Blood and Ice (13 page)

Pfeffer-Wildenbruch observed the officer with mild amusement. Even at this late hour the man was still seeking some desperate glory, while all that awaited them was death. ‘Please be so kind as to do so, Habicht,’ he remarked.

‘Gentlemen, I think all of us know that we are not going to leave Buda alive,’ Habicht began starkly. The faint smiles disappeared from his listeners’ faces. ‘Once we are aware of that, I suggest the rest is easy.’

Pfeffer-Wildenbruch sipped his drink and listened, but he felt a sudden quickening of his pulse at the prospect he knew the young crippled Colonel would hold out to them.

‘There are two ways one can fight a siege, gentlemen,’ Habicht continued. ‘One can lie supinely like some fat whore with her legs open passively waiting to be taken. Or one can fight back against the rapist with tooth, nail, and claw.’ His voice rose a little. ‘We can make the Reds pay – and pay dearly – for every metre of territory they take. The defender in a built-up area is always at the advantage. For every casualty we take, we inflict four on the Reds. Buda can become a running sore on the side of the Red Army. As long as we are able to hold out here in Buda, Tolbuchin will not dare to penetrate deeper into Western Hungary.

‘Gentlemen, we must not see ourselves as already dead and forgotten, but as men who are admittedly condemned to death but who are fighting against that sentence and making their fight visible to the world.’ His voice was shaky with excitement now. ‘Buda can well go down in German history, gentlemen, as another Kollwitz!’
1
Habicht knew by the looks on the faces of his listeners now, from general to staff lieutenant, that he had them.

‘We must change our tactics. Instead of waiting passively for the Reds to attack, we must go over to the offensive. Small well-armed fighting patrols, led by the most aggressive officers and NCOs and guided by Hungarian volunteers, who know Buda like the backs of their hands, ferreting out Red CPs and HQs and destroying them. Larger groups working their way through the sewers and coming up in the Red lines of communications and creating panic and havoc there A surprise armour thrust towards Gellert Hill to destroy that damned artillery concentration up there.’ He gasped for breath. ‘That should be our aim, gentlemen,’ he concluded, his face flushed crimson, to drive the Reds mad. They will crush us in the end undoubtedly, but they will have to pay the price of their sanity to do so!’

Habicht’s impassioned speech was received with excited chatter and comment. Pfeffer-Wildenbruch let the conference have its head for a few minutes; he let them talk, knowing how gullible the younger Armed SS officer was for such heady, exciting words. Of course, the man was a fanatic. Yet what alternative was left open to them?

Then he made up his mind. Tapping his glass on the table to attract their attention and that of the orderlies with the bottles, he waited until their glasses were filled once again. A little unsteadily he rose to his feet and gave them a sad, little, drunken smile, before raising his glass, knowing that very few of them would survive the next few days. ‘Gentlemen, I give you a toast. To the last days of Buda!’

‘To the last days of Buda!’ they chorused as one and drank the fiery spirit in a swift gulp. Next instant glass after glass was shattered against the wall as if to symbolize the final destruction soon to come.

Note

1.
  A famous siege in Prussian military history.

The company-sized NKVD patrol caught them at dawn, just as they were emerging from the sewer. Schulze’s group had carried out a very successful raid that night, destroying a whole vehicle park of the 7th Mechanical Corps, without a single casualty. But obviously one of the many communist infiltrators, who were now everywhere among the Hungarian civilian population in German-held Buda, had betrayed them. The NKVD murder specialists, who were dug in among the shattered ruins all around the square where
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patrols generally left the great underground sewage system, waited until the full patrol of some thirty men emerged; then they opened up with their automatic weapons.

It was a massacre. On all sides the young Europeans fell on to the suddenly blood-red snow, screaming for help in their own languages and the one word of German they all knew – HILFE!’

But there was no help to be won. The god of Colonel Habicht’s ‘holy crusade against the heathen Bolshevik’ was deaf to entreaty. The NKVD systematically slaughtered the young SS men, trapped in the ruined square. Then the fire stopped as suddenly as it had started, and Schulze, hidden behind a body next to Chink realized why. There was a sudden whoosh like a dragon’s breath and a monstrous sheet of evil blue flame hissed across the heaving pile of young bodies. ‘
Flame thrower!
’ Chink screamed in a paroxysm of fear.

‘Come on,’ Schulze cried. ‘The sewer!’

The flamethrower spoke again. Behind them as they ran crazily for the entrance, the human bodies began to blaze. Slugs beat a pattern around their flying feet. Without the slightest hesitation, Schulze dived head-first down the stinking hole, his fall softened by the noxious, unthinkable brown deposit which lined the bottom of the dark shaft. Next instant, Chink fell beside him.

They dodged away from the entrance just in time. The first dark shapes of grenades came hurtling down. They exploded with a tremendous, ear-splitting noise, magnified tenfold by the round echoing shaft. Red-hot, razor-sharp fragments of steel flew through the narrow confines of the tunnel, whining off the dripping, lime-encrusted walls. The two survivors of the ill-fated patrol blundered blindly away from the entrance and the cloud of poison gas that was already being pumped down the shaft.

The ill-fated patrol was the third that Schulze had led that week, each worse than the previous one. Habicht gave the Regiment no rest. Every hour of every day brought fresh deaths and fresh casualties. The regimental hospital, the cellars of a shattered store, was a crowded scene of butchery. Above ground the streets were littered with
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’s dead and the charred, burnt-out wrecks of their vehicles, the result of Habicht’s dynamic, unrelenting aggressiveness.

Now, as Schulze and Chink, their chests heaving wildly, sat in the stinking shaft, well away from the scene of the ambush, listening to the scampering of the huge, pink-eyed rats which were everywhere, the big Sergeant-Major realized that, at last, he had had enough. He handed the Chink the damp remainder of his last cigarette and sighed, ‘The time has come for Mrs Schulze’s boy to get back to Hamburg and Mother.’

‘Chink, he come with, yes?’

‘Yes, Chink he come with,’ Schulze answered wearily, ‘but Christ knows how.’

‘Howabout shit-Jewboy?’ Chink suggested. ‘He got us in – he get us out.’

Schulze sat in thought for a moment. He knew that the Regiment’s days were numbered and that Germany was nearly finished. The Russians were already in East Prussia and the Tommies and Amis in the Eifel fighting their way to the Rhine. The time had come to save his skin. He made up his mind. Wearily he got to his feet. ‘Come on Chink, let’s get out of this shitheap and back to the Regiment.’

‘And then?’

‘Then,’ Schulze grinned at him suddenly, ‘we go and find the Jewboy.’

Two hours later Schulze reported to Habicht in his cellar CP. ‘They did not die in vain,’ he said fervently when Schulze was finished. ‘They died for the cause of Europe. Rest assured, Schulze, that one day they will be remembered.’

‘Ballocks’, Schulze thought. He’d had a bellyful of the Hawk’s fanaticism. All he wanted to hear now was, ‘The war’s over. It’s peace!’

‘Well, Schulze, I expect you’re beat. See if the cooks still have anything for you to eat, then get some sleep.’

‘Before I go, sir,’ Schulze said slowly, ‘I’d like to report something.’

‘What?’

‘Just before we were jumped in that square, I thought I heard the sound of tanks off in the direction of Kobanyai Street.’

‘Tanks?’ Habicht said eagerly. ‘They must have been Red. Ours are all wrecked.’ He strode across the cellar to the big street map of Buda and peered at it for a moment. ‘Kobanyai Street is well within the Red-held sector. I think the 8th Cavalry must have lost it last week.’

Wearily Schulze clicked his heels together and played his new role. ‘Request permission to select my own patrol and go out tonight and destroy those tanks?’

The Hawk swung round, his single eye gleaming excitedly. ‘Permission granted, Schulze. Pick whoever you like.’

Schulze pushed aside with a grim smile the blanket and went out.

Down the ruined streets of Occupied Buda, the refugees poured eastwards, backs bent under their pathetic bundles of possessions. Bearded Jews, who had somehow managed to survive the German persecution, in worn black frock coats; Hungarian aristocrats in their shredded finery; workers in overalls and quilted jackets; furtive deserters from the Hungarian Army, their uniforms hidden beneath tattered old coats. Everyone was attempting to leave the capital before the final attack on the German positions.

The refugees provided excellent cover for Schulze and Chink and the hand-picked patrol of trusted SS men as they emerged from the sewer system into the winter dusk. Schulze led his men through the maze of streets following the map he had imprinted on his memory, directing them skilfully through the flood of civilians.

Finally they reached their destination: Kobanyai Street. It was different from the other roads they had passed along. It was empty of refugees and the cellars beneath the rubble were still occupied. Schulze could tell that from the smoke emerging from their on chimneys which poked up everywhere from the ruins.

‘All right men, spread out. You two Cheeseheads, get yourselves under cover at the head of the street. And keep down if you spot any Ivans. I don’t want any trouble tonight. You Frogs get up to the other end and dig yourselves in on both sides of the road.’ The Frenchmen sped away.

Schulze detailed the two remaining Danes to act as bodyguard and the little group began to check out the cellars.

At first they were unsuccessful. The cellars were crammed with gypsies and peasants from the surrounding countryside who had moved in once the owners had fled before the Russian attack. They had never heard of Csoki.

But just as Schulze was beginning to believe that the old Jewish pedlar had already made his escape from the doomed city, he found an old woman who knew him.

‘The little chocolate drop?’ she echoed the name, staring up at the soldiers quite unafraid. ‘Yes, I saw him yesterday.’

‘Where is he?’ Schulze asked eagerly.

‘Two cellars further,’ she answered readily and then for some totally unfathomable reason she began to laugh. She was still laughing when Chink knocked on the shrapnel-splintered door of the cellar indicated.

A boy opened the door. Over Chink’s shoulder, Schulze caught a quick glimpse of an untidy kitchen, with children playing on the dirty floor, a woman with dark nervous eyes checking a girl’s hair for lice, with beyond a dark hunched figure in priest’s robes, sitting at a wooden table, eating a pork sandwich and reading his holy book.

Then a woman appeared. Didn’t they know the Russians would shoot her, if they learned she had spoken to a German patrol. She threw up her hands in nervous extravagance. ‘God preserve us from the Germans and the Jews,’ she exclaimed.

‘Amen!’ the figure at the table said solemnly, without taking his eyes off the book.

‘We’ll cause no trouble, Mother,’ Schulze said appeasingly. ‘All we’re looking for is a man called Csoki. We were told he might be here.’

‘Never heard of him,’ the woman said decisively and made to slam the door in their faces.

‘Wait,’ the figure at the table commanded. ‘Did you say Csoki?’

‘I did,’ Schulze said eagerly.

The priest said something quickly in Magyar. Reluctantly the woman stood aside and let them pass into the kitchen. She closed the door hastily after them and said in German: ‘They’ll bring us trouble, take my word for it, Monsignor.’

‘The door of God’s house is always open, my child,’ he said gently. Slowly he turned to face them and Schulze’s mouth dropped open as he recognized the man in the long black robe.

Behind him Chink gasped. ‘It’s the Yid!’

Janosz the Pedlar had changed since they had last seen him. His beard had gone and he no longer appeared as old. His face had fattened out and he had definitely got a small paunch, which went well with his new role of a good-living Churchman. Indeed all in all, it looked very much as if Janosz had not done too badly for himself since he had arrived in the capital.

Schulze swallowed the last of his sandwich, washed it down with a mighty slug of the wine and turned to the ‘priest’.

‘Come off it, you old hypocrite. What are you doing here, togged up like the sodding Pope, eh?’

‘What can a poor Jew do?’ he said softly and shrugged eloquently. ‘It’s the best cover imaginable, Schulze. Those Russian soldier boys might be communist, but they’re peasant first and they’ve got a lot of respect for a man of the cloth. It is surprising where one can go in Budapest when one is a Monsignor! But what do you want from me, Schulze?’

‘You know what you said back there after we had crossed the river? Well, I and a few of the boys want out. We’re finished here. We want to be gone before the end comes.’

Janosz seemed pleased. ‘You have come just at the right time, Schulze. In twenty-four hours I am going to make my own departure too. I have what I came here to Buda to find, my fare to Palestine.’ He opened the breviary and took out a small envelope. Very carefully he let its contents fall on the opened pages. Perhaps two or three dozen stamps tumbled out.

‘Your fare?’ Schulze queried puzzled.

‘Yes.’ Janosz smiled. ‘Doesn’t seem much to you, does it, eh?’ He picked up one of them carefully by the edge. ‘A five pound orange on blue paper, worth perhaps four hundred British pounds.’

‘You get money for stamps?’ Chink said incredulously.

‘Very much so, my Chinese friend. Hide them in the lapel of your jacket, say, or in its lining and you carry a fortune with you, able to turn it into any currency you like and in any country.’