The Commissar (30 page)

*
Kriegsverdienstkreuz
(War Cross lor Merill)

*
Army Signals girl

*
Rale Husaren: Red Hussar

†
Der Tori miel aufeinem kahlenschivarlwn rappen: Death rides on a coal-hlark horse

*
stufe 3:
German: Stage 3 alarm

*
P’nnyr Sptihinmrn
: German: Seoul car

*
Pour le mérite (a high WWI orderl)

*
Argrmner Wald um Mliltematlri
: The Areonne Forest at Midnight

*
Alie kameraden
: Old Comrades

*
Bummelunden South Jutland schnapps.

*
We remain simple, while the people remains simple. Our thinking is primitive. when the people’s thinking is primitive. We become aggressive, when the people become radical
.

The wind howls miserably through the stretched-out ruins of what has been, not long ago, a whole new
kolchos
*
. Now it is an untidy heap of collapsed walls and grotesquely bent steel girders. The frozen, half-burned bodies of its animal stock lie scattered about. War in all its wild ferocity has swept over the
kolchos
, and razed it to the ground with one satanic breath.

Three soot-blackened T-34s stand in the flattened orchard. Icicles cover them. Their crews are hanging half out of the hatches, blackened and burnt.

The Old Man is first out of the section personnel carrier. He looks about him, carefully. It is dangerous to feel oneself to be safe. Death lurks everywhere.

‘Drive the waggon well in under the trees,’ he orders Porta, who has his foxy, freckled face up out of the hatchway, sniffing the air.

‘Jesus, but it’s
cold
!’ he says, his teeth chattering. He blows warm breath up along the sides of his face. ‘It’s colder than a polar bear’s arse!’

The snow squeaks under the Old Man’s boots, as he goes teetering up the icy path. He pulls the fur collar of his coat up around his ears, and turns his back to the biting wind, which tears at the stiff material of his camouflage jacket. He has a couple of stick-grenades in the tops of his boots, but this is no cause for suspicion. Russian front-line troops like to get hold of German stick-grenades. They throw better, even though the absence of a safety attachment
makes them more dangerous. Once the cord has been pulled there is no way back. You’ve got just seven seconds left before it goes off, whether you like it or not.

The Old Man stops at the edge of a steep cliff and tugs the broad yellow leather belt with the long
Nagan
holster into place, irritably.

‘Oh, how bloody
cold
it is,’ whines Porta, banging his blue hands together. ‘I’m glad I’m not a Russian and have to live here all my life.’

‘Get the map out,’ orders the Old Man. ‘This has to be the rendezvous. The white
kolchos
has got to be those ruins, though there’s not much white about ’em any more!’

‘Who the hell
did
do that?’ asks Porta, wonderingly. ‘The war hasn’t got to these parts yet! The enemy’s a long way off! We’re the first Germans here, and we’re not the real enemy. We’re just here to pick up something which legally belongs to us!’

‘Flying bombs, I guess,’ says the Old Man. He puts the heavy artillery glasses to his eyes. Silently he stares up at the long winding mountain road, which disappears in mist and driving snow high up amongst the storm-bent trees.

‘Want us to put the tea-waggon in under cover?’ shouts Tiny. His voice echoes in the ruins and rings back a hundred fold from the mountains.

‘Shut it!’ shouts the Old Man, nervously. ‘They’ll be able to hear you in Moscow!’

‘Yes, but listen ’ere,’ shouts Tiny, even louder. ‘If we let this fartin’-box stand’ere puttin’ down roots d’you think Ivan Stinkanovitch will believe we’re some of his mates?’

‘Leave it there,’ snarls the Old Man, irritably. ‘But hide everything else and camouflage it.
Thoroughly
!’

Heide swaggers around importantly in the uniform of a Russian lieutenant, but despite the uniform nobody can have the least doubt that he is a German. He is far too correct. No Russian in his senses would think of going around looking like him. He has even cut away the long hairs in the grey-brown fur of his cap so that the large red
star with its gold edges can be seen to greater effect.

‘Get a sight of Ivan?’ asks Porta, rubbing the snow from his eyes.

‘Shut it, for God’s sake,’ snarls the Old Man sourly, polishing the lenses of the artillery glasses before again putting them. to his eyes.

‘There’s a three-axled truck up there with a 76 on the back of it. There’s something wrong with this set-up. It smells like a trap!’

‘They wouldn’t bloody be bothered,’ says Porta, indifferently. ‘Who in the world’d want to trap shits like us?’

‘You never know with Ivan,’ mumbles the Old Man, thoughtfully, continuing to stare intently through the glasses. ‘Those devils don’t think the way we do. They’re an unaccountable lot of sods!’

‘Give me that!’ says Porta, tearing the glasses out of his hand. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you, letting an old Ford truck scare the shit out of you?’

‘I know that gun,’ answers the Old Man pessimistically. ‘It’s got a muzzle velocity like all get-out, and its shells can penetrate any armour in the world.’

‘Weep on my shoulder,’ suggests Porta. ‘An explosive shell from our new 75 mm an’ that peashooter can stick its muzzle up Stalin’s arsehole, velocity an’ all, and shit the casings out in granny’s apron.’

‘When we gonna start creatin’ confusion?’ asks Tiny impatiently, throwing a lump of ice over the edge of the cliff.

‘What do you think we
are
doing?’ answers Porta. ‘You’re screaming loud enough to give ’em earache in the Kremlin! And stop talking German in the neighbours’ backyard, will you! It’s dangerous!’

‘Go shit! Everybody talks what ’e’s born to,’ snarls Tiny. ‘I can’t talk foreign!’

‘Got us out here on a wild-goose chase again have you?’ says Heide, with a malicious triumph. ‘What did I tell you?’

‘I can tell
you
that this caper’s bang on,’ says Porta,
raising the glasses to his eyes again. ‘It’s a dead certainty this time! And the prize is that big it’s worth taking a risk for.’

‘Last time it wound up as usual, with us empty-handed and standing there staring like a herd of dumb cattle,’ says Heide, cantankerously.

‘Was that my fault?’ protests Porta, sourly. ‘We ran into a couple of bits of bad luck. My plan was genial!’

‘The plan was all right,’ Heide admits, ‘but all we got out of it was disappointment. All that was needed was for us all to have got shot. But this time the risk is considerably greater.’

‘No battle, no victory!’ says Porta, swinging the binoculars demonstratively in the air.

‘If it goes wrong this time, I’ll never listen to a plan of yours again,’ snarls Heide.

‘Listen here. Every sensible feller’s goin’ round waiting for the real big un’!’ explains Porta.

‘There’s always something that goes wrong with your plans,’ hisses Heide, angrily.

‘You make me tired,’ says Porta, giving him a wicked look. ‘If you want to spend the rest of your life in Russia in company with a machine-pistol, all you need to do is to withdraw from this party.’

‘Try, for the devil’s sake, to keep your mouths shut for once!’ the Old Man scolds them, viciously. ‘A man can’t hear himself think with all that crazy chatterin’ goin’ on!’

‘Let’s get under cover,
amigos
,’ says Barcelona, shivering in the icy wind. It comes howling down from the mountain-tops, whipping razor-sharp crystals of ice into our uncovered faces. The cold bites through even the thick felt boots, making our toes ache.

The bitter wind is getting up to storm velocity. A deadly dangerous Russian winter storm may be on its way.

‘We’ll have to make snow-masks,’ decides the Old Man. ‘Make ’em out of camouflage stuff. Ordinary cloth gets wet and is worse than nothing. Barcelona, you put out sentries!’

‘Why’s it always have to be us?’ protests Barcelona, stamping his feet in the snow to get the circulation going.

‘Because I say so,’ replies the Old Man, brusquely.

‘Shit an’ shankers!’ barks Barcelona angrily. ‘If I hadn’t been through a real Prussian unteroffizier school where they teach you to eat old socks and look as if you like ’em I wouldn’t bloody well accept this, I wouldn’t!’

‘What a lot of piss!’ grumbles Albert. He is piling large blocks of snow one on top of the other. ‘Why don’t we just get inside the waggons and let the motors warm us up instead of workin’ ourselves into the ground buildin’ igloos?’

‘You must have hit that black head of yours when you fell out of the tree,’ sneers Porta. ‘It costs fuel to keep the motors running, and if Ivan lets us down, we won’t have all that much of it left to get home on again.’

‘Start up every fifteen minutes,’ orders the Old Man. ‘The Devil help the driver whose motor freezes! It’s 44 degrees below!’

The starting motors are already dead. All they give us is a long, hoarse, complaining moan. Even with the big starting handles we cannot get a response from them. Everybody helps to collect brushwood so that we can start a fire under the vehicles. The frost has turned the oil to a thick, doughy mass. The Old Man does not need to chase us. The thought of going back is in itself enough to speed us up.

‘You idle pigs,’ he rages. ‘How often haven’t I told, you rotten lot to start your motors up at least every thirty minutes? Do I have to do every bloody thing myself? What the hell are we going to do if we have to take off in a hurry?’

‘Grab on to the exhausts, an’ slide on our bleedin’ elbows,’ laughs Tiny, noisily. ‘It’s slippy enough ’ere for it any road!’

Albert goes down flat on his face, and two large blocks of ice slip away from him. Only a stunted bush prevents him from going over the edge of the cliff. Furiously he gets up and kicks out at an invisible enemy. His feet slide from under him, and he goes down again.

‘Don’t count on me much longer,’ he whines, and crawls up into the T-34 to make another attempt to start. To his great satisfaction the heavy Otto motor roars into top revolutions immediately. ‘When you know your way around motors . . .’ he boasts, looking triumphantly over at Porta, who is having trouble with the Panther’s Maybach.

‘German
shit
,’ he hisses. ‘Pretty enough to look at, but shit-all good on the job.’ He kicks the instrument panel in vicious rage. After a long period of trying the motor finally begins to roar.

‘What about the sentries?’ asks the Old Man, as we huddle up together in the igloo.

‘All in order!’ declares Barcelona, snuggling down between the Legionnaire and Albert.

‘Funny thing, but I happened to think of a certain Major-general Rottweiler just now,’ says Porta, shaking a Juno cigarette out of its green packet. ‘Not to be mixed up with the very well-known Herr Rottweiler from Hannover, who bred the Rottweiler police dog. The general wasn’t even related to the dog-Rottweiler feller. They didn’t either of them even know the other existed, and the general couldn’t stand the sight of a Rottweiler police dog, because one of the black beasts had bit him once. It all started with a bicycle, one of the well-known Opel bikes from Bielefeld that only the upper classes roll round on. This Opel bike was standing up against the wall of the general’s house one day, doin’ nothing at all, and taking no notice of a big sign which said:

PLACING OF CYCLES HERE
STRICTLY FORBIDDEN

‘Well, when the general got back from a court-martial he’d been holding where he’d condemned a deserter to death, and saw this bike, he was so angry he had an attack
of hiccoughs. He screwed his monocle fast in his eye to make quite certain there really was a civilian bike parked up against his general’s wall, and when he realized his military eye hadn’t been foolin’ him, he give out a lot of funny noises and changed the colour of his face. Then he made a quick strategic decision, attacked the bike, and threw the civilian shit into the park on the other side of the road. Back it came straight away. It was a park inspector who’d bunged it back again. You could just see his uniform cap above the top of the wall.

‘“What the devil?” roared the general and he gave that park inspector a rollockin’ of dimensions.

‘With a lot of cursing and swearing he got the bike up into the regulation position for bicycles, and gave it a hefty push that sent it rolling along riderless down the hill towards the Soester crossroads. There it crashed into one of the post office’s red bicycles, which was carrying reserve postman Grünstein, so that both of them were on duty. Grünstein wasn’t carrying ordinary post that day, but secret post, sealed and registered and goin’ from one Gestapo office to another. Herr Grünstein fell on his backside with a crash, and a treacherous gust of wind took all the letters and blew ’em all over the place. But it was much worse what happened next. Out of the park came a black-an’-brown Rottweiler police dog with its jaws lollin’ open, just as the general was on his way in through his garden gate, which had eagles decorating it.