Monte Cassino (3 page)

Leutnant Frick studied his map.

"There should be a bridge here, Herr Oberst, but can it take the weight of our 50-ton Panthers?"

"Of course," the colonel stated with the utmost selfassurance. "Our assault guns were driven across it several times."

"Allow me to say, Herr Oberst, that there is an essential difference between assault artillery and a Panther tank. Fully laden, our tanks weigh nearly twice as much as an assault gun and our tracks are three times the width."

The colonel's voice took on a dangerous, quiet note. "Let me just tell you this, Leutnant, that's nothing to do with it, but if you don't bring up your tanks pretty sharp and clear the village of the Americans, you'll have a hurricane on your hands."

"I'm sorry, Herr Oberst, but I have orders from my regimental commander to find out what's in the village, and so I cannot carry out your order."

"Are you out of your mind?" the colonel roared. "Your army book!"

"I cannot show you my army book, Herr Oberst. I have no guarantee that you are what you say you are. I am Leutnant Frick, troop commander in No. 5 Squadron of Special Duties Panzer Regiment, and our regiment, Herr Oberst, comes directly under C-in-C South."

"Now you come under me. I'm Chief of Staff of the Division in this area. I order you immediately to fetch your squadron. Refusal smacks of cowardice."

"Herr Oberst, I cannot carry out your order."

"Arrest that man!" the colonel roared furiously. None of us moved. He pointed to the Legionnaire.

"Didn't you hear? Take hold of that man!"

The Legionnaire smacked his heels together with a tired movement.

"Je n'ai pas compris, mon commandant."

The colonel's red, brutal face gaped.

"What the hell's this?" He turned to me. "Arrest that officer." His amazement only increased when I answered him in Danish, gaping at him with an uncomprehending expression on my face. He was almost beside himself with fury and kicked at a stone; and when he turned back to Leutnant Frick his roar had become a shrill squeak and the words came tumbling over each other. "You, Leutnant, order your scarecrows to arrest you! Hell's bells, do something." He cursed, swore and threatened.

All at once, Leutnant Frick had had enough. He swung his machine pistol up under his arm and ordered:

"Reconnaissance group, single file, after me!"

The colonel tore his pistol from its holster and his voice thundered.

"Halt or I shoot!" It was a roar that could have stopped a division in flight. And it stopped us for a moment. Then we walked on without looking back.

A burst of pistol shots followed.

"
Il
est fou,"
snarled the Legionnaire, as the bullets whistled round our ears.

The colonel was roaring savagely behind us. A fresh burst of fire pursued us.

I glanced across my shoulder. He had gone amok. He was kicking at the amphibian; then he leaped into it, tried to start it, but it had gone on strike. He leaped out again, pistol in hand.

"Look out!" I yelled and flung myself in the ditch. The next moment Leutnant Frick and the Legionnaire lay beside me.

Only the strange feldwebel did not have time to fling himself flat and the entire burst hit him in the back. He collapsed with blood spurting from his mouth and his helmet rolled homeless across the road.

"Jamals vu si con,"
swore the Legionnaire. "Pot him, Sven!" I pulled the LMG's legs down.

"No," muttered Leutnant Frick. "It's murder."

"Shut your eyes, Herr Leutnant," suggested the Legionnaire, "or comfort our dying pal there."

I tucked the butt into my shoulder, set the visor, loaded, turned the LMG. The colonel had put a fresh magazine in his machine pistol. A rain of bullets spattered round us. His great figure was balanced neatly in my sight.

"Nice fine bead," I grinned to the Legionnaire, but I had aimed short and the bullets spattered the road a couple of yards in front of the colonel, who gave a bellow and leaped for cover behind his car, roaring: "Mutiny!"

A whining swish almost burst our eardrums as a shadow swept across us and we rolled into the bottom of the ditch as a Jabo straffed us. Its cannon banged and a couple of rockets registered bulls on the colonel's amphibian, flinging it away into the trees, where it was consumed in fire, leaving no more than a charred mummy of the man who had so short a while before been a colonel.

Leutnant Frick got to his feet, shouting: "Follow me."

I broke off half the dead feldwebel's dog-licence and took it with me. We crept right up to the village, on the outskirts of which our infantry and gunners were still running about wildly, hotly pursued by Americans drunk with victory.

A captain landed literally in our arms, sobbing: "Finished. The regiment's wiped out. They overran all our antitank guns. I managed at the last moment to get out of the window of the room I was sitting in with my NCO. Hand grenades came flying round our ears. I was the only one who got out alive. The entire company office was wiped out."

"But hadn't you put any pickets out?" Leutnant Frick asked, amazement in his voice.

The captain tore the cap from his head.

"We felt so safe. Yesterday evening they were 100 miles away. A couple of their regiments had been pushed back. We had some prisoners brought in from the American 142nd Infantry Regiment and they weren't worth much. We were getting ready to celebrate a victory and I had only set ordinary sentries. Our antitank guns were in position behind the houses with muzzle covers on, their shells packed away in the trailers."

"But what about sentries?" Leutnant Frick asked.

"The Amis throttled them with steel nooses." The captain sat down wearily between us. He was quite old and had white hair and was the kind that had believed in the invincibility of the German soldier right up to the moment when the Americans' Shermans overran his regiment; a learned chap, a doctor of something or other at the university in Freiburg, the kind of person who regards anyone under thirty as a child. But the twenty-year old American tank men had taught him differently. He had seen 4,000 troops go up in flames in twenty minutes and now he was sitting in a ditch being questioned by another twenty-year old, a young puppy in a black tank uniform with a decoration round his neck, who was telling him what he should have done.

"One should never feel safe," Leutnant Frick smiled. "When I go to bed, I have my machine pistol in my arms. Your experience was a common one in Russia. War is all cunning and foul play."

The captain regarded his iron cross from the first world war. "In '14-18 things were different. I was in the Uhlans, attached to Count Holzendorf*. I was only called-up again three months ago. This is an evil war." Leutnant Frick nodded. "And I believe we're going to lose it," the captain whispered.

* C-C of the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914-18.

Leutnant Frick did not answer. Instead, he watched for a moment the macabre spectacle being enacted in front of us before he let his glasses drop onto his chest.

"What happened out there, Captain? Could you tell us quickly, we're in rather a hurry."

The Legionnaire lit a cigarette and stuck it in Frick's mouth.

The captain gaped.

"They were just suddenly there," he resumed.

Leutnant Frick laughed. "That I realise," he said.

The captain looked reproachfully at the laughing lieutenant. He picked up a stick and drew in the sand.

"I imagine they must have come in here."

Leutnant Frick nodded. "Obviously. I would have broken in there too. Then they knocked out your guns according to the book."

"I suppose so." He hid his face in his gloved hands. "I cannot understand how I escaped. My No. 2 lay across the table with his back torn open. He was full of promise. We had just been saying that he must come to Freiburg. He knew everything about Kant."

Leutnant Frick laughed ironically.

"It would have been better, if he had been a specialist in automatic cannon and lateral security. It's soldiers we need just now, not philosophers."

The captain looked up. "There's another time coming, young man."

"Most certainly. But in all probability you won't see it, any more than your philosopher-second-in-command."

"Are you intending to report me for dereliction of duty," the captain asked anxiously.

"Wouldn't dream of it," Leutnant Frick answered casually. "How many tanks do you estimate there are in the place?"

"At least a battalion."

"Hm," Leutnant Frick snorted. "Sounds incredible, but you must know what you've seen. But do you realise how much space a tank battalion occupies? 80 to 100 tanks plus all the accessories. It's traffic enough to make the hair of even a French policeman stand on end."

"It was absolute slaughter," said the captain defending himself. "I saw my batman being crushed under a Sherman. He was a law student, from a good Viennese family. We had a lot of promising young men in our battalion, academically, I mean. Now they've all been killed. We had a sort of lecture-circle. The regimental commander was a university professor. We honoured the academic spirit."

"I can't say anything about that," Leutnant Frick remarked drily. "But it seems to me, it would have been better if you had been military-minded. You might have saved half of your battalion, if you had." He brushed an imaginary grain of dust from his sparkling grand cross. "The philosophic approach is no use for commanding a battalion."

"You are a soldier, Leutnant, decorated for bravery-- and very young."

"Yes, I'm a soldier and have been one since they fished me out of the classroom. In your eyes, perhaps, I'm only a child, but now the child had got to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for you and your intellectual aristocrats. Lying behind me, there, is a man who has been a soldier for thirty years. He has learned his craft thoroughly with the French, and the ensign there by the LMG is one of those you despise. In your eyes he is just a product of the gutter. He and the little NCO there know nothing of Kant and Schopenhauer, but they do know the cruel laws of Mars."

The captain gazed steadily at the young lieutenant. A tired smile appeared on his face.

"You would kill your own mother, if your superior ordered you to do so?"

"Certainly; just as I would run over her if she stood in the way of my tank."

"Poor world," whispered the academic in uniform. He got to his feet, chucked his pistol and cap into the ditch and walked off down the road, alone.

The Legionnaire lit a new cigarette from the old, as he watched him go.

"A generation will disappear with that naive idiot.
C'est fini."

Leutnant Frick righted the order on its ribbon that he had been given for smashing a battalion of Russian tanks. "He believes his ideas. Let him keep his illusions till he pegs out. We'll write a nice report about him, when we get back; we'll have him manning an antitank gun, the last survivor of his battalion."

We sneaked back along a sunken road and the dry bed of a stream and rejoined the squadron.

Major Michael Braun, known as Mike, our new squadron commander, who before the war had served in the US Marines, listened in silence to our report. He turned, grinning, to the radio-operator "Barcelona" Blom and, in a gruff beery voice, ordered: "Call up the regiment, ask for the code word for starting general slaughter." He shot a jet of tobacco juice at an industrious lizard and hit on the tail.

Barcelona called into his microphone.

"Rhinoceros calling Sow, Rhinoceros calling Sow. Over."

"Sow here. Come in Rhinoceros. Over."

We hung our heads in through the hatch and listened to their conversation, complete gibberish to the uninitiated.

"Rhinoceros here calling Sow, Rhinoceros calling Sow, Point 12 AZ water 4/1. One litter of pups drowned. Four mothers. Not clear if more. Wild pigs scattered. No pikes. Code word desired. Mike. End. Over."

"Sow here calling Rhinoceros. Do it yourself. Responsibility Mike's. No extra wild pigs. Good luck. End."

"What a change," grinned the Major. "The responsibility is to be mine. I've been a pistol-cooly for a hundred years now but I've never yet heard of the responsibility not being the squadron boss's." He perched on the nose of 523, which was our tank. "Tank commanders to me!" He placed one of his giant cigars bang in the middle of his mouth.

The tank commanders came trotting up, their silk neck-scarves glowing with all the colours of the rainbow. Each tank crew chose its own colour. Mike surveyed us.

"Park your arses on the sward and listen. I haven't time to repeat anything, and the pisser who doesn't get what I say will have to deal with me. We have had our code word and that means: clear the bog! My old friends the Yankees have just roasted a couple of regiments of our coolies and are busy marking them on the arse with their bayonets. They think they're all ready to pull on the zabarotsch* and have begun writing postcards home reporting their victory. Quick victories induce megalomania, and now we're going to take them down a peg or two." He jumped down from the tank. "Out with your maps. We must be over them like thunder and lightning. There's a gap here." He pointed to the map. "We'll go through there. We've two miles on the other side of the wood, the hell of a big open stretch, but we've got to cross it. At all costs. And it's all up to us. We've no help. We're on our own. No infantry support, no artillery support. The lads from Texas have shot 'em all up." He enveloped himself in blue tobacco smoke. "I thought we'd do the trick this way." His cigar swung from one side of his mouth to the other. "Four Panthers smash slap through into the village. We'll catch the Texas bums at their coffee and cakes." He swept his cigar from his mouth and held it up admonishingly. "The Yankees must have no idea of our existence until we're right in among them administering emetics, so," Mike raised one big bushy black eyebrow, "no pooping off. All safety catches on. And the Yankees must not be allowed to start shooting either."

*Russian -- shirt of victory.

"Well, we'd better send them a postcard about that," said Porta disrespectfully from one of the back rows.