SS General (31 page)

The general glared at him. He shouldered his rifle and stalked on, shouting at us to follow.

The retreat continued, deeper and deeper into the frozen plains. The vicious east wind cut through our clothes, through our skin, into our very bones, blowing and howling with all its spiteful might, as if trying to sweep us away. We were the hated enemy, invaders of another people's land, and we felt the hostility all around us.

Suddenly, from a fold in the ground, a Russian supply column appeared. Porta swung the tank sharp left and pulled up behind a solid wall of snow, but the Russians had seen us. Their cries came sharp and clear across the plain.

"Stoi! Idi suda!"*

*"Come here!"

And then, gaining courage, they suddenly came at us with bayonets fixed. It could not have been every day they met up with stray German troops, and it seemed to excite them. An officer ran ahead, waving a revolver.

"Ruki verx! Ruki verx!"
+

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"Hands up!"

"Bloody nerve," growled Tiny.

He raised his rifle and fired. The foolhardy officer crumpled up, and his men stopped short and looked at us with new respect.

"Spread out!" one of them ordered.

We scattered instantly, and within seconds our machine guns were sending the enemy racing backward. Porta was crouched behind the P-4, steadily firing with a long-range rifle which used explosive bullets. One had only to bury itself in a man's shoulder for his entire arm to be wrenched away.

The Russians retreated busily, leaving several of their number behind, but they were turned around and sent straight back again by their commissars, who seemed to wield the power of the devil himself over their men.

"Cover me!" a sergeant beside me hissed, and moved out into the open with a flamethrower. A long red tongue went snaking toward the Russians and engulfed them in a sea of fire. The sergeant laughed happily as he saw them burn. He turned and gave me a quick salute and a mischievous grin before running off to set light to a few more men. He obviously loved his job. It was not one that I myself particularly envied, but it takes all sorts to make a war.

We outnumbered the enemy and eventually those that remained gave up the fight and once more withdrew. It was already dusk, and the steppe soon became thick with darkness and with silence.

General Augsberg threw himself down beside us, his frozen lips cracked and bleeding. "At 2300 hours we move out. Meet up again at the Shchir. It's about forty miles west of here."

He moved on to the next group, leaving us flabbergasted.

"Forty miles!" I said. "Only forty miles--why not make it New York while he's about it? Who's going to last another forty miles, for God's sake?"

The Russians came at us again, tearing across the snow in the blackness. My machine gun was still in working order, thanks to the Legionnaire's antifreeze, but it was difficult to control without the tripod and I kept firing short. In the end, Tiny snatched it away from me, slipped the strap over his neck and, disdaining the enemy guns, stood in the midst of flying shrapnel and fired rapidly from the hip. I watched him in wonderment, until he jerked me back to reality with a kick that sent me flying.

"I want another magazine! Don't just stand there gaping! Go and get me one!"

I crawled away through the snow, ran back through a shower of bullets, grabbed the machine gun, and in my panic jammed the loading mechanism. Tiny gave me another kick. I accepted the blow meekly and wished I possessed his thick skin and brutish lack of fear. I always imagined Tiny as having nerve fibers the size of tree trunks.

Again the Russians fell back. A couple of infantrymen came across and set up their machine gun nearby. We learned that they had fought at Moscow and we accepted their presence with grudging respect.

From far off, in the darkness, we heard men shouting for stretcher-bearers. In the confusion there was little that could be done. Germans and Russians lay side by side, bleeding to death. We had no stretchers, we had only one doctor, and the general was already passing along the same order as before: reassemble at the Shchir.

"Where
is
Shchir?" demanded Tiny fretfully.

Nobody answered him.

"Well, all right," he said. "If you don't know where it is, you might at least know
what
it is."

"It's a town!" snarled Porta.

"A river," said the Old Man, with an air of slightly weary apology. "It's a river."

"Another
river?" said Tiny. "Jesus, that's all you ever do in this country--march from one bit of water to the next!"

We lay back in the snow, listening to the silence, waiting for the next attack. Nearby, a man had unwrapped a filthy rag and a wad of old newspaper from his arm, revealing a hole the size of a small pudding basin. The skin around the edges was deep purple, almost black. The hole itself was full of moldy yellow pus. I caught the Legionnaire's eye and we both looked away, as if we had found each other out in some obscene act. The man with the pus-filled crater tore a strip off the edge of his shirt and began solemnly binding it around his arm.

"Could have been worse," he said cheerfully. "Could have been blown right off, I suppose."

I said nothing. I knew, and the Legionnaire knew, and the man himself probably knew, that before very long the arm would have to come off in any case.

In the distance we heard a long-drawn-out howl. One of the infantrymen looked up. "Wolves," he said briefly.

The Russian horses began to join in, whinnying and tossing their heads. They hated the wolves as much as we did.

A rocket flared into the sky, and at the same moment there was a shout from the other end of the lines. "They're moving across from the road!"

An artillery sergeant came running up to us, waving an arm over his head. "We're pulling out! Abandon all heavy arms! You two--" he pointed at random, catching Tiny and me, "cover the retreat!"

He galloped off, and everyone else followed--except Tiny and me. We stayed behind to face the new horde of Russians. The two infantrymen sprang up, Porta, Gregor, the Old Man, the Legionnaire, Heide--they all went rushing off behind the sergeant. Even the man with the bandage took to his heels, still trying to tie a knot with one hand and his teeth. Tiny and I grimaced at each other and crouched for comfort behind the machine gun.

The minutes passed. I looked repeatedly at my watch, but the hands seemed not to be moving. It must have been broken in the last skirmish. I decided to count the seconds instead. Half an hour later I asked Tiny, "How the hell long have we been here?"

Tiny glanced at his own watch. "Nearly ten minutes," he said.

"Ten minutes?" I said. "Is that all?"

"Whaddya mean, is that all? It's long enough, ain't it?"

"Too long," I said. "Why don't we pull out? They must have got clear by now."

"I guess you're right," agree Tiny. "It's time we pushed off."

We looked at each other, licking our lips and not moving.

"Better a live coward than a dead hero," said Tiny.

"Damn right," I nodded.

"So let's go, eh?"

"Why not? What are we waiting for?"

I slipped back the safety catch on my submachine gun and prepared to move, but as I did so Tiny stretched out a hand and held me back. He put a warning finger to his lips and then cupped a hand behind his ear. Tiny could pick up the smallest sound, he could have heard a sparrow breathing half a mile away, but I listened and could hear nothing. He held up a finger, his head to one side. And then I heard it myself, and looked in astonishment at Tiny, who had had several seconds' start on me and should by now have interpreted the sound. He had.

"The bastards are digging a tunnel over there."

Rapidly he tied three grenades together and crept over the ridge. Seconds later there was a violent explosion. Tiny came running back, waving at me to follow him with a terse "Let's get out of here!"

I needed no second invitation, I was after him like a shot. We caught up with the rest of the company trudging through the snow by the side of a frozen stream. As we approached them, a line of enemy fire broke out and a stray shell exploded almost in our faces. It caught hold of the man with the bandage and tossed him high into the air. He screamed hideously as he went up, but he was already dead by the time he came down. Tiny and I were splashed with his blood, great streaks of it down our faces and tunics.

We began running. It was difficult in the snow, it caught at our feet and dragged us down, but we kept it up mile after mile until we could run no longer and the men at the head of the column collapsed in exhaustion, their hands pressed to their sides, their breath steaming out into the cold air.

In the far distance, away across the endless plains, we heard the sound of gunshots.

"That's Ivan, clearing the place up," said Porta, "I'd recognize the voice of a nagan anywhere."

We rested for ten minutes, and then went on again. Throughout the night we marched. Some men fell out and we left them huddled in gray heaps in the snow. By morning they would be dead; some of those who had dropped by the wayside ahead of us were already on the point of death as we passed them.

"Victorious Sixth Army on the retreat," said the Legionnaire in his dry way. "What a heroic sight!"

I looked ahead at the straggling column; I looked back at the men strung out behind. Gray-faced and stoop-shouldered, the sick and the starved and the crippled. Scarcely three hundred left, and many of those would be gone before the night was out.

"They do tell me," said Porta, glancing at my face, "that it's quite cozy, freezing to death."

"They, of course, have already tried it?" I said.

Porta shrugged. "I'd as soon go that way as be shot through the back of the head."

"Or crucified on a doorframe," said the Legionnaire.

"Or castrated," added Gregor. "They do it with blacksmith's tongs, did you know?"

"That's not the worst," said Tiny eagerly. "I met a guy who they'd . . ."

"Shove it!" roared the Old Man.

Tiny looked at him, quite hurt. "I was only going to tell you about the things they'd do if they ever got their hands on us."

Already an old soldier at the age of twenty, I knew only too well what they were likely to do. I didn't need Tiny to tell me. I'd heard the tales of castration and crucifixion. That was why I was marching through the night with a submachine gun slung over my shoulder and a couple of grenades on my belt.

"In actual fact," said the Legionnaire, "never mind they cut your balls off and stick dirty great nails through your hands and feet, I don't believe they treat criminals like us nearly as badly as they do the PU boys."*

*PU regiments were those classified as "politically doubtful." The Legionnaire's company belongs to a disciplinary battalion, made up of military and civilian prisoners of various kinds.

"Everyone treats the PUs like shit," said Porta. "Both us and the Russians. It don't seem to matter whether they're wearing a lousy swastika or a red star, nobody can't stand the sight of 'em."

"That's because the Nazis and the Communists both have the same mentality," explained the Old Man. "They're blood brothers under the skin. If the Nazis label someone as politically undesirable, then the Commies do the same, and vice versa."

"I guess that's about the size of it," said Porta.

We marched on a while in a brooding silence, and then Tiny, who seemed to have something on his mind, turned to the Old Man.

"Look here, I don't get it," he said, puzzled. "If they're what you said they are and they're all the same under the skin and they all hate Jews and they all do the same as each other, then what the hell are they fighting about?"

"Who cares?" The Old Man stared straight ahead. "What difference does it make to you and me what they're fighting for?"

This Adolf Hitler is a curious phenomenon. He'll certainly never become Chancellor. Postmaster General, possibly--although even that I very much doubt-- but Chancellor, never! Why people should go around in fear of him is more than I can understand--what is he, when all's said and done, but some jumped-up provincial? Some raw Bohemian house painter with an overdeveloped sense of his own importance. I warrant you, gentlemen, that within a year or two the man will be forgotten, and his party of young hooligans along with him.

President Hindenburg, during a conversation with General Schleicher and the Bishop of Munster, February 14, 1931

On October 1, 1933, SS Standartenfuhrer Theodor Eicke, inspector general of the concentration camps, made the following speech to his famous Tod ("Death") Regiment:

"Tolerance and humanity are signs of weakness. The man who feels himself incapable of cutting his mother's throat or castrating his father, should he be called upon to do so in the course of duty, is of no use to me. And, by the same token, of no use to Germany. By the oath we take, we render ourselves strong in mind and body. We shall not flinch, no matter what the task! We shall employ without hesitation and without qualms the most brutal methods available to us, if by so doing we shall achieve our ends. Better to kill a dozen innocent men than let one guilty man go free!

"We cannot expect the ordinary citizen, leading his ordinary bourgeois life, to understand or to sympathize with us; his imagination cannot go that far. He must therefore be protected from knowledge that would be both distressing and dangerous for him. The work that we do here, in our camps, among the subhuman and the politically undesirable, must be kept strictly secret. You---my soldiers--my own Tod Division--you among all men must be hard! Hard as granite! For you the sight of blood must be no more disturbing than the sight of water running from a tap! For you the screams of our enemies must sound no different from the screams of a pig when its throat is cut. Learn to enjoy your work! Destroy the traitors! Burn their antisocial books, nip their reactionary daydreams in the bud, crush them beneath you and learn to laugh as you do it! And always remember, National Socialism has three sworn enemies: the priests, the Jews, and the intellectuals. Be always on the lookout for them. If you can find no other justification for arresting them, then arrest them simply for what they are--and take care to plant your own evidence as you do so. It is as well to be in the habit of carrying proscribed literature with you as you go about. That way, you can always be sure of having something to pin on the bastards. Never forget that the end justifies the means!