Monte Cassino (31 page)

"Most companies have been wiped out, Herr Generalmajor. All our positions razed to the ground. All batteries silenced. All contact lost, but we're fighting everywhere."

"Everything destroyed and yet fighting. Who the hell is doing the fighting?" One-eye shouted hysterically. "How the hell am I to lead a division that doesn't exist?"

The telephone rang. It was the forward artillery observer from the monastery.

"Herr General, large tank units attacking from the north-east and south. We have no antitank guns available. For God's sake send reinforcements!" A hysterical sob ended the conversation, as the wretched gunner's nerve went.

One-Eye darted across to the big map on the wall. He spat on it. It was no help. Everything was in confusion. He yelled at the adjutant, who was standing holding a telephone in either hand:

"What the hell are you gaping at, Muller? Take your fingers out of your arse and get those shits in the rear stirred up! Up with the reserves. I demand reinforcements! Every cook, every hospital orderly. Empty the dressing stations. Take their crutches and give them rifles instead. This isn't the time to lie farting in hospital."

The situation maps were swept from the table and trampled under dirty boots. Maps were no use any more. This was the overture to Death's
danse macabre.

The orderly officers were sent off. One-Eye threatened to courtmartial them if they did not get there.

"I forbid you to get killed," he shouted.

A badly wounded lieutenant staggered in and collapsed on the floor. Just before he died, he managed to stammer out: "Herr General, No. 4 Company wiped out. Fighting continues. Sherman's fought to a standstill in front of our positions!"

One-Eye banged his stout walking stick on the table and seized the dead lieutenant by the collar.

"Answer me, man, before you die! What positions? Who's fighting?"

But the lieutenant's head fell back lifeless and blood ran from it across One-Eye's hands. He flung the dead eighteen-year old aside.

"There should be a punishment for dying like that," he swore. He flung a pistol at a Hauptman, yelling: "Don't stand there gaping! Get me situation reports from the Companies. I want to know who are these ruddy spectres who're still fighting."

The same crazy confusion prevailed in the HQ of the other side. The Americans and New Zealanders were attacking them under command of that headstrong general, Freyberg. On his orders the monastery was razed to the ground. He wanted his own Verdun, and he got it. When he heard of the resistance his tanks and troops were encountering, he flung his helmet to the floor.

"Impossible!" he roared. "There can't be anyone alive up there. You must be seeing things. It must be ghosts!"

If so, they were ghosts armed with machine guns and flamethrowers. Fresh units were thrown in and bled mercilessly in front of the remains of that formerly lovely monastery.

British tanks came roaring up the serpentine road. Scots infantry men clung like bunches of grapes to their turrets. A furious blast of machine gun fire shaved them away. Soldiers in blood-soiled rags chucked mines under the tanks' vulnerable bellies.

General Freyberg took his Bible oath that he would take the monastery, whatever the cost.

Fresh units were sent in: Scots, Welshmen, lads from Texas cotton-pickers from Alabama, Australians, New Zealanders, warriors from the mountains of Morocco, Indians in turbans, melancholy blacks from the banks of the Congo, battle-happy Japanese. And heading them all a Polish division thirsting for vengeance.

They wept. They roared. They cursed. They fell and toppled in that hellish machine gun fire. They were beating the air. There were no positions, and yet they were being fought.

The tanks got stuck. Their aerial-photograph maps were of no use. Their own artillery had transformed everything. Where, three days previously, had been a road or a path, was now an impassable area of rock. We were lying in a dug-out, Porta, Tiny, the Legionnaire and I. Two GI's put up their hands. Porta chucked a hand grenade at them.

"The red light's out, chums. All seats sold."

The GI's collapsed in a rain of steel. I planted the legs of my MG42 firmly in the churned up mud. The next moment it jammed. I opened the breech. Heide prised the treacherous cartridge out with a bayonet. I got ready to load. New cartridge belt.

Snarling, the quick-firing MG spat steel from its muzzle. When the barrels got too hot, we pissed on them to cool them. Gregor Martin came with three new ones.

Eagle landed beside us, laden with ammunition. God knows where he had got it. He had been pretty well scalped by a shell splinter and half of one ear was missing. He relieved Heide as my helper.

I pressed the butt to my shoulder, jammed the feet against a stone. The MG spat death and destruction. Khaki-clad infantrymen crumpled and dropped a few yards from us. Another stoppage.

Eagle handed me a bayonet: up with the cap and out with the jammed cartridge. The cap shut tight with a click. Loading action again. The 42 had been on strike only a few seconds, but they were closer because of it.

Heide had also got hold of an MG. He was on his knees, the great gun pressed to his side, shooting. His kidneys and bones must have been shaken loose, but we knew what was at stake. The moment they reached us, we should be killed. Neither side was taking prisoners.

The bodies piled up. Porta and Tiny were throwing hand grenades. Gregor Martin pulled the cords, handed the grenades to them and counted. It would have turned any hand grenade instructor's hair grey; but every grenade exploded exactly at waist level in front of the enemy soldiers.

Then a mortar began pumping its shells out. That was Mike and the Old Man. Mike handed the shells to the Old Man.

A Sherman stuck its great snout over the ruined monastery wall. We stared at its belly that towered there in front of us; in a matter of seconds it would tilt down and crush us.

Porta leaped to his feet and flung a T-mine at it. A column of fire. The tank became a raging hell. A human voice shrieked in panic. It was the tank commander, stuck in the turret. His torso twisted convulsively. His arms flailed like windmill sails. His lower half was burning.

An American infantryman gave him the
coup de grace.
We changed position. A couple of paratroopers with a great bundle of panzerfausts joined us.

The Legionnaire was kneeling. Holding a flamethrower that spurted fire in all directions.

"Allah-el-Akbar! Viva la France!"
he shouted idiotically, as if we didn't know we were fighting a French general.

They were beginning to waver, the Americans and the death-defying New Zealanders.

Then all at once One-Eye was there among us, in one hand a Nagan, in the other his gnarled stick.

"To me!" he ordered. "Follow me!" He had lost his black eye-patch and the empty socket glowed redly. His general's badge on his shoulderstraps glinted in the light of the flamethrower's darting tongues. Stout and broad, he trundled like a steam roller down the slope, closely followed by men from every conceivable arm.

On his right stormed Mike, an enormous cigar nicely centred in his mouth. On his left ran Porta, his yellow top hat on the back of bis head. A bloated general with his bodyguard.

With savage fanaticism we rolled and fell down the steep side of the sacred mountain. Crazy hand-to-hand fights were fought on piles of shattered masonry. We bit, snarled, kicked and thrust.

An American captain, armed only with a bayonet, rushed at a Panzer lieutenant. His uniform was in tatters. He was bathed in blood. I turned my machine-pistol on him. He was invulnerable. He killed the lieutenant. His bayonet snapped. Foaming with fury, he flung the handle at me. He picked up a stone and went for a paratrooper who had taken up position with an LMG behind a rock. The raging captain smashed his head with the stone, seized the LMG and swung it in a semi-circle with tracer bullets fanning out from him.

A panzerfaust blew him to bits.

An American corporal of marines and a German paratrooper lay entangled in death. The American's teeth were buried in the German's throat.

A French major sat on a stone trying to stuff his guts back into his ripped-up belly. An American negro sergeant was lying with both legs caught and crushed beneath the track of a burned-out tank, firing hurricanes of bullets from a red hot machine gun. Beside him was a great pile of empty cartridge cases. A hatchet split his skull for him.

When we ran out of grenades, we flung duds at them. The air was full of whining and whistling. Clouds split. Flames shot down from the heavens. The ground splintered. Barrage. The shells, American and German, killed friend and foe indiscriminately. The staff in the rear had panicked and set in motion a giant mill that ground down everything.

We leaped for cover and flung ourselves down together with our opponents of a moment before and shook furious fists at the gunners we could not see.

I found myself lying beside a GI at the bottom of a shell-hole. Too frightened to speak, we watched each other. Who would shoot first? Then with an oath he flung his machine-pistol aside and held out a packet of Camels. I laughed with relief and offered him a Grifa. He smiled. We both roared with laughter, and fell on each other's neck. We began jabbering away, great laughing explanations of which neither understood a word the other said. We exchanged water bottles. He had gin in his. I Schinkenhager in mine.

Two figures came tumbling headfirst into our hole. It was Porta and Tiny. They started back when they caught sight of the GI. Tiny undid the safety catch of his Kalashnikov. I kicked it out of his hand. I gestured reassuringly to the GI. We crawled deeper into our hole. Our water bottles went the round. We swopped buttons, ribbons. The GI. became quite crazy, when he saw the red Commissar's star on my purse.

We diced, smoked Grifas and Camels, and emptied our water bottles. The GI. showed us a tattooing of Donald Duck on his chest. When he moved certain muscles the beak opened. We laughed so much, we almost died.

Then the shelling stopped. Cautiously we peered over the rim of the shell hole: three Germans and one American.

"Now I am going home," said the GI.

We slithered back to the bottom of the hole and took a fond farewell of each other. We exchanged home addresses and field post numbers, promising to write, as soon as we had time. We covered him with our automatics against possible murderous devils as he ran bent double across the shell-ravaged ground.

"I in person will strangle anyone who picks him off," said Tiny.

We saw him jump down into a dug-out, then wave his machine-pistol.

A machine gun began to bark beside us. Figures in field grey leaped across our hole. The attack rolled on.

Figures in khaki emerged. A brief salvo from Gregor Martin's machine-pistol. They folded up. A group of them was lurking behind a great block of stone. A hand grenade went whistling through the air. The lurking group was transformed into a bloody heap of flesh. On! On! An Englishman crouched to jump. The next instant a knife sat quivering in his back.

More shells. Masses of infantry shot up from the ground. We withdrew. Groaning, sweating, gasping for breath we flung ourselves into what had once been a trench, set up our automatic weapons in position. We tore our shirts into strips and used them to clean the earth and filth off our weapons. What made us fight on so obstinately? Was it the monastery, the holy mountain, our country? No. We were fighting for our bloody lives. All that we still possessed. We were as poor as church mice. Did not own as much as a clean shirt or a pair of boots that did not leak. We had forgotten what soap looked like. We were no longer human, but machines that had run amok and were killing everything living.

One-Eye landed in the hole beside us. His empty eye-socket was full of earth. He lit a cigar at the red-hot barrel of a flamethrower. His one savagely flashing eye stared at Porta.

"I shall put you in for a decoration. If anyone deserves one, it is you!"

Porta grinned impudently.

"I'd rather have a case of beer and a nice little cunt to myself."

A wave of gunfire, the like of which we had not yet seen, made further conversation impossible. The holy mountain shook. An earthquake of giant proportions. We pressed ourselves to the ground, dug our fingers into the mire, made ourselves small, became insects that sought shelter in cracks in the rock and under protuberances. The valley and the mountain were on fire. Every millimetre was plastered with shells of the largest calibre. The village of Cassino vanished.

A paratrooper went off his head and began climbing. He swarmed up the rock faces like a monkey, a feat that under normal conditions would have been front-page news. As it was scarcely anyone noticed. Our nerves could take no more. We lay with our faces in the mire. Smoke shells. Gas masks on. Barrage. Then they came. First the Poles, the Carpathian Brigade.

"For Warszaw!" they shouted.

We withdrew to the monastery. We dug ourselves in. The first khaki-clad figures appeared and were mown down. Bodies, bodies, piles of bodies. Men were burned. Men were crushed. Men were pulverised.

Some thousands of Moroccans, led by fanatical French officers, came storming up, hard on the heels of the Polish Division, which broke in the concentration of machine gun fire.

A Polish lieutenant-colonel, bleeding from countless wounds, rose from a hole and shouted to the twenty men who were all that remained of his regiment.

"Forward, men, and long live Poland!" He had knotted a Polish flag round his neck.

"You're a man after my own heart," said the Legionnaire as he knelt and took careful aim. "You shall be seated at the right hand of Allah, my brave Pole." Then he emptied a magazine into the Polish officer's belly. "God is wise," he whispered. "It is not for us human vermin to ask why." He seized a number of hand grenades and flung them into a nest of American machine guns.

Then the Ghurkas came, wearing their broad-brimmed hats turned up on one side.

They died in our machine gun fire.