SS General (32 page)

"I regret to say that there are those, even high up in the ranks of the Gestapo, who have still failed to grasp that we have entered upon an era of bloodshed. These are the imbeciles who would retard progress by making rules and regulations under the headings of humanity and justice. I say to you now, ignore them! They will be dealt with when the time is ripe.

"One last word, and that is, patience! The day will come when we shall have all the traitors in Germany locked behind bars, and then I promise you a free hand. Soldiers of death, you shall have your hour of glory!"

Dinner and Dance with the Kalmucks

For five days we had been pushing forward in the face of a swirling tempest of snow and wind. Vision was restricted to a few yards and progress was slow and tedious.

We discovered the village entirely by accident, when Porta almost drove the P-4 straight into a vague gray shape which turned out to be a hut. He swore roundly, and we at once moved forward in support with our arms at the ready. We mistrusted all abandoned dwelling places. More often than not they were stacked from floor to ceiling with enemy troops.

Porta pulled the P-4 back into a firing position. The Legionnaire stepped forward and kicked open the door of the hut. A wave of heat rushed out to greet us.

Through the narrow entrance we saw a dim, smoke-filled room and a huddled group of civilians, who eyed us warily. In the center sat an old crone on a milking stool, nursing an earthenware bowl full of what looked like sunflower seeds. The frightened faces of some children peeped out from behind the large stove. Experience had already taught them that soldiers of either side were liable to bring destruction and death.

"Ruki verx!"
I cried, none too certainly, to a young man wearing a torn sheepskin coat and German Army trousers.
"Ruki verx!"
I told him, waving my submachine gun under his nose and picking on him for the simple reason that he was the nearest to us.

He rose slowly from his chair, his hands behind his head. Gregor stepped forward and patted him up and down for weapons. He had none. The Legionnaire took a look behind the stove, but there was no one else there; only the children, their heads full of fleas and their faces full of tears.

An old man stretched out his hands toward us in a bemused show of welcome. "God be praised, Germans! I thought you'd never come back! It's been a long time, and Babushka is dead . . ."

"Who the hell is Babushka?" demanded Tiny. "What's he raving on about? Have we been here before?"

"God knows," said Gregor helplessly. "All these peasants look alike to me."

"Let's shoot the old goat and be done with it," urged Tiny. "I don't like people who want to shake hands with you. It's what the Gestapo always do before they lock you up and start pulling your fingernails out."

"Let him be," said the Old Man. "He'll die soon enough without you giving him a helping hand."

The village was small and we quickly searched it from one end to the other. No Soviet soldiers; only simple Kalmucks, mostly old men, and women and children. Those in the first hut had set lighted lamps before the icons and were pressing glasses of tea on us. The samovar was singing in the corner and it was all very cozy and just a bit unnerving.

"Doesn't taste too bad," said Tiny, gulping down his tea in greedy swallows. "For hot water, that is; could do with a bit of rum to liven it up, but I've tasted worse."

He looked around hopefully in search of hard liquor, only to have the Legionnaire close steely fingers over his wrist. "Drink your tea as it is and don't abuse people's hospitality," he said between his teeth.

Tiny blinked, and said no more. The Legionnaire was very hot on matters of etiquette, and I felt suddenly ashamed of the submachine gun beneath my arm. How could I stand there pouring their tea ration down my throat and threatening them with firearms? Awkwardly, I dropped it against the wall. Seconds later an old woman shuffled across, gave me a toothless grin and removed the weapon to the other side of the room, where she set it down with great care by the stove. She then sat beaming and nodding at me across the room, while I frantically tried to attract the Old Man's attention to my plight and wondered if the Legionnaire would bawl me out for abuse of hospitality if I were to go across and retrieve my property. I felt naked without it. Sooner stand there without my trousers, I felt, than without my submachine gun.

"Sir," said Porta, deferentially inclining his head toward the old man who had first addressed us, "we are your servants."

"You what?" said Tiny.

He stood goggle-eyed as the oldest of the Kalmucks began to gather about Porta, pressing little presents upon him, little oddments, bits and pieces, food and drink, which he graciously accepted in his bad Russian. He then, to my horrified astonishment, offered them his submachine gun in return.

"Here, what're you doing that for?" demanded Tiny, his jaw dropping slackly open.

"Shut your goddamn mouth and let me get on with it!" hissed Porta. "I know the habits of these people. Keep 'em happy and we'll all get along fine."

Porta certainly seemed to be getting along fine. The Old Man watched him in some amusement, and shook his head wonderingly. "What a country! What a daft country! One minute they're putting bullets through the back of your neck, the next minute they're treating you like royalty. And this," he added, turning to the Legionnaire, "is the simple land that the Austrian peasant sent us out to conquer! Adolf doesn't know the half of it. He just doesn't know the half of it."

The Legionnaire slowly nodded his agreement. "Come to that," he muttered, "I'm not sure that I do, either. They're all right at the moment, gentle as lambs--but you rub 'em up the wrong way and they'll be at your throat within seconds."

After the tea-drinking ritual, the women cleared the great wooden table and spread across it an embroidered cloth with elaborate lace edging. From the reverent way they handled it, I assumed it was some sort of ceremonial cloth which had probably been in the village for centuries, handed down from generation to generation. We were served with the local wine in shapely earthenware goblets, and a whole sheep roasted on a spit was brought into the hut by two girls. They set it before the
starosta,
the village elder, and he took down from the wall a great Cossack saber, sharp and gleaming, and raised it above his head. Tiny, growing ever more anxious, began fingering his revolver and glaring across the room at Porta. I confess I was none too happy myself. I had my back to the stove and had to keep twisting my head around every few seconds to see if the submachine gun was still there.

The
starosta
brought his saber whistling down through the air and sliced the head clean off the sheep. Then, holding it aloft, he paced solemnly around the table and deposited it in front of Porta. The rest of us were seated on the bare floor, but Porta, who had earned for himself a position of privilege, was cross-legged on a fat silk cushion. Smugly facing the sheep's head, he poured out a flow of nonsensical and ingratiating Russian to mark his appreciation of the honor.

Before we could eat, we were entertained with dancing. Four young girls appeared in the doorway. They were wearing flowing white robes which, someone informed us, represented winter, and behind them came four more dressed in blue, symbolizing spring. The room rang with the sound of twanging balalaikas, and Tiny stopped glaring at Porta and suddenly lost all interest in his revolver. He let his hand fall to his side and sat forward eagerly, his tongue sticking out of his mouth and his face puckered up in a gorilla grin of delight.

"For God's sake!" said the Legionnaire, restraining him. "This isn't a brothel!"

Tiny spared him a fleeting glance. "What're they carrying on like that for, then?"

"They're entertaining us," said the Legionnaire. "It's just for watching. Strictly hands off."

Tiny snorted and turned back to the alluring spectacle of four winter girls and four spring girls disporting themselves before him. Tiny had no appreciation of the dance as anything but a gymnastic prelude to bed, and I could see he genuinely believed the Legionnaire was pulling his leg.

Porta, meanwhile, always more interested in practicalities than in daydreams, had dug out the sheep's brains, divided them in two, and offered half to the
starosta
and half to his eldest son, thus causing a murmur of respectful admiration to run through the room. This German was obviously a man of high breeding and exquisite manners!

The wine jug passed busily back and forth. It was, fortunately, considered the height of politeness to belch in Kalmuck society, and Porta went from strength to strength, farting loudly and cutting off the right ear of the unfortunate sheep and handing it with impeccable taste to the
starosta's eldest daughter. It appeared that he had now scaled the very summit of Kalmuck etiquette. Porta had at last found his rightful place in society.

The old woman with the sunflower seeds inserted herself between the Legionnaire and me and began telling us what had happened in the village before our arrival. It seemed that a section of Russian cavalry had passed through, and the first sight to meet their eyes had been a brown shirt hanging on a line to dry outside one of the huts.

"Babushka's hut," said the old woman mournfully. "It was her lover's shirt. Her lover was a German."

The Legionnaire pulled a face. "SS, by the sound of it."

The commissar in charge of the group had slashed the shirt with his saber and had his horse trample on it until it was in shreds, and had then followed this burst of pettiness by sending two of his NKVD men into the hut in search of Babushka, who was taking temporary refuge in the stove. Seventeen years before, Trotskyist soldiers had hidden in that very same stove. Babushka was discovered and hanged, just as the Trotskyist soldiers had been before her. Just as several other villagers were, including the old woman's only son. Their bodies had been flung into the snow and their relatives forbidden to give them a decent burial. The Legionnaire and I listened with wavering interest to the tale. We had heard of too many similar incidents to be very much moved.

While Porta and Tiny, glutted with roast mutton and wine, lay back with silly smiles on their faces and dancing girls on their knees, I rested my head against the Legionnaire's shoulder and closed my eyes. The atmosphere was thick with smoke and with sweat, and the wine had been stronger than I realized. Half asleep as I was, I felt the old woman creep closer to me. I felt her hand on my brow, sweeping back my hair, and I heard her thin, cracked voice crooning over me. I was just like her son, her only son whom the NKVD had murdered. We were the same age, I looked just like him. I fell asleep with the gentle touch of her old, callused hand stroking lightly back and forth across my forehead, and for the first time in many months I dreamed that the war was over.

The next morning, as we were leaving, the old woman pressed a leg of mutton into my hand.

"For you," she whispered. "No one else, mind--just you! May God protect you, my son."

The whole village turned out to say farewell. Some of them even accompanied us as far as the river, but none would dare to cross it. On the other side there were NKVD men, roaming the countryside with their nagans. The Kalmucks hated and feared the NKVD more than anything else on earth.

"Same thing in Indochina," mused the Legionnaire. "You could be at home among your enemies and killed by your friends. God help those poor devils if the commissars ever find out we were there."

The retreat continued. The snowstorm continued. Lost in the middle of a forest, we encountered some stray Cossacks. They were as surprised to see us as we to see them, but we stopped halfheartedly to do battle with each other. It seemed the height of lunacy to stand fighting in a snowstorm in the middle of a forest. I believe both sides would have preferred to pass on without exchanging blows, but there was always some fanatic like Heide who wanted to kill.

We moved on from the forest, out into the open. The wind was so strong we were scarcely able to make any headway. Hour after hour we marched on in search of the front line, bent double, our feet shuffling through the heavy drifts. Days merged into nights; nights, for all I knew, into weeks; weeks into months, into years, into decades--it seemed we had spent all our lives stumbling across Russia.

"Never mind! Wait till we get to the Shchir . . ."

"We'll find our troops at the Shchir . . ."

"We'll be OK when we reach the Shchir . . ."

And at last we reached the Shchir, and the snow was still falling and the landscape was still bare, and where the German front line was to be found was anyone's guess.

"They're not here!"

"They're not here!"

A hundred or more chapped lips echoed it, incredulous, stunned, as men floundered forward in the snow, unable to believe that after all this while we were still on our own.

We could take no more. Even the most foolhardy of optimists had reached the end. Even the redoubtable General Augsberg fell on his knees and buried his head in his hands. "Oh, God! My God! For pity's sake . . ."

He seemed momentarily to have forgotten that the SS were strictly forbidden to believe in God.

There was no sound save the howling of the wind, and to that we were so accustomed that we hardly noticed it. No gunfire, no shells, not even the faint rumbling of distant artillery. No sign of the front line for miles in any direction.

"Brigadenfuhrer!" The young lieutenant, who had grown visibly older since I first saw him, hurried forward and knelt in the snow beside the general. "You can't give up! You can't abandon us now!"

"Let me alone! Go away and leave me in peace! I'm not going any farther . . ."

"But, sir--all these men--all of us here--we've all put our faith in you. You've brought us this far, for God's sake don't give up now!"

The general looked up at the young lieutenant. His gray eyes were bleak. "What is the point of carrying on?" he asked simply.