The Bloody Road to Death (7 page)

The Old Man gives the order to resume the march immediately.

The next day we cross a plain of stones and shale. Not even cactus can grow here. Our tongues swell in our mouths like great pieces of dried-up leather. There is no more than a mouthful of water left for each man. Then the jerricans are empty.

Two
sod’s
die without a sound. Not even the usual convulsive jerk. Death from thirst is a different kind of death.

‘Why couldn’t those bastards have kicked it
before
they’d hogged their water ration?’complains Tango.

‘Oh God, do you remember the time we fucked those Mongol girls under the waterfall?’shouts Porta.

‘T’ll
shoot
the next man who talks about water,’ screams Heide hoarsely.

Skull discovers that the padre has a goatskin filled with water hidden under his gown.

‘Hand over that water, parson!’demands the Old Man, sharply, catching hold of him.

‘It is
holy
water,’ the padre smiles foolishly. ‘We must lave our feet in it before we enter the Temple.’

With a comical hop he is up on a boulder. He holds the goatskin high above his head.

‘He ain’t washin’nobody’s feet in that goddam water,’ screams Buffalo madly.

We make a ring about the padre. A ring which closes in on him threateningly.

‘It is
holy
water,’ he howls, ‘holy water from Dimitrovgrad!’

‘We don’t give a fuck if it’s the ‘igh priest o’Jerusalem’s own piss!’roars Tiny. ‘Give it ’ere you Easter bleedin’maniac’

‘He’s bringing us
bad lucky
shouts Barcelona furiously. ‘When I was with the Mountain Brigade, we had to drag a bastard like him about with us. Mahogany trees fell on us. The troop-transporter broke down. We walked straight into a minefield that cut us to ribbons. At Drutus the mountain rolled down on us. A month of it, we had! A Russki deserter – a commissar – convinced us finally it was all that pissin’parson’s fault. But you know the Mountain boys – missionaries to a blasted man. Singin’psalms over the poor dead ’uns and
nobody’d
do this parson in. The Russki did it for us. He was educated up to have no moral scruples about doin’a parson. He crept up behind ’im while he was gettin’round some Georgian clotted cream. Bang! And the parson’s brains’re mixed up with the cream. The very same evening, lads, our luck was back with us.

‘Everythin’went like a dream till we got to Elbruz where there was a new parson waiting for us. Off pisses our luck again. Eight days after he arrived the whole bloody Brigade’s sittin’up in Valhalla.’

Fast as a cat the Old Man is up by the side of the padre, tears the goatskin from his hands and throws it to Porta.

‘You’re responsible to me for the contents!’

‘Well,
well
!’ Porta bows deeply. ‘You trust me
that
much?
Even my old dad wouldn’t have. Least not since he caught me drinking from his private bottle of
Slivovitz?

We march steeply upwards and meet cactus again. Tiny’s body towers like the side of a house in front of me. His language is almost turning the air blue about him. When he stops I bang into him. He has the SMG, with tripod and all, strapped to his back. He seems tireless. He takes one step to my three. His size is abnormal. Huge muscles swell the tight-fitting uniform. His strength is abnormal. He can shoulder-charge a wall and down it goes. Breaking bricks with a single chop of the edge of his hand is child’s-play to him.

Porta is confident that Tiny’s great-grandfather was a gorilla which had got loose from Hagenbeck and raped his great-grandmother. She was digging peat, says Porta, just outside the Zoological Gardens at the time. Tiny is quite proud of this anecdote.

I get myself tangled in a patch of thorn. I bend to free myself and a branch whips across my face, ripping it open. Blood pours down. I stumble, and the long thorns go through my uniform and bore into the flesh like bayonets.

Porta helps me out. The unit takes a break while the medical orderly extracts the poisonous thorns and treats the wounds. By afternoon I am swelling up and have a high fever. Luckily the orderly has a supply of serum. He bangs the needle into me straight through the uniform and camouflage jacket. It feels as if it goes straight into a lung. Raging I hit out at him with my Mpi. The needle snaps off as he jumps to safety.

‘You wicked monkey,’ he yells, pulling out his P-38. ‘I’ll teach you to lay your filthy hands on the Medical Corps!’

His pistol cracks twice before the others reach him and wrest it from him. It takes him a long time to simmer down and even then he won’t touch me any more.

A
500
who has had medical training removes the broken needle from my back.

‘Death by thirst is the worst death of all,’ says the Legionnaire, staring out over the stony desert. The air shimmers in the heat.

We reach an impenetrable wall of scrub. The machetes cannot touch it.

‘Back!’orders the Old Man, setting his teeth.

Despair and fear slowly take hold of us. It all seems hopeless.

We hear violent firing – which seems to come from the other side of the hills. A Maxim stammers furiously and an MG-42 replies. The path leads us back into the bush.

Porta recognizes a spot we have passed earlier. We halt, overcome by fatigue, and let ourselves drop to the ground.

The Old Man studies the map carefully, wrinkling his brows and clattering the lid of his pipe. Stojko sits down and hums a peasant song.

‘Where the hell are you taking us?’shouts the Old Man, angrily, banging the map.

‘Why you mad, Herr feldwebel?’asks Stojko, wonderingly. ‘You crazy march compass 46. Needle run round and round all the time. But Bulgarian Guardsman always obey order. Only dumb soldier think self.’

The Old Man snatches the compass and map from him.

There’s nothing wrong with the compass!’he shouts, red in the face.

But when Stojko comes near it the compass needle whirls crazily.

The Old Man looks at Stojko.

‘What’ve you got in your pockets, you Bulgarian assassin you?’shouts Porta.

‘Only thing I take use on farm when war over.’

The Old Man searches him and turns up the better part of a dynamo.

The magnet has, of course, affected the compass needle.

The Old Man roars like a madman and throws the magnet far into the brush.

‘Feldwebel take care,’ Stojko warns him. ‘No make big noise. Bad cactus devil come. Cut with sharp machete knife! Cactus spirit no care you German, you Russki. Cut off turnip before you say “Heil Hitler”, they say “Red Front”. Spirit no like crazy man make big noise. You take much care. Sun go, bad devil come from cactus!’

‘Your bad devil can fuck me
crossways
,’ roars the Old Man, beside himself with rage.

Stojko crosses himself three times and spins round in strange jerks. These are, apparently, protection against the cactus devil.

‘I don’t like this,’ whispers Tiny to me, crossing himself. He has a great respect for everything supernatural.

‘Why in the name of hell didn’t you take the road you knew?’shouts the Old Man in a fury.

Stojko shakes his head despairingly and throws his hands wide. The sun glitters on his broad Royal Guards shoulder-straps.

‘Feldwebel order follow compass 46. Stojko think crazy but Royal Bulgarian Guards no think self, so I not
care
you crazy. Order is order. You order compass 46. I see needle crazy too but me not leader.
You
leader. You
not
say go
short
way home. You say this we home long time.’

‘Jesus wept!’groans the Old Man. ‘Why did I ever have to meet up with you?’

‘’E’s a right ’un, all-right,’ says Tiny with a belly-chuckle. ‘Few more like ’im ’an guns’d never be enough to finish the complicated bleedin’kind o’ war
’e’d
set up.’

The Old Man shakes his head several times, then sits down and pulls Stojko down beside him.

‘Listen Stojko! Forget all about the military. You are no longer a soldier.’

‘Feldwebel!’Stokjo stands up and starts to brush the dust from his uniform. ‘Stojko go farm now. Do all work not done since bad war start. You write me letter when home Germania.’

He goes round saying goodbye to all of us. It takes the Old Man several minutes to pull himself together. Then he explodes with the intensity of an artillery barrage.

‘I’ll give you farm, you mad, mad man. You’ll not be maulin’those bloody cows of yours for hundreds of years yet.
Sit
, you sod,
sit
!’ The Old Man bangs his Mpi butt on the ground beside him. ‘Listen to
me
, and keep your bloody mouth
shut
until I’m finished. Anything you don’t understand, say so. Do you understand me?’

‘Feldwebel! No understand!’

‘What?
What
don’t you understand?’asks the Old Man, his jaw falling open.

‘No understand what you want me understand,’ says Stojko, with a friendly smile.

The Old Man throws his cap up the path, kicks an ammunition box violently, then fixes his gaze for a long while on Stojko’s face. The patient face of a peasant.

‘You are a soldier again. I order you to think for yourself. Now! If there is anything wrong then tell me what it is!’

‘Feldwebel! War is wrong! All war! I not understand
war
!’

‘Jesus wept, and well He might!’shouts the Old Man despairingly. 7 know
thatl
But we’ve
got
a war. And we’re
in
it. Forget all that. We’re in the middle of a lot of cactus. It’s all we can manage to think about
now
. Don’t
you
think about anything else. Just think how to get us out of it. Will you
do
that? You are our only leader. You alone. I, and the whole unit, will follow
you
. You are
the boss. Do you understand me?
’

‘You give stars, I give order, Bulgarian Guard no dare give order no stars.’

The Old Man pulls the stars from his shoulder-straps and without hesitation names Stojko acting temporary feldwebel (unpaid).

The unit presents arms.

‘
Now
I understand. We two feldwebel.’He laughs happily. ‘You do first time, we home now, drink good cold water. You wait. I find way in cactus.’

We have almost given him up when he bursts out of the bush several hours later. He is filthy and scratched, but with a pleased expression on his weather-beaten peasant’s face.

‘Me find path,’ he shouts happily. ‘Hard path but good path. We no meet cactus spirit. Spirit no like blue cactus. Blue cactus send hell quick. Many scorpion live blue cactus. No touch blue cactus. Kill scorpion. Then path easy.’

‘Shoulder arms! Move!’orders the Old Man, already off on Stojko’s heels.

The entire spectrum of war noises can be heard in the distance.-

‘Sounds as if the whole bloody brothel’s on its way up,’ says Porta thoughtfully, listening carefully to the rumbling of the guns.:

‘Better get movin’, as the wench said as she was on the verge o’gettin’raped for the fourth time,’ grins Tiny.

‘Jesus, boys, think if we could only run across some goddam transport we could commandeer,’ says Buffalo, dreamily.

‘Transport? Here?’says Porta. ‘
Horses
is what
we
could use. When they die of thirst you can at least drink their blood.’

‘Soon as we’re back with the regiment, I’m going sick. Think if part of the cure was drinking a whole barrel of icy-cold water,’ sighs Gregor, licking his cracked lips.

‘I’ll be consulting the pavement artists first about the state of the little old man down below,’ shouts Porta lecherously. ‘Think if the poor little sod had got himself a permanent disability from all this shortage of water.’

We cross an interminable sequence of hills and then come to one which looks different from all the others. It is steeper, higher and completely flat on top. We stand and gaze for a few minutes. There is a threatening look about it which disturbs us.

Stojko finds a slope which is negotiable. Panting and blowing we crawl upwards. At the top a fantastic panorama spreads itself before us. We throw ourselves down for a short rest. We have been lying half-asleep for only about fifteen minutes when the padre begins to scream. We snatch at our weapons, partisans our first thought. In hysterics he points out over the great stony desert, which lies before us shimmering in the heat.

‘Water!’he screams. ‘See! see! A lake with swans!’

The Old Man gets up and snaps out his binoculars. There is no lake. Only rock and stone. Burning hot, glittering stone.

The padre runs lumberingly forward, holding his long staff out in front of him. He tumbles and rolls down the steep slope. At first we think he has broken his neck, but then he is up again and lolloping on in and out between the boulders. He throws himself down and rolls about, the dust rising in clouds around his threshing body.

‘Water! water! My God Thou hast not forsaken me!’

But it’s not water he is rolling in. It is dry, red dust.

‘Up!’orders the Old Man harshly, and starts to move off himself.