A Kiss for the Enemy (33 page)

He crouched down and saw, without question, two shapes that were not rocks or bushes, saw them against the ever paler background of the night sky. It was the sentries all right –
about twenty-five yards away. Anthony noted with wry amusement that they were close together and could not possibly be covering each other in the approved manner. Battalion Headquarters! This would make an acceptable story in B Company! He strode forward.

There followed several sharp cracks, followed by a number of blinding flashes. Anthony found himself lying on his back without knowing how he got there.

‘Grenades!' he thought, perfectly clearly. ‘My God, they must think I'm a whole bloody company withdrawing.' He was conscious of no pain. But when he attempted to turn on his stomach, to crawl, he found that he could not move and the attempt brought anguish which he thought he identified as running down his left side. There seemed to be a great weight pinning his left thigh. Then he found that he was, for no reason that made sense, calling out –

‘It's Captain Marvell!'

He remembered afterwards, when these things began to come back to him, a great deal of shouting. Words were distinguishable as from a great distance –

‘
Nur ein! Nur ein
!' and ‘
Verwundet
!' and a little later –‘
Offizier
!'

He saw a boot near his head. Then a voice spoke, very near. Fear, pain, were overtaken by irritation as Anthony heard the sound of a German, clearly fancying his fluency in English, showing off his skill with unconvincing idiom. And there was nobody to laugh with about it! The voice was patronizing and affected, the accent artificial.

‘Well, old boy, I'm afraid you must be spending Christmas behind barbed wire!'

Anthony summoned up a flicker of resistance – ‘
Unsinn
!' he found he could do no more than whisper, ‘
Dummkopf
! he added for good measure. He could not tell whether the croak was audible but the defiance was necessary even if childish.

Then he lost consciousness.

Ten days to Christmas! Christmas, 1942! Toni Rudberg shivered. He stamped his feet ceaselessly on the earth floor of the peasant cottage to try to maintain some sort of circulation. The temperature was twenty degrees below zero and still falling.

Against the wooden walls of the cottage two command vehicles were parked and Toni, now a Major, had set up the Divisional operations staff cell in the cottage itself. With casualties and illness having taken their toll he now found himself virtually running the Operations Staff of the Division. They'd moved south some weeks before to join what most people regarded as a doomed attempt to relieve Sixth Army from the south-west, to fight their way from the Don to the Volga and somehow link hands with the poor wretches in Stalingrad. It had been the first such attempt. In Stalingrad more than 200,000 German soldiers of Sixth Army were surrounded by what appeared to be most of the Red Army, pinning them in a great pocket west of the Volga.

Toni had been delighted to be assigned again to a Panzer Division, after nearly a year spent on a Corps Staff. One was nearer the troops, the action. A Divisional staff was small, intimate, congenial. But when he gazed at the sullen grey of the eastern sky, listened to the incessant grumble of the Russian guns and rockets pounding the defenders of Stalingrad, he found himself thinking with nostalgia of his last appointment, of a different part of the front. Above all, his mind went back to those extraordinary days in the Summer of 1941. The advance had been exhilarating, no question of it. They had been going forward – going forward huge distances over an empty landscape much of the time. Until the beginning of November the weather had been agreeable. Thereafter – the winter of 1941 was not a pleasant recollection. There had been
no decent winter clothing, no effective winter equipment. Vehicles had been unusable, oil had frozen, automatic weapons jammed, supply had been laborious or non-existent. Instead of sweeping advances into this vast and melancholy land they'd had to sit tight, to hold positions where they happened to be – which were seldom positions any sane man would have chosen to defend.

Then had come the huge Russian attacks on the Central Front. Immense packs of men, advancing wolflike across the frozen ground in close order, inviting massacre, yelling, mad with drink, making no attempt to manoeuvre, to skirmish.

It was like a film he'd seen in Berlin long ago about the English being attacked by Zulus, although from his recollection the Zulus had appeared more methodical.

Most of the Russian troops who had carried out the great counter-attacks of the winter around Moscow had been oriental divisions from the Soviet east. Again and again the defenders had given ground because there simply wasn't enough ammunition for the machine guns and mortars to stem the flood. Toni had been shaken on one occasion by seeing at first hand the sense of self-preservation which even the hardened German
landser
could display. He had been sent to visit a forward regiment and was lying behind a bank of snow beside a light machine gun team, one of half a dozen on the front edge of a wood. The Russian attack was the third in two days. Toni watched the leading ranks through his binoculars as they stumbled forward in the snow. Maybe one thousand metres, he thought, and glanced at the nearest machine gunners. The
gefreiter
in charge was an old soldier, grizzled, hardbitten. A minute later the Spandau opened up. The Russian shrieks were audible in the crisp, icy air.

‘Urra! Urra!'

There were German shouts from left and right of Toni and a yelled order from the team next to him.

‘Back, right away!'

‘What the hell –' roared Toni. He was a Staff officer, visiting in order to report first-hand impressions, but he knew that no withdrawal had been authorized in this sector.

‘We're going back,
Herr Hauptmann.
You'd better come. Quick.'

‘Why –'

‘You don't think we've got the ammunition to stop that lot!' the man said contemptuously as he shouldered cartridge belts and bent to lift a box. Toni looked at him. Should he shoot the
Gefreiter
instantly, take command, restore the situation? He looked at the other machine gun teams. They were already climbing out of the snow-filled ditch into the cover of the wood and through it. Toni looked at the Russians. Six hundred metres.

‘Better come along,
Herr Hauptmann
,' said the
Gefreiter.
‘There's plenty of Russia behind us. If we stick to this bit of it for another three minutes we'll never leave it.' Toni moved back without a word.

It was the same everywhere, this second winter. There was the conversation he had had with an old friend only two weeks ago, here in the south. They'd met during what passed for a rest period – a few days' lull before this last desperate attempt to relieve Stalingrad. Von Wrede was with an infantry regiment, a battalion commander, several years younger than Toni. Most infantry battalions were commanded by lieutenants by now. Wrede was a friend from carefree, peacetime days. They'd once been in the same skiing party at St Anton, raced each other, drank together until all hours, chased the same girl. Toni had won the chase but they'd always got on well. Wrede appeared a different man now. He not only looked older than Toni, Toni thought without pleasure: he, a youngster, actually looked like an old man.

‘Rudberg, these men have got to have some rest, some relief. They're fine men but they've been pushed too hard. They're losing confidence.' And von Wrede told him that during the great Soviet advances of mid-November, 1942, those attacks which had smashed the Rumanian army, torn a great hole in the Don front and encircled Stalingrad, his Sergeant-Major had come to him one evening and saluted.

‘Are we to retire tonight?'

‘No, we're staying here.'

‘
Herr Oberleutnant
, the soldiers –' the man was embarrassed. More, he was wretched. He told von Wrede that unless orders were given to withdraw he had information – reliable information – that there was a plot to kill the officers and withdraw
willy-nilly. There were no loyal, dissentient voices: none, at least, that could be relied upon to stay firm.

‘They know they may be detected, shot. But they count on the confusion to get away with it. And they're saying – what's the odds? If we stay here, it's a Russian bullet or bayonet. For the lucky ones,' the Sergeant-Major muttered. For the less fortunate, as every man knew, torture and mutilation were the hazards of wounding or capture by the Red Army.

Toni heard his friend, aghast. Von Wrede held the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.

‘What happened?'

‘I talked to them. We went back. I pretended I'd decided myself. They knew, of course. And they were ashamed. But the trouble was that they were right. It was a hopeless position and every
landser
realized it. I made out a report which squared it all up, of course, not particularly relishing the prospect of being court-marshalled and shot myself. It wasn't too difficult. You know how chaotic things were just then –'

Remarkably, letters from home continued to arrive. They took a long time, but even in the most unpromising conditions the field post office worked. There might be no more mail before Christmas but Toni had one letter in the pocket which could bring before his eyes, smarting as they were from the bitter cold, scenes of peace, beauty and tranquillity. Unfortunately, Toni reflected, even war could not eliminate the emotional complications which beset man's life. Of course all one's energies, here on the Don, were concentrated upon survival and the performance of rigorous, unpromising duty. But one could still find a few minutes now and then to dream, and dreams were confused.

Since the Russian campaign started, Toni had had no leave in Germany, no leave for eighteen months. On every occasion when there had been a chance, an operational crisis had intervened. There had been the appalling winter in front of Moscow, and then he'd been promoted, given this new job, greater responsibilities; and now it was winter 1942! Toni had, therefore, had to pursue Anna Langenbach by letter. The more he thought of her, the more he told himself that this was an extremely sensible thing to do. He was able to recall Anna's face and figure with huge approval – she really was a lovely
woman, one in a million, he decided. And the more this damnable business of war depressed him (although he had to admit to enjoying a good deal of it. Despite his frivolity Toni was a soldier through and through) the more he thought with longing of the possibilities of a home, a wife, calm, prosperity! Small references by her to domestic concerns had long persuaded Toni that his information was accurate and that Anna was rich. He was sure Anna cared for him, was attracted to him. He made her laugh. They talked the same language. It was too bad that circumstances had not enabled him to get her into bed. That would have persuaded her! But she was a mature woman, she understood life. Anna Langenbach, née von Arzfeld, was, Toni had convinced himself, the ideal mate for Count Toni Rudberg.

But Anna's letters were so – so
cool.
When he asked her something directly – and the passage of time was leading him, against his instinct for tactics in these matters, to be more direct, more pressing – she either disregarded the request or question, or treated it as if it were a trifling matter which she would ‘think about'. He asked for a photograph of herself –

‘Believe me it will make an immense difference, out here, if I can be reminded daily of the face dearer to me than any other.'

She had replied that she had no decent photograph. She had even written –

‘You must content yourself with one of your little Viennese beauties. Surely you haven't thrown them all away?'

This might be coquettish, teasing. But Anna was not coquettish. Her letters were invariably thoughtful, intelligent, strong. They had the effect of making him desire her company ever more violently and at the same time gave her an aura of remoteness. She was so extraordinarily self-contained. Had he touched her inner self not at all?

And in September, 1942, after being disappointed of yet another leave, Toni had (with what he reckoned was particular skill) laid bare his heart, his hopes. He had written that – comparatively short though their acquaintance was – he sincerely loved her. He had described himself as unworthy of so much beauty, courage, intelligence –

‘The sheer quality you possess, Anna, unlike that of any other woman I have known or dreamed of –'

but as a man, nevertheless, who had perceived in Anna
for the first time in life
a woman with whom he felt capable ‘of better things'. He had ended, unequivocally, by saying that he was asking for hope that ‘If I survive this extraordinary campaign' she would become his wife. He had concluded –

‘I cannot believe that any man could be with you and not wish to love you. And no doubt many would deserve that more than I. But nobody – absolutely nobody – could outdo me in the fervour and energy with which I would love you if allowed to do so. Your face is before me every waking hour. Yours until the end of time.'

‘That makes it all pretty clear,' he thought, as he committed the letter to the field post office. Then there had been a long period of waiting, a period filled by the murderous activities of the Red Army and the ceaseless demands on the scanty Panzer reserves of the Wehrmacht. But ultimately a letter had arrived.

And Anna's answering letter, the one in his pocket, had been harsh. Toni thought, easily, that women often went through the motions of rejection while strongly hoping that the rejection would itself be disregarded, that the lover would persist, ardour strong enough to warm the coolest heart. But in Anna's case it was hard to believe that she was playing. She had a sort of terrible sincerity.

She wrote that she regretted giving him pain, but –