The Bloody Road to Death (8 page)

We have to use our carbine-butts to get some of them moving. One of the wounded is dead, but we haven’t the
strength to bury him. We push his carbine into the ground and hang his helmet on the stock. The Old Man puts his identity discs in his pocket. His parents will be told, and spared the pain of endlessly hoping against hope that he will come home.

The Legionnaire begins to sing. Porta takes his piccolo from his boot-top. Tiny taps his mouth-organ on his palm. Hoarse-voiced, the rest of the unit join in. It sounds like a party of maniacs on the march.

Es waren zwei Legionäre,
Michael und Robert,
sie hatten das Fort verlassen
und suchten den Weg zum Meer.
Sie wollten nie wieder Patrouille gehen,
und nie wieder im Leben auf Posten stehen.

Es waren zwei Legionäre,
Michael und Robert,
Adieu, mon général,
Adieu, Herr Leutnant
¹⁴

Dull-eyed we watch the padre, who is lying in the dust making swimming strokes. None of us has the strength to help him. Our whole attention is turned inwards into ourselves.

‘Water!’ he screams. He laughs insanely, throwing the red dust high above his head, as if he were splashing himself with water.

‘Let’s crack his skull,’ suggests Heide hoarsely, lifting the stock of the MG like a club.

‘Leave him be!’ thunders the Old Man, wiping his sun-blistered face with the veil hanging from his tropical helmet.

The sun is merciless. It seems to boil the marrow of our bones. Two
500’s
begin to fight. Before we can get between them one of them has ripped the other’s stomach open with his bayonet. Entrails fall out and the blue-green flies swarm to a new feast.

The medical orderly puts the mortally wounded man out of his misery.

It is not, of course, permitted to administer a mercy bullet, but it is necessary here. The Old Man hardly knows what to do with the murderer. He is an ex-stabsfeldwebel. We pass a verdict of temporary insanity and forget the episode.

The padre has disappeared. We notice it only when the Old Man asks for him. Two men are sent back to pick him up. It takes threats of summary trial and the Old Man’s Mpi to make them go.

Far into the night they return. Angrily they dump the padre’s body on the ground at the Old Man’s feet.

‘Safe at last in Abraham’s breast!’ hums Tango, dancing round in the sand.

‘Oh the poor dear man. How sad he had to die right in the middle of the testing God was giving him,’ sighs Porta, with a simulated air of condolence.

The unit is on its way again. Stojko and the Old Man in the lead. Tiny’s broad grey-green back is still in front of me. I cannot see past him. His shouders sway in a rhythm like the gait of a camel. His back bends under the weight of the SMG. In the old days the only weapon a soldier had to carry was a rifle, but take a look at us, the soldiers of the current World War. Machine-guns, mountings, replacement barrels, double-barrels, pistol, Mpi, range-finder, a damned lot of ammunition, signalling equipment, and then personal effects. All we have dumped is the gas-mask. Not because it’s particularly heavy but because the container is handy to keep small things in: cigarettes, matches and the like. If they ever begin to use gas without warning, the war will end abruptly. Very few soldiers have a gas-mask left. Half Europe is littered with unwanted gas-masks.

The stone desert seems endless. Rocks on the left, rocks on the right. As far as we can see in front of us an endless sea of stone hot as the hob of hell. The sun bakes the stones, which give off heat like a breath from the mouth of a furnace. At night it is freezingly cold. Our teeth chatter. No birds fly here. We see their bodies lying spread-winged, dried out by the sun. Dead bodies of birds are everywhere.

‘Wonder what it is kills ’em?’ asks Porta, pushing cautiously at the body of a large black bird with the barrel of his Mpi.

‘Plague! Bird pest,’ says Heide, who, as always, is annoy-ingly well-informed. ‘Keep your grabbers away from ’em. Humans can catch it!’

Hastily Porta rubs the barrel of his Mpi with the red dust.

‘
Plague?
Jesus that’s a wicked bleedin’ thing!’ says Tiny, hoarsely, looking around at the army of dead birds. ‘War an’ pestilence. That’s what the biggest part of the ’uman race kicks off from.’

‘You can live through both war and plague, if you can get a bit of the old lucky shit rubbed off on you,’ laughs Porta wearily, fanning himself with his tall yellow hat.

We fall into a deathlike sleep. A
500
kills himself with a hand-grenade. It is a terrible sight. Entrails splashed everywhere. It interests us. Gives us something to talk about for a while.

Tiny is sure we are going to find water. He swears he can smell it and rubs the air between thumb and forefinger.

‘There’s damp in the air!’ he states with conviction.

We come close to fighting over his statement.

Porta finds a handful of half-dead, yellow-brown snails. They taste fairly good. You just have to get them down your throat quickly. The whole unit crawls round looking for snails, until Tiny ruins it by suddenly asking Heide if snails can carry bird-pest.

We throw up. Only Porta is indifferent.

He collects the snails from those who cannot eat them.

Throwing them into the air he catches them in his mouth and swallows them like a stork swallowing frogs. You can see them moving down his long thin neck.

I can only manage five. The sixth starts to move in my mouth and I have to spit it out.

Strangely the snails seem to assuage our thirst. We feel a little easier, as we march on.

Stojko leads us down through a passage between cliffs. The granite sides tower above us on both sides. The clear blue sky with its merciless blazing sun is no more than a slit high above our heads.

‘God, we’re marching into a grave,’ groans Gregor in despair. He is in the depths of despondency.

It doesn’t even help when Porta starts up a conversation on Ferrari cars.

‘How was that long Mercedes Benz high-compression sports job?’ I ask. ‘Did you and your general have one of those to run round the front with?’

Gregor merely stares at me with dull eyes. He has completely lost interest in sports cars. Even when we ask him to describe his general’s mobile thunder-box of Meissen porcelain, we can’t get him to liven up, and that is usually the magic key.

In the course of the day we emerge from the cleft and are out on the stony plain again. We are happy to have left its grim shadow.

Heide sees them first. Skeletons. Hundreds of them. Bones gleam whitely amongst the green of the cactus. They are not all human bones. There are also the bones of mules. Equipment lies scattered all around. Some of the skeletons are still wearing steel helmets. Most of them are Bulgarian, but we see also a few Italian Bersaglieri. We can see it by the helmet channelled for plumes.

‘Holy Mafia, what’s happened?’ asks Barcelona uneasily.

‘God only knows,’ answers the Old Man. ‘Partisans probably, and it mayn’t even have been very long ago. The sun, wind and drought soon make a skeleton of a dead ’un here.’

‘And the ants,’ adds Porta.

Our diet becomes strange and various. The Legionnaire finds some beetles running around on the skeletons. They are big and fat and taste wonderful.

‘We used to eat them in the desert,’ he explains, breaking one apart.

Late in the afternoon we drag ourselves into a village where there are also skeletons everywhere, but here there are signs of
fighting. On the square a whole row of skeletons hang. Their clothing keeps them whole.

Porta disappears with Tiny on a search of the ruins. We can hardly believe our own eyes when they come back with a goatskin filled with water.

The Old Man has to hold us back with his Mpi. We are like wild animals, and only quiet down when he is forced to shoot an ex-leutnant who refuses to obey his orders.

The bloody corpse stops us dead. Has the Old Man gone mad? He can usually maintain discipline without having to resort to arms. He swings the Mpi in a semicircle.

‘Get into line you lousy bastards. Anybody else looking for a ticket to heaven?’

Pushing and snarling like mad dogs we fall into line.

Porta hands the Old Man the goatskin. One by one we fill our canteens, and the goatskin is empty.

Despite the Old Man’s warning we drink the whole of our ration immediately. It tastes terrible. Tiny thinks it is most probably donkey-piss, but we couldn’t have cared less. It slakes our thirst for a while.

Porta is so happy he pulls his piccolo from his boot-top and plays.

In the shadow of the gallows with its swinging, rattling burden of skeletons we get together and sing:

Germany you noble house
Hang the bloodstained banners out.
Let them ever wave and strain
God is with us in storm and rain.

We all become very sick from the water. Men squat everywhere with their trousers down around their heels.

‘Dysentery,’ comments the medic.

Six men die before it is over. We lie dozing for several days while fever rages in our bodies. The medic gives us what he has available. Slowly we recover.

Porta has found water again. This time the medic insists on it being boiled. There is not much of it but it helps.

‘See! What did I say? Didn’t we find water,’ grins Tiny in triumph.

It is Buffalo who first sees the two men in front of us. We had almost caught up with them. Strangely enough they do not see us. Silently we follow them. They are moving fast. It is as if they had some important errand.

We march all night. The moon casts her pale light over the stony wasteland. A dog howls far away. Where there are dogs there is water and usually human beings.

The house is an adobe hut plastered up against a slope and looking as if it might at any moment disappear down into the depths below it. The two hurrying men disappear behind the house.

Porta and I steal after them. The unit fans out. The SMG is positioned behind a rock. The night quivers with tension. Not a sound can be heard. It is as if the cliffs had swallowed the two men up. Porta and I stop and take cover behind a stack of straw which should give some protection against bullets.

We hear heavy knocking on a door, and a harsh voice cuts through the night.

‘Delco! 0lja! You’ve got visitors! Come out and greet us!’

There is no reply. Only that night wind whistling faintly. There is the sound of wood splintering under the blow of a rifle-butt.

‘Come out, you bitches’ afterbirth! You cannot hide yourselves from our justice.’

‘Justice by night! ’ whispers Porta half-laughingly.

The two men stamp into the hut. Nailed boots ring ominously. The tramp of executioners.

‘Delco and Olja! Come out and defend yourselves, you filthy traitors! Your German friends can’t protect you now!’

‘How wrong can you get?’ whispers Porta patting his Mpi tenderly. ‘Death comes, more often than not, as the result of an error!’

Light flares behind the small windows. It flickers and throws long shadows. We see the man holding the light quite clearly.

‘What a perfect target he
does
make,’ says Porta lifting his Mpi.

‘Think I can win the cigar?’

‘Get him!’ I whisper breathlessly.

‘
Njet!
’ grins Porta. ‘Let’s find out what these two high
waymen are up to before we let their brains out. Couple of limp pricks, that’s what
they
are. Nothing else!’

A long thin candle has begun to burn sleepily. On a low bed in the corner sit three people pressed up against the wall. A young woman, a man, and a child about five years of age.

‘There we have Olja and Delco,’ whispers Porta. Traitors, but of course depending on which side you see their case from. I know a lot of quite nice traitors, who are far more honest than these “five minutes after midnight” nationalists.’ He puts a cigarette in his mouth.

‘You’re not going to show a light?’ I ask, terrified. Porta looks at me contemptuously, knocks a spark from the razor-blade, blows on the charred cloth and lights his cigarette from the glow. The Russian ‘lighter’ is made for night smoking in wartime. Primitive as the people who invented it, but there is no betraying flame.

He expels smoke, holding the cigarette in the cup of his hand so that the burning tip cannot be seen.

‘A good play calls for a smoke,’ he whispers.

The man inside the room laughs aloud with satisfaction.

‘Why didn’t you open the door? Why should we have to break it down? Come here Ljuco! All the family together and quite speechless with happiness at the sight of us.’ He laughs long and loud.

Ljuco, the comrade who has been standing by a narrow door at the end of the hut, comes stamping in. A cigarette holder moves jerkily between his teeth. He laughs. A strange dry crackling noise. Executioners laugh like that when they tell the story of some interesting execution.

‘Got any schnapps?’ he asks, opening cupboard doors and throwing tins and bowls to the floor. Poorly-made kitchen utensils smash to pieces on the stones.