicks at a sausage, which is lying on the floor. ‘I could make you eat it. How quick d’you think you’d kick the bucket?’

  ‘I’m pretty resistant,’ Porta smiles in friendly fashion. ‘I’d give myself thirty seconds, I reckon.’

  Wolf chases the vicious dogs into a corner. Snarling, they lie watching Porta, who comes down from the table.

  ‘Here!’ says Wolf, sliding a black box across to him. ‘You can have those for your tea!’

  Porta examines the three large diamonds with a jeweller’s glass.

  ‘You’re funny I Top of the bill in the village circus, you’d be. You know, the boy who falls on his arse all the time. Show that shit to an Amsterdam Jew, Wolf, an’ he’d have you under the doctor before you could turn round.’

  ‘Hey?’ said Wolf, insulted.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about, all right. Christmas at Tiffany’s. Shove that glass up your arse and save it till you have to deal with a Socialist, or some other kind of idiot.’

  ‘I don’t understand a word of it,’ sighs Wolf, banging the lid of the black box shut.

  ‘You look like a wet newspaper with the print all smeared out,’ grins Porta, jeeringly.

  ‘All right, forget it!’ Wolf gives in. ‘I admit they were paste, but how was I to know you hadn’t got yourself a brain injury when you got blown up last week in your battle waggon? Times are hard. It was worth a try.’

  ‘You’re bringing tears to my eyes, Wolf!’ says Porta.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like a month’s leave?’ Wolf smirks. ‘Or, maybe, a duty trip up an’ down Europe? How about, now, a hospitalization with a real ailment as no M.O. can cure?That is, not before you want to get cured.’

  ‘Jesus, Wolf, you’re full o’ shit!’ Porta shakes his head resignedly. ‘If I wanted leave I’d be out of here in ten minutes time. If I want to be sick I’ve got ten thousand diseases you’ve never even heard of, ranging from growing pains to plague and pestilence. God love us, any hospital’d roll out the red carpet for me if I really went to town on it. General Sauerbrauch, the top man’d be on his way by air to follow my complicated case as closely as possible. And duty trips! Duty trips I, Wolf, am the expert in arranging. Let’s see what else you’ve got in that safe, now!’

  ‘Porta, you just get close to that safe and you’ll have more holes in your Yid body’n a colander has. It’d take all the bloody doctor-generals in the German and the Russian armies to plug ’em up again, son!’

  ‘All right, Wolf, I don’t need to take off my boots to count to twenty. We’re not going to do a deal!’ Porta gets up and moves towards the door. He tightens his pistol belt, releases the safety catch on his Mpi and walks backwards. ‘Luckily I know a few other people who know what Darjeeling and green tea are worth. I made the offer for old time’s sake, so don’t break into tears when I come and tell you, in ten minute’s time, that I’ve sold the lot.’

  ‘Take it easy, now,’ smiles Wolf, trying to look pleasant. ‘Where’d you get that crazy idea that I didn’t want to buy the tea?’

  They seat themselves on Arabian cushions. Wolf’s security chief serves them with more coffee. A bottle of Napoleon brandy appears. Cigars appear from a silver box which once belonged to a Rumanian prince.

  After three hours of hard dealing the tea has changed hands. They go to pick it up. Smi
lingly they cover one another with Mpi’s. They have known one another for a long, long time.

  The tea is hidden behind some large bales of straw in a kolchos. Wolf tastes it sceptically. His tea experts, the two Chinese, examine it more scientifically and after a while declare it to be Darjeeling with an admixture of green tea.

  ‘Where the devil’d you get it from?’ he asks, suspiciously.

  ‘From China,’ answers Porta. ‘Where else? That’s where they fix this kind o’ stuff.’

  ‘You ain’t been to China ever, Porta!’

  ‘Look now! Did I ever ask you where you get the coppers to buy Darjeeling with green tea?’

  ‘There’s something fishy about this!’ Wolf mumbles, darkly.

  ‘Tea good, tea very good,’ shouts Wung. ‘I guarantee good tea. No better tea!’

  ‘I believe it,’ says Wolf, thoughtfully, ‘but I got an instinct more certain ’n fifty Jews. There’s somethin’ wrong that ain’t right. There’s bells goin’ off in my head.’

  ‘Forget it then,’ says Porta indifferently. ‘I’ll get rid of it easy enough. Then you can see where your fifty Jews’ve got you!’

  Wolf tongues the tea again and looks up at the heavens as if expecting a sign from God. The tea is good. It is very high quality tea. He straightens up and looks wickedly at Porta.

  ‘Joseph! If you’re doin’ me down with that tea, then Jesus Christ and the Holy Mother of Kazan be merciful to you! You’ll need more. You’ll need every single saint in the bloody calendar just to keep you alive, son!’

  Wolf pays and goes off with the tea.

  Porta makes to step up into Wolf’s amphibian, but the bodyguards push him back down roughly with their Mpi’s.

  ‘Deal’s closed! There’s no room for you here, Porta! Walk like the rest of the clodhoppers. Only the military upper classes ride.’

  ‘You might have kept a little of that tea back for us,’ says the Old Man disappointedly, when Porta returns.

  This stuff is better’n tea!’ grins Porta, holding a box of ancient gold coins up triumphantly. Tea’s soon pissed up the wall, but this yellow stuff keeps its value.’

  ‘Bleedin’ ’ell,’ cries Tiny in amazement. ‘There’s enough there to buy one of’ the gold-braided bleeders an’ all ’is staff, lock, stock an’ bleedin’ barrel.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll do just that one of these days,’ answers Porta, mysteriously. ‘Those chaps go up in value when our neighbours the enemy start holding war criminal trials.’

  ‘Would you help ’em?’ asks the Old Man, disgustedly, lighting his silver-lidded pipe.

  ‘I’1l help anybody with anything as long as they pay me enough for it. The Fatherland and flag-waving aren’t my cup of tea.’

  ‘You’d sell your own mother if you got the chance,’ says Heide, contemptuously.

  ‘Why not, then?’ answers Porta, smiling. ‘Once they got to know her they’d be willing to pay me to take her back. Now you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got a couple of the Army’s tractors to get rid of, pdq.’

  Wolf has guests when Porta arrives. A QM officer from the 4th Panzer Army, who has actually come to buy perfumed soap and girls. His eye falls on a bag of tea, and he forgets what he came for.

  ‘What’s that you’ve got there, Wolf?’ he asks, with a greedy look in his eye.

  ‘Tea,’ replies Wolf in a subdued voice, kicking himself for not having put the bag out of sight. There are limits to the price he can ask of the QM.

  Porta grins openly when he sees the light of greed in the QM’s eyes, and begins, without the least thought of comradeship, to extol the tea’s high quality. Wolf is not going to make much of a profit on that tea, and Porta is openly happy about that.

  ‘How much is there?’ asks the fat QM officer, weighing the bag in his hand.

  ‘Two pounds and a bit,’ mumbles Wolf, wishing he were able to kick the QM in the balls.

  ‘What kind of a price were you thinking of asking, Wolf? To me that is!’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not able to sell it, sir. It is not mine.’ He pours out cognac and hopes the QM will lose interest in the tea. He begins to describe the charms of the Polish and Slav ladies he is in touch with. ‘Real monkeys on a mattress they are, sir. They know how to wiggle more than their ears, they do!’ he shouts enthusiastically.

  ‘Let us get back to the question of who really owns the tea,’ says the QM, with a cunning gleam in the eyes behind the pebble lenses of his spectacles. They make him look like a fat toad sitting on a sun-warmed rock.

  ‘I’m sorry sir. The tea belongs to a high-ranking officer.’ Wolf pats his shoulder and runs a finger over his left breast several times to indicate just how high-ranking.

  ‘I’ve heard of even high-ranking officers having things stolen from them, despite their rows of medals,’ considers the QM officer, inflating his fat cheeks.

  Internally Chief Mechanic Wolf has to agree with him.

  ‘Sir, sir! No indeed. I’m an honest man. I could never do a thing like that.’ For a moment Wolf looks like a saint in a stained-glass window.

  Porta coughs discreetly in the background, and pours more cognac into his glass. Wolf has quite forgotten him. When he tilts the bottle over his glass again, Wolf tears it out of his hand and fills his own glass and the toad-like QM’s. Quick as lightning Porta exchanges his empty glass for Wolf’s full one.

  Wolf sends him a wicked look. A long discussion, on the subject of the tea, follows between Wolf and QM Toad. The QM explains, pleasantly, the procedure by which he could if he wished commandeer it. He is, of course, Chief of the 4th Panzer Army’s Quartermaster Branch.

  Wolf replies with a beautifully oblique threat, which the QM allows to slide off without any visible reaction. He has too many irons in the fire with Wolf to be able to allow himself to feel insulted. Wolf has hold of the right end of the stick. If he goes, the 4th Panzer Army will go with him, and the tidal wave will take more than a few others with them. Even in Admiral Schröder Strasse this would be noticed.

  After a long time, the QM officer leaves with his bag of tea. He is on top of the world. Partly from cognac, partly from having obtained the tea. He has completely forgotten the highly-praised ladies. He loves tea and has calculated on now having enough of it to last him for the rest of the war, even if it turns into a war of attrition with trenches and the milder forms of poison gas.

  Wolf has become the happy owner of a large brown bear, which can drink beer and throw hand-grenades.

  ‘What do you want with that horrible monster?’ asks Porta, in amazement, as he stands with Wolf watching the bear, which has just arrived as passenger in a large Mercedes. The driver, an SS-oberscharfiirer, salutes as he dismounts from the vehicle. The bear has a green NKVD officer’s cap on its head and is immediately supplied with a crate of beer. Wolf knows how to make a high-ranking Russian officer welcome.

  Porta laughs until he is on the verge of getting cramp in his stomach, and soon becomes good friends with the bear. They kiss in Russian style. Wolf looks thoughtfully from the bear to Porta.

  ‘I’ll sell him to you,’ he decides. ‘He’ll be enormously useful to you at the front. Teach him to eat Reds, and when you’re on a moppin’-up job he can sniff out their hiding-places for you.’

  ‘That’s not a bad idea you’ve got there,’ considers Porta, looking at the bear with great interest. ‘I’ve heard these bears are a lot easier to teach than dogs or horses. I could teach him to do the Red salute with a clenched paw. The gold-braided boys’d love it. Even they couldn’t punish a Russian bear for being true to Moscow. What’d your conscience permit you to let him go for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Wolf, slowly. ‘Bears are a bit outside my field. I’ve taken him over from a bankrupt Russian circus.’

  ‘They’re a drug on the market,’ says Porta, knowledgeably. ‘Siberia’s swimming with ’em.’

  ‘We ain’t in Siberia though, Porta,’ Wolf reminds him.

  ‘You’ll get there sooner
or later,’ Porta warns him, ominously.

  ‘Yeah, the way the sun seems to be settin’ over the German Reich, with the strong possibility of a new movement of the German peoples northwards, you may be right,’ Wolf points at the bear. ‘It’s possible there’s many like him in Siberia but they haven’t all learnt to drink beer and swing a club.’

  ‘You’re wrong, man, wrong! Haven’t you heard,’ cries Porta. ‘The Siberian bars are full of ’em till far into the night!’

  They go over to discuss Caterpillars, and when they finally agree, and Wolf has seen them and found that they are so new that the protective grease has not yet been removed, he cries, in wonder:

  ‘Hell, Porta. Did the Yanks consign these straight to you?’

  ‘Not far wrong,’ Porta boasts, gesturing broadly with his hands. ‘They’ve come by rail direct from God’s Own Country via the Arctic Circle. There’s even a Bible installed just behind the carburettor!’

  ‘Jesus, boy,’ comes admiringly from Wolf. ‘Keep on like this an’ you’ll soon be sunnin’ yourself along with the big Greeks in Monaco!’

  They drive home to Wolf to have a drink on the bargain. The bear rolls itself into a ball in the corner and eyes the wolfhounds with contempt. They keep a respectful distance.

  ‘To prove I am your true friend,’ begins Wolf, solemnly, ‘I will give you the bear as a present!’

  ‘That is meant friendly?’ asks Porta suspiciously. ‘You want to get him out of your hair, Wolf! He’s unsaleable, and those brown boys eat more than a hungry German who’s lived through the last three wars. To be perfectly honest I don’t care much for your present. It’ll certainly bring me more problems than pleasure. Before you know where you are you get blistered on a monster like that. Remember that pig we had. The one we couldn’t bring ourselves to slaughter. If the neighbours hadn’t captured Sophie we’d’ve had her yet, and that brown boy there looks to have more charm than Sophie ever did! Pets don’t belong in the Army. Look at his eyes! What he needs is a good home, to ensure him a happy old age. What’s his name, by the way?’