Wheels of Terror (26 page)

It was dark when the train for Minsk steamed into the station. All the carriages were filled with soldiers. They lay everywhere. On the luggage-racks, under the seats, along the corridors, in the toilet.

At daybreak we passed by the border-town of Brest-Litovsk and rolled towards Minsk. Late in the evening we arrived.

I was so tired and sore I could hardly walk. In Minsk I had to report to the MTO. My papers, which I had got from Berlin, stated: Berlin-Minsk over Lemberg-Brest-Litovsk.

In the station office I was received by a sergeant. He consulted some lists, stamped my papers and said:

'You are going to Vjasma. There you must report to the MTO and get a new route, but hurry up - your train is on track 47.'

I arrived at Vjasma the following day about three in the afternoon. Hungry, tired and wet through, I fumbled my way to the MTO office.

An NCO disappeared into an office with my papers. A little later he re-appeared with a stout, elderly captain. Placing himself in front of me with splayed legs and gloved hands on hips, he glared nastily at me and asked:

'What the hell are you thinking of?' He croaked like a hoarse raven. 'What are you doing here, travelling half round Russia. You've had leave and now you're playing truant?'

I stood stiffly to attention and stared blindly into the room. A stick in the stove crackled. It smelt of fire-wood, birch-logs.

'Is he dumb?' coughed the captain. 'Answer, spit it out!'

('Choose the right answer Sven. What you say now will decide your fate. How that captain reeks of sweat and grease.')

'Yes, Herr Hauptmann?'

'And what the hell does that mean?' he raged.

The flames in the fire played warmly. It looked cosy and lovely. (Your leave is over, quite finished.)

'I humbly report, Herr Hauptmann that I travel round half Russia.'

'Ah, you rat, you confess. Wise of you. Take that chair, jump ten times at the double and then another ten. Quickly now, front animal!'

Stiffly I bent my knees, gripped the heavy office chair and held it with straight arms while jumping with bent legs.

The captain grinned contentedly.

'Faster, faster!' He beat the rhythm with a ruler.

'One, two, one, two, big jump - one, two, big jump!'

He was not content with two times ten, but three times ten satisfied him.

With the station staff loudly applauding him, he ordered:

'Other way round, now, lazy animal!'

A respirator container hit me hard on the neck as I raced across the desk and crawled underneath a row of chairs placed to resemble a tunnel.

It blackened in front of my eyes. The blood pumped. Far away I heard the raven's croak:

'Faster, faster, idle dog!'

Who shouted 'Room to attention?' I stopped automatically and stretched my dirty fingers along my trouser seams and stared stiffly at a photograph of Hitler. Did the picture move? Or did I?

My head ached. Red spots danced in front of my eyes. The picture came and went.

A razor-sharp voice cut the silence:

'What's going on here?'

Silence. The fire was full of joy. It smoked birch-sticks. It smelt beautifully of forest and freedom (birch-trees are friends. Friends are birch-trees. Oh, nonsense!).

'Now then, are all you gentlemen struck dumb?' It was the cold voice again.

'Herr Oberst, Hauptmann von Weissgeibel, detailed for station duty humbly reports the punishment of a gunner who has been dawdling behind the lines. The punishment is completed.'

'Where's the gunner, Herr Hauptmann von Weissgeibel?'

The voice was rough but polite.

The captain, small, fat, glistening with grease, pointed a sausage-finger at me. A cold, smooth face beneath a white fur hat stared at me.

'Easy!'

Automatically my left foot slid out to the side. The hands relaxed a little. Every muscle is ready to spring to attention again if the small mouth commands. A colonel's mouth. A colonel with many crosses, white, black, red and blue.

'Gunner? Come here, Herr Hauptmann. Where are you?'

The captain rolled across, glared at me and shifted his short legs in the far too large boots.

'I humbly report, Herr Oberst, this man is a tank-gunner.'

'You think so?' The colonel smiled thinly and dangerously. 'Forgotten the German army's rank badges?'

A long finger encased in black leather touched my belt buckle.

'Report, soldier!'

'Report, Herr Oberst, Fahnenjunker Hassel, 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment, No. 5 Company, travelling from Berlin to Minsk via Brest-Litovsk after completion of leave. From Berlin MTO office orders of new route in Minsk. Ordered from Minsk to Vjasma. Humbly report arrival at 15.07 hours with train No. 874.'

'Easy, Fahnenjunker!'

A hand is stretched imperiously out.

'Your papers.'

Boots bang across the wooden floor. Heels click together. Voices report humbly. The colonel says nothing. He reads the papers with the green and red markings, thumbs the tickets, screws in a monocle, studies the rubber-stamps. The monocle disappears in the pocket between the third and fourth button. He considers the situation.

Like arrows the orders shoot out. The captain trembles. The NCOs shake. The clerks at attention beside their desks swallow hard.

Only the front-line soldier wishing his pals were here does not listen very carefully to what happens. The amusements have been interrupted by a fighting officer on his way to front-line headquarters. A small colonel with only one arm and a merciless, smooth and handsome face. A colonel who is dead inside. A colonel who hates everybody because everybody hates him.

A clerk takes his seat behind his typewriter. Springily the colonel walks up and down before him dictating, the empty sleeve hanging loosely.

He looks at the typewritten sheet. With two fingers he hands it to the captain.

'Sign it; it is to your liking, isn't it?'

'Yes, Herr Oberst,' stammers the Captain nearly weeping.

The colonel nods.

'Read it out, Herr Hauptmann!'

It is a short and concise military application for a transfer. When the captain reads the thanks to Colonel von Tolksdorf for his concern in so quickly sending off Captain von Weissgeibel and his station staff's transfer request to an infantry battalion, his eyes bulge.

Indifferently, quite impersonally, the colonel puts away the three folded applications in his pocket. The station staff's fate is sealed.

A few minutes later I am in a train on my way to Mogilev.

In front of the engine we push an open truck filled with sand. A precaution against mines. How it works only God and the German railway-security service know.

The ice-roses on the window change into faces. The faces come and go. Berlin - House Vaterland - Zigeunerkeller - and all the other places where we had been, she and I.

She approached me as I stood on the Schlesischer Station in Berlin.

'On leave?' she asked. Her eyes measured me, coolly and firmly.

Deep grey eyes, heavily framed by mascara, with a little grey-blue. She was
the
woman, the woman every soldier on leave must have. It was my duty to get a woman.

In my imagination. I undressed her. Maybe she had got a girdle like that girl in Porta's picture, a red one. I nearly trembled. Perhaps black underwear?

'Hell and death,' Porta would have shouted if he had been me.

'Yes, I'm on a four days' leave.'

'Come with me, and I'll show you Berlin. Our lovely Berlin of the eternal war. Party member?'

Without answering I showed her my armlet: special section framed by two death's skulls.

She laughed quietly and we walked quickly down the street. My footsteps drowned the elegant tapping of her high heels.

Kurfurstendamm - Lovely! Friedrichstrasse - dark, but lovely - Fasanenstrasse - a wonder. Leipziger Platz and last but not least Unter den Linden. Lovely, eternally young Berlin!

Her face was calm, beautiful, a little hard but picturesque. Her chin was lifted high and haughtily above her elegant fur collar.

Her long fingers stroked my hand.

'Where to, my kind sir?'

Stammering a little I got out that I did not know. Where does a front-line soldier take an elegant lady? A front-line soldier with pistol, gas-mask, steel-helmet and heavy crashing infantry-boots.

She threw me an inquiring glance. I suspected a smile in the cold eyes.

'An officer doesn't know where to take a lady?'

'Sorry, I'm no officer, only a Fahnenjunker.'

She laughed a little.

'Not an officer? Much happens in this war. Officers become privates, privates officers. Officers become dead bodies dangling from ropes. We are a great and well-disciplined nation which does as ordered.'

What was the matter with her?

The train gave a violent jerk. It nearly stopped. A long whistle and it was on its way again. Rat-tat-tat-tat. The ice-roses again became a picture-book of a leave which now seemed far, far away ...

Zigeunerkeller with soft music. Sighing violins which wept for the gypsy prairies. She knew many people. A nod, an understanding smile, a whispered conversation and many bottles with scarce labels appeared on our table ...

Her girdle was red, her underwear sheer. She was insatiable in her erotic wildness. She collected men. She was a drunkard, an erotic drunkard. Men were her drug.

I had much to tell the lads in the bunker out there. Much can be experienced during four days' leave. A new world can transpire. An old world disappear.

The last night she wanted my Iron Cross. She got it. It fell into a drawer among several other decorations and rank-badges from men who had visited her.

She called herself Helene Strasser. She laughed as she told me. She showed me a yellow-star carefully wrapped in silk. She threw her head back, shook her hair and laughed.

'That is
my
decoration.'

She looked at me expecting a violent reaction. But I was indifferent. Once there was an SS man who tried to forbid Porta to sit on a bench with the notice: 'Only for Jews'. The SS man died.

'Don't you understand? I've got the Jew's star.'

'Yes, but what of it?'

'You'll be sent to prison,' she laughed, 'because you've been in bed with me. Was I worth it?'

'Yes, but how is it you are free? And living here?'

'Connections, connections.' She showed me a party membership card with her photograph.

*

The train rumbled across the steppe past forgotten villages. Sleepy Hungarian guards looked after its many unbelievably dirty trucks and ages-old passenger carriages.

One of my friends, a colonel's son, at a military college had to leave Germany because his wife's great-grand-father was a Jew. They were divorced on paper. Further the discipline could not reach. We drove him and his wife to the Swiss border in a Mercedes staff-car, with a three-cornered flag on the mud-guard and SS number plates right up to the frontier. He went across with his wife whose ancestors had been Jews, and in a wood at Donaueschingen the SS plates were changed with WH plates.

They arrested his mother and her father, for the sake of symmetry presumably. Her mother and his father they let go, but they never received any ration-cards. In 1941 his father was shot. They said it was suicide. There was a nice wreath from the army. Officers followed behind the colonel's coffin. Nice speeches were made.

In Nogilev I changed trains. On the platform I ran into the MT officer who stopped me and asked after my well-being. He offered me a cigarette and addressed me: 'Herr Fahnenjunker.'

My astonishment was great. I was almost frightened by this unexpected politeness. He was dressed in the uniform of the cavalry with finger-thick yellow cords, high glossy boots with huge silver-spurs which jingled like sleigh-bells.

He regarded me benevolently through his monocle.

'And where are you off to, my dear Herr Fahnenjunker.'

I crashed my heels together and answered in the fully regulated manner:

'Herr Rittmeister, Fahnenjunker Hassel humbly reports that he is proceeding to the regiment via Mogily and Brobrusk.'

'Do you know when the train starts for Brobrusk, dear friend?'

'No, Herr Rittmeister.'

'I don't know either. Let's guess.'

He stared up at the grey racing clouds as if he expected a timetable to drop down from heaven. He gave up.

'Well, well, let's see. How was it? You want to go to Brobrusk, my dear Fahnenjunker? Have you got the standard you bear with you?'

My eyes rolled with sheer confusion. Was he making fun of me? Was he insane?

I glanced round. There were only two people, two station-staff men far down the platform.

He smiled wildly, took his monocle out and polished it.

'Where's your standard, dear friend. The regiment's beloved standard?'

He started quoting Rilke:

'
Meine gute mutter,
Seid stolz: Ich trage die Fahne,
Seid ohne Sorge: Ich trage die Fahne,
Habt mich lieb: Ich trage die Fahne--
'

He put his hand on my shoulder:

'Dear Rainer Maria Rilke. You are a hero, the pride of the cavalry. The Great King will reward you.'

He walked up and down, spat at the sleepers and went on in his falsetto voice as he pointed to the rails:

'What you see there is the railway. It's so named because it consists of two parallel steel-rods. These are called rails in the handbook for railway employees. The bed you see under the rails is made of gravel, shingle and broken stones. By scientific tests it has been established that the best method is to put sleepers across with a distance of 0.7 metres between them. On these wonderful, precisely-cut sleepers the steel-rails are bedded and screwed, each single unit secured by bolts and buttjoints. The distance between the rails is, according to the text-book for the railways, termed gauge. The Russians have a special gauge because they've got no culture. But the National-Socialist German army-state is changing the whole Russian railway net to our cultured gauge as our liberation army marches into Russia to bring light into the darkness.'