The Bloody Road to Death (21 page)

‘Oh-oh!’ snarls the major, leafing thoughtfully through the movement and rail orders. ‘Aren’t you a little off the route to Vienna?’

‘With all respect, sir, the partisans wouldn’t permit us to take the direct route,’ smiles Porta genially.

‘What’s that Italian doing with the German army?’ growls the major sceptically, and demands Luigi’s papers.

Luigi searches his pockets desperately.

The major waves to two MPs, but before they reach the car they are cut down by a burst of machine-gun fire. Hand-grenades rain into the street. From the roofs machine-guns open fire on the Jaeger battalion. Wounded soldiers crawl moaning to cover. Molotov cocktails explode with a hollow
sucking whoosh. The burning liquid splatters men and material.

‘Partisans!’ gasps the major, jumping from the car.

Porta salutes and smiles idiotically.

‘Yes,
sir
! They’re going to do us, looks like.’

A burst from a machine-gun rakes the street and bullets shake the bodies of men already dead.

Porta backs the car close in to the house wall, from where they can watch the drama in comparative safety.

An armoured car mounted with an automatic cannon rattles round the corner, strafing house walls and roofs. Hand-grenades fly through windows into houses. A long white sheet unfurls from one window. Soldiers storm the street doors. Soon after the bodies of men and women whirl from the windows. They strike the roadway with a thick soggy sound.

Two Pumas thunder forward. Their machine-guns send bursts of tracer through windows.

The major is there again, suddenly.

‘You are under arrest!’ he shouts, aiming his pistol at Luigi. He falls forward with a gasp.

Tiny rolls to one side to avoid the falling body.

Carl’s Mpi rattles. A figure falls from a roof. After him an Mpi comes whirling down.

An hour later it is all over. The prisoners are packed into a church. Enraged soldiers surround them.

‘This bitch killed old Herbert from No. 4!’ shouts a fat Artillery wachtmeister. He smashes his fist into the woman’s face, splitting her lips, and then boots her between the legs.

‘Bitch!’ others scream. ‘Finish ’er off!’

A leutnant works his way through the crowd.

‘Pay attention!’ he shouts, his voice cracking with rage.

Not until he fires his pistol in the air, do the enraged soldiers notice him.

‘Prisoners are to be treated
correctly
,’ he orders. ‘We are not bandits like the enemy! We are getting a summary court together and they will all be shot but first they must be tried.’

‘Just wait, you bastards. We’ll pull your guts down through your arseholes! ’ an oberjaeger threatens three prisoners who are sitting against a wall with their hands folded behind their necks.’

‘Why waste time tryin ’em,’ asks a gefreiter from a Pioneer Battalion. He points at a young woman standing in a corner. ‘That bitch there is mine. By Jesus she’s going to sing before she goes out!’

‘You heard the Leutnant,’ a cavalry wachtmeister warns some soldiers who are beginning to exhibit signs of doing more than threaten. ‘We are the
Herrenvolk
but we are not brutes!’

‘When Ivan the
untermensch
comes this way these bastards’ll know the difference,’ shouts a feldwebel, maliciously.

A tall, thin soldier jabs a young man with the barrel of his Mpi.

‘This pig smashed up our kitchen waggon. He’s the sod we’ve got to thank for no hot dinner today.’

‘Smash his face in,’ suggests an old infantry-man with a sausage under his arm.

A legal officer has established himself behind the altar, which with the help of a flag, has been turned into a judgement seat. His rimless spectacles reflectthe light down onto the tworows of prisoners lined up in front of him. He clears his throat, takes up a long list and in a thin piping voice begins to recite their names. After each name he looks up and says solemnly:

‘In the name of the Führer and of the German people I sentence you to death by shooting!’

He repeats this sixty-seven times.

The sentenced are taken outside the town. In a gravel pit a mile from Samaila the Pioneers hand each of them a spade. They are to dig one long communal grave. This is the most practical way of doing things.

When they are finished they wipe the spades before returning them to their captors. They are poor peasants and know the value of a spade.

A very young leutnant is in command of the execution squad. He is sweating and stammers nervously.

The prisoners are lined up along the edge of the grave so that they can fall backwards directly into it.

‘Gome on, come
on
!’ shouts the leutnant. ‘Next, next, let’s see some movement here!’

The youth who smashed up the kitchen waggon is so frightened
that he falls into the grave and has to be helped out again by his fellow prisoners.

Some of them break into the
Internationale
and shout ‘Nazi murderers!’

The oberst, who has come to see the execution, expresses his admiration of the prisoners’ conduct.

‘Excellent, excellent!’ he says. ‘Many a German traitor could learn something from these people. It’s a pleasure to see them!’

‘God will no doubt take everything into account,’ says the adjutant, swallowing with difficulty.

‘They deserve it,’ says the oberst, a deeply religious man.

When the last man has been executed, earth is shovelled over them and the Pioneers tread it down.

Porta swings the Mercedes up on to a primitive gravel side road. A bridge on the main road has been blown up.

Suddenly there is a thunderous explosion and the road splits open. A sheet of flame rises towards the sky. The Mercedes is lifted into the air and the four men thrown from it.

‘What now?’ pipes Luigi, unhappily, as they sit in the shelter of a haystack looking at the wrecked Mercedes. The only thing left untouched is the command flag.

Porta pushes it into his belt. It might come in useful some other time.

‘What now?’ asks Carl worriedly. ‘Am I
ever
going to get to Germersheim and start working off my ten years?’

‘Every day you’re with us, is a day off your sentence,’ Tiny comforts him.

‘Why I no stay with my own people?’ asks Luigi tearfully. ‘I get new division kitchen. Never Italian Army make war without kitchen for
spaghetti carbonara
.’

Rain begins to fall as they tramp miserably down the road. The cold comes down from the mountains. Down in the valley the Danube winds grey and sad. In the distance machine-guns rattle.

Towards night they take up quarters in an uninviting chilly villa on the outskirts of a village, but they have hardly closed their eyes when they are awakened by a party of infantrymen who are also in search of quarters.

A leutnant fumes at them and orders them to show their documents. These have been burnt in the wreck of the Mercedes.

Tomorrow you will be turned over to the MPs,’ he barks brusquely.

‘We
are
MPs!’ says Tiny proudly, taking out his brassard.

As he does so, machine-guns begin to hammer and hand-grenades tear up the road outside the house. Harsh voices are heard shouting orders in Serbian.

‘Move!’ screams the leutnant. ‘Partisans!’

‘Let’s get
out
of here,’ whispers Porta and moves smartly out of the back door with his three companions at his heels.

As they leave, a group of partisans enter the villa. Wild-looking figures emerge from side-streets. Molotov cocktails crash through the windows of houses.

‘Going our way?’ grins Porta, swinging, himself up on to a truck in a convoy which is on its way to Belgrade.

Just before the convoy reaches Belgrade it is attacked from the air. The truck they have hitched a ride on is thrown into a field. Shrapnel hits Porta in the shoulder. Tiny’s foot is crushed under a box of shells. Carl’s arm is broken.

They drag themselves optimistically into Belgrade and report to a field hospital. Tiny is using a rifle as a crutch. Luigi is hopeful of a train to Italy from Belgrade.

‘It would really be better if
you
were wounded too,’ says Porta, looking hard at Luigi and fingering his Mpi. ‘It would get you a new set of documents.’

They come under fire in Ubi. A grenade explodes in front of Luigi, blowing off half his face and an arm. He lies groaning and before they can give him first-aid he is dead from loss of blood.

They bury him in a railwayman’s front garden and hang the plumed Bersaglieri helmet on a birchwood cross over the grave.

‘Eight days should be enough,’ says the sour-looking MO at Reserve-Kriegs-Lazarett 109 in Belgrade.

A flak
⁸
gunner tells them with a tastelessly gleeful air that the previous patient in Porta’s bed died only an hour ago.

‘That’s
lucky
!’ cries Porta, pleased. It’s not often two people die one after the other in the same bed.’

‘They’ve crossed my documents in red,’ says an infantryman quietly, from a corner where he is sitting staring at a fly on the shade of the nightlight preening its wings. ‘Think they’re gonna shoot me when I get better?’

‘O’
course
they’ll shoot you,’ says the artillery gefreiter who had been in the hospital a long time. ‘
You
are a self-inflicted wound. Most of the blokes here are batty,’ he says, turning towards Porta. ‘If the enemy was to put a spy in here he’d go back an’ report that the whole German Army was made up of maniacs. We’ve got a fellow from the Engineer Corps (Buildings). He was supposed to build a chimney for the Catering Corps (Bakeries). In some weird way he wound up with the chimney built and himself
inside
it and unable to
get
out. This happened in a rarely used part of the building and he was posted as a deserter. If a baker hadn’t happened to come into the room where he was inside the chimney they’d
never
have found him. They got this nutcase out with the help of a couple of pneumatic drills. He’d been in the chimney twelve days and was raving when they got him out. Now they want him to confess it was an attempt at desertion.
He
says he didn’t think what he was doing and the mortar’d dried before he realized where he was.

‘He couldn’t go
up
because the chimney got narrower towards the top. Now they’ve got a commission coming from Berlin. They’ve photographed the chimney and made drawings of it. They’ve tried to climb up it to make sure he really
couldn’t
get out that way. But they still insist on his having done it in an attempt at desertion.’

‘Well, if he couldn’t get
out
of the chimney,’ says Porta seriously, ‘it’d be difficult to
desert
!’

‘Our opinion exactly,’ laughs the artilleryman, ‘but the red-tabs’re of a
different
opinion. An MP officer visits him every day an’ sits by his bed shouting:
Confess man
, or you will suffer for it. You were trying to desert!’

‘Want some poor bleeder they can shoot at, I s’pose,’ says Tiny, gloomily. ‘A war without nobody to execute, ain’t much of a bleedin’ war!’

‘There are a lot here who’re seriously wounded. I’ve lost both legs and half my stomach myself.’

‘
You
won’t be hard on the rations then, will you?’ says Porta, with a practical air. ‘Got to
think
of that sort of thing in wartime, you know. How did it happen?’

‘I was asleep in an orchard.’

‘Doesn’t sound dangerous.’

‘It is when a self-propelled gun runs over you,’ says the artilleryman, sadly.

‘Aren’t you in danger of a self-inflicted charge?’ asks Carl.

‘No, the SP commander’s got to take the blame. The orchard was out of bounds for exercises. It’d been commandeered by Division and I was picketing it. I was asleep in my dinner break. The SP chief’s crawlin’ round the eastern front now pickin’ up mines. The driver’s got his for careless driving. Solitary in Torgau.

‘In B-Block there’s the blinded and the one’s who’ve gone dumb,’ says the artilleryman. ‘They’re readying a ward for the deaf, too. There’s only one just now an’ they’ll be shooting him next week. Failure to obey orders. Forgot to put his ear-plugs in. Rail artillery he was. They held the court at his bedside and had to give him the sentence in writing as he couldn’t hear
it
read out. He’s been crying ever since and tryin’ to volunteer for everything, but who wants a soldier who’s got to have all his orders in writing?’

‘No, there’s not really time for it, is there?’ agrees Porta, thoughtfully.

‘In A-Block we got the malingerers. Lively over there, it is. They start ’em off every morning with No. 9’s and a dose of emetics, no matter what it is they’re sick with. Same again at the end of the day. A phony typhus case died of it day before yesterday. There’s one fellow been playing barmy for a whole year. Soon as anybody comes near him, he growls like a dog and goes for their legs. Still an’ all the most interestin’ case of the lot’s this boy in the next bed here. Broke his neck,
he
did, tryin’ to show his mates how to dance the
prisjatska
. He went at it too hard an’ when he came to the big jump into the air, missed his bearings like, an’ flew straight out the window. Broke a flagpole off on his way down, spun over and
would’ve
landed on his
feet if he hadn’t got turned over again by the regimental notice board. As it was he landed on his napper and broke his neck. It’s gonna cost him a packet, too. They’ve told him his injury can’t be regarded as bein’ in line o’ duty an’ he’ll have to pay for all the damage he’s done
and
for the treatment.’