Guns At Cassino (19 page)

`Like
sticking pigs,' a big rawboned South Tyrolean grunted as he placed his muddy boot on the chest of a dead American and pulled out his blood-stained bayonet, 'only this lot don't make so much noise as pigs do.'

The
next tent's occupants were lightly wounded, and awake. They were desperately slashing at the rear canvas wall with surgical knives to cut a way out before it was too late. The Creeper fired a wild burst. A group of them went down still clawing at the canvas.

`No
more firing,' the Creeper yelled above the screams. `No more noise than necessary ... use the cold steel.'

A
sudden blood-lust had overcome the young SS men. They darted forward, springing over the rumpled beds to plunge their bayonets into the back of the terrified Americans. A big red-haired American loomed up in front of the Creeper. He ripped at the bandages covering the lower part of his face. They came away to reveal a shattered bloody mess below the mouth.

`Look,
man,' he screamed in German, 'I'm shot – badly shot. You can't shoot me – my father came from Mannheim! Kurt Desch from Mannheim, Heidelberger Street thirty-six – everybody knew him in Mannheim. You can't - '

The
words ended in a scream, as the Creeper smashed the iron butt of his Schmeisser in his face. As he went down, the Creeper kicked him in the side of the head. His neck clicked back, spine broken. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Now
they ran from tent to tent. The Creeper pelted into a tent, filled with lung cases.

`By
the great whore of Buxtehude,' one of his panting men gasped, 'what a hell of a stench!'

`It's
their lungs - they always stink like that when they've been hit in the pumps,' someone explained.

`We're
doin 'em a favour then - to get them out of this shitty smell!' the first men yelled gleefully and reaching up, pulled down a long tube leading into one of the wounded Amis.

`What
the tarnation is going on here?' a high-pitched female voice asked in English.

The
Creeper swung round. A fat woman stood there, dressed in an olive-drab dress, the golden star of a major gleaming on the shoulder, her double chin trembling in righteous indignation.

‘
Will you look at that, you currant-crappers,' a soldier exclaimed in wonder, 'an Ami wench, right up here in the line. Do you think she does it for the soldiers.'

He
grinned and thrust his thumb between his two fingers in the obscene gesture used by the troops.

`No,'
someone else jeered. `Ami wenches don't have one. You know what they say about 'em - whores in the kitchen and cooks in the bed!'

The
others laughed uproariously. The American military nurse lunged at the man who had spoken. Before she reached him another man knocked off her gold-rimmed glasses. They fell to the floor and shattered. A laughing trooper pushed her. She fell over the metal side of a cot and sat down suddenly, her skirt riding up to reveal black pubic hair.

`Wow,'
the laughing trooper who had pushed her over, breathed in mock wonder. 'Look at that! She's got one after all.' He made a play of fumbling with his flies with his free hand, looking at the Creeper. 'Shall I slip her a link, Lieutenant? A little fly one - something for her to remember us by!'

The
Creeper's pudgy face flushed unpleasantly:

`No,
we have no time for that kind of piggery. Let her stay alive. We need a witness to tell them what happened to her. But strip her. They tell me that the Amis are very moral in such things.'

Half
a dozen laughing troopers dragged the woman up from the bed. She fought and scratched crazily as she sensed what they were going to do, but she was helpless in their hands. In an instant she was naked: narrow shoulders, great dangling breasts hanging over a pale scarred belly, her body shivering with cold and terror.

But
the Creeper had no eyes for the naked American nurse. His mind was full of his scheme to ensure that the Führer’s brilliant plan succeeded.

`You
- and you,' he bellowed at the two men next to him. `Take those bottles,' he indicated the ether bottles in the cabinet at the end of the tented room.

While
they carried out his order, he himself slung extra blankets on each bed, spreading them over the unconscious Americans.

`Now
splash plenty of it over the blankets,' he yelled.

The
two soldiers ran from bed to bed throwing the liquid everywhere. As the tent filled with the heavy suffocating fumes, an Ami, who was awake and had tried to scream, heaved and twisted, attempting vainly to free his body from the stifling horror of the blankets.

`All
right, outside everybody!' the Creeper cried, reaching in his pocket for his lighter.

`Oh
my God!' the nurse screamed, her hands flying from a pathetic attempt to hide her sex, to cover her face in terror. `You can't - you can't be that cruel!'

A
young soldier punched her in the face. The nose shattered and blood shot everywhere. They kicked her outside, their muddy boots leaving dirty marks on her pale flesh.

The
Creeper waited till they were clear. On the bed, the Ami tossed and turned, desperately trying to free himself, a strange bubbling sound escaping from his lips all the while. The Creeper backed to the flap and tossed the burning lighter onto the nearest ether-soaked blanket.

As
he backed out, there was a muffled explosion. Flames ran up the sides of the tent, greedily eating up the canvas. The troopers scattered hastily, pushing the naked, sobbing nurse in front of them. The flames leapt higher and higher. Suddenly the man who had tried to escape appeared at the door of the tent. Tubes hung from him everywhere as he stood there blinded, the flames licking at his lower body.

`Help
... help me!' he bubbled.

Behind
the Creeper the nurse screamed and fell into the mud, as the wounded man staggered forward, his burning arms held upright in the shape of a cross. He didn't get far. He stumbled blindly over a crate and fell full length, a blazing torch for an instant, his head a blue flickering puddle of fire. The next moment he disappeared as the remaining bottles of ether inside the tent exploded. When the explosion had died away, he and the tent had vanished.

`My
holy Christ, Kriecher!' von Dodenburg thundered, pushing back the crowd of SS men staring at the woman sobbing in the mud, her breasts smeared in blood, 'what's been going on here?'

The
Creeper turned and faced him insolently. He waved a pudgy hand at the bullet-holed tents. 'It's obvious, isn't it, Major. Now the Führer has got his incident!'

Beside
himself with rage, von Dodenburg laid Kriecher flat in the mud and brought up his Schmeisser.

`My
God, Kriecher,' he cried thickly, 'they were wounded men!'

But
just as von Dodenburg's forefinger started to squeeze the trigger, there was the faint but definite squeaky rattle of rusty tank tracks to the south. Von Dodenburg hesitated. He cocked his ear to the wind. They were definitely tracked vehicles; and there were no German tanks on this side of the River Rapido. He let the gun drop.

`You're
a lucky swine, Kriecher.' He nodded to Schulze: `Get the miserable bastard up out of the mud, will you?'

Schulze
hurried forward and put his arms round the Lieutenant. As he did so, his fingers slipped into Kriecher's top left hand pocket.

`There
you are sir,' he said dutifully, as he extracted the Creeper's notebook and slipped it inside his sleeve.

Von
Dodenburg slipped off his long camouflage cape and drew it over the naked nurse sobbing brokenly in the mud.

`Here,
place this on,' he whispered in his awkward English. Then he turned to the others:

`All
right,' he said wearily, 'move it, men. Let's get our arses back across the river before the Ami armour gets here.'

He
took one last glance at the ruined camp, full of slaughtered men, silent now save for the persistent sobbing of the nurse and the dying crackle of flames.

`I
guess we've done what we came here to do.'

`You
ain't shitting, sir!' Schulze said glumly, staring at the charred corpse still smoking at their feet 'You ain't shitting ...’

As
the sun came up behind Cassino an angry blood-red, and the first enraged Ami barrage started to slam into the position at the top of Peak 555, the Wotan volunteers slipped across the Rapido again and commenced their weary progress up into the hills. The die was cast.

Fourteen

But nothing happened. Despite the massacre of the US clearing station, the Americans were apparently not prepared to retaliate. Indeed after a couple of days, the infuriated Ami bombardment of the Wotan positions on the peak died down completely; and the front settled into a strange brooding stalemate, with the fighting limited to sporadic patrol activity during the night.

At
his headquarters in Rome, Kesselring questioned his staff every morning, half expecting that the Monastery had been attacked, half hoping it hadn't.

And
morning after morning the same reply came back:

`Nothing
new on the Cassino front, Field Marshal.'

The
great Monastery, founded by St Benedict himself, had been saved for another day.

But
if the Field Marshal, devout Catholic that he was, experienced a certain relief every time he learned that the Monastery was still intact, his master grew increasingly angry. Twice in the first week of February, 1944, he was called urgently to the telephone to hear that well-known voice demand:

`In
heaven's name, Kesselring - how much longer must I wait?'

And
all that an embarrassed Kesselring could reply was: `Soon, my Führer, I promise you ... Soon!'

On
the Peak the officers of Wotan, who knew what had happened at the American hospital, were also puzzled. They spent hours searching the valley with their binoculars for some clue to the Ami intention, but they could discover nothing. As the Vulture remarked more than once:

`It
almost looks, gentlemen, as if our American friends have packed their suitcases and returned to the land of unlimited possibilities, what?'

Life
on the peak settled down into the dreary routine of garrison duty, with inspections, regulation pre-dawn stand-tos and incessant weapon cleaning. For von Dodenburg the lack of activity was a boon. It gave him time to think things out, steeled his resolve to do what he knew he had to do. But he realized now that there was more to do than just getting rid of the Vulture. He must ensure that the Wotan Battle Group did not fall into the wrong hands. There must be no more Geiers. in charge of the Third Reich's elite formation. When the Vulture was dead, Wotan had to be his. There was no other alternative. But how was he to do it? How was he to kill the Vulture and still retain control of the Battle Group?

It
was a problem that he had still not solved when the great clouds of dust, that seemed to spring up from nowhere on the white roads leading into the Liri, indicated that trouble was definitely brewing. The Vulture, alarmed by the outposts, lowered his binoculars and commented:

`Well,
gentlemen, it looks as if we are receiving new guests. If I am not mistaken, our friends from that Empire upon which the sun never sets, are arriving down there. I suggest we set about ensuring that they receive a warm welcome. Gentlemen,
the
Tommies
are
here!
'

But
Colonel Geier was not altogether right. The troops who were flooding the valley below, relieving the beaten Americans of the US Second Corps, were not entirely British; they were General Freyberg's New Zealanders, and the tough New Zealander who had won the Victoria Cross in the First War, was not too happy with the situation. He kept glancing at the grim stone block which dominated the whole valley and his big tough jaw jutted out angrily as if he would ram it at the damned place at any minute.

Just
before they parted that morning, General Gruenther (1) said a little wanly:

‘Well,
Freyberg, what do you think the chances are?'

The
New Zealander hesitated a moment. He had never worked with the Yanks before; he did not know how they would take his legendary blunt honesty. He decided to risk it. `Not more than fifty-fifty, General,' he growled. 'It's that damn monastery up there. Gives me the creeps. It's him having someone watching you all the time even when you think you're in the privacy of your own thunderbox!'

Gruenther
knew what the New Zealander meant. The place dominated the whole front. Perhaps the failure of the 36th on the Rapido was due to that too. Now, with the massacre of their rear elements by the Krauts, the survivors were in open rebellion. That very morning, the CIC had reported that a secret meeting of the 36th's junior officers had decided that they had been squandered unreasonably on the Rapido and they were proposing to raise the matter before Congress after the war. Morale was low enough in the Fifth Army without these new arrivals adding their own doubts to it.