The Bloody Road to Death (2 page)

A shrill scream makes us jump and grab for our weapons. Down the hill a woman comes racing, stumbling, followed by a fat little man waving an axe above his head.

The Legionnaire’s Moorish knife flashes like lightning through the air and sinks into the man’s chest. He continues running for a few strides then falls like a log.

To our amazement the woman throws herself sobbing across his body, and screams Bulgarian oaths at the Legionnaire.

‘She says you’re a goddam murderer,’ explains Buffalo, who understands a little Bulgarian. ‘They were just havin’ their daily bit of fuss, and the axe was part of it.’

‘Holy Allah!’ groans the Legionnaire wiping his Moorish knife on his sleeve. ‘Who in the world could have guessed it?’

A chattering Krupp-Diesel rumbles into the sun-baked village. A party of excited ‘
500’s
’
⁴
jump down from it.

‘They’ve slaughtered the whole bloody battalion. We’re all that’s left,’ shouts a feldwebel, sweating with dirt all over his face.

‘Who has?’ asks the Old Man expressionlessly.

These bloody heathens,’ the feldwebel screams, raging. ‘Our battalion got here from Heuberg only a few days ago, and in the very first engagement we fell into an ambush. I dropped behind with my section and got away.’

‘You ran for it, in other words,’ grins Porta, sarcastically. ‘Our Adolf wouldn’t like that.
If
,’ he was to hear of it, that is.’

‘Can we join you lot?’ asks the feldwebel, ignoring the jibe.

‘Have you got weapons?’ asks the Old Man, brusquely.

‘Only carbines with twenty rounds a man,’ answers the feldwebel. ‘The Prussians aren’t too generous with 500’s.’

‘Juice in it?’ asks the Old Man, nodding his head at the Diesel.

‘No, it’ll only go downhill.’

‘Then we’re all right,’ laughs Porta happily. ‘The Greater German
Wehrmacht
is used to things movin’ in
that
direction.’

‘Stay if you like,’ shrugs the Old Man, ‘but remember
I’m
in charge!’

‘Shall we turn in our pay-books?’ asks a young
500
, offering his.

‘Wipe your bleedin’ arse on it, son,’ suggests Tiny, assuming a lofty air.

‘We’re hung up by the balls,’ the Old Man tells the feldwebel. ‘Our battlewagon’s a burnt-out wreck, so it’s foot-slogging for us, and a walk over the mountains.’

‘Know ’em?’ asks the feldwebel, with a sour smile.

‘No!’ the Old Man is laconic.

‘They say it’s the arsehole of the universe up there, and two days is a long lifetime,’ says the feldwebel, looking worriedly at the black mass of the mountains. ‘Snakes, scorpions, giant ants and God knows what else. Cactus with enough poison in ’em to stock a chemist’s bloody shop!’

‘Got a better idea?’ asks the Old Man, biting off a chunk of chewing tobacco.

‘No, I’m workin’ for you now!’

‘All your lot got battle experience?’

‘Only a few,’ the feldwebel laughs tiredly. ‘The rest of ’em are swindlers an’ thieves. There’s a cunt-stealer among ’em, even!’

The Old Man sighs and sends a brown stream of tobacco juice at the well. He shrugs his Mpi
⁵
to a more comfortable position on his shoulder.

‘Tell your coolies, we’re on drumhead!’

‘Drumhead court-martial, eh?’ the feldwebel rolls it round his tongue.

‘No misunderstandings?’ asks the Old Man, sneeringly.

‘You wouldn’t think it,’ laughs the feldwebel, wickedly.

‘Glad we understand one another.’

‘What about a couple of Mpi’s or an LMG
⁶
’ asks the feldwebel, offering a packet of Junos
⁷
.

‘Think you’re in a damned arsenal?’ growls the Old Man, turning on his heel and kicking at a helmet which flies through the air and drops on a corpse. ‘You drop your equipment anywhere,’ he scolds. ‘No
discipline
any more! How the hell can an army fight a war with its bloody equipment spread all over the map of sodding Europe?’

‘God, but you’re in a bad mood today,’ remarks Porta, opening his third tin of tuna.

The Old Man does not answer, but swings his Mpi over his shoulder, lights his old silver-lidded pipe and wheels over to the ammunition-trailer where the feldwebel has seated himself, together with some of his unit.

‘What’s your name?’ asks the Old Man, grumpily.

‘Schmidt,’ a short pause, and, ‘line regiment,’ he adds.

The Old Man takes his pipe slowly out of his mouth, and spurts a tobacco-darkened stream of spittle to one side.

‘What’s that mean?’

‘I thought you’d be interested.’

‘I don’t give a sod if you’re a feldmarschall!’

The Old Man stalks over and sits down with the rest of us, demanding his share of Porta’s tin of tuna.

‘Hell I’m
tired
,’ groans Gregor despairingly, wiping his sleeve across his dust-masked face. ‘Here we go, the flower of Germany, lettin’ the
untermensch
piss all over us. My general
and me, we wouldn’t ever have let that come about. If we’d had him an’ our monocle with us the missing links’d really have had something to worry about!’

‘If things go on as they are Greater Goddam Germany’s gonna get wiped off the map,’ says Buffalo, darkly, ’an’ us Germans ’re gonna drop back into bein’
the
background characters in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.’

‘We’ll be the wicked ogres they frighten the nippers with after dark,’ nods Porta.

‘Pissy bleedin’ outlook, ain’t it?’ sighs Tiny despondently, packing banderoles of cartridges glumly into the ammunition boxes.

From the mountains to the north artillery fire is audible.

‘The neighbours are a’knockin’,’ sings Porta, turning a body over on its back to look for gold fillings.

‘You take the heavy mortar,’ roars Barcelona to one of the 500’s. Barcelona is a feldwebel but doesn’t get much of a chance to pull rank when he’s with us.

‘What about the blackbird there?’ asks Heine, pointing with his Mpi at the padre who is sitting drawing circles in the dust of the road.

‘He can go when we go, or he can stay where he is,’ says the Old Man indifferently.

‘Chase the black bastard out of it,’ suggests Tango, a Rumanian-born German, who has been a teacher of dancing in Bucharest. Whenever he gets a break he dances tango steps to an internal orchestra of his own.

‘Let’s liquidate the bleeder,’ shouts Tiny. ‘The ’eavenly bleedin’ reps down ’ere on earth always bring bad luck!’

‘Yeah, let’s turn him off. I never see a blackbird get a ticket for the one-way trip,’ chuckles Buffalo, his rolls of fat wobbling in wicked glee.

Til
tell
you
when I want anybody liquidated,’ the Old Man decides, coldly.

‘I’m going to keep an eye on him anyway. Soul and body don’t always keep in step,’ says Tango, circling in a few dance steps. ‘The 44th sorted out a sky-pilot once who had no more connection with the heavenly host than the devil himself has!’

Everybody stares at the padre.

‘Let me open the bleeder’s throttle for ’im!’ says Tiny, touching the edge of his combat knife.

A squadron of He III’s roars over us. One of them circles and returns.

‘That’s all we need, for them to take us for some of the heathen,’ says the Old Man, looking nervously up at the fighters.

‘Jesus, they’re droppin’ their shit!’ howls Buffalo, dashing between the houses.

‘Shrink!’ warns the Old Man, creeping into shelter behind the coping of the well.

I follow Porta down into the well itself. The water is icy. I almost drown before he gets hold of me. We hang on to the bucket.

There is a crashing and rumbling above our heads. Machine-guns chatter. The whole squadron is attacking us. It seems like the end of the world.

The planes do not leave until the entire village is gone.

Strangely, not one of us is even wounded. Air attacks are nerve-racking but not really effective. Imprecise.

‘Long as you’re not where the bombs drop, there’s no worry,’ grins Porta, sitting down on the sand in the very same place he sat before the attack started.

‘What about stopping here?’ suggests feldwebel Schmidt. ‘The Division’ll pick us up.’

‘Will the Division fuck?’ cries Porta scoffingly.

‘
Merde dors!
They have more than enough to do,’ sighs the Legionnaire. ‘What is a section to them?’

‘We ain’t worth as much as a lump o’ dried cat-shit,’ states Tiny, throwing a stone at a cat which is sitting, washing itself, on the corpse of a German soldier.

‘Jesus!’ shouts Porta angrily. ‘Even the cats down here round the Black Sea have lost all respect for the German Army! Where’s it all going to end?’

‘In Kolyma!’ grins Gregor, hitting the cat squarely with a well-aimed steel helmet.

‘That bleedin’ cat’s a bleedin’ Yid cat,’ considers Tiny. ‘It
might
even ’ve been thinkin’ of ’avin’ a shit on that poor German body.’

‘What we have to go through,’ sniffs Heide, angrily.

‘The army’s finished,’ says Tiny, lighting a cigar. ‘Even the Goring fly-boys shit on us!’

‘Grab it an’ get moving,’ orders the Old Man, rising to his feet.

‘The human body was not created to march with,’ protests Porta, working his stiff muscles and shouting at the pain.

The mountains are depressing. Each time we reach the top of what we think is the last rise, we find another one, even higher, awaiting us.

The section has not gone far when the Old Man remembers that water-bottles have not been filled. Without water the Cactus Forest is certain death.

‘Back to the well!’ he orders roughly.

‘Have I ever told you of the time my general an’ me marched across the Danube?’ asks Gregor.

‘Can it, we’ve heard that one at least twenty times,’ Barcelona cuts him off irritably.

‘Did you eat with your general?’ asks Tango, interestedly. He has a decided weakness for higher ranks.

‘Of course,’ says Gregor, condescendingly. ‘Sometimes we even slept in the same bed with our monocle between us.’

‘Was your general a fairy?’ asks Porta, disrespectfully.

‘A question like that could put you in front of a field-court of honour,’ mumbles Gregor, insulted.

‘Bloody ’ell,’ shouts Tiny, in surprise. ‘Is there
really
such a bleedin’ court?’

‘Did you sometimes
touch
your general?’ asks Tango, with awe.

‘I had to undress him every bloody evening, when he rested up to be ready for the next day’s war,’ answers Gregor, proudly.

‘’Bout time we shifted our baggy bleedin’ arses under cover, ain’t it?’ asks Tiny, looking towards the mountains, from which machine-gun fire can be heard.

‘How many jerricans have we got?’ asks the Old Man, cocking his
grease-gun
⁸
.

‘Only five,’ laughs Barcelona, mirthlessly.

‘
They’ll
soon be finished,’ grins Skull. It sounds like a bag of dried bones rattling.

‘Water’d bleedin’ run out o’ you, fast as it went in,’ says Tiny. ‘’Ow the bleedin’ ’ell can a man
be
that bleedin’ thin? I can’t
understand
it.’

‘Skull ought to go to America. He’d make a fortune showin’ himself as a victim of the horrors of the concentration camps,’ suggests Porta.

‘Cut the talk a minute,’ snarls the Old Man, ’and listen. We’ve got to go over the mountains with or without water. It’s our only chance.’

‘Holy Christ!’ breaks out Unteroffizier Krüger from the PR’s. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying! There’s a forest of cactus with prickles the size of bayonets. We’ll have to chop our way through with machetes and we’ve only got two.
They
won’t last long. And there’s not a drop of water
anywhere
up there.’

‘What the hell do
you
suggest, then?’ shouts the Old Man, desperately.

‘The tracks and out on the road,’ answers Krüger, looking around him for support.

‘Mad as a bloody hatter,’ the Old Man dismisses his suggest tion contemptuously.!

‘The rightful owners of the country are lined up along the roads with the firm intention of knocking us off.’

‘Let’s kick ’em in the balls,’ suggests Tiny, turning his cigar butt between his lips and champing on it. ‘It’s about time this Black Sea shower found out who it is as is visitin’ ’em.’

‘Brave little man, ain’t you?’ grins Porta, holding out his hand for a cigar. Tiny hands one over without a murmur.

Heide has to supply him with a chunk of liver sausage. Nobody dares to refuse Porta when he asks for something. If you want to stay alive the wisest thing is to keep friendly with him. He has that strange sort of sixth sense, otherwise only found amongst Jews, of being able to sniff out supplies at a distance of miles. Turn him out naked in the middle of the Gobi Desert and he’d find his way straight to something drinkable. Not an ice-cold beer perhaps, but at any rate water.