by Steve Vernon
We could see the village below us. Not a breath of life stirred within its fences and huts but I thought I saw something moving in the church.
“Do you see her sir?” Gerhardt asked.
He always called me sir. I’m not certain why. I wasn’t anything more than a soldier with a bit of brass.
“See who?” I asked.
“The nun, sir,” He pointed at the church. “The red nun.”
I focused my binoculars in the direction he’d pointed. Then I saw her standing outside of the church. A nun all dressed in a blood red habit. She must have been perched up on a window ledge or some sort of balcony because she looked as if she were levitating.
In truth, she looked to be dancing. Not a waltz or a polka but a strange sort of shimmering dance that struck me as both celebratory and strangely hungry. I dismissed it as my imagination. War did that to a man. In the heat of battle you might see all of the devils of hell coming out to feed. Shapes moved in the shadows and artillery shells shrieked out your name.
“She’d better pray hard,” I said. “Hauptman’s devils have come to call.”
Major Hauptman was our commanding officer. He was a lean man, all cuts and angles, worn and weathered with a hide like a bit of smoked leather. I would have trusted him with my life but I had never learned to like him. Respect and affection often walk two different roads.
We stood there amongst trees so tall that we could barely see the sky. They leaned down as if they were listening to us, like old men leaning down over children. They were leaning and listening, or maybe they were reaching. I and the other ranking officers stood silently as Major Hauptman considered his plans. We didn’t have a full contingent of officers. Just as many as served our purpose. We were symbols and figureheads, nothing more than that.
“Should we advance?” I asked. “Take the village and hold it?”
Hauptman snorted.
“That collection of piss pots and pig sties wouldn’t offer enough cover to harbor a mosquito. We’ll meet them here, and drive them back. Let the rear echelon stallions hold the outhouses. We’ll advance or die.”
I pointed down at the church.
“That church would offer some cover.”
Hauptman looked at it warily.
“I don’t like the look of it.”
And that’s all he would say.
*
We dug in as best as we could. The November dirt was frozen harder than a whoremaster’s heart but we swung our entrenching spades like we were digging for gold. A hole can be a good friend to a soldier. I crouched in the darkness of my foxhole, staring up at the heavy swollen autumn moon.
“Hunter’s moon,” Gerhardt said. “Bad luck for Ivan. We’ll see them coming.”
I nodded thoughtfully. She was a hunter’s moon for certain. Fat and full and gravid with auger. I wondered what it meant.
I shook my head. “If we can see them it stands to reason that they’ll see us.”
Gerhardt shrugged. “It’s a damned poor knife that cuts only one way.”
We fell into uneasy silence. Ivan was coming. Out there in the darkness I could hear him stomping stolidly through the snow. A vast Russian bear, with armor that our petty little artillery couldn’t hope to pierce. His was a fat and heavy army, thick with blood and meat and muscle. An army of solid peasants who looked on us like a field that was ready to be plowed under.
Our rotten currant-crapping troops were nothing next to this. Our Wermacht were far too civilized. We were born in a country of warmth and easy living. We had forgotten the growl of the polar wind, the bite of the snow freezing the meat from our bones, the taste of steel and death.
Ivan was harder than we could ever dream. His troops had pulled themselves from some primeval muck beyond the roots of time. We never imagined such brutality. Our smiling Panzer divisions had breezed across the Polish border and the steppe had sucked us in until winter slammed the door behind us. It was 1943 and the German army had begun to lose. I was both terrified and afraid to die but ready to do what duty demanded.
In the belly of the night I heard a soft whistling like a bird singing a death song and I let it croon me down to a hard dreamless sleep.
*
The next morning the enemy arrived. We were outnumbered, as usual. A horde of stocky Siberians, their skin and uniform the color of the dirt they would soon lie in. They charged at our position like eager wolves.
“Hurrah,” they shouted hoarsely from throats burned raw with cheap vodka and harsh tobacco. Everything about them was crude, even their weapons. Blunt ugly little submachine guns with fat drums of ammunition slung beneath them. The submachine guns had a loud angry sound, but they killed just as efficiently as our finely designed Schmeisser submachine guns.
A Siberian rifleman came at me. Gerhardt caught him with a boot between his legs. I took the Siberian’s jaw off with a hard swing of my rifle butt. He stood there gawking at me, blinded by the shock and pain until a blast from his own line opened his chest and dropped him.
A whistling shell took a German corporal’s head off at the neck. His decapitated body kept firing blindly treewards, driven by long drilled memory and simple nerve action. I wondered if he thought he was killing something.
We met the Siberians with everything we had, with tactics that were more desperate than courageous. Our rifles cracked like a celebration of fireworks. The barrel of our platoon machine gun glowed dull red from the sheer volume of fire. I saw a fat Bavarian sergeant rip open the buttons of his fly and sluice the barrel with his own piss to cool it down before it seized up. A Russian submachine gunner tore the Bavarian’s fat sausage fed belly open in midpiss. He splattered upon his boots as he fell into the dirt.
“They’re beating us, sir,” Gerhardt shouted above the gunfire, still grinning in the midst of the carnage. “Permission to reconnoiter the rear. I believe I saw an entire platoon of field whores in need of my manly protection.”
“Reconnoiter my unwiped rear end you fat beer swilling pervert. Fight harder! Fight or die!”
They were bold words and I meant them but I knew Gerhardt was right. We were losing. There were simply too many of them.
I heard someone on the right flank yelling. “Panzer! Panzer!”
It was a tank and not one of ours. One of those damn Ivan KV-1’s. Our best tank couldn’t begin to touch this brute. Our unit’s antitank gun, a puny 37mm, rang shell after shell off of the heavy tank’s glacis plate until the massive Bolshevik tank rolled completely over the glorified door knocker.
“Come on!” I shouted to Gerhardt, yanking out a stick grenade.
The KV-1 had two weaknesses. The first was the engine. The gearbox was prone to malfunction, however it wasn’t very practical to sit around and wait for a tank to break down. We had to exploit the tank’s second weakness.
In order to allow for the recoil of the tank’s heavy 76.2 mm cannon, the turret had a large overhang built into it. If a determined German soldier could place a charge of explosives directly beneath the ledge of this overhang, he could blast the turret completely from the tank’s hull.
“Here sir,” Gerhardt shouted, waving a single stick grenade and running in my direction.
If we’d had the time we could have wired the two grenades together but the Russians weren’t giving us the luxury of time. We scrambled through the gunfire, aiming ourselves for the rear of the tank, firing one-handed blasts of our Schmeissers. And then we scrambled up onto the tank itself. The rear metal was hot as hell from the engine working beneath it. My hands would be seared from the heat but I didn’t have time to think of that now. I jammed my grenade in under the ledge and Gerhardt jammed his beside mine as if we were working with a single shared mind. We pulled our pins simultaneously.
“Does this mean we’re married, sir?” Gerhardt cheekily shouted.
“JUMP!” I yelled.
We hit the ground hard. The tank rolled on without us, two more meters, before the grenades went off. The turret tilt
ed a little. We’d jammed the ring. Then our men threw themselves onto the metal monster, firing blindly through the observation slits. The ricocheting bullets, trapped inside the tank’s steel belly, did the rest.
I stood up, ears still ringing. There was no time to waste congratulating myself. Fight or die.
And then the Russians started running. I’m not sure why they retreated. They had been beating us. It was as if they’d received some secret signal to withdraw. In the distance I saw that red nun dancing before the church, shimmying like a red whirling tornado. Whatever had happened she was enjoying this.
I looked back towards the battle just in time to see a retreating Russian infantryman cock his arm and lob a last grenade our way. I watched it arc towards me like a message from the gods of gunpowder and death. I heard a great sound like my ears popping open all at once and the dirt rose up about me and the last thing I saw was Gerhardt throwing himself over me for cover, placing his body between me and the grenade blast and that damned black church.
*
The battle was over.
The moon spilled out across the Russian steppe. I felt the moonlight pouring downwards, like blind acid washing me clean down to the bones.
I had good bones. Clean and honest, worn as bare as simple truth. I looked down at them now and could see my skin lying at my feet. I pulled the skin back on over my good German bones like a pair of long underwear.
I looked up into the night sky and was amazed to see that the moon had swollen into a giant vulva. I felt my cock bone harden beneath my skin.
Then I looked towards the village. The houses were made of tombstones and toadstools with fat swollen eyeballs for windows. My platoon was down there, raping naked nuns with their bayonets slung between their legs. In, out, in, out, in a mad blood polka. One soldier was playing accordion music with the rib cage of a slaughtered whore. They were all making music. They were whistling as they fucked. I heard the whistle, soft and rising like bird song. I heard it singing downwards like the howl of a Stuka dive bomber’s death scream.
The whistle burned beneath my skin like an army of acidic vermin, each of my individual skin cells staging their own private revolution, uprooting and crawling down into the darkness that swam between the meat and the bone, getting down to the secret truths hidden deep inside. The church rose up from the hard Russian dirt, swelling and expanding like a giant shadow cock, raping the full moon hard, hard, harder.
And then I awoke.
When I awoke there was no one to be seen. Just Gerhardt lying atop me like the world’s ugliest quilt. His eyes were closed. I touched his chest and was relieved to feel his heart beating beneath his tunic.
“If you don’t tell I won’t sir.” He was grinning. “The ways of the heart are strange indeed.”
“Get off of me you field ape,” I pushed him unceremoniously aside. The bastard was laughing, and I didn’t blame him. We did look damned funny.
Too bad nothing else did.
There was nothing around us but the dead bodies and the empty tank. There was nothing but death and silence. And then I heard the soft whistling sound that I’d heard before. Not a bird call but something else.
“What’s that?” Gerhardt asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where did the company go?”
I shrugged. “Where else? I believe we have just witnessed what mealy brained tacticians might call a correction of the front.”
Gerhardt grinned. “I don’t know about you sir, but I don’t really remember seeing a damned thing. All I remember is the worst fucking nightmare that I’ve had since I wore short pants.”
He had a point but I wasn’t convinced. I believed that the battalion had run in the night. It was as simple as that. I’d seen it before. A sudden self-starting reversal. A single man turns and runs and a battalion follows. A retreat that grew into a rout, leaving an undermanned platoon hanging onto their Mauser rifles and potato masher grenades like a huddle of dying sinners clinging to the empty promise of a stolen crucifix.
“I can’t see Major Hauptman running,” Gerhardt observed. “Not from anything less than God himself.”
“I can’t even picture him running from the devil,” I said. “But where the hell is he?”
“Gas?” Gerhardt suggested. “Maybe Ivan fumed them out?”
I shook my head. “There hasn’t been a gas attack since your dirty arsed daddy went up over the top of the trenches at the Somme. The closest thing I’ve seen to gas around here is that green smoke they make in the mess tent on Saturday nights when those Bavarian farm boys get into the pea soup and sausage.”
Gerhardt rooted through what bodies were left. He found two Russian grenades and pocketed one of them. I picked up a Schmeisser from one of our fallen comrades and a couple of clips of ammo. The submachine gun would be handier in the close quarters of the village.
“Here sir,” Gerhardt said, handing me the other grenade. “These Ivan eggs don’t throw as far as our potato mashers but if you tuck them in close enough they hatch just as loud.”
He was making sense, so I took it.
“So what will we do?” Gerhardt asked.
As commanding officer I was duty bound to offer a sensible answer but I’d be damned if I knew what that might be.
“We wait,” I said. “We hold our position as any good German stubble hopper would do. We hold and we wait.”
That was the only answer I could give them. We were soldiers and as such we were duty bound to offer ourselves up as sacrifice to the blind gods of war and chance.
Then I turned my face towards the horizon, doing my best to look resolute and irrefutable. My bit of brass and pitiful rank was all of the god and authority I believed that I needed.
“Here sir?” Gerhardt asked. “Hold this forest? Just the two of us?”
I looked around. It was a big forest, full of blown out foxholes, overturned trees and a few scattered dead bodies.
“Who else did you expect? Is my company too good for you Gerhardt? Yes, the two of us. We are the platoon now. We will hold but not here.”
I pointed at the village gates.
“In there.”
*
Gerhardt and I entered the village. The gates of the stockade must have been blasted in the battle. They hung open but as we stepped inside they swung shut.
“Damn wind,” I swore unconvincingly.
We looked about us. The scene was unbelievable.
“Holy Christ on a half-turned crutch,” Gerhardt swore.
I stared in disbelief. The villagers were hanging from every house and tree. Some of them right side up like gallows bait and others dangled head down like freshly slaughtered pigs.
“SS?” Gerhardt hoarsely whispered. “It looks like their work.”
I shook my head. I had witnessed the SS at work far too many times but at their worst they were nothing as bad as this. These men and women hadn’t been executed. They’d been massacred.
“Look,” Gerhardt pointed. “There are some of our boys.”
It was true. I saw Russians and Germans alike, hanging from windows and roof beams and trees on strange twisted homemade gibbets. All of the victims were dead as far as I could see.
We walked closer and I saw that they were not hung by ropes. Their spines had been yanked from out of their backs and some of them hung on those. Others were strung up by spools of intestine and what looked like thin red rope.
“Great God of hell,” Gerhardt swore. “That’s tendons. They’ve been drawn and hung. What sodding bastard did this?”
I heard a growl and turned suddenly. There was a lanky yellow hound gnawing on the decapitated head of a woman. It looked as if the dog’s eyes had been yanked out with pincers and the skin of its face peeled evenly and rolled back to make a bizarre collar. The combined effect reminded me of a four legged phallus with teeth. The dog shook the head, trying to free itself. Its teeth were snagged in the woman’s eye sockets.
Gerhardt shot fr
om the hip, nearly cutting the beast in two with a burst of his Schmeisser submachine gun.
“Damned thing.”
The hound twitched and whimpered in death and kept twitching as we passed.
And then I saw him.
“Oh my God, Hauptman!”
There he was. The old man himself, Major Seigfried Hauptman, twisted and bound onto a cross of thornwood. It looked as if he’d been skinned and patched back together.
“Cut him free!” Gerhardt urged.
I already had my knife out. I leaned forward working the knife into the first knot tied about Gerhardt’s left wrist. He screamed like I was rubbing a handful of salt into an open wound.
“Oh my god,” Gerhardt swore in realization.
It wasn’t rope that was binding Hauptman to the goddamned cross. It was his own skin. Some clever torturer had slit and peeled Hauptman’s hide in such a way as to leave the nerve endings intact. He writhed and twisted upon the cross like a burning snake. In fact everything was twitching and moving. The bodies all around us were still alive. Some of them moaned and above the moaning I heard a soft sound like birds in the wind.
We opened fire, letting our Schmeissers vomit hot lead. The bodies danced like electrified marionettes. We blasted them completely, yet even after emptying our clips, the bodies kept twitching and moaning and that damned whispering birdsong kept twittering in the still silent wind.
“It’s coming from the church,” Gerhardt said. “What ever did this is in there.”
I wanted to say no. I wanted to say that there was nothing in the church, nothing in the village. I wanted to turn and run into the hills and pray that some eager Cossack found me and gutted me with his dullest saber.
But instead we kicked the door of the church in.
It was like standing inside a mouth and a tomb at the same time. There was a dead and dank closeness all about us. The room was littered with fallen crosses, broken Jewish stars, Buddhist scrolls, heathen masks; the trappings and talisman’s of a thousand religions broken and scattered like a trash heap. The walls were made of a mass of a stained glass depicting atrocities that defied description.