Blitzfreeze (43 page)

‘We won’t bleedin’ well salute
you
,’ says Tiny coldly.

‘I wouldn’t want you to,’ says Heide, superciliously.

‘You mean you wouldn’t even recognize us when you’ve made Chief-of-Staff?’ gapes Tiny, thickly.

‘I won’t be able to,’ answers Heide proudly. ‘I shall belong to a different class to you. A man has to burn his boats behind him eventually!’

‘Will you tighten your mouth like Iron Gustav?’ asks Tiny, looking at Heide as admiringly as if Julius were already on the General Staff.

‘Tightening your mouth has nothing to do with it,’ answers Heide with a self-satisfied mien. ‘It’s a question of personal pride.’

‘Will you go round with a monocle screwed into your eye like old “Arse an’ Boots”
²
used to?’ asks Porta.

‘If my sight should weaken, which I doubt, I would use a monocle as is the Prussian habit. I am absolutely against officers wearing spectacles. Spectacles are only for the coolies who work in offices.’

Passing through a frozen swamp we fall in with an infantry platoon led by a brutal-looking Feldwebel.

‘Where are you men from?’ shouts Moser, in surprise.

‘We’re what’s left of 37 Infantry Regiment, 1st Battalion,’ replies the Oberfeldwebel brusquely, spitting into the snow.

‘Who do you think you are, Feldwebel?’ says Moser, sharply. ‘Have you forgotten how to report to an officer in a proper manner? Pull yourself together, man! You’re speaking to an officer now!’

The Oberfeldwebel stares at the officer for a moment. His brutal face works with rage. Then he brings his heels together with a smart click, his left hand goes to the sling of his weapon and the right presses tightly down along the seam of his trousers in properly regimental manner.

‘Herr Oberleutnant,’ he roars in a parade-ground voice. ‘Oberfeldwebel Klockdorf and nineteen other ranks, the remainder of 37 Infantry Regiment, 1st Battalion, reporting for duty, sir!’

‘That’s better,’ smiles the Oberleutnant. ‘We are also a remainder. The German Wehrmacht seem to be holding a remainders sale at the moment!’

‘Did you really expect anything else?’ asks Porta half-audibly. ‘Any fool could’ve guessed how it was all going to end.’

Moser hears Porta’s remark and steps closer to the Oberfeldwebel. ‘Have you any idea at all of what is happening in this area?’

‘No, Herr Oberleutnant. The only thing I know with certainty is that the German Army is getting the shit knocked out of it, sir!’

‘You know nothing, then?’ shouts Moser. ‘Don’t you read Wehrmacht reports? It’s your duty to do so! Orders from above! Well above!’

A tired laugh goes round the ranks of the company.

The Oberfeldwebel looks at Moser in astonishment. Is he dealing with a madman? How’s this going to end? But German soldiers are used to dealing with madmen. He takes a deep breath and clicks his heels an extra time. Mad Prussians like that sort of thing.

‘Herr Oberleutnant I have a man in the platoon who was an Unteroffizier on the Staff of the Division. He tells me we are preparing a new front further to the west.’

‘What a mine of news you are, man!’ Moser grins broadly. ‘So we’re preparing a new front further to the west, are we? In front of Berlin, perhaps?’

‘Very possible, Herr Oberleutnant. Unless they’ve decided Paris would be better, sir?’

Late at night we march into what appears to be a ghost village without a sign of life. Small huts peep out fearfully from between mountains of snow.

Porta is the first to discover smoke coming from the chimneys.

Signs of life!

‘There’s somebody talkin,’ says Tiny, listening intently.

‘Are you sure?’ asks Moser, sceptically.

‘When Tiny says he can hear something then there’s something to hear!’ states Porta emphatically. ‘That boy can hear a hummingbird farting on its nest.
And
hear it twenty miles against the wind.’

‘Russian or German?’ asks the Legionnaire.

‘Russian. It’s women natterin’.’

‘What are they saying?’ asks the Legionnaire.

‘I don’t understand their foreign piss,’ answers Tiny. ‘Can’t understand why these bastards can’t speak proper German. Talkin’ foreign’s sneaky.’

‘Very good!’ decides the Oberleutnant. ‘We’ll spend the night here after we’ve cleaned it out.’

At the thought of warmth and something to eat the company livens up amazingly. There must be something eatable in a whole village.

Porta picks up a bread-bag and runs through it with practiced fingers. It’s empty. He throws it down in disgust. With weapons at the ready we search the huts. We take no chances. Fire at the slightest sound. Even children would be shot down if we felt they were dangerous, and children
can
be dangerous here in Russia. Before now a five-year old child has bombed an entire company to death. In that respect there is little difference between Russia and Germany.

‘Take care!’ shouts Moser warningly, as we enter a tileworks with the Old Man in the lead.

‘Hell!’ says Porta. ‘It’s as dark in here as the inside of a nigger-woman’s cunt!’

‘Shut it!’ whispers Tiny, stopping as if he had run into a brick wall. ‘There’s somethin’ wrong in ’ere!’

‘
Tu me fais chier
,’
³
whispers the Legionnaire, going down on one knee behind a stack of tiles.

‘Some murderin’ bastard cocked a gun!’ answers Tiny, staring intently into the darkness.

‘Are you sure?’ asks Heide anxiously. He has a grenade ready to throw in his hand.

‘Go an’ ’ave a look,’ whispers Tiny almost inaudibly.

We drop to the ground with every nerve taut.

‘Close your eyes,’ whispers the Old Man. ‘I’m gonna let off a flare.’

There is a hollow report as the flare goes up into the ceiling.

Cautiously we open our eyes. The blue-white light burns them like fire.

Porta comes halfway to his feet and with the LMG pressed tightly into his hip lets off a burst. The belt flaps like a wounded snake. Tracer lines out and up into a distant corner of the tileworks.

Piercing female shrieks drown out the chatter of the machine-gun. An Mpi stutters viciously from a beam. A hand-grenade rolls to Tiny’s feet. Quickly he picks it up and throws it back. With a roar it explodes in the air.

I throw a potato-masher. Everything goes quiet.

Over in the corner we find six women in Red Army officer uniform. The head of one of them is shorn off cleanly as if by a giant knife. It lies quite naturally in a pool of dark blood. The eyes almost seem to be looking at us, examining us.

‘Nice-lookin’ bint,’ says Tiny, picking up the head. He sniffs at the hair. ‘What a lovely smell o’ woman. Pity the Fatherland requires a bloke to kill pretty little things like ’er.’ He spins the head and examines the profile with connoisseurmien. Blood runs from the shorn-off neck down onto his wrist.

‘Rough, tearin’ the ’eads off pretty women!’ He lays the head carefully under the girl’s arm.

‘When people were beheaded in the old days, they used to bury them with their heads between their legs,’ explains Heide.

‘Pretty girls, too?’ asks Tiny.

‘Everybody,’ states Heide firmly.

‘You’d think it was a bleedin’ cock-sucker on the job!’ Tiny grins long and loud.

‘On Devil’s Island the executioner holds up the head by the ears and says: Justice has been done in the name of the people of France!’ explains the Legionnaire.

‘Lord love us!’ cries Porta, ’and I thought the Frenchies were a cultured lot!’

‘But it is only criminals who are treated in this way,
mon ami
,’ the Legionnaire goes to the defence of French culture.

‘Only criminals,’ mumbles the Old Man. ‘You can’t tell these days whether you’re a criminal or a hero. They change the bloody rules every day.’

‘Yes they do ’urry things, nowadays,’ says Tiny, looking over at Heide accusingly. ‘Glad
I
ain’t a member of the bleedin’ Party.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ comes threateningly from Heide.

‘What I say,’ grins Tiny, pleased.

‘Come along,’ shouts Oberleutnant Moser. ‘Feldwebel Beier! Put some gunpowder under that gang of yours!’

‘Remove fingers! Get your arses in gear!’ shouts the Old Man. ‘Peace hasn’t broken out yet, you know!’

In short order the village is ransacked. Civilians come out of hiding. Everybody protests hatred of the Communists, and their great pleasure at seeing Germans.

‘These people must’ve been Nazis before Adolf even heard of it,’ Porta considers. He catches hold of an old woman, who isn’t as old as she looks. ‘
Matj
,
⁴
you no like Commie partisan. You love Nazi!’

‘Up with your right arm, old thing, and shout after me: “
Heil Hitler, grosses Arschloch!
”’
⁵

They shout it gladly without having the least idea of what it means.

‘I’ve never heard anything like it!’ Heide explodes. ‘If the Führer only knew what was going on!’

‘Stop that nonsense,’ orders Moser, irritably. ‘Tell them to boil potatoes, and get some big fires going.’

Porta explains to the Russian women that they are to boil potatoes and not spare the firewood.

The Old Man is bellowing at an artillery Obergefreiter who has been so foolish as to remove his boots. With a lost look the artilleryman stares at the fleshless white bones of his feet. Sanitäter Tafel throws up his hands in despair.

‘I’ll have to amputate! Boiling water!’

‘Can you do it?’ asks Moser sceptically.

‘I can’t
not
do it,’ replies the Sani. ‘He can’t be left here and we can’t shoot him either!’

‘Nobody is to take off his boots,’ shouts the company commander. ‘That’s an order!’

‘Gawd, if ’e was to start marchin’ off on them ’e’d scare the life out o’ bleedin’ Ivan!’ cries Tiny. ‘They think ’e was the old man with the scythe comin’ after ’em!’

The artillery Obergefreiter is strapped to a table with rifle slings. A woman brings boiling water. She helps the Sani as well as she can. Her husband and two sons are with the Red Army, she tells us.

The operation takes an hour. Before evening the Obergefreiter dies without regaining consciousness.

We lower him into an antitank trench and shovel snow over him. We hand his helmet on a stick and the Old Man adds his identity discs to the growing collection in his pocket.

We stuff ourselves with hot potatoes. They taste wonderful. After a while we feel as if we were born anew, and don’t even grumble when we have to go out on guard. The posts are double-manned. Thirty minutes on. Nobody can stand the cold for a longer period.

Moser decides to march at 7 o’clock. This will give us three hours before light, and we should be able to get a good distance from the village in case the villagers alarm the local partisans. They’ll have to do this, in all probability, to avoid being liquidated for aiding the enemy.

Oberfeldwebel Klockdorf suggests, cynically, that it
would be wisest to shoot all the civilians before we march off. ‘Dead men tell no tales,’ he says with a grin.

‘You weird bastard!’ Porta stares at him. ‘We can’t knock off all these old
matjeri
!’
⁶

‘Why not?’ asks Klockdorf. ‘It’s them or us. What’re they worth? People over fifty ought to be put away, anyhow! Heydrich made the suggestion once!’

‘I’ll make a point of calling on your fiftieth birthday, chum,’ Porta promises him, indignantly, ‘just to see if you mightn’t have changed your opinion.’

‘Puncture that bastard!’ growls Tiny.

A little past midnight it’s our turn on guard. It’s bitingly cold, and has just begun to snow. Visibility is no more than a couple of yards.

Porta and I have the post on the north side of the village. The Sani has excused Tiny guard duty, because of his feet. Half the period is over when Oberfeldwebel Klockdorf comes out of the darkness with two men behind him dragging a young woman between them.

‘Found a knocker?’ asks Porta, examining the girl with interest.

‘
Ein Flintenweib
,’
⁷
grins the Oberfeldwebel sadistically, pushing his Mpi into the young woman’s stomach.

‘And you’re taking her to the OC, of course?’ asks Porta with a sly look.

‘Like fuck we are!’ answers Klockdorf, coarsely. ‘What’s it to do with him? We’ll put this hellcat away right here on the spot.’

‘She’s too good to waste on the worms,’ says Porta. ‘Let me have her, instead.’

‘Don’t try anything with her!’ Klockdorf warns him. ‘She’s poisonous as a snake!’ He bends down over the girl, who cannot be more than twenty years of age. ‘Now then, you dirty little whore. This is where you get your brains blown out!’

‘But you’re going to die slowly, girl! We’re going to gut-shoot you first!’

‘Nazi,’ she hisses, spitting at his face. ‘You never leave Russia alive!’