Reign of Hell (15 page)

We reached a patch of bogland and waded knee-deep through the muddy waters. It was difficult, once your feet were down, to pick them up again. Men heaved and grunted and lifted their legs on high, while the marshes sucked and gurgled and clung with all their might. I daresay we looked more like a troop of performing elephants than a regiment of soldiers on the march.

From time to time, when Löwe himself was mercifully too exhausted to go on, we sat on our packs on the wet ground and stared blankly into the rain with our minds as vacant as our faces. It was possible to reach a stage where thought itself was too much effort. For much of the time I marched with my eyes closed. It was a tip the Legionnaire had given me. You plodded forward automatically, step after step like a pack-horse, following the man in front. If he stopped, you stopped. If he walked into a minefield, you walked into a minefield. It was a chance you had to take. If you didn’t occasionally snatch a quick forty winks on the march, you might well find yourself going without sleep for days on end.

Lieutenant Stegel, half-way down the column, was staggering like a drunkard, slipping and stumbling and swaying to and fro. He had been running a high temperature for the past four days, but they had refused to let him report sick. He hadn’t been out at the front long enough to be allowed the luxury of a hospital bed. In any case, they didn’t believe in his fever. It must have been obvious to even the most prejudiced observer that Stegel was in genuine distress, but he would need to lie down and die before he could hope to convince the authorities.

I suddenly heard a crash, and opening my eyes I saw that the suffering lieutenant had pitched forward into the mud, losing his helmet and his rifle. A sergeant ran to pick him up. He was hauled to his feet, mumbling and incoherent, but even with a man supporting him on either side, and relieved
of the weight of his pack, it seemed doubtful that he could go on very much longer.

The Old Man was marching in uncomplaining silence alongside the Legionnaire at the head of the second section. Despite the rain, the Legionnaire had his inevitable cigarette stuck between his lips.

Suddenly, from somewhere overhead, we heard the busy drone of engines. We craned our necks and peered up into the sky, but the rain obliterated everything, there was only a grey mist and some unseen terror lurking behind it. The drone of the engines increased to a rumble, to a deafening roar, and now above the mist we could see black phantom shapes on the move.

‘Storm clouds?’ murmured Fischer, in his vague parsonical fashion.

‘Storm clouds my anus!’ shrieked Heide, and he dived for the nearest ditch.

Tiny gave Parson Fischer a shove that sent the old fellow flying. Barcelona and I followed Heide into the ditch. Seconds later the earth began to split apart as the first bombs fell. I heard Löwe shouting to everyone to take cover. I saw the ground ripped open by a long tongue of flame which ploughed a gaping furrow before it. I pressed my face hard into the damp earth with my hands over my ears to muffle the sound of the explosions. The bombs were aimed at a village half a mile away. The village was completely obliterated, and the road on which we had been marching now no more than a jagged mound of rubble.

Löwe rose cautiously to his feet and waved his hand at us to follow him. We set off again, in line behind him, picking our way over the chunks of tarmac, side-stepping the craters. The dead and the injured we left where they had fallen.

‘There’s a war on,’ said the Legionnaire, shrugging his shoulders. He lit another cigarette and glued it to his lip. ‘That’s the way it goes,’ he said.

The Russians had a system whereby at the end of every action they sent out a shoal of postcards with the single word ‘Missing’ printed on them. No soldier from the Russian Army
was ever reported dead or captured. Only missing. There was, after all, a war on. It didn’t do to undermine morale.

Night at last covered us with a protective black shield and we began to feel slightly safer. The rain went on falling. Lieutenant Löwe brought the straggling column to a halt, and stiff and footsore as we were we began to dig ourselves in at the edge of a forest. Fortunately the earth was soft and peaty and gave us no trouble. As we dug, Gregor began to lecture Lenzing yet again on the value of keeping your mouth shut at all times and never believing a word that anyone in authority ever said to you. The subject seemed to obsess him.

‘All this crap,’ he said, contemptuously throwing a load of earth over his shoulder. ‘All this crap they give you about Russia being the ideal state. Communism and all the rest of it. Workers unite and let’s all be jolly comrades together and so forth. It’s all a load of bloody wank. It’s all one bloody great fantasy.’ He paused in his digging and pressed a hand into the small of his back. ‘You reckon you’d be any better off in Russia than in Germany? Forget it, mate! Forget everything they ever told you. Nazi, Communist, Fascist, what the hell? They’re all the bloody same when you get down to it.’

‘Do I take it,’ said Lenzing, cautiously, ‘that even though you’re not a Communist you don’t care for the present régime in Germany?’

‘I don’t care for any bloody régime,’ said Gregor, banging his spade hard into the earth. ‘All I ask is to be left alone to get on with my work. At the moment there happens to be a flaming war on, so I reckon we’ve all got to pull our fingers out and do our best to get it finished with as soon as possible. I don’t give a sod which side wins just so long as I can get back to civvy street and pick up the threads where I left off. That’s all I ask.’

‘What did you do,’ said Lenzing, ‘before the war started?’

‘Me?’ said Gregor. ‘I drove a van, didn’t I? Worked for a removal firm. Didn’t do so bad, neither. The tips some of them rich bastards used to give us, just for humping a few bits and pieces of furniture about – bloody ridiculous it was!’

‘You should worry,’ said Lenzing.

‘I should worry,’ agreed Gregor.

There was a pause.

‘Did it never bother you,’ said Lenzing, after a bit, ‘that you should have to do that sort of work? Humping furniture about for people who could afford to sit back and give you filthy great tips for doing it?’

‘Why should it?’ said Gregor. ‘If they want to chuck their money around, who am I to complain?’

‘But you don’t think it’s wrong,’ persisted Lenzing, ‘that some people should have that sort of money to burn while others are homeless and starving?’

Gregor hunched a shoulder.

‘That’s the way it goes, ain’t it? That’s the way of the world, mate. Some have it, some don’t.’

‘And it doesn’t strike you as being unjust? You wouldn’t rather see a system in which wealth was more evenly distributed?’

‘Sod that for a laugh,’ said Gregor. ‘Who wants a world where we’re all bleeding equal? It’s every man for himself, that’s what I say.’

Lenzing slowly shook his head. Gregor was one of those who had been brainwashed even before birth, and there was obviously little point in attempting to convert him. Gregor was just opening his mouth to make some provocative remark on the subject of socialism and sour grapes when the Old Man came running up and put an end to the discussion.

‘You’re wanted back there.’ He gave Gregor a push. ‘Look sharp, there’s a bit of a panic on.’

‘When isn’t there?’ Gregor threw down his spade in disgust and set off with the Old Man. ‘What is it this time?’

‘Reconnaissance behind enemy lines – and don’t start whining to me about it, it wasn’t my idea!’

They jumped down into a bunker, where Porta was stretched out full length on a camp bed. Gregor’s eyes opened wide with accusation.

‘Where’d you get that from?’

‘Found it,’ said Porta, simply.

Really, the man was something of a genius in his own way. The sort of person who would accidentally stumble over a crate of champagne in the middle of the Arizona Desert. The sort of person who found stray camp beds lying about in the middle of nowhere.

The Old Man pushed his feet out of the way and sat down rather wearily beside him.

‘Right. This is it. Porta, Tiny, the Legionnaire, Gregor and Sven will all come with me. As soon as we’ve—’

‘Fuck my bleeding uncle!’ Porta sat bolt upright on his bed. ‘Anyone’d think we were the only flaming soldiers fighting this flaming war!’

He aimed a furious kick at someone’s tin helmet, and now the rest of us joined in in an aggrieved chorus.

‘Yeah, why us? It’s always bleeding well us!’

‘Why can’t some other buggers go for a change?’

‘Why can’t they get someone else to do their dirty work for them?’

The Old Man held up a hand and silenced us.

‘Moaning and bloody groaning isn’t going to make it any easier,’ he said. ‘Orders are orders and you know it as well as I do. Where’s Tiny?’

‘Gone back home,’ snarled Porta. ‘He said the war didn’t amuse him no more. He took the first train back to Berlin and he told me to tell you goodbye for him.’

The Old Man frowned. He jerked his head irritably at me.

‘Sven, go and find him – and don’t be all bloody night about it!’

I ran Tiny to earth playing dice with three privates from the Fourth Company. At some point during the game they had obviously come to blows: one of the men had a black eye and another was nursing a badly bruised hand. Tiny himself reacted most unfavourably to the news I brought him. He stamped back with me to the bunker, shouting all the way, in total defiance of the order for silence.

‘Look here,’ he roared, as soon as he came face to face with the Old Man, ‘I can’t go traipsing about behind enemy lines at this time of night! I’m not well. I’m a sick man, you don’t
seem to realise. I’ve got a backache. My legs are all wobbly. My head feels like sawdust. My bones is aching. I think I’ve got the flu.’

‘I don’t care if you’ve got a dose of the galloping clap,’ snapped the Old Man. ‘I don’t care what you’ve flaming well got. You’ve been given your orders and you’re bloody well going to carry them out even if you have to crawl along on your hands and knees to do it!’ He turned to the rest of us. ‘Now, then. Shut up talking and just pay attention. These are the passwords: wooden legs and a pair of felt boots.’

‘Wooden legs and a pair of felt
boots
?’ I said.

The Old Man glared at me.

‘That’s what I said, isn’t it? What’s the matter with you? Going deaf or something?’

He picked up a box of grenades and began to dish them out. Gloomily, we stuffed them into our pockets and prepared to set off on our unwelcome mission.

‘I don’t want to hear another word from any of you!’ hissed the Old Man.

Silently, resentfully, single file and sullen, we slipped out behind him into the darkness. There was a low, clinging mist which swirled about our feet and gave us all the cover we needed. We crouched, listening, in the wet grass, straining our eyes until they gradually became adjusted to the dark. From somewhere ahead we could hear muffled sounds, and we knew that the enemy lines could not be far away. The Old Man turned and whispered to us.

‘We’re going to move forward. Keep as low as you can and don’t fire unless I tell you to.’

We set off again, through the mist and the gloom, with the tall grass brushing against us. From near by came the sudden alarming chink of metal on metal. Scarcely enough to frighten a bird, but more than enough to scare the living daylights out of six wary soldiers creeping through the darkness. The Old Man dropped to his knees in the grass, and the rest of us followed suit. For a long time we stayed as we were without moving or speaking, and then the Old Man whispered to the Legionnaire and the message was passed back
down the line: there was an enemy machine-gun post dug in by a pylon, only a few yards to our right. Beyond that, undoubtedly, lay the first of the Russian trenches. After several moments of silence, the Old Man rose cautiously to his feet and beckoned us on.

‘What the hell’s he playing at?’ hissed Gregor, furiously. ‘We’ve found out where the bloody Russians are. What more does he want?’

‘Fuck knows,’ I said.

Disconsolate, we trailed onwards in the Old Man’s wake. Even the Legionnaire, indifferent as he always was to personal danger or discomfort, began to question the wisdom of going any further.

‘Be reasonable,’ he urged. ‘I heard what the orders were just as well as you did. We’ve done what we were sent to do. There’s no point in pushing our luck.’

‘That,’ said the Old Man, grimly, ‘is for me to decide. So long as I’m in command round here, we do what I say. All right?’

The Legionnaire shrugged a shoulder.

‘OK, OK. No need to get shirty. I only thought—’

‘Well, don’t,’ advised the Old Man. ‘Keep it till we get back. There’ll be plenty of time then to lodge a complaint.’

The pylon, with its sheltering nest of machine-gunners, was now behind us. We edged our way out of the long grass and entered the wood, where the twigs crackled and snapped underfoot like a breakfast cereal and the low-hanging branches of trees dragged bony fingers across our faces. Once more, our sodden uniforms were sticking to our bodies. Once more, our bare feet were being rubbed raw in their waterlogged boots. Shivering and trembling, we pushed on through the undergrowth. For all we knew, the whole wood might be alive with Russians, but when once the Old Man had taken an idea into his head there was no shifting it, and we could only tramp along behind him and pray that he would find himself satisfied before we had gone very much further.