The Cross of Iron (12 page)

There was a halt at the head of the line. Steiner had stopped. The forest floor here was covered with tall fern. Steiner looked at his watch. Krüger asked: ‘What’s up?’

‘We’re at the road,’ Steiner said. Seeing the bewilderment on their faces, he jerked his thumb toward a fringe of brush ahead. ‘It’s just behind that. Sit down; you’ll want to know how we’re going to do this thing.’

‘Hope nobody can hear us here,’ Schnurrbart said. He sat down beside Steiner. The other sprawled in a semi-circle around them.

‘It’s another hundred yards over to the road,’ Steiner said. ‘If you talk as low as I am doing now, nobody can hear.’ He sounded mellow.

‘All right, let’s have it,’ Schnurrbart said.

‘It’s fairly easy,’ Steiner began, puffing at his cigarette. ‘The main thing is to make certain none of the Russians gets away. The houses are on this side of the bridge. If we can take the other side at once, we’ll have them between us. Half of us will wait on the edge of the woods. No prisoners are to be taken. Clear?’

‘Hmm-’ Schnurrbart nodded speculatively. ‘Might work.

With a little luck we ought to make it.’

‘Good,’ Steiner said. Now that the critical moment was upon them, his impatience had vanished. If there were no complications, they would have the bridge in their hands within twenty minutes. He turned to Dorn. ‘How’s your stomach, Professor?’

His voice sounded almost friendly, and Dorn looked at him in astonishment. Harder and harder to know what to make of him. ‘Thanks, the pain is gone.’ Steiner reached into his pack, took out a flat bottle and handed it across Schnurrbart’s legs to Dorn. ‘Have a drink—it’s vodka.’ Mechanically, Dorn drank off the bottle. He coughed and made a face. ‘Strong medicine,’ he said gratefully.

Steiner grinned as the bottle was handed back to him. ‘But it helps. If you’d mentioned the matter yesterday, you could have spared yourself a sleepless night.’ He returned the bottle to his pack.

Krüger had been watching jealously. Suddenly, he thrust both hands under his belt and put on a pitiable expression of pain. ‘Oh,’ he moaned. ‘My stomach’s gone to heil too.’ The men laughed softly. Steiner did not even grin. ‘Go and have a shit,’ he said brutally.

Anselm giggled spitefully. ‘He’s got his breeches full already,’ he said, grinning at Krüger’s angry face.

Krüger turned toward him swiftly. ‘I’ll shut your big mouth for you, my boy.’

‘You’ll need another hundred men for that?’ Anselm said. He was surprised at his own bravado, but he knew that Steiner would not permit a fight.

Sure enough, Steiner intervened. ‘Wait till we’re out of here. I don’t give a damn what you do to each other once we’re back with the battalion.’

Krüger grinned at Anselm. ‘All right,’ he said.

Steiner stood up quickly. ‘Let’s go. Don’t forget that anyone who is wounded is going to lie where he falls. We can’t drag anyone along with us.’ He chose the words deliberately, and he could see that they took effect.

When they reached the road a few minutes later, Steiner stopped and waited until the last man had come up. Schnurrbart looked around him, shaking his head. The road was about six feet wide and ran straight east and west. At this point it was lined on both sides by high bushes. ‘Why couldn’t we have found it yesterday?’

Dietz uttered a low cry. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘tracks.’

Schnurrbart stooped. ‘Wheel tracks, and still fresh. How many are there?’

The wheels of the vehicles had sunk deep into the soft ground. Exposed tree roots had been scoured clean by sharp rims and there were innumerable impressions of unshod horses’ hoofs in the mossy ground. Schnurrbart straightened up. ‘Three wagons, horse-drawn. There are some footprints too, but it’s hard to make out how many. In any case, it can’t have been too large a force.’

‘Enough to give us a hero’s death,’ Kern growled.

Schnurrbart grinned. He turned to Krüger, who enterprisingly tapped the butt of the machine-gun against the ground. There was a metallic click as Steiner took out the magazine of his tommy-gun.

They watched him check the magazine and then replace it. Silently, they inspected their own weapons. Krüger put a cartridge-belt into the machine-gun; Zoll helped him and then slung several belts of ammunition around his neck where they would be handy. They began moving cautiously toward the invisible bridge. The bushes on either side of the road grew denser. The ground steamed; birds twittered in the trees, and the sun cast diagonal beams of light through the leaves.

Zoll had removed his glasses. As he walked, he tried to avoid stepping on any of the withered leaves strewn all over the ground. He kept telling himself that he was not afraid, but he could not overcome a queasiness in his stomach. It hampered his walking. From his clothes a repulsive stench rose to his nostrils. As he moved along, eyes fixed on his feet, he noticed the small patches of sunlight on the ground; they changed shape, expanded and contracted each time the leaves stirred over head. Sometimes a shaft of light would dart like a silver arrow across the road. He recalled a game he had played with other boys years ago. On a hike through the woods they had arranged a race in which none of the runners was allowed to step on the spots of sunlight. Strange that he should be thinking of this game right now. If I don’t step on a spot of sunlight before we halt again, I’ll come through all right, he thought. He became so obsessed with this idea that for a while he forgot the impending attack on the bridge. He found a pretext for standing still until the last man had passed him. Then he followed, his attention concentrated on the ground. In the next five minutes he crossed the road a dozen times, now taking mincing little steps, now jumping or skipping to avoid a band of sunlight. The ammunition boxes weighed him down. He began sweating, but did not notice. He was so absorbed in his game that he ignored everything else.

Steiner, happening to glance back, noticed Zoll’s strange progress. He left Schnurrbart in the lead and stood still. Zoll was on the point of jumping over a broad strip of light when their eyes met. His intended jump became a halting step that carried him right into the middle of the sunlit band. Zoll’s glance shifted rapidly from Steiner’s immobile face to his foot, which still trod the same spot. I’m done for, he thought. He felt paralysed with terror. A few seconds passed while both men stood motionless. Finally Steiner asked: ‘What’s the idea?’ His cool voice brought Zoll to his senses. He raised his head slowly and stared into those unfriendly eyes. Steiner repeated his question: ‘What’s the idea?’ For the space of a few heartbeats Zoll fought the temptation to drop his ammunition boxes and fall upon Steiner with flailing ; fists. But Steiner had the tommy-gun crooked in his arm; only a motion and the barrel would be pointing at him. Slowly, with bowed head, Zoll walked by him, gradually increasing his pace.

When he had come level with Dorn, Steiner trotted past him and took the lead again. Zoll was still quivering with rage and disappointment. That skunk, he thought, that rotten skunk. He could hardly restrain his tears. While he automatically trudged ahead, he tried to adjust to the idea that he would be killed in the attack on the bridge. It gave him a certain amount of pleasure to imagine himself the centre of a dramatic event. Marching along behind Dorn in a haze of muddled thoughts, he began ransacking his mind for the memorable happenings of his twenty-five years. He felt like a man who is being compelled by financial reverses to part with precious belongings, and who examines each article in turn with love and pain. Suddenly Dorn stopped.

‘What’s the matter?’ Zoll asked, startled out of his sombre meditations. Then he saw the men clumped together on the right side of the road, watching Steiner cautiously negotiate what seemed to be a turn in the road. Steiner vanished for a moment, then reappeared and beckoned to them.

‘How does it look?’ Krüger asked.

‘We’re there,’ Steiner whispered. ‘It’s about a hundred yards to the bridge—and it’s guarded.’ The men exchanged anxious glances. ‘We’ll stick to the plan. Krüger sets up the machine-gun on the edge of the woods. Dorn, Dietz, Zoll and’—he hesitated for a moment, studying their faces—‘and Pasternack stay with Krüger and see that no one gets out of the windows. The doors are on the other side. The rest will come with me. Don’t fire until I start. Keep your heads behind the trees. If I see that we can’t silence them all, I’ll send up a flare. That’s the sign for everyone to dash across the bridge as far as he can run. If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll set fire to the houses over their heads. Let’s go.’ He crossed the road and started into the bushes. They moved forward; very slowly, crawling most of the way. After a while the underbrush thinned out, but it still offered some cover.

When they topped a small rise in the ground, they saw the buildings in front them: three one-storey houses made of massive logs, all on the right side of the road. Above the slate roofs rose two chimneys from which dark smoke mounted into the cloudless sky. The creek flowed parallel to the row of houses; here, too, its banks were overgrown with shoulder-high reeds which swayed gently in the wind. The bridge was close by the first house, a primitive but wide wooden bridge with rails on both sides. In the centre, leaning against the narrow slats of the railing, stood the guard—an elderly man with a yellow, wrinkled face. His cap was pushed back on his head and he was staring dully at the dirty surface of the water. His tommy-gun was slung diagonally across his back.

For a while the men lay motionless. Then Schnurrbart crawled over to Steiner and whispered: ‘Funny business. I don’t like this silence.’ He glanced at the three wagons which stood near the long side of the middle house, their contents concealed under dark-brown canvas. ‘Funny business,’ he repeated suspiciously.

Steiner glanced irritably at him. ‘What’s funny about it? The rest of them are still snoozing. We’ll wake them up soon enough.’

‘I don’t know,’ Schnurrbart murmured. ‘There’s something in the air.’ He paused a moment. ‘The house on the right seems empty; the chimney isn’t smoking and the shutters are closed.’

What mattered now was to determine where the horses were. The horses could not be inside the buildings, nor behind them. If they had been stabled elsewhere, there must be a guard with them. He had not thought of that before. If the man guarding the horses succeeded in escaping, there would be the devil to pay. As long as their presence behind the Russian lines was unknown, it was not half as bad. Once the Russians found out, there’d be hundreds of men beating the bushes for them. But how could he track down the horses. Searching at random through the woods would be dangerous and time-consuming. They would just have to take the risk.

He looked again at the Russian guard, who had not changed his position. Then he turned his head slightly and whispered: ‘Get ready!’ A suppressed moan arose from the men. They stared fixedly at the bridge.

A few yards behind Steiner lay Dorn, his chin propped on his left forearm and his eyes narrowed to slits. For the past few minutes he had been afflicted with a torpor that smothered all feeling. He saw Steiner lifting the tommy-gun and then he threw a rapid glance at Dietz, who lay beside him and suddenly began to shake violently. The boy’s teeth chattered audibly. Dorn felt tempted to close his eyes, press his face into the damp moss and just lie still, ignoring whatever happened. But instead he touched Dietz’s arm reassuringly. As if through a curtain he saw Steiner sighting upon the man on the bridge. He tried to think of his wife. But each time he had almost summoned up her face, the outlines of it grew vague, like smoke rings dissolving in a sudden draught He gave up trying. Then he suddenly recalled what Professor Stahl had said to him in parting: ‘You have been an excellent teacher; I hope you will be just as good a soldier. But you must go into it without illusions.’

Dorn smiled bitterly. With a curious sense of remoteness he saw the barrel of Steiner’s tommy-gun jerk a little higher. The whipping round of shots reached his ear without arousing in him the usual sense of horror. The man on the bridge started to move as though he were standing upon a whirling disc. Then his hands gripped the wooden railing for support, his legs sagged as though the sinews had been slashed, and he slid, knees first, underneath the railing and into the dirty water, which reached up to the stringers of the bridge. At the same moment the machine-gun began to chatter. Steiner leaped to his feet and raced with giant strides toward the bridge. Close behind him ran Schnurrbart and the others. When they reached the bridge, they threw themselves on the ground and immediately began firing at the doors of the huts, until Steiner changed his magazine and cried out: ‘Stop!’ There was a sudden stillness. Krüger, too, had stopped firing. The men looked around questioningly. Several minutes passed. Nothing stirred inside the houses. Steiner muttered: ‘What do you make of that?’ Schnurrbart shook his head in bewilderment.

Cursing under his breath, Steiner straightened up somewhat and stared blackly at the silent houses. ‘I thought there was something fishy from the start,’ Schnurrbart declared. Suspiciously, he regarded the silent woods across the bridge. Then he turned to Steiner again: ‘What are we going to do?’

Steiner did not answer for a moment. Had a single shot been fired from the houses, his next steps would have followed automatically. But this uncanny silence put him in a cold sweat. He glanced down at his hands and saw that they were shaking. ‘We have to break in,’ he said. ‘If there’s so much as a mouse inside there, we’ve got to make it squeak.’

The others were still lying on the ground, white-faced. ‘Get up!’ he roared at them. They rose cautiously to their feet. Steiner gripped Anselm’s arm. ‘You go over there to Krüger. Tell him to post a guard at once about a hundred yards back along the road. Then hurry back here, cross the bridge and stand guard on the other side another hundred yards back in the woods. If a single Russian comes along, kill him; if there are more, run for it and report to me. Got it?’

Anselm nodded and began running back. Steiner turned to Maag. ‘You and Kern run past the houses now. Duck your heads; we’ll fire to cover you. Run as far as the last house and see whether there are any doors or windows on the north sides. If there are, see to it that nobody comes out. Get going.’