Reign of Hell (21 page)

The Old Man waved his arm over his head and shouted at us to follow him. We streamed after him, down the hillside, with bayonets and flame-throwers. The Russian infantry were in a state of confusion, but they were backed up from below by heavy mortar fire. I saw Sergeant Blaske running forward, plunging over the body of a wounded Mongol. He tripped and fell, and before he could scramble to his feet the man had tugged the pin out of a grenade and blown them both skyhigh.

Down in the valley the ground was shaking with the thunder of artillery fire. There must have been heavy fighting along the river. I wondered if the bridge had been blown or whether it was still standing, but either way it was a purely
academic question, since we had no earthly means of reaching it.

The mortars were now beginning to find their length, and we were forced to retreat to the plateau. Porta came running past me, followed closely by Tiny. He waved a hand and yelled to me.

‘What are you hanging around for? Let’s get the hell out of it!’

‘What about the wounded?’ panted Kuls, who had decorated himself with a Red Cross armband in the hope that the enemy would thereby treat him with respect.

‘Fuck the wounded!’ shouted Porta, over his shoulder.

The Colonel said nothing. He could hardly have missed hearing Porta’s words, but he must have known as well as anyone that it was quite impossible to take wounded men over the parapet with us. We had neither the time nor the necessary equipment to lower them by ropes and stretchers. There were no footholds in the smooth face of the rock, and it was going to be a question of launching oneself over the top and trusting to luck that we would reach the bottom without too many broken bones.

Heide was still fighting his own rearguard action over on the far side of the parapet, running amok with a flame-thrower. The Colonel was creating havoc among the rest of us by firing off a succession of flares, with which he seemed suddenly to be obsessed. He was evidently under the impression that he was lighting our way down the sheer slope of the mountain-side. But with the constant swinging to and fro from brightness to blackness we were thoroughly confused and dithered about on the edge like a pack of mentally deficient sheep. The night itself was not so dark that we could not pick out the general shape of things, but the flares were too dazzling, they blinded rather than illuminated. The Colonel strode up to the Old Man in a state of self-righteous fury.

‘What the devil is the matter with your men, Sergeant? Do they want me to carry them down there on my back? If they don’t make a move pretty quickly, I shan’t have any more flares left . . .’

Heide came running towards us.

‘Time to go!’ he said, and without more ado he flung himself over the edge and disappeared.

In a shower of dust and stones, the rest of us followed. I found myself instinctively curling into a ball with my hands over my head, bumping and bouncing from one outcrop of rock to the next, never knowing when I might be hurled into space. Some slid down on their backsides and tore themselves to shreds. Others attempted to snatch at trees and bushes as they hurtled past and had arms almost wrenched from their sockets. I heard Porta screaming with manic glee as he zoomed downwards like a human bobsleigh. I heard a bloodcurdling yell of terror as someone else was thrown clear into the void, disappearing to God knows where. I found myself gathering momentum, scarcely aware any longer whether I was still in contact with the hillside or whether I was falling into the gaping chasm below. And then my headlong flight down the mountainside was brought to a sudden and shattering halt by a pine tree. I went crashing into it when I was doing what must have been about fifty miles per hour. My helmet flew off and went racing on down the mountain all by itself, bouncing from rock to rock, while I hung gasping to the trunk of the tree and wondered how many bones I had broken. Blood was pouring from my nose and my mouth. I felt sick and giddy and almost paralysed with terror. From somewhere below me came a shout.

‘Get a move on up there! I’m not going to wait all day for you!’

It was Porta. Still alive and in one piece, perched on a slab of rock and beckoning impatiently to me.

‘Come on down! You can’t spend the rest of the war sitting half-way up a mountain!’

I wrapped both arms round the trunk of my pine tree and crouched there, shivering with fright, snivelling like a baby and dripping blood all over myself.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ snapped Porta.

He clambered up towards me, and still I held on tight to my tree and whimpered self-pityingly.

‘You’re going down this perishing mountain if I have to throw you down!’ snarled Porta.

He pushed his bottle of sake into my mouth and forced me to drink. And then, when I was half choking and almost purple in the face, he tore my arms away from my protective pine tree and set off again down the steep slope, dragging me behind him. It was easier now, there were patches of coarse grass and a few stubby bushes growing out of the rock, there were foot-holds and handholds and a man could at least control the speed and the direction of his descent. But my nerve had been broken and I shouted and fought the whole way down to the valley, where I was met by Tiny and slapped soundly across the face until I managed to pull myself together.

‘I should bloody well think so,’ he said. ‘Bloody awful racket.’

We collected ourselves up at the foot of the accursed mountain. We were a sorry-looking lot. Tattered and torn, with an assortment of bruised and broken limbs, uniforms ripped from top to bottom, faces covered in blood and dust and half our equipment wrenched away in our landslide descent. From far above us, from the other side of the plateau which we had just vacated, came the steady pounding of artillery. The enemy had obviously not yet discovered we had fled, and we had a few moments’ breathing space.

I threw myself to the ground, my heart still hammering against my ribs. Slowly I became aware of the racking pains in my body. The whole of my right side was bruised and battered. My head was cut open, my lips were hanging in shreds, my nose was swollen to twice its normal size. But it could, of course, have been far worse. I could have broken my back, or shattered a leg so I’d have to be shot like a horse. There was no way of taking the badly injured along with us. A man either kept up or he fell behind, and that was the end of it. We were in no condition to carry passengers.

There was a sudden lull in the firing, and the Old Man hauled himself to his feet.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, abruptly.

We strung out behind him in a long, limping line. The Colonel was still with us, marching grimly, head down, by the side of the Old Man. We left the valley and passed through the bottom of a narrow gorge, where we found ourselves up to the waists in a glutinous bog. Several of those who lost their footing floundered deep in the mud and were never seen again. There was no time to stop and organise rescue parties. It was each man for himself. You struggled on as best you could and had no energy left for anything other than your own survival.

We left the bog and cut across the middle of a cornfield. To one side of us lay a burning village. To the other side lay the river, and the Russian artillery. The Old Man pressed relentlessly on. I staggered and stumbled and would have fallen but for Gregor who gave me a hearty kick.

‘Pick your feet up, you stupid clumsy sod!’

I wiped the sweat from my forehead and the blood came cascading down my face, dripping into my eyes and half blinding me. The straps of my pack were cutting into my shoulders, rubbing them almost raw. I could hear my own breath coming and going in great gasping sobs, and the black night suddenly turned vivid scarlet before me. I stumbled again, and this time Gregor’s infuriated kick had no effect. I lay where I had fallen, with my head on the cool earth. Let them go on without me. I wanted no more part in it. Let the Russians capture me and do with me what they would. I was beyond caring.

‘Shoot that man!’ screamed the Colonel, galloping past me on his way to round up the stragglers. ‘The advance must continue!’

‘Advance?’ sneered Porta. ‘I thought it was a strategic withdrawal?’

The combined efforts of Gregor and the Legionnaire hauled me to my feet. Tiny forced open my mouth and poured half a bottle of singularly repellent liquid down my throat. It was so utterly vile that I vomited it all up on the spot and at once felt a great deal better. God only knows what it was. I never had the courage to inquire.

Another half mile and we were on the edge of a forest. We dragged ourselves thankfully into the welcoming shelter of the great trees and hacked our way through the undergrowth into the comparative safety of an encircling thicket. There at last, as the dawn rose, we were able to find peace. You could hide an entire army in a Polish forest, and we were but one depleted company. The Russians would never find us there, unless by some most unhappy accident.

We stretched out on the ground, and the earth was as soft and as welcoming as a feather bed, and the sheer luxury of being able to relax was almost enough to convince a man that life was after all still worth living.

‘
We shall not flinch from the shedding of blood, be it foreign blood or be it German blood, should the nation so demand it of us
.’

Himmler. Article in the
Völkischer Beobachter
, 17th January
1940.

Pelagaja Sacharovna, captain of the NKVD and liaison officer for the Polish partisans of Lublin, had endured seventeen hours of torture at the hands of the SS. Not until they held her naked body over an open furnace did they manage to break her resistance – and even then she passed out before she could tell them anything.

They brought her round by douching her with icy water. The burns on her back were deep and searing, and a judiciously placed finger was enough to make her scream in agony. She had been a beautiful woman before her torturers had been let loose upon her. Dirlewanger himself had slept with her on several occasions. Now there was nothing left of her former glory; nothing but the ugly wreckage of humanity, degraded beyond the limits of what is endurable. A body flayed raw and burnt to the bone, and a creature that moaned and called out for death.

When at last she had told them all that she knew, they put her out of her misery with a bullet through the back of the neck.

We had been in the forest for thirty-six hours, and it was raining again. It had started shortly after we arrived, and it showed no signs of letting up. It dripped off the trees and ran in torrents down the rutted paths of the forest. The ground was soft and spongy, it squelched as we walked on it, and then men at the back of the column found themselves having to splash through muddy water ankle deep.

We stopped for a rest in an area of dismal brown marshland, and Porta took off his boots and wrung the water from them. Heide, to the astonishment of those who did not know him, took out a cleaning kit from his pack and began solemnly to scrub and polish himself. He removed his boots and scraped them free of mud. He examined the soles and discovered that three of the thirty-three regulation studs were missing. But naturally, being Heide, he carried a spare tin of studs with him wherever he went. Having fixed up his footgear, he next turned his attention to his uniform. He sponged dry blood off the sleeve of his jacket with a piece of rag dipped in a pool of rainwater. He brushed the mud off his trousers. He counted all the buttons he could find, and then solemnly pulled out a rag and began polishing them. Even the Colonel sat watching him in unconcealed fascination.

‘Any minute now,’ said Porta, ‘and he’ll start checking his pubic hairs to make sure they’re all present and correct.’

Heide laid down his brushes and his cloths. He buttoned up his tunic and he smoothed back his hair and he turned, very slowly, to contemplate Porta. He let his gaze run up the length of the mangy body, from the bare black feet with their horny nails, to the unshaven face and the matted hair that was caked with mud. He didn’t say anything. He just gave a cold, superior smile and began to reassemble all his cleaning kit.

The Colonel leaned across excitedly to the Old Man.

‘Tell me, sergeant,’ he whispered, ‘is there something wrong with that soldier?’

‘Wrong?’ said the Old Man.

‘Up here,’ said the Colonel, and he tapped significantly at his forehead with one bony finger. ‘Something loose in the top storey, eh?’

The Old Man allowed himself a faint smile.

‘Not really, sir. He’s just what you might call a Living Rule, as it were.’

‘A living rule, Sergeant?’

‘Like in convents, sir—’

‘Ah! Aha! Yes, indeed, yes.’ The Colonel slowly sat back, never once taking his gaze off Heide. ‘Frightening,’ he said. ‘Positively frightening.’

Private Abt, who had been a schoolteacher before joining the Army to do his not very useful bit for the Fatherland, had been hit by a bullet in the thigh. It had passed right through and left two clean, neat holes, but the way he was carrying on you’d have thought he’d had his whole leg amputated. He lay moaning on the ground calling out for morphine, while men far worse off than he sat silently in pain because they knew there was nothing to be done for them. We had no morphine, and hadn’t had any for some time. Private Abt was very well aware of the situation, but still he went on whining and groaning and driving us all mad.