SS General (35 page)

"Ivan!"

Porta flung himself behind the machine gun. The opposite bank of the river became in an instant a struggling mass of men, as the Russians swarmed out of the village and clashed with the general and his advancing troops. Within a matter of minutes, we saw the whole lot of them disarmed and led away, prisoners of the enemy.

"Only to be expected." The Old Man sat back and calmly lit his pipe. "A place like that--it was bound to be occupied."

"There was nothing we could do," said Gregor virtuously. "He told us to sit tight and wait."

"Quite." The Old Man puffed out a thick cloud of stinking smoke. God knows what he'd put into that pipe in place of tobacco! " 'Stay put and see what happens.' Well, now we've seen, and it's up to us to go and get them out of it."

"Get them out of it?" snapped Heide. "You must be joking! Get us out of it, more like. Any minute now and we'll probably hear the firing squads start up."

"When I want your advice I'll remember to ask for it," the Old Man assured him equably. "And until we know for certain that they're dead, we shall assume that they're alive."

"What's your plan?" asked the Legionnaire quietly. The Old Man pointed across the river with the stem of his pipe. "Go over there and get them out. Attack the enemy when they're not expecting it. It's the least we can do for Augsberg. If it weren't for him, we'd never have got this far."

"I agree," said the Legionnaire. "We owe him that much." "We don't owe anybody anything!" snarled Heide. "He couldn't have got this far without us, that's for sure!"

The Legionnaire looked at him, cold and contemptuous, then slowly turned away. The Old Man stood up; sturdy, immovable, unquenchably loyal. "Can I have two volunteers to go across and reconnoiter?"

Tiny and Porta were on their feet before anyone else. "One thing I've always wanted to find out," said Tiny as they set off together, "and that's what Ivan gets up to when he thinks he's all alone."

They were gone two hours. It was midmorning when they returned. Tiny was carrying a large bundle over his shoulders, wrapped around his neck like a fox fur. It turned out to be a pig, half roasted with the spit still in place.

"Just picked it up in passing," said Tiny, casually letting it fall at the Old Man's feet. "It's not quite finished cooking, but we didn't have time to hang around."

"What about the general and the rest? Did you find out what's happened to them?"

"They're in an empty pigsty," said Porta. "All herded in together with two sentries guarding them."

"And how about the Russians? What strength are they? A company? A battalion?"

"A battalion, I should say."

"A battalion of women," added Tiny in disgust. "More women than men, and so scarecrow ugly, not even a gorilla would fancy 'em."

"Seem to be part of a supply section," Porta. "They've got trucks full of grenades parked under the trees."

"Amateurs!" said Tiny, still brooding over the general lack of sex appeal. "They haven't even stood a proper guard." "They're probably not expecting any more German troops to be in the vicinity." The Old Man put away his pipe and nodded thoughtfully. "An attack is the last thing they'll be waiting for."

He divided us into groups, and Gregor and I set off with Porta toward the cover of some woods. The trees were so thick they cut out all the light and it took our eyes a while to grow accustomed to the darkness. Gregor hated woods at the best of times. He stuck close to my heels, almost treading on me, breathing anxiously down my neck.

"Don't shit in your pants before the show's even started," protested Porta.

"It's these damn trees," muttered Gregor. "I keep seeing things in them."

"Nothing like a good tree," said Porta cheerfully. "You can climb up 'em, piss up 'em, hide up 'em . . ."

"I wish you'd climb up one and stay there," I hissed, almost as nervous as Gregor. "All this racket--they'll hear us coming miles away."

"Screw me!" said Porta in disgust. "It's like taking two maiden aunts out for a stroll!"

We moved on in silence and darkness. Twig fingers with thorny nails reached out and clawed at our uniforms. Behind every bush lurked an enormous, fur-clad Mongoloid figure, waiting to jump out at us. We trod cautiously on. Porta tripped in the tangled undergrowth and fell sprawling. His submachine gun landed in some bushes, and he was so furious he picked himself up and began kicking a tree trunk. Gregor and I stood silently watching in the gloom, far too scared to laugh or jeer.

We retrieved the weapon and pressed on. Suddenly, overhead, there was a loud burst of wing claps and a vast gaggle of crows rose flapping and clacking from the trees.

"That's fucked it," said Porta. "That'll bring the whole Red Army out to investigate."

We reached the edge of the wood and stood in the shadow of the trees, waiting for the Old Man's signal. Kubyansk was spread out before us. The sky had darkened and the snow was beginning to fall again. It was good weather for launching a surprise attack. Our group was to move out under cover of a protective smoke screen, and Gregor and I were to make our way to the pigsty and deal with the sentries.

The whistle blew, and we moved in on our rescue mission. Shells and grenades rocked the buildings to their foundations and set the very streets afire. Machine guns clattered, women ran shrieking out of houses, dogs and children were everywhere under foot. Gregor and I charged along the main street and dived for cover behind an American threshing machine, a goodwill present from the United States to the Soviet Union, as a nearby house collapsed with a roar and a wall of bricks came tumbling down. In one of the neighboring streets a shell scored a direct hit on a truck loaded with grenades.

By the time we reached the pigsty, the panic was such that we found the prisoners had already dealt with their guards and were streaming out into the streets. The lieutenant caught sight of Gregor and me and grabbed us by the shoulder. "What the devil's going on? Have the Americans arrived?"

"It's all right!" I yelled above the general uproar. "It's only us!"

We made our way out of the burning town, meeting more resistance from the smoke and the flames and the falling buildings than from the enemy. We had lost fourteen men and had nine wounded, seven of whom we were forced to abandon. They would have died sooner or later on the march, and there was no possibility of carrying them with us. General Augs-berg, his uniform blackened and torn, and his face covered in angry burns, lost no time in driving us forward again, away from the village and on toward the west. The sight of the town in flames would be certain to bring other enemy units to investigate, and we were in no condition to face full-scale combat. Our task now was to dodge the enemy wherever we could.

Somewhere ahead of us, somewhere over the hundreds of miles of snow-covered steppe, lay the Donets. We had made that our goal.

"As far as the Donets and no farther," we said. "When we get there, that's it."

But we had said that about the Don, and we were still marching. Our spirits were low, and falling lower by the day. We grumbled incessantly, and orders were carried out with provocative slowness. Even the equable lieutenant lost his temper and began threatening us. Not until General Augsberg, choosing the right psychological moment, gave a blast on his whistle and called us to order did we regain at least the rudimentary aspects of an army on the march.

The general knew well the power of a whistle, and he used it sparingly and to good effect. The Germans are a nation of natural slaves. They respond to the crack of the whip and the threat of the jackboot; to the shrill blast of the whistle and the hectoring shouts of their superiors.

The whistle is one of the most powerful instruments in all Germany. It controls the nation's life, from the kindergarten through to the army. At school, children fall obediently into line at the call of the whistle; in the street, traffic comes to a halt when the policeman puts his whistle to his mouth; in barracks, men are marched and drilled and trained by the whistle. Conquerors can cause oceans of German blood to be spilled, and whole seas of tears to be shed; they can take away their uniforms and take away their weapons and forbid them their armies--but only let them take away their whistles and Germany would fall to its knees and never rise again!

Shouting is not so ingrained in civilian life as in military, but for a soldier it is as much to be feared as the ubiquitous whistle. At Breslau, I remember, we attacked Polish tanks with bare fists and bayonets, all because a quartermaster sergeant shouted at us. Another time, a comrade and I bodily picked up and supported a huge brute of a horse that refused to be shod--all because a sergeant major bawled at us. We then spent two months in the hospital with torn tendons, but although the doctors were doubtful about our fitness for any further military service, they changed their minds pretty quickly when the CO screamed at them.

Perplexing people! Wild beasts that have to be tamed by the whip. Led not by persuasion but by brute force. Broken in, but never completely broken down. And I had chosen to become one of them!

The general brought the column to a halt at the edge of a wood which was not marked on his map. Most German maps of Russia seemed to have been inspired by lunatic guesswork. The general angrily folded it up and crammed it into his pocket, then picked out Gregor and me as a couple of unwilling volunteers to explore the wretched wood.

We had penetrated about a mile inside it when suddenly and silently a party of men in a variety of uniforms materialized from the trees and the undergrowth. There was no opportunity to turn and fight. They were on us before we realized it.

"Who are you? Where have you come from?"

The spokesman was wearing a faded Rumanian uniform. As Gregor and I stood staring with our hands held above our heads, he clouted us both in the face and repeated his question.

We had fallen into the hands of the Vlasov Army, a group of partisans who worked behind the Russian lines and were noted for their savagery. Having no very strong aspirations for martyrdom, Gregor and I opened our mouths and talked. We explained how we had marched out of Stalingrad and how our numbers had steadily dwindled. We impressed on them that after the fracas at Kubyansk we were the only two to have escaped. They were obviously suspicious, but for the moment they decided to believe us and to keep us alive for further questioning when we reached their headquarters.

With hands secured with barbed wire, we shuffled along in the midst of our captors. For three days and nights we marched, mainly through forest. At one point we trekked across the snowy wastes in order to collect some supplies that had been parachuted into the void by German aircraft. I wondered how many other supplies had fallen into enemy hands because the pilots had been unwilling or unable to pinpoint their targets.

On the evening of the third day we reached a village and came to a halt. At the entrance to the village, a Russian lieutenant and a German sergeant hung side by side high up in a pine tree. The partisans waged war on everyone.

We stayed twelve hours in the village and then moved on, but not before our captors had filled a sled high with provisions and laid a charge of explosives in every one of the mean little huts. The village was burning fiercely as we left it.

We took to the forest again, with Gregor and me pulling the loaded sled behind us. We had no idea where we were going and we never did find out, for only a couple of hours after we had left the village we were overrun by a group of Russian soldiers, and after a short skirmish the partisans were disposed of, leaving Gregor and me alone to face the enemy. A sergeant came over to us. He had a large red face covered in blisters, and he was wearing a forage cap with the light blue cross of the Service Corps. It could have been worse, it could have been the NKVD; but at that moment one Russian seemed every bit as bad as another. The sergeant searched us both and gloatingly removed Gregor's tiny pocket-knife, only an inch long and quite useless.

"Hitler's secret weapon?" He wagged it under our noses, then threw back his head and guffawed. All his men stood and guffawed with him. "Hitler
kaput!"
he informed us merrily. "All
Germanski
are vermin! Long live Stalin!"

He wasn't a bad guy, really. Apart from prodding and poking us in the back as we stumbled through the trees, he used us quite decently. He laughed a great deal and tried to chat with us, but neither his German nor our Russian was up to it. As we reached the village where his division had set up its quarters, he rearranged his face into a ferocious mask, began jabbing us with his rifle and driving us forward, shouting at the top of his voice.

"Davai, davai!"
he screamed, flashing his eyes about to see if his superiors were watching. "Hitler
kaput!
Long live Stalin!"

He marched us triumphantly along the main street and stopped before a two-story brick house. The door was flung open and we were kicked inside and pushed at gunpoint along the passage to a room at the far end, where we were confronted by an elderly adjutant and several officers, all wearing the blue epaulettes of the Service Corps. The adjutant stood up and strutted over to examine us. Quite gratuitously, he struck us both very hard across the cheek with the back of his hand.

"Chort!"
he cried contemptuously.

They were all the same. German or Russian, the only difference lay in the uniform, although the Russians were perhaps a little less refined in their methods. The adjutant's behavior would certainly have done credit to an SS sergeant. He screamed till he was purple in the face, and he then drew breath and spat at us. As his spittle dribbled uncomfortably down my cheek, I instinctively raised my hand to wipe it away and was knocked almost senseless by the blow he gave me.

"Voini plenni
--prisoners of war--
kaput!"
he hollered, tearing the eagles off our uniforms. "Here! You eat!"

He thrust them at us, and we obediently chewed our way through them. It was not, after all, so terrible to eat a piece of cloth. There were plenty of worse fates; as we would probably find out, given time. For the moment they contented themselves with throwing us into a small, damp, airless cellar, used as a storeroom for potatoes. The place smelled unimaginably foul, and all the potatoes were rotten. We gnawed our way through one or two--Gregor swore they were more nourishing when rotten than when fresh--but it was as much as we could do to keep them down. Our stomachs rebelled even as we ate them.