Legion of the Damned (23 page)

Stege flung an S shell into the gun, the only type of shell capable of penetrating a KW2's thick hull. A conflagration of flame spurted from the muzzle as we fired. To my horror I saw that I had aimed too low. The shell had exploded on the monster's track. Porta and The Old Un cried out at my clumsiness and the great monster's turret began to turn toward us. Luckily a KW2's turret is slow to turn.

"Shoot, blast you!" shouted The Old Un. "What are you sitting there snoring for?"

Again our gun roared and an S shell landed on the brute's side. For an instant the turret halted, then it went on turning.

"Porta, move on, blast you!"

The Old Un pulled me away from the sighting apparatus and seated himself behind it. In a flash he swung the turret round and sighted; then our gun roared another five times. There was a thunderous explosion inside the monster, which strangely enough did not catch fire, although its turret was torn from its seating and hung out over one side. Three men leaped out, but were mown down by our machine guns. The Old Un gave the KW2 two more S shells, after which smoke and flames were pouring from it.

Thus the whole day passed and by the end of it we had no tank left but had to sit up behind von Barring's as he drove back to our lines. Three days later, after eight days' uninterrupted fighting, our regiment was taken out of the battle and we went into rest billets in the village of Achtyrka.

Perhaps to some people this account of the fighting will seem romantic and exciting. Any dueling with death, in whatever manner, is dramatic; it takes you away from, or beyond, the everyday. But you can try a throw with death in other ways than by going to war and you will experience the same liberating drama, only with this difference: that the purpose of it is sensible and the intention to save life.

Only a few find war exciting and romantic. To most it is dirt, suffering, interminable monotony; and its highlights consist in pressing a button that releases what you long to experience, many miles away. War is a bad way of experiencing the heights of life; it leaves you disappointed, and when you come back from it you discover that you have not had any sensible purpose and have lost contact with that to which you have returned; you have become restless, as it is called, and your nerve has gone. That is true both for the victors and the vanquished. Perhaps the tragedy is greater for the victor. He has been victorious, but whom has he vanquished and for what has he conquered? He cannot make head or tail of it. It was so different when he set out, for then he believed in a simple truth; but that proved to be hopelessly involved once it was stripped of the proud words in which it had been presented to him.

After the Russians had been driven back to Bielgorod on the Donetz River, the German spring offensive came to a halt, swamped in blood, and the entire front from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea became static. Even the planes of either side remained inactive.

It was a lovely summer.

"First I would have a bathroom made," said Porta. "There would be a shower so designed that the water fell in gentle summer rain; and when I had had rain enough a pack of naked and dainty maidens would come and carry me up to one of my thirty-seven rooms. They would all be hot on me and would take it nicely in turn to sit beside me and play with Father's southern fruits. Then the next team would come, fine specimens too, and would have a hundred pipes filled with different kinds of the finest tobacco obtainable. The maidens would light the pipes for me and hold them to my mouth, so that I only needed to lie and suck the smoke in and puff it out again. Now and again one or two of them would hunt my tongue down my throat. One and all would smell of violets. When I wished to eat, the girls would cut my food into nice little pieces and blow on them, and if there was anything that needed chewing they would do it for me so that I didn't have that trouble."

"I suppose you would have another team to wipe your behind when you had been to the can?" said The Old Un.

"Have you read that last letter from Asmus?" Pluto put in. "If only half of it is true I wouldn't have a thing against having both legs and an arm cut off. He says as well that it doesn't hurt any longer. Just imagine having the can brought to you in bed and a darling nurse to give you beauty treatment when you've messed yourself. And Asmus seems to get mashed potatoes and masses of diced ham every single day, and on Sundays two eggs! They're damned well off, the wounded are!

"What luck that Asmus has had!"

The Russians bombarded us with leaflets and propaganda pamphlets. In one of them we read that Hitler had died a week before and that Stalin was seriously ill. Hitler had been shot by a general but his death was being kept secret by the Nazis, as Stalin's illness was by the Politburo. The pamphlet concluded with this appeal:

Men of the army and of the fleet of the Russian and German forces!

Get together for a free Germany and Russia! Turn your weapons on your true enemies, the SS and Gestapo, the murderers who guard the prisons in Germany, those who are prolonging the war, the loathsome ones who like war. German soldiers! Cast the yoke of slavery from you! Wait no longer, but do it now. And you, soldiers of the old holy Russia, shoot the GPU and the commissars! How much longer will you be led by these brutes who rape your wives, sisters and sweethearts at home while you shed your blood at the front? Soldiers of the Russian and German armies! Stop shooting at your brothers; instead turn your arms on the murderers in the SS and GPU!

FREEDOM ARMY

This leaflet was read and discussed with excited seriousness. We were all more than eager to believe any statement, however unreliable, asserting that Hitler was dead and that we could soon go home and settle accounts with his crowd. We took the revolution as given and assumed that it would be quickly won. Porta said thoughtfully:

"First we'll have to clear up some of all this mess we've made and hand the place over to Ivan nice and neat. Stack all the bricks nicely so that he can just throw his gun away and start building his houses up again. Also we had better restore one or two bridges and some of the other damage we have had to do so that the place doesn't look too bad when we hand it over."

"And what about all our towns in Germany?" exclaimed The Old Un. "You can take your oath that Tommy isn't going to help us by stacking bricks for us."

"Don't you be so sure," replied Porta in a tone of conviction. "Otherwise it may well be that Ivan and we go and teach Tommy manners. But, naturally, our airmen will have to go across and clear up the mess they have made over there. That's only reasonable."

Pluto mentioned France and all the other countries where we had made a mess and would have to clean up, and Porta became thoughtful.

"It looks as though we're going to have a hell of a lot to do in the immediate future," said he. "But, whatever happens, all generals and officers will have to strip off their shoulder tabs and come and dig too. It would be a good idea to put Goebbels and Goring and Adolf and Himmler and that chap Rosenberg and the other gentry to tidying the Warsaw ghetto. They should be made to weep tears of blood."

We knew better a couple of days later. The war was to continue, and not just for a short time. Our battalion was going to be used as infantry and was to relieve the 14th Jager Battalion, which occupied a sector along the Donetz. The front was quiet and we did not hear a shot as we moved into the lines by night. Stalin sat on Porta's pack, dressed in a thin uniform of white linen, thoroughly enjoying the trip. He was the only obergefreiter in the German Army who had put on white tropical uniform, but the kommandofeldwebel had entered written permission to do so in his Soldier's Book, which he carried in regulation fashion in his right-hand breast pocket, so the "bloodhounds" could come and look as much as they liked. Everything was in apple-pie order as far as Obergefreiter Stalin of the 27th's No. 5 Company was concerned.

As we took over, the men of the Jager Battalion's 7th Company said:

"Don't you go shooting at Ivan, now. They're a good bunch over there. We don't have any such crazy nonsense as shooting here."

We thought they were mad.

Shortly after sunrise we heard a tremendous commotion over on the Russian side, shouting and calling and hallooing. They were obviously enjoying themselves, we could hear that; then some of them appeared on the parapet of their trench and shouted good morning across to us, and we gaped in amazement. At the same time they asked politely if we were the new lot and if we had slept well. They hoped their dog had not disturbed us with its barking. Then things became really lively on the Russian side: the whole lot of them came pouring out, stark naked, and dived headfirst into the river while we hung half-out of the trench staring at them with our eyes popping out of our heads. The Russians in. the river called and shouted and splashed each other and bawled up at us:

"Hurry up and come in. The water's lovely and warm."

Headed by Porta, stark naked but for a forage cap, we rushed down. Porta jumped in with Stalin in his arms, and the Russians nearly drowned themselves laughing when they heard that our cat was called Josef Vissarionovitch Stalin.

"This is the proper sort of war to have, don't you think?" shouted a Russian NCO, and we agreed with him. They gave three cheers for Germany and we three cheers for Russia.

The Old Un was as delighted as a child. "This is damn fine," he cried, his eyes sparkling. "At home they would think it was a lie."

The day brought more incredible surprises. It transpired, for example, that there was a regular agreement that the Russians fired off a few shells every day between four o'clock and five-thirty while we fired ours from three o'clock to four-thirty, each shell dropping nicely in no-man's-land where it did nobody any harm. That satisfied the generals. When there was any shooting with machine guns or small arms they were naturally fired up into the air. If the Russians sent up a four-starred red Very light it meant that there was a staff officer inspecting them and that for the sake of appearances they would have to do a little shooting with their automatics. When the inspecting officers had gone they sent up a green Very light. We had all sorts of signals that helped to make life pleasant for everybody, and of course we visited, inviting each other to dinner and vodka. We swapped and bartered to our hearts' content: schnapps, tobacco, tinned foods, rugs, arms, watches, newspapers and magazines. Illustrated magazines were much sought after, and if we came across any pictures we found especially interesting we would make a trip across to have the text translated, and of course the Russians did the same.

Otherwise those summer months passed quietly and smoothly in monotonous work. When in our quarters at Achtyrka we had to help train the recruits who kept pouring in from Germany in a never-ending stream. Training recruits is a boring job, especially when you cannot see the point of what you are doing.

We had one magnificent coup, when we relieved a truck of eighteen bottles and a fifty-liter keg of good French brandy. On this sound foundation we arranged a feast. We exchanged five of the bottles for thirty eggs, three chickens, ten pounds of potatoes, some tinned plums and tomatoes; then we stuffed the chickens with the plums and tomatoes and various other things and poured a whole bottle of cognac over them and invited the Russian owners of our billets for a drink. Porta borrowed a Cossack's horse (he was one of the Cossack volunteers fighting with the Germans), but as Porta had never been on a horse before the episode ended by the horse breaking its neck. The Cossack became troublesome, and in the end we had to tie him up and put him together with his dead horse on a timber raft and set him adrift on a river that ran through the villiage. One of the Russians asked us if we would shoot his cat for him as it was stealing hens, and this too Porta arranged in a way that earned general approbation. It is true that the cat did not die of his efforts, but when the hunt was called off for lack of ammunition Porta had bagged one dog and three hens, wounded a cow and a goat and sent a bullet through the hat of the old Russian who owned the cat. The Russian comforted Porta by telling him that the cat was a most unusually difficult one to hit.

One night we stole a 400-pound sow from the 89th Artillery Regiment in the neighboring village of Starja. After that we sat on our latrine eating boiled sow, drinking vodka and playing cards for seven hours at a stretch.

The Old Un also pulled one of Porta's teeth. He had had an appalling toothache for a long time but did not dare go to the dentist. We tried the old trick of tying a thread to the tooth and a door and slamming the door, but the thread broke. Then our old Russian produced an aged pair of dental forceps, so we tied Porta up and The Old Un wrenched the tooth out of his head. But it was the wrong tooth, so the performance had to be repeated. That left Porta with just the one tooth, the black front one, so The Old Un had that as well before we untied his bellowing patient. We had to keep the two apart for many days, but in the end Porta had his revenge. He managed to tie The Old Un up, whereupon he removed his boots and socks, lashed each of his feet to a pole, rubbed the soles with salt and invited two goats to have a lick. While The Old Un shrieked Porta drank beer and kept the rest of us at bay with a long Cossack whip. The goats licked and licked, The Old Un sobbed and bellowed and laughed convulsively.

That was a summer for you!

Far away in East Prussia there was a great gathering of all the German corps commanders. There were generalobersts and generalfeldmarschals with blood red stripes down the sides of their well-pressed trousers. The gold braid on their red collars competed in brilliance with the jewels of the Ritterkreuzs that dangle round the necks of such gentry.

With monocles screwed well in they bent over large maps of the huge front. They spent hour after hour moving little colored flags on pins. Each pin indicated a division of eighteen thousand to twenty thousand men. To be the object of the screeching little Fuhrer's satisfaction meant power and honor.