Blitzfreeze (23 page)

‘You were born to shit against the wind!’ jeers Porta. ‘Do you think anybody’ll bother listening to a Nazi unteroffizier who’s lived on an exclusive diet of swastikas all his life and painted his prick brown to make sure he’ll only make Nazi kids when he fucks!’

The forest is ringing with frost. Ice crystals whirr through the air and the snow lies thickly everywhere.

‘What a country to make war in,’ says Barcelona, depressed. ‘Even a skiing fantatic’d be cured of his liking for winter sports for the rest of his life.’

We keep falling into deep snowdrifts from which we need help to extricate ourselves. The Professor is nearly going crazy. Without his glasses he is almost blind and now the snow continually covers them. He blunders around until finally we tie him to Barcelona. We’ve got fond of this little idiot of a Norwegian student. At first we took the piss out of him. Not so much because he volunteered, we nearly all did that, but because he came to us from the SS. We never really discovered why. There are rumours that he’s a quarter-Jew. That’s one good reason, at any rate, for the SS throwing him out. We have three quarter-Jews with us. Porta says he’s a half-Jew but that’s only to annoy Heide. He says they always
sat at table with their hats on in his family and held an economy council every Friday, before the Sabbath began.

We keep stopping all the time. The enemy barrage is terrible. It looks as if the Russians are throwing in everything but the lavatory seat to keep us from getting across the river.

Shells falling in snow sound funny. A queer sort of splashy thump sounds from far away. Then a column of snow shoots up into the air. They’ve executed three from our division. It was read out to us this morning. They always do that when somebody’s due to be hanged. These execution notices made an impression on us at first, but now we’re used to them.

‘Executions are necessary in wartime,’ explains Porta, as we stand in front of the gallows with its three swinging corpses. ‘They are what educated people call pedagogic. They make carbine coolies like us lose interest in getting up to funny business. The track of a good army is marked by its gallows.’

‘Speed, speed!’ orders Oberleutnant Moser.

‘Faster, faster,’ scream the section leaders furiously, raising their clenched fists above their heads in the signal for: ‘Forward! Quick march!’ The artillery fire is to be ‘ducked under’ as the Army calls the manoeuvre. It
sounds
easy. Marshal your forces close to where the shells are dropping, and execute a quick forward movement
under
the barrage. There is a lot of stuff like this in military manuals. The fat HDV is the German Army’s bible. There are even people who run their private lives according to HDV. Iron Gustav at Torgau, for example, has brought his wife almost to the verge of madness. Like a good housewife she prefers to change the bed-linen every fourteen days. Iron Gustav won’t permit it. According to HDV, prison personnel change every six weeks, and prisoners every eight weeks. In Iron Gustav’s home they take a bath every Saturday between 10 and 12 o’clock. The water is 18° C., neither more nor less, and bathing is carried out, of course, under the shower and lasts for exactly seven minutes. After twenty years of married life the good woman is
still
unable to understand why they mustn’t use their bath-tub,
and this despite the fact that her husband has explained to her countless times that bath-tubs are for officers only. Over Iron Gustav’s front door, in beautiful gothic letters, is the inscription
ICH DIENE
.
⁶
And this is the motto the family has to follow. Soldiers spring up from the snow and start off on the race with death. We pant under the heavy weight of weapons. Suddenly the road grows steep.

We use bushes and saplings to pull ourselves up the slope. An infantry Gefreiter just in front of me gets his. He stops as if he has run into a wall. His carbine flies up into the air, he falls backwards and rolls down the hill, over and over and over in a cloud of snow. His body is stopped by a bush, his steel helmet rolls on by itself. His hair is yellow as corn, and shows up against the snow like a newly-opened sunflower.

I stop for a second to look back down at him before following the others.

The MG-fire grows still fiercer. They are firing from above us.

The MG salvoes tear long splinters from the trees. Great pieces of stone and ice come howling transversely in amongst us.

No. 5 Company seek cover in the scrub. With practiced speed machine-guns are mounted to cover No. 7 Company, the spearhead. Below the heights the heavy company places its mortars and soon after we hear the cosy: Plop! Plop! of our own mortar bombs. Enemy mortars sound terrible, but ours have a wonderfully comforting sound.

‘Fix bayonets! Prepare to advance singly!’ comes the order.

‘Hold on to your guts, Ivan Stinkanovich, I’m comin’ to carve ’em out of you!’ shouts Tiny drawing his short bayonet from its sheath. He is off at an amazing speed under Heide’s covering fire.

Muzzle-flashes from the Russian fortifications make a long necklace of light. Heide relieves me at No. 1. I’m a grenade specialist and must now go forward and attempt to blow up the machine-gun nest. It’ll have to be fast. I throw five
grenades, one straight after the other. They fall where I want them to. One by the heavy MG, which is now on continuous fire. One a little to the right where the command group is lying, and the rest behind, where the ammunition is stacked.

Porta shoots from the hip as he runs. Tiny follows him with the light grey bowler jammed down on his head. He affects to believe that it makes enemy bullets veer away from him in sheer horror.

‘Get your finger out!’ screams the Old Man furiously. ‘Use your grenades! Stop that Maxim!’

‘Bugger off!’ I answer, and stay down.

The heavy Maxim is firing so that even a fly would get itself killed if it were mad enough to run across the snow.

‘Forward, or you’re for court-martial!’ shouts the Old Man, raging.

The Maxim gets a stoppage and, tight with nervousness, I spring up and run forward.

I throw my grenades on the run. The heavy machine-gun is blown high into the air together with the gunner.

Our legs move under us like racing pistons. The bloodstained bayonets gleam dully on the end of our guns.

We tumble into the enemy entrenchment. Now it’s not half so dangerous, as long as you don’t run blindly down the straights.

We know to perfection how to roll up a trench with hand grenades. The enemy mustn’t be given time to think. The first three minutes in the trench are decisive. I throw a grenade into each dug-out as I pass. Explosions crash behind me. A group is about to leave the trench as I round a corner. My last grenade drops in amongst them and explodes with a vicious crack. There is blood everywhere on the snow. I tear the sub’ from my shoulder and empty a magazine into those who are still moving. Then I drop down between a couple of torn-open bodies.

‘You did very nicely!’ says the Old Man, appreciatively.

‘’E’ll ’ave ’is name mentioned on the bleedin’ wireless as an ’ero some day,’ jeers Tiny with a grin. ‘Then they’ll find
out afterwards ’e’s a bleedin’ Yid an’ ’ang ’im with the Star of David spinnin’ merrily on the end of ’is prick!’ He throws his MG quickly up over the lip of the trench and opens fire on the fleeing Russians who are rolling in panic down the slope.

‘Cease firing!’ orders Oberleutnant Moser. ‘Five minutes rest!’ We drop where we stand. Most of us fall asleep.

Half unconscious I hear Porta explaining something to Stege about a donkey which had to cross the Landwehr canal, an exercise in which the military observers had decided all bridges had been blown.

‘Everything would have gone off all right,’ I heard Porta say, ‘if only the bloody donkey hadn’t been
white
! It was immediately suspected of being a spy for international Jewry. . . .’

I fell asleep and unfortunately heard no more. When I asked Porta, later, for the end of the story, he had forgotten it and denied ever having known a Jewish spy in the shape of a white donkey.

‘2 Section take the lead. Take up your arms! Get moving! Forward, you sad sacks!’ orders Oberleutnant Moser.

Mortar grenades fall around us. We look back and are glad we are spearheading the advance. A wall of fire and steel rises where our trench has been. The heavy Russian artillery is spotted in on it.

‘There’s the river,’ says the Old Man, with relief, pointing with his Mpi.

We can’t realize that this dirty brown ditch is the Nara. Even the ice, which is screwed up into hillocks, is a filthy brown.

‘So this is the trickle of piss we’ve been chasing after for the last few weeks,’ mumbles Porta wonderingly. ‘I can well understand never having heard of it.’

‘Rinse, please!’ grins Tiny, as he urinates in the river.

‘Nara!’ mumbles Oberleutnant Moser. ‘So we’ve made it. We’re
that
close to Moscow.’

‘Can we take the tram in, please, Herr Oberleutnant?’ asks Porta. ‘I’ve got
such
pains in my knees.’

We have become noticeably more disillusioned recently. Even though we have gone from victory to victory, passed endless columns of prisoners and seen mountains of captured equipment, Heide is still the only one of us who believes in the ultimate victory.

‘I don’t give a sod who wins this war,’ says Porta. ‘When I get back to Berlin they can all fuck a pig far as I’m concerned!’

No. 3 Company begins the river crossing. We give them covering fire with automatic weapons. They are almost halfway over when suddenly it’s as if the whole river explodes. Yellow, stinking watery mud flies hundreds of feet into the air. A seemingly endless sheet of flame spreads out to all sides, and great chunks of ice are thrown far into the forest. No. 3 Company is gone without a trace under the gurgling, bubbling water.

The Stalin Organ starts up. It sounds as if every planet in the Solar System is on its way towards earth, and it looks like it. The entire sky is covered with the long fiery tails of great rockets like shooting stars.

Where they strike every living thing is annihilated.

‘The bloody swine,’ curses Heide indignantly.

‘Why?’ asks Stege in surprise. ‘They’re only using what they’ve got. They won’t stop till we’re spitted and roasted!’

‘These
untermensch
will never live to see that!’ shouts Heide fanatically.

‘Don’t be too sure,’ grins Porta. ‘I do believe they’ve given your Führer an unpleasant surprise.’

‘He’s your Führer too,
isn’t he
?’ shouts Heide threateningly.

‘So
he
says at any rate. These Austrians have always been good at persuading themselves. Their mountains give them a superiority complex.’

‘Joseph Porta I intend to make a duty report to the NSFO. Take warning of that!’ screams Heide, his eyes flaming.

‘Be a good little boy now, and bend you ’ead down so’s Daddy can put a bullet through it,’ says Tiny pleasantly, pressing his gun against Heide’s neck.

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ howls Heide, dodging to cover behind the Old Man.

‘Bet your sweet life I
would
dare,’ answers Tiny, with a perfectly diabolical look on his face. ‘You wouldn’t believe what I’d dare do now that I’ve put on the Wehrmacht uniform! Prepare to be shot. I don’t like these long drawn out executions.’

‘Stop that
piss
!’ orders the Old Man, knocking the muzzle of Tiny’s Mpi down. ‘That’s no toy you’ve been issued with.’

‘I
do
’ave a lot of fun playin’ with it though,’ says Tiny pleasantly.

‘I’ll have you shaved with the big razor,’ shouts Heide desperately. ‘Threatening an Unteroffizier in the German Army is not a cheap amusement, Obergefreiter Creutzfeldt! It’s bloody
dear
!’

‘No. 2 Section follow me!’ commands the Old Man curtly.

Porta stumbles over a body, a dead German major with the Knight’s Cross round his neck.

‘The heroes are all dying!’ mumbles Tiny, seating himself comfortably on the body. He takes a long pull at his water bottle before handing it on to us.

‘Where in the name of hell did you get this?’ coughs Porta gripping his throat which burns as if he had swallowed acid.

‘Can’t you take it?’ grins Tiny. ‘It’s a naphtha and reindeer piss cocktail.’

‘Where’d you get it?’ asks Porta doubtfully, sniffing at the bottle which gives off a dreadful aroma.

‘A present from a departed comrade commissar who thought I might need somethin’ with a kick in it before I knocked on the gates of the Kremlin,’ grins Tiny, clicking his tongue.

‘What the devil are you men doing sitting here staring?’ shouts a strange Feldwebel briskly.

‘Giving the dead major here, sir, extreme unction, sir, if you please, sir,’ shouts Porta in military parade-ground manner.

Tiny sticks his water-bottle between the dead major’s lips.

‘’E’s gone,’ he sobs aloud, and falls on his knees with folded hands.

The Feldwebel is visibly confused. He doesn’t know what to think. On the other hand he doesn’t feel he can start bawling them out with a major present – even a dead major!

‘Get along with you, quick,’ he orders tamely and disappears between the trees.