Wheels of Terror (21 page)

A violent sobbing shook him. He fell forward on the table shaken by an almost paralysing weeping.

We were completely taken aback at his reaction to his own, and to us his extraordinary, speech.

'What the hell's the matter with you?' burst out Porta. Stege stood up and went across to the sobbing Old Un and patted his back.

'Take it easy, Old Un. It had to come, even to you. Pull yourself together, old friend. It'll sort itself out.'

The Old Un straightened himself slowly, stroked both his hands over his face and said quietly:

'Sorry, it's my nerves. I try to forget there's something called Berlin where the bombs fall every night and where a woman lives who's the mother of my children. But it didn't come off.'

He banged both his fists down with such violence that the old table creaked, and cried out, completely uncontrolled:

'To hell with it all. I'll run away. I'll spit at their court-martial and damned head hunters. I'll manage. I don't want to die here in Russia for the lies of Hitler and Goebbels!'

He cried wildly and violently, but later calmed down.

We sat quietly, each absorbed in his own thoughts. This at least we had learned: to sit quietly with our thoughts and each other without filling the empty space with obscenities at the wrong moment.

It is cold. We freeze, despite the heat from the big stove in the hut, but not bodily; only in our souls. We can kill and kill willingly. What have they made of us?

Now even the calmest of us has broken down weeping because he thinks too deeply about his wife and children in bomb-ridden Berlin.

We drink noisily. Not that we shout and clown. We drink deeply of the vodka and the grain-liquor. The bottle is passed round. We drink as long as we can without taking the bottle from our mouths and we are masters at it.

Then we are quiet again while watching another man who is carefully binding his dirty feet in foot-rags; or we catch lice which we throw in the Hindenburg candle where they explode.

We talk with slow, low voices as if we are afraid someone is listening. We quarrel too. We rage at each other, shout the most terrible things, swear and threaten while hugging our combat-knives or machine-pistols as if we were about to murder our best friends.

But just as fast and violently as it starts it dies down.

Outside in the darkness a flaming, roaring explosion sounds. Instinctively Stege ducks his head. Pluto laughs loudly:

'Can't you learn not to put your skull down when you hear a few bangs?'

'Some people never can and I belong to them,' says Stege. 'Perhaps you're used to the idea of getting a bullet in your skull one fine day?'

'They'll miss, my treasure!' replied Pluto with conviction. Pulling out a bullet from his pocket, he held it between two fingers above his head for us to see. 'This funny thing was fired at your father by a fellow in France. If I had stayed put where I was lying and I was lying bloody comfortably, this would have hit me smack between the eyes; but I stood up and bang the thing got me in the hind-leg. That was my death bullet, but it gave me a miss. So you see I'm going to get away with it.'

Outside, the impact of the huge shells shook the ground again.

'It's starting again,' said The Old Un.

'Well, we haven't got to wait long now before we're playing fire-brigade for the division again,' Moller observed.

'This waiting drives me mad!' burst out Bauer. 'You wait and wait and wait!'

It is really quite comical how much time a soldier wastes just waiting. In the depot you wait to be sent to the front. At the front you wait for the softening-up firing to stop so that you can attack, or you wait to get into battle.

When you are wounded you wait to be operated on. You wait for the healing of the body's wounds, for the health of your soul is passed forever. We await death with patience. We await the peace with time to watch the birds migrate and the children at play without thinking that we have no time.

Even if we are a noisy community in a big war, we ourselves remain a small and sometimes gay community: we are only eleven friends or you might say: eleven brothers with different parents, our bond of union being that we are each condemned to death. We are really moody. One minute we are up in the clouds, the next down in the dumps. Our wishes for the future are peculiar. As Stege once said:

'I long for the day when I can scratch a pig's ear without my mouth watering at the thought of how such a noble animal tastes when cooked with windfall apples.'

Many of our conversations were about women, not only those we met in brothels, or the too-willing Russian girls or the nurses and telephone girls who served us behind the lines, but the unobtainable ideal girls who to us were incomprehensible but fragrant, reminding us of living spring flowers. Women who gave us a friendly smile and nothing more, or comforted us with words and perhaps a single caress which meant so much - these were the girls we dreamt of marrying.

The Old Un was quite different from us. As just now when he had wept. It often happened when he got letters from home. It was really The Old Un who led the company even if Captain von Barring was the company commander. The Old Un decided most things for us. His word was law. What The Old Un said was sense. The Old Un was our father. When something serious happened we sought comfort and advice from him. He brooded with his half-shut blue eyes, and sucked heavily on his antique pipe before he answered. If it was especially difficult, he would take the pipe out of his mouth, dry it carefully and then answer. If we were on exhausting route marches The Old Un always decided when it was time for a rest. Von Barring always asked his advice. The Old Un saw to it that our newly-appointed section-leaders and tank-commanders were experienced NCOs. It didn't matter if someone from the officer colleges wanted front-line experience. The inexperienced meant death and mutilation to our tight-knit body of friends. They did no regulation training with us. The war and the front-line saw to that. When The Old Un said a man was good then he was good.

When The Old Un and Porta took a man to the medical sergeant you could bank on it that someone next day would get orders to see the doctor and that man would go to hospital with a temperature. How it was managed nobody asked. The whole regiment knew that Porta was a law unto himself. Nobody believed he was honour personified or even a street boy with a newcleansed soul, but no bishop could have found any basic fault in him if he had analysed the particular soul that was Porta's.

As he sits, grossly dirty, with his top-hat and monocle, drinking and belching, he radiates the exact opposite of reliability. He is a soldier, a vagabond, a perfectly trained killer who without winking pushes his long combat-knife into the guts of his enemy, afterwards drying off the blood on his sleeve with a grin. With deliberation he files his bullets down to dum-dum shape, hoping they are destined for a hated officer such as Captain Meier. He coolly kills for a piece of bread. In addition, he would, without a single qualm, send a whole bunkerful of people sky-high if he had orders to do so.

Who has made him into this human savage? His mother? His friends? His school? No. Totalitarian government, the barracks mixing-machine, the military fanatics with their bloated ideas of fighting and Fatherland. Porta has learned the slogan that was dinned into his head as well as ours. 'You may do as you like, but never be caught. If you are you've had it. You must be tough and cynical, or else you will be trampled to death. There are thousands behind you ready to crush you if you become soft. There is only one way to get through: Be tough and brutal. If you give in to humanitarian ideas you are finished.'

Thus was Porta moulded. It is not the Nazi Prussian military creed only. It exists everywhere where totalitarianism reigns.

Get in behind the barrack-gates, use your eyes and you will grow pale with shame. Try for once to study the military disciples objectively. Imagine them with their unnatural broom-stick bodies, their comical chest-swellings, their staccato speech, lipless faces with a couple of stupid reptilian eyes. Imagine this bunch dressed in striped prison-uniforms being inspected by a psychiatrist. What label would the unwilling scientist have to hang on most of these sinister apprentices to the military trade? I know because I have spent many years among men who passed their apprenticeship.

15

They had crushed all that was human in us. We knew only retaliation with the murderous weapons they had pressed into our hands.

Our knowledge of anatomy was worthy of a doctor. Blinded, we knew where a shot or a knife would cause the maximum pain.

Satan sat behind a stone and laughed.

The Sneaking Death

Our wounded had been flown out. Lieutenant Harder and all the others were now lying in hospital miles away from the white Russian hell.

Again we were made a fighting-group. Lieutenant Harder was replaced by a Lieutenant Weber. He led No. 5 Company and Captain von Barring commanded the fighting-group.

It was self-evident that the fighting-group led in any attack. Weighed down by weapons and ammunition we were now edging along to the attacking point.

'Ascension - to - heaven - detail as usual,' Pluto growled.

'You mean hell-travel-detail,' mocked Porta. 'Not one of you clots will go to heaven!'

The Little Legionnaire asked:

'Will you, then?'

'Yes, any objections, you unhappy desert nomad?' Porta said, and crossing himself he merged into the darkness: 'Amen, in my name!'

Tiny guffawed.

Lieutenant Weber came running along the column and whispered exasperatedly:

'Shut up laughing. You'd think you wanted the Russians on top of you.'

'Oh dear, no, we're afraid of them,' came from the darkness.

Lieutenant Weber cried hoarsely:

'Who was that?'

'Saint Peter and the Holy Trinity,' came the answer.

Several of the men started laughing, everybody except Lieutenant Weber who had not recognized Porta's voice.

The Lieutenant became angry and forgot to be quiet:

'Step forward, you smart Alec,' he cried. His voice shook with rage.

'No, I daren't, I'll be spanked,' Porta's voice came from the dark.

'Stop!' raged Lieutenant Weber.

'Yes, I agree with you too,' conceded Porta.

The lieutenant rushed into the column and grabbed the first man he could lay his hands on as he hissed:

'Who dares to make fun of an officer? I order you to give me his name or the whole company will suffer. I know how to tame you, you swine!'

A growl was the only answer. From the darkness threats were issued:

'Have you heard, lads, that somebody here wants a grenade on his head?'

'You'll have to use another tone here, sabre-swallower. We're not used to your kind!' (that was Tiny's voice).

'Swinish slum-droppings!' Weber shouted and ran forward to Captain von Barring. We heard him complaining and shouting about mutiny and courts-martial.

Von Barring received him coldly.

'Stop this nonsense. We've other things to consider here than depot "bull".'

Snow crunched under our boots. Frost was the herald of the dark velvet night. When one brushed against a tree-branch the disturbed snow fell like a shower of needles.

Our orders were to penetrate the Russian positions in a silent attack. No firing except in extreme emergency for self-defence.

Porta pulled out his combat-knife, kissed it, and grinning said:

'You'll soon be back at work, my pet. You'll be licking Russian stomachs and picking out Adam's apples just as the girls at the factory meant you to do when they made you.'

The Little Legionnaire and Tiny preferred spades, which they weighed testingly in their fists. In such ways each one prepared for what he was picked to do.

'
Allah-Akbar
,' whispered the Little Legionnaire and disappeared.

We slid forward without a sound, just as the Finns had taught us at the training course. We were masters at employing our close combat weapons. But so were our colleagues on the other side, particularly the Siberian skirmishers. And they loved this form of warfare.

We reached Komarovka without firing a shot. Several of us were smothered in blood and, as the blood quickly froze, our clothes were soon as hard as boards.

Porta had his combat-knife broken in a fight with a Russian. Stuck between two ribs it was not to be prised loose, so he acquired a Siberian knife which he used with marvellous dexterity. He had tied on his top-hat with a cord under the chin. It was spattered with blood.

Just outside Komarovka we had to destroy a 15-cm. field battery, but here they were fully awake. Before we reached it the shells rained over us and exploded in fire and thunder in the middle of No. 7 Company which had been detailed to help us.

Limbs and bodies whirled through the air. Screaming ferociously, we stormed forward at the brave but desperate artillerymen. Some tried to run away when most of the battery was destroyed but well-aimed bursts from our machine-guns and machine-pistols dealt expertly with them.

The few who gave themselves up we shot. It was impossible to look after prisoners. Both sides shot prisoners. Who started it nobody knows ...

The first time I saw it happen was in 1941 when I myself was taken prisoner. A few miles behind the front-line I witnessed how NKVD riflemen got rid of a whole heap of German officers and SS men. Later I saw it happen on our side several times.

There were many different reasons why prisoners were shot. For instance if we fought behind the enemy lines it was impossible to take along prisoners. Worse was when we found our friends tortured to death. That gave rise to revenge murders. I have seen rows of Russian prisoners mown down by machine-guns - not to mention the countless times men were shot 'trying to escape'.

The fighting-group stayed in position to let the regiment catch up. We immediately dug ourselves into the snow. Porta announced in his own kind of broadcast what he would eat when he got out of the battle area: