Reign of Hell (19 page)

‘Fuck the flares and get the hell out,’ muttered Porta.

The Old Man raised a warning eyebrow. He turned to the trembling Colonel.

‘I think we probably ought to go down and see what’s happening, sir. See if the bridge is still there. I can’t see we’re doing any good staying up here, and I really don’t—’

The sound of an explosion suddenly ripped through the night, cutting off the rest of the Old Man’s sentence.
Everyone rushed to the parapet to look over. Geysers of flame were spouting into the air all the way along the skyline.

‘The bastards!’ screamed Barcelona. ‘The bloody bastards! They’ve blown the bloody bridge!’

I looked at the Colonel’s face. It was grey and scaly, and his lower lip was twitching.

‘I reckon that’s it,’ said the Old Man. ‘I reckon we’ve left it too late, sir.’

‘Nonsense!’ The Colonel drew himself up very straight. ‘Nonsense, Sergeant! They would never blow the bridge without first giving us the signal.’ He gestured nervously with a paper-thin hand. ‘Take these three men with you and go down there and see what’s happened. I shall follow on with the rest of the Company.’

‘Very well, sir.’ The Old Man turned towards us. ‘Sven, Tiny, Porta—’ He slung his rifle over his shoulder and jerked his head in the direction of the river. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Us
again
?’ I said.

‘Fuck that for a laugh,’ muttered Porta.

The Old Man turned on him, furious.

‘Will you kindly keep your bloody mouth shut and just do what you’re told?’

Porta mutinously slapped his yellow top hat on to his head and set off in the Old Man’s wake, using his rifle as a walking stick. Tiny slipped and fell going down the steep slope of the rocks, and his machine-gun went clattering ahead of him, making a noise like a thunder peal. Tiny’s shouted oaths went ringing after it.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ said the Old Man, irritably.

Barcelona leaned over the parapet and called down to us.

‘Why don’t you just pick up a loudspeaker and tell ’em you’re coming?’

The rest of the Company caught us up before we had gone very far. It seemed they had decided among themselves that they had waited long enough, and accordingly they shouldered arms and set off, leaving the Colonel to follow them or not as he would. It was obvious that the man was quite unfit for command.

‘Knicker-brained old goat,’ muttered Porta. ‘He should have been preserved in pickle many years ago.’

The night was warm and heavy, and we sweated as we descended the same narrow path up which we had come only a few hours earlier. The mosquitoes were abroad in their multitudes, rising from the marshes which lay below. We could smell the familiar sweet, rotten stench of the bogs, and we knew that somewhere down there was the enemy.

From way ahead of the rest of us, Tiny suddenly fired two warning shots, and we guessed he must have caught wind of the Russians. The Colonel shouted a vague, hysterical order, but men had already followed what had become instinct and were leaping to the side of the path, taking up their positions, setting up machine-guns and mortars.

I saw Lutz crouched behind a boulder. He was shaking so violently I could hear his teeth chattering.

‘Look at him,’ jeered Barcelona, who had regained all his usual good humour now that the time for action was upon us. ‘Like a bloody rice pudding!’

Gregor crawled up to the man and stuck his revolver threateningly into his ribs.

‘Just remember,’ he said. ‘One false move and you’re for the high jump, mate . . . we don’t go too much for the Gestapo round here.’

A whole series of shots resounded from further down the path, and then the Old Man suddenly appeared. He looked round for the Colonel, located him in a ditch, and calmly went up to make his report.

‘Russians all over the place, sir. We don’t stand a chance in hell of breaking through. We’ve managed to wipe out one small section, but the whole area’s lousy with ’em . . . I reckon the best thing we can do is sit tight and wait to see which way they jump.’

Before the Colonel could reply, the sky over our heads was suddenly illuminated with a bright light. Full of joy, the Colonel started to his feet.

‘The signal—’

‘No, sir.’ The Old Man held him back with a restraining
hand. He pulled him down again just in time to avoid another flare which burst over our heads. ‘It’s the enemy, sir, trying to locate us.’

Not a single man moved. We stayed where we were, hidden among the rocks, while the flares hovered overhead for what seemed an eternity. Gregor kept his revolver pressed hard into Lutz’s ribs. The Old Man respectfully hung on to the Colonel in the safety of the ditch. The slightest movement could have betrayed our presence.

The last flare went shooting high into the night. It rose in an arc above us, showering us with its light, and slowly, very slowly, fell away across the river and burnt itself out.

‘Right, sir.’ The Old Man helped the Colonel out of the ditch and began to stuff tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. ‘I think perhaps we ought to prepare for action, sir—’

Most of us were already occupied. Heide and the Legionnaire were laying T mines down the length of the narrow path. Porta was busy preparing Molotov cocktails. Gregor and Barcelona were camouflaging the mortar beneath branches of trees. It was stationed well back from the road and was pointed in the direction from which the Russians must come. Tiny was sitting on a rock happily attaching hand grenades to sticks of explosive. As weapons they were verging on the suicidal, but they made a good loud bang and that was enough for Tiny. He seemed cheerfully unconcerned at the prospect of having his head blown off or his arms wrenched out of their sockets. No one else would go anywhere near him.

The Colonel bustled busily from group to group issuing a series of contradictory orders, all of which were discreetly cancelled or corrected by the Old Man going round after him. He reached Tiny, who was perched on his rock playing with his box of hand grenades. He turned in horror to the Old Man.

‘Sergeant, does this corporal of yours know what he’s doing? Is the man feeble-minded? Is he aware that he is about to blow himself up?’

‘That’s all right, sir.’ The Old Man edged the Colonel nervously
away from Tiny and his lethal toys. ‘It’s just his idea of fun.’

‘Fun?’ said the Colonel. ‘Is the fellow a cretin?’

The Old Man was spared the trouble of replying. From somewhere below us a machine-gun opened up, and we could hear pieces of broken rock cascading down the hillside.

‘That’s it,’ said the Old Man, calmly. ‘They’re on their way.’

Heide suddenly came scrambling up the slope. He put a finger to his lips and pointed silently down the path towards a clump of bushes. We all squinted at them in the semi-darkness. The Old Man raised an eyebrow.

‘Well? What are we supposed to be looking at? Just a handful of lousy bushes—’

‘A handful of lousy bushes that weren’t there half an hour ago,’ said Heide.

The Old Man looked again.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Bloody positive. That area was nothing but rocks.’

The Colonel clicked his tongue impatiently.

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ he said. ‘What is the matter with your men, Sergeant? Are they all sub-normal?’

The Old Man frowned.

‘Sergeant Heide is one of the best soldiers in the entire Regiment, sir.’

It was quite true. The man may have been a louse and a bastard and a Nazi into the bargain, but call him what you like there was no denying his skill as a soldier. (Despite his fanatical belief in the Party, he was to end up, twenty years after the end of the war, as a lieutenant-colonel in the Russian Army. Not bad for a child of the Berlin slums!)

The Colonel stared haughtily at Heide.

‘Are you trying to tell us that a whole plantation of trees has suddenly sprung up out of nowhere?’

‘Bushes, sir,’ said Heide. ‘They’re bushes.’

‘Bushes or trees, Sergeant! What difference does it make? Have you ever heard of a bush that grows at the rate of five feet an hour?’

‘No, sir, I haven’t,’ said Heide. ‘I’d be a great deal happier if I had.’

The Old Man suddenly drew in his breath. All eyes were instantly trained on the mysterious shrubbery below. As we watched, a couple of the bushes uprooted themselves and walked. They shuffled forward a few yards and then settled down again. Another pair followed them, and then another and another. Lutz gave a frightened yelp, and Gregor closed a hand over his mouth. Tiny picked up one of his home-made weapons. The Colonel stood gaping.

‘When I give the signal—’ said the Old Man.

He held up a hand. We all watched him like hawks. His arm fell, and one hundred and thirty-six hand grenades were sent hurtling through the air. The walking bushes shrieked in agony. Dark shapes were seen bounding off among the rocks. The noise of the explosions died away, and the dust settled on a chaos of torn flesh and severed limbs. The Legionnaire went off to examine the remains.

‘Mongols,’ he said, on his return. ‘Ugly-looking bastards. Still, we seem to have scared them off all right.’

‘Don’t worry, they’ll be back,’ said the Old Man, grimly.

We settled down again, nervously awaiting the next attempt. The Colonel seemed unable to keep still and persisted in marching up and down tearing at his fingernails. Porta was trying to play dice in the dark, right hand against left, and Barcelona sunk back into his former mood of disgruntlement.

‘One Mark a day,’ he was saying. ‘One Mark a bleeding day. Join the Army and have your brains blown out, and that’s all you get for it . . . and me with another twenty years to go! Jesus God Almighty, I must have been mad. I must have been off my rocker. I must have—’

He stopped abruptly as Tiny suddenly made a dive for the machine-gun and began firing frantically into the gloom. The Old Man sent up a flare. By its light, we could see what Tiny’s sharp ears had heard. Bundles of grass moving slowly up the hillside . . .

They were barely thirty yards away, and as Tiny opened up
with the MG they abandoned their attempts at camouflage and came running towards us up the path. They were Mongols, all right. I could see their slanted eyes and their broad, flat cheekbones. Strange soldiers of the Russian Army who could scarcely speak a word of Russian.

‘Fire at will!’ shouted the Old Man.

The Colonel was screaming his usual stream of inanities, but fortunately they were drowned out by the noise of rifle fire. Sergeant Koblin and Corporal Lutz, working without steel gloves, were shoving one grenade after another into the mortar and never seemed to notice their burnt and blistering hands. Heide had snatched up a flame-thrower and was firing in short, accurate bursts into the midst of the oncoming Mongols. The grass was scorched and the path running with blood, but as fast as one man fell, another came leaping up to take his place.

A line of Russian infantry now appeared behind the Mongols, and we picked them off like flies. There is nothing more deadly than attacking on an open slope. They had no form of cover, no protection of any kind, and yet still they kept on coming, wave upon wave of them into the slaughter. I wondered why the enemy should be trying so hard to eliminate us, one solitary company, abandoned and forgotten in the general flight of the German Army.

‘Fire low!’ called the Old Man. ‘Sighting three hundred.’

It was a massacre. In such conditions, it could scarcely have been anything else. Not even the sheer weight of numbers could compensate for our superior position, at the top of the narrow track. When danger point was reached, we simply activated the mines which had been so carefully laid by Heide and the Legionnaire. The resulting blast made us stagger. Great cracks appeared in the path, and a landslide of rocks and rubble tore down the hillside, carrying half the enemy along with it. The other half either fled or were left behind to die. We hurled ourselves after them down the slope, with Tiny in the lead, firing at anything that moved and shouting and hallooing like a maniac.

An enemy officer, with the red star gleaming on his fur
cap, suddenly stepped out from behind some rocks and raised both arms over his head. He was holding an S mine in each hand, but before he could throw them, a shot rang out and his face shattered in fragments like broken glass. Porta laughed sardonically and lowered his rifle. Eyeless and faceless as he was, the man still tried to drag himself over the ground towards us. Tiny gave an exultant shriek and plunged the point of his bayonet into him, pinning him to the ground. It seemed that all the world had gone mad. We were killing in a frenzy, killing for the sake of killing, wallowing like animals in a bath of blood.

Slowly, the hillside fell silent. The enemy had departed, and there was nothing left to kill. Only the dead and the injured to dispose of. We could hear the moans of dying men as we trailed back to our rocky plateau, and Heide picked up a can of petrol, unscrewed the cap, and tossed it down the slope towards them.

‘What are you doing?’ screamed the Colonel, who had so far taken no part in any of the night’s activities. ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing? Lighting a funeral pyre?’

Heide bowed his head.

‘It seemed the easiest way, sir.’