SS General (23 page)

"Think," urged Pfeffer, "of the monuments they would erect to our memory. Never before, in the history of our nation, has such an attack taken place! They were led by their generals, bayonets gleaming in the sunlight. . ."

"Beautiful!" sighed Stempel. "I can see it all; I only wish I could be there when they describe the scene to the Fuhrer."

"Never mind all that," said von Hartmann irritably. "What about the details?"

"Ah, yes!" Pfeffer leaned forward, eyes eagerly gleaming. "I have it all planned. I have it all worked out. I thought we should honor the occasion by wearing our dress uniforms."

"The ones we brought over with us to celebrate our victory," said von Hartmann dryly.

"And this too will be a victory in its own way!" cried Pfeffer. "How glorious, how honorable, how . . ."

He broke off in annoyance as a Feldwebel arrived, followed by Captain Glaser. They saluted. The Feldwebel laid a white sack on the table and took a respectful pace backward.

"What is this?" asked von Hartmann distastefully.

"Bread and sausages, sir."

"Bread and sausages?" Von Hartmann looked around rather wildly at his colleagues. "Bread and
sausages,
Captain? Have you lost your head?"

"No, sir. It's a gesture from the Russians. I have to report that General Voronov of the Third Armored Division has offered us favorable terms for capitulation. The offer is open until 1800 hours. If we don't accept it by then, they're going to fling all they've got into one final attack."

The generals remained silent and stunned. Only Colonel Crome seemed capable of speech. "And if we do accept?" he said.

"General Voronov assures me that we shall be treated with honor. The officers can retain their arms and the men will be issued with rations of food. Our sick and wounded will be taken care of."

Colonel Crome raised an eyebrow and glanced at his colleagues.

"The Russians," pursued Captain Glaser, "are as anxious as we to bring the hostilities to an end."

This remark brought the generals' heads up in one sharp movement.

General Pfeffer banged on the table with his hand. "How dare you come to us with such disgraceful propositions! How dare you hold converse with the enemy! Even to contemplate surrender makes my blood run cold with shame! Has not the Fuhrer said he expects each man to fight to the very end, no matter what the final outcome?" He lifted his head proudly. "For my part, I intend not to disappoint him. Others, of course, may do as they like. I shall stand firm."

"We have already agreed on a course of action!" snapped von Hartmann. "Pray let us have no more histrionics!" He turned back to Captain Glaser. "As for you, I wonder you have the effrontery to show yourself before us. Surrender to these half-baked barbarians!"

"Out of the question!" cried Stempel, hearing his drums and trumpets pounding in his ears. "A Prussian officer would sooner die!" He leaned across the table and stared penetratingly at Captain Glaser. "In any case, what were you doing parleying with the Russians? You know the orders! Why didn't you shoot the bastards?"

"It was difficult, sir. On the spur of the moment, like that--it was difficult to make up one's mind. I thought perhaps . . ."

"You
thought?"
broke in Stempel incredulously. "Hell and damnation, it's not your duty to
think,
Captain! It's your duty to carry out orders!"

"A clear case of contempt," said von Hartmann.

General Pfeffer nodded. He picked up his gaily decorated helmet and settled it on his head: a judge about to pronounce the death sentence.

"You know what this means, Captain?" Solemnly he began to intone, "In the name of the Fuhrer and of the German people, you are hereby condemned to face death by a firing squad for failure to carry out orders . . ."

Pfeffer and von Hartmann nodded their agreement. They were Prussian officers. Iron discipline, head before heart. It was the spirit of the old days under Frederick the Great.

The Feldwebel disarmed the captain, the guard was called up. They led him outside, into the snow. Minutes later, and the German Army was another officer short. The firing squad left him where he fell, too weak to waste their energies digging a grave, too indifferent to death to feel any respect for the man they had shot.

Down in the depths of the bunker the officers still sat around the table. Pfeffer still wore his golden helmet.

"All the same," Colonel Crome was saying, "we can hardly just ignore it. We shall have to take some sort of action."

"Of course," said von Hartmann, in quelling tones.

"So . . ."

General Stempel suddenly interrupted with a short cry of hysteria and snatched up the telephone. The others turned to watch. They listened in silence as he called up his division and crisply gave the order to attack the Russians immediately with every man they had. But they were unable to catch the reply:

"If you want to attack the fucking Russians," snarled a voice at the other end of the line, "then get out there and attack them yourself, you stupid old cunt!"

There was a click, and the line went dead. Stempel sat back, pale and gasping. He had not yet been able to grasp the fact that his division had for some forty-eight hours consisted of no more than sixty men under the command of a lieutenant. In his swiftly deteriorating mind he still saw himself at the head of a great body of men.

"Do you think that was quite wise?" von Hartmann asked him quietly.

Stempel made a choking sound and abruptly left the room.

"How very odd," said Pfeffer.

Back in his own quarters, Stempel screamed for his batman. "Get me out of this and into my dress uniform!"

"Your--
dress
uniform, sir?"

"Do what I say!" shrieked Stempel.

Five minutes later, arrayed in his pearl-gray trousers with the red stripe, in his green tunic with the gold braid, Stempel called his two ordnance officers to hear his last words.

"The men have betrayed me," he said in low, shaking accents. "I have no alternative but to take my life. And so I bid you farewell, gentlemen. We shall not have died in vain at Stalingrad. History will remember us. Heil Hitler!"

He picked up his revolver, closed his mouth around the barrel and pulled the trigger. The two officers stood frozen in a stiff salute, the tears rolling unchecked down their faces.

Two hours after Captain Glaser had been shot and General Stempel had committed suicide--although that was not yet general knowledge--a trio of generals stepped out onto the snow-covered steppe. They were dressed as if for a parade. Their gold trappings glittered and winked, the red stripe on their trousers shone like a beacon.

"Hello, hello!" said Porta as he caught sight of them. "Here comes the reserve."

"What're they pimping about like that for?" demanded Tiny. "Might just as well get a loudspeaker and tell the Russians they're on their way."

The Old Man gravely shook his head. "Something screwy's up," he said. "When you get the brass hats strolling about on the battlefield like that, you can bet your life they're going to make a mess of things."

The generals trod solemnly toward us. They looked like something out of a light opera, we could hardly take our eyes off them.

Lieutenant Keit, still young and inexperienced enough to be impressed by the sight of a bit of gold trimming, stepped smartly forward and saluted. "Seventy-first Infantry Division, sir! Three officers, eighteen NCOs and two hundred and nine men."

"Thank you, Lieutenant." Von Hartmann raised a hand in the manner of one about to bestow a holy blessing. "The time has come for you and your men to show that you are worthy of the great trust that the Fuhrer has placed in you."

"Sir!" Lieutenant Keit sprang into the air, his arm flying up into another salute.

"We are all about to die, Lieutenant. True patriots and brave soldiers. History demands that we be heroes. Let us not fail in our destiny."

"Whatever you say, General."

The lieutenant gave a nervous half grin of pride, quite overwhelmed that such an honor should befall him. Von Hartmann and the others then turned and began casually to stroll out into the middle of no-man's-land. We were so amazed that it was several seconds before even Porta found his tongue.

"Well, God rot my toenails!" he exclaimed. "You ever seen the like of that before?"

"They've lost their marbles," said Tiny, staring with mouth agape. "Dressed up like a dog's dinner--they don't stand a chance, they'll be picked off in no time."

"What's the point of it all?" I demanded.

As we watched, von Hartmann nonchalantly unslung his rifle from his shoulder. His companions followed suit. They moved with the same air of alert precaution as men on safari; no more, no less. They seemed blissfully unaware that Russian snipers lurked along the borders of their territory.

Von Hartman's rifle suddenly cracked. A Russian soldier catapulted into the air. Back in our dugout we gave a suppressed cheer. A German general stepping out toward the enemy lines and actually firing a rifle!

"Must have been a fluke," hissed Porta jealously.

Seconds later von Hartmann bagged another Russian. Within the space of the next five minutes he had accounted for three more. All this with a common rifle, such as we suspected he had not handled for a good many years! Porta became so enthusiastic that he began shouting aloud.

The generals went on their way, strung out in a line. Pfeffer and von Hartmann and Wultz. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. They were firing indiscriminately at everything that moved, shadows, snowflakes, trees and Russians, and Wultz laughed aloud every time he squeezed the trigger.

But such sport could not last indefinitely. The odds were outrageous; the smooth surface of the snow was already being churned into divots by enemy gunfire. The three generals prowled on regardless, amiably boasting of their individual scores. Back in the dugout we laid beta on the winner. Pfeffer was in the lead at the moment, with von Hartmann a decent second. Wultz was trailing a little. His enthusiasm was boundless, but his aim was poor.

"Who'd have thought it?" muttered Porta at my side. "Who'd have ever thought it?"

For months now, the German radio had been claiming that the generals were fighting side by side with the men. Until this moment we had always regarded it as a masterstroke of comedy, designed to give the troops a good belly laugh. But the laugh, so to speak, was now very much on the other cheek.

General von Hartmann was the first to succumb to the inevitable. We saw him sink groaning to his knees, a hand pressed into his side. He raised his rifle, attempted a final gesture of defiance, but before he could fire, he was blown into the air by an exploding shell.

General Pfeffer was the next to go. He suddenly plummeted forward headfirst, in a straight line to the ground. His helmet, with its gold tracery, fell off his head and rolled a few yards into a snowdrift. We saw a Russian soldier crawl out of his hole, snatch it up on the end of his bayonet and covetously withdraw. A general's helmet was a precious prize indeed, and would doubtless make its new owner a rich man before the day was out.

General Wultz was shot in the back and lay screaming and writhing on the ground. Two men were sent out to retrieve him. One of them was killed outright, the other received a bullet in the hip on the way back. The general died within seconds of being rescued.

Lieutenant Keit, in a burst of naive enthusiasm, called for volunteers to recover the bodies of Pfeffer and von Hartmann. Not a man stepped forward. Who cared about a couple of dead generals? We listened dispassionately while the lieutenant abused us as traitors and cowards, and we watched without very much interest as he and a fool of a sergeant major crawled out into no-man's-land. The sergeant major caught a bullet in the head before he had gone more than a few yards. The lieutenant came back alone in a furious temper.

At dawn came the promised attack. In the vanguard were a solid mass of T-34s; forbidding, prehistoric shapes, like an army of mechanized dinosaurs. We were powerless against them. We had nothing left to fight them with and they ran straight over the top of us, crushing men and equipment as they came, meeting no resistance.

After the tanks came the infantrymen, with submachine guns and rifles. Row upon row of them, elbow to elbow, running toward us. They had no need to break their tight-packed formation; they met with none but the most fragmentary opposition.

The few of us who had survived the first onslaught leaped in terror from one hole to the next, sweating, slipping, gasping, faint with fear and hunger, panic-stricken and helpless. I tripped and fell, and lay sobbing with fright in the snow.

The straps of my pack were cutting into my shoulders, rubbing them raw, and I had lost my helmet as I scrambled out of the path of an oncoming tank. We were the hunted now, a few frightened sheep pursued by a massive pack of howling wolves, and there was nowhere to run.

Gregor leaped out of a nearby shell hole and gave me a vicious kick in the ribs as he dived past me. "Get up, you lousy swine! Get up and fight!"

My muscles responded instinctively to the command, without my mind or my will having anything to do with it. They sprang up with a strength I never suspected them of possessing, and they carried me fast in Gregor's wake.

I crouched panting at his side, in a slight dip in the ground. Over the top of a snowdrift we fired into the midst of some oncoming Siberians. The recoil of the heavy guns pounded against our shoulders, bruising the muscles, but we went on firing, scarcely aware of the pain. Sheer desperation gave us some sort of manic strength, and for a moment the Siberians hesitated and fell back.

Gregor jerked his head. "Let's get out of here!"

Bent double, we fled across the snow-covered ground, straight into the path of some approaching tanks. We flung ourselves into a shell hole and crouched there, praying we had not been spotted. The firing of the heavy cannon chewed up the ground on either side of us. One of the tanks was making straight for our puny sanctuary.