Blitzfreeze (22 page)

‘God’s death, Jesus Christ!’ moans Brumme, grabbing at his hammering head with both hands. He groans. A long trembling cry of anguish.

‘Oh the Devil!’ cries Porta with unconcealed nausea and snatches a bottle from the floor. He drinks long and noisily.

Tiny falls off the bed with a thud, creeps like a wounded boar to the water bucket and pushes his whole head under the water. He drinks like a camel which has been wandering a month in the desert without water. His belly swells visibly. He doesn’t stop until the bucket is empty.

Porta sits up in bed with bloodshot eyes and wonders if he is dead.

‘I am quite against the sky pilots who preach about the holy communion of friends,’ he explains to Brumme, who is lying over the foot of the bed making weird sounds. ‘People like that are trying something underhanded,’ he concludes, and throws up under the pillow.

‘They oughta be shot!’ echoes Tiny from the empty water bucket.

‘Fire!’ moans Brumme, wrenching his revolver from its holster and sending three shots into the ceiling. The signal for the headwaiter from ‘Kaminski’ to serve coffee. In bed, of course.

A couple of hours later moving farewells are being made. They are friends for life. Porta and Tiny go back to the regiment with bulging sacks of supplies across their shoulders.

Brumme stands at the door and watches them disappear into the drifting snow. He is not quite certain whether or not he has been conned by a couple of swindlers or has been lucky to get out of the clutches of a couple of tough Ironheads.

‘If they’ve swindled me, by God I’ll
shoot
the bastards!’ he shouts, raging to himself, and his face goes quite a pretty shade of blue at the thought. But he decides to reply in comradely manner as Porta turns at the gate for the last time and waves a salute.

1
I have given myself to you, my heart and my hand,
You land full of love and of life,
My German Fatherland.
My heart is bursting with love for my land,
The land of the free, the brave wonderful
Herrmannsland
.

2
Glatz, Torgau, Germersheim: Three notorious military prisons.

3
With the flag above
In closed ranks
The SA marches
. . . .

4
Geheime Feldpolizei
: The Field Security Police.

5
Moses Dragoons: Supplies Service soldiers who had been to the Army School at München, where most of the students were Jews.

6
Eisbein
: Salted and boiled shank of pork. (Also pig’s trotters.)

7
Tatar
: scraped beef.

8
Kaminski: Berlin luxury restaurant.

9
PU (Politisch unzurverlässig): Politically unreliable.

10
Wir halten fest und
, etc.: German song approximating to ‘The more we are together, etc.’

‘We demand the death penalty for those who oppose our fight for the fellowship of the people. We demand the death penalty, likewise, for criminal traitors, usurers, defrauders and national parasites, without regard to belief or to race.’

Major Mikhal Gosztonow, partisan leader of the district of Minsk was a heavy-set brute of a man, hated by his subordinates. A man who had in his time waded through seas of corpses. His small furtive eyes examined the men around him in the little
izba
,
¹
which stank of damp clothing and unwashed bodies. ‘Tomorrow night we attack the village,’ he said in a voice which brooked no refusal. He pointed with his machine-gun at an old man in a worn ragged coat, his feet bound in old cloths like thousands of other Russian peasants. ‘Rasin, you’ll see to it that your village is set fire to just after midnight. When everything is ablaze, and the Nazis are running around like blinded rats, we attack and liquidate the green swine.’

The old man, marked by a life of poverty and toil, wrung his hands in despair.

‘
Tovaritsch gospodin
, what about our children, the old people and the sick? It’s cold, and the winter gets crueller every day,
gospodin
, I don’t remember a harder winter than this year!’

‘Stop crying,
moujik
,
²
this is war,’ roared the partisan major. ‘We must all make sacrifices. Your life means nothing when you’re fighting for the Soviet Fatherland. The Devil help you, old man, if your damned village isn’t in flames shortly after midnight!’ He drew his Nagan and smashed it brutally across the old man’s face. Two teeth snapped and blood poured from his
nose. ‘You are
Staross
,
³
so don’t forget your first duty is to our father Josef Stalin, who gives you bread and work! The Fatherland requires your services. You don’t seem to realize this. Burn your pigsty of a village as I have ordered. And now: Get out!’

‘They need a taste of the whip now and then,’ grinned the major to the partisan leaders when the
Staross
had left the little room.

‘Those swine let the Fascists sleep in their beds, sit with them at table, fill themselves with enemy food instead of dying honourably of hunger!’

He pushed a large piece of ham into his mouth and swallowed it like a stork swallowing a frog.

A bottle of French cognac was passed round. Left over from a raid on a German supply column.

‘The knout is what’s needed to keep these peasants down,’ he continued in a hoarse voice. ‘They help us, but only because they are more afraid of us than they are of the invaders. For us there is only victory or death. Don’t forget this, any of you partisans who might just be thinking of going over,’ he added threateningly. ‘Any partisan the Germans get hold of gets tortured before they hang him. We can expect no help from anyone. Our war never stops, day or night. Our lives are worth nothing. We have nothing but our duty to the Fatherland and to Comrade Stalin to live for.’

In the icy cold of a jet-black night we creep from our fox-holes and march forward to new positions over against the forest. Half unconscious we weave in disorderly column. We are wadded out with newspaper, the QMG-Clothing’s latest idea. According to orders paper is just as warm as fur. A lot of orders are read out to us every day. About victories and heroic deeds. Nobody listens to them any more. The brave men who
had the courage to lie down in the snow are dead. The not-so-brave, like us, keep on marching and let ourselves be misused, as has been the custom in all ages with the young.

The man marching beside you drops suddenly into the snow and lies there, his hand gripping his rifle. If you’ve a little strength still left in you, you bend down and break off his dog-tags so that the folks at home will know he’s dead and won’t spend years searching for him. Many die like this.

Fog comes creeping up from the river, and in our half-awake condition we see dream-figures coiling in it. Porta sees a giant table covered with the most wonderful kinds of food. He tells us that he sees whole battalions of Supplies soldiers piling tons of mashed potatoes and mountains of tiny cubes of pork on it.

‘Jesus ‘n Mary!’ groans Tiny, snatching at a great chunk of
eisbein
which seems to swim past him dripping with fat. All his hand touches is Heide’s icy, frost-covered pack.

‘Wizened-up Chinese cunt!’ he curses in disappointment, but a little later he tries again. Now it’s a huge lump of roast pork, covered with apple sauce, which is sailing by in the fog. He stands quite still for a moment staring in astonishment at his empty fist. He can’t believe it wasn’t real. The hallucination is so realistic the smell of roast pork still seems to hang in the air.

Heide has just pushed a piece of frozen bread into his mouth and is chewing energetically on it.

‘You’ve stole my bleedin’ pork!’ rages Tiny in disappointment, and grabs him by the neck.

‘Get the hell away from me,’ snarls Heide savagely. ‘Don’t give me the chance to get you for insubordination! I’d get pleasure out of it! Understand, you Jew psycho bastard?’

‘Get fucked, brown-nose!’ says Tiny unimpressed, pushing in between Porta and me.

When Heide’s trigger finger starts to itch it’s wise to keep your distance. He suffers from the kind of madness which, sooner or later, attacks every political fanatic.

‘Black as the inside of a nigger’s arsehole,’ confirms Tiny a
little later. ‘Man can’t even scratch ‘is piles. Bleedin’ arse is that froze-up your finger’d break off!’

‘
Caramba
, do you see those domes shaped like onions?’ shouts Barcelona Blom in amazement.

‘We’re
there
! We’ll be thawing out tonight by the Kremlin stoves,’ says Stege relievedly.

‘An’ fillin’ our guts with
Kaslak
an’ vodka,’ cheers Tiny, beaming all over his frost-seamed face.

‘Damned if it
isn’t
Moscow,’ mumbles the Old Man fascinated. He puffs hard at his silver-lidded pipe. ‘Can you hear the bells? But why the bonfires in the streets?’

It isn’t the bells of the Kremlin the Old Man can hear, nor is it bonfires in Moscow’s streets he can see. It’s the fiery fountains of shell-bursts, which sweep the whole terrain in a violent barrage. The fog dances and is split into long waving veils by the violence of the explosions.

The company advances towards the edge of the forest, at the double in a confused hobbling mob, with shrapnel flying about their ears. These shrapnel splinters smash joints as if they were glass. Shrapnel is the Devil’s work. The splinters leave terribly large wounds which in this weather bring almost certain death.

‘Forward!’ shouts Oberleutnant Moser hoarsely. He stops a moment and leans tiredly on his machine-gun.

‘He’s sick,’ says the Old Man quietly. ‘The medical orderly told me he’s pissing blood. His kidneys are shot. But he’s not sick enough for hospitalization. You have to get your head shot off now to get into a bed!’

‘Forward!’ repeats Moser, the sweat pouring down over his ghastly face. Tiredly he lifts his arm and points out the attack objective.

‘No. 5 Company. Forward!’

Knots of men storm forward. Every step is agony. Our boots are frozen hard as iron. The German military boot was not designed for a Russian winter.

Porta, of course, has long since exchanged his German infantry-boots for a pair of butter-soft yellow Lapp boots. He
has liberated almost everything the heart could desire in the way of Russian equipment. Nobody can understand just how, but one way or another he always gets hold of the things he needs. The other day we went past Djil – it was just after we’d taken the railway line and were advancing on down towards the
kolchos
,
⁴
Porta stops suddenly. ‘Hang on!’ he says. ‘It’s my guess there’s something worth snitching over in that barn.’ He disappears quickly between the low buildings and reappears soon after with a sheep over his shoulder and a jar of vodka in his hand.

And now we are sitting in our hole in the snow filling up in readiness for the seven lean years.

‘When you can turn up something like this, and a little sup now and then,’ explains Porta with his mouth full of mutton, ‘you can always get by in a World War.
Al
though I wouldn’t complain if the knocking-off whistle went in an hour’s time! You’d see a cloud of snow moving westwards at a very rapid rate! And in the middle of it would be Obergefreiter, by the grace of God, Joseph Porta. I’d like to see the lousy NKVD gang that’d be able to catch
me
when the Berlin magnet’d begun to tug away at me little old cock!’

But now we’re hungry again. For us, the Army, will always be the place where we were hungry and short of sleep.

They say we’re to cross the river. Then we go into quarters.

That’s what we want. Two nights more of this murderous cold and it’ll be all over with us. Warmth, above all warmth. It’s the most important thing in life.

Great numbers of dead horses lie alongside the road. Their legs stick straight up in the air in an unreal manner. A whole cavalry regiment has been killed with one shot. Surprised by the Stalin Organ. An Organ strike bursts your lungs. You die so fast you don’t even have time to go blue in the face. Nevertheless we still prefer the Organ to the
rasboms
.
⁵
You can hear the Organ’s rockets and have a chance to run, but
the
rasbom
’s there before you know it. You hear the detonation at the same time the sound of the discharge reaches you. Now they’ve starting fusing them for air burst. Heide affirms that this type of bomb or shell is forbidden by international agreement. But then so is the flamethrower, not to mention the explosive bullet that tears half your head off.

Heide has a little book bound in red in which the provisions of the Versailles Treaty with regard to forbidden weapons are printed, and every time we come across something forbidden he writes down the date, the time and the witnesses names in a black book.

He says that at the right time, he will place his book at the disposal of the international commission which will try war criminals.