Legion of the Damned (22 page)

Even the prison warders were impressed by her proud courage and they brought her many forbidden things in the last few days, though she shrank from receiving anything from people who wore the hated uniform.

A friend of mine witnessed the execution of these young people and he told me that they sang a couple of the forbidden songs so that they resounded throughout the prison, and the other prisoners sang with them from all the windows. Neither threats nor blows were able to silence them, and when the last had been executed there was a thunderous roar from those in the cell windows: "Vengeance! Vengeance!" and then they sang
Red Wedding
.* [* A revolutionary song. Wedding is a district of Berlin.]

Burn this letter, as soon as you have read it. I am sending it by a good friend who is going to the front near where your regiment is. I enclose a locket with her picture and a lock of her hair.

Dear son-in-law, Ursula's broken-hearted mother and I have, of course, never seen you, but we ask you to come and visit us as soon as you can. We will regard you as our son and ask you to regard our home, and all that is ours, as your own. We send you our most cordial greetings and hope most profoundly that all may go well with you. May we see you here with us soon!

Yours very sincerely,

When The Old Un finished reading we all sat silent, smoking, while the dusk grew thicker in the room of the dirty little cottage. I kept shuddering, for the whole time I could see Ursula's head rolling into the basket with the sawdust, the blood spurting from the neck in a thick stream, her lovely black hair stiff and sticky with blood, the glazed eyes, wide open and expressionless, staring up at the heaven in which she had believed. I knew exactly how her warm body had twitched and finally been flung indifferently into a grave.

Oh, I knew so exactly how it had all happened. I knew all the details, for I had seen it so often.

Before my companions could prevent it I had undone the safety catch of my revolver and shot the wooden crucifix and the picture of the Madonna on the wall to pieces. Then I put the bottle to my mouth and emptied it at one draught. The Old Un tried to quiet me but I was in a frenzy. He had to fell me with a blow on the chin.

When I came to we sat down to drink; and I drank as I have never drunk before. For days I was doped with schnapps. I put the bottle to my mouth the moment I wakened and drank till I fell over again. In the end it became too much for The Old Un. He and Porta hauled me out into the yard and put me in a trough till I had become normal again, and for the next few days they never let me sit idle for a second. I was dead tired and black and blue when I went to bed, and as soon as I woke in the morning they took me out to the trough and roused me with icy water. That helped. Slowly I began to become clear in the head again-- clear and cold and dead.

I became a man hunter, angry and slightly crazy for all the clarity of my thoughts. I took to standing in the trench with a sniper's rifle with telescopic sights knocking the Russians down in their trench. I was delighted each time I saw one of them leap in the air as a bullet went home. One day Hauptmann von Barring came and stood just behind me, watching me in silence. I do not know how long he was there. I laughed and told him that I had bagged seven in half an hour. Without a word he took the rifle from me and went. I wept a little and for a long while stared vacantly in front of me. He was right, of course.

I remember the following day most distinctly. I was having my mess kit filled with broth, elderly cow broth, when there was a bang and something scaldingly hot struck my leg. There went your leg, I thought, but it was half the hindquarter of the old cow the explosion had flung at me. The whole field kitchen was smashed and round about it lay five or six bodies swimming in their blood and the soup. A yard from me lay a leg with boot and all the rest of it.

I swung the hindquarter onto my shoulder and walked back to our billet, and there we had a feast.

"One man's loss, another man's gain," said Porta phiosophically.

It would never have occurred to anyone to do other than what I did: carry off the meat and feast on it. It was not cynicism that made me not stop to help the wounded, but war. War is like that There were others there to do the helping. Apart from your immediate companions you do not know one another in war.

Fighting flared up again when spring came and the roads and fields became dry and firm enough for such activities.

The bottle of vodka goes the round for the last time. The Old Un sticks a lighted cigarette between my lips and greedily I suck the smoke deep into my lungs while with forehead pressed against the rubber sheathing of the periscope I stare out at the riven earth.

"All tanks--open fire!"

The roaring hell begins. The heat in the tank becomes appalling. We pour across the Russian trenches like an avalanche. On the open steppe countless tanks stand blazing, with pitch-black smoke welling up from them toward the smiling blue heavens. Tanks cannot take prisoners, only kill and crush. We were no longer human beings but automatons performing movements we had learned by rote.

The T34's came rolling up in a counterattack and so we no longer had time to murder the fleeing infantry but had to fight for our own lives. The turret with its long gun barrel turned, and shell after shell was hurled at the roaring T34's.

I was on the point of suffocating. There was a tightness round my forehead and chest, as though I were in the clasp of iron rings that were slowly crushing me. I realized that in a short while I would be able to control myself no longer and must fling the turret hatches open and jump out of that hot steel monster. Then there was a thunderous roar and the tank stopped with a jerk. At the same moment a blue-red flame shot up from one side of the tank. As through a haze I saw Pluto and Porta leap out of the forward hatches while Stege shot from the off turret hatch. The whole thing lasted perhaps a second, then I came to myself and acted, as I should: up with the hatch and out in a mighty leap.

Colossal flames were pouring from the tank. All at once it bulged out like a balloon and exploded with a bang that made us gasp, and red hot metal was flung high into the air.

When we got back to our unit on another of our tanks Porta had the cat Stalin under his arm. Stalin had had his fur singed, but not so badly that he seemed to mind. He lapped up his vodka with evident delight.

We were sent to Dnepropetrovsk to fetch new tanks, and a couple of days later we were back in the battle that was raging with undiminished fury, although in its tenth day. Everything was flung into the fighting and consumed. Endless columns of reserves came hastening along the roads in the rear and vanished when they reached the front. It was like stoking a fire.

From Senkow, once a village but now a conflagration, comes a T34 at full speed. Like lightning I aim and adjust the gun. It is either them or us, whoever gets the first shot home. I take aim right at the collar beneath its turret, which is the T34's weak spot. The numerals in the periscope dance before my eyes. Then the opposite points of the sighting mechanism meet and with a roar a shell speeds on its way followed by another almost before the first has left the muzzle. The T34's turret is flung into the air, and even before the crew have time to get out the whole thing explodes. So that is that.

There is savage, furious fighting among the burning houses. From one house a Russian machine gun is firing at our infantry. Porta swings the tank round, a cloud of bricks and plaster flies in all directions as we thunder through the wall. The terrified Russians squeeze up against one wall and are mown down by our machine gun, and so we roll on through the house and out through a haze of lime dust. And that is that.

Farther on a dozen infantrymen try to get under cover. They squeeze themselves flat to the greasy earth, then they discover us trundling at them, leap up and rush toward a house. One of them gets a foot caught in a fence and before he can free it he is a gory pulp beneath our tracks. So that's that.

We tumble trees, burst through walls, over people in brown uniforms. You have to be inside a tank and hear the bang when a shell hits your turret before you know what a bang is. The gun that is shooting at us is behind the cover of a stone fence.

"Give them a kiss with the flame thrower," says The Old Un. "Then give them a high-explosive shell for dessert."

Hastily I adjust the flame thrower and at the same time as it shoots its jet of flame at the gunners a 10.5 HE shell from our gun explodes right among them. Three minutes later, when we trundle across that place, there is nothing but a twisted, unrecognizable mass about which flames are dancing and all is scorched and black.

On. On. Forward. Where the tank's broad tracks pressed into the ground no life remained. When you saw the slaughter of men that took place in the spring of 1943 you realized how well the grinning death's head suited the uniform of the tank regiments. At intervals we halted to replenish our supplies of gas and ammunition and to see to our motors. Woe betide the tank whose motor broke down during a battle. It would be holed like a sieve in three minutes.

We were engaged with a big force of T34's. Those dreaded Russian tanks were wonderfully powerful and speedy, and it was only with our new types, such as Tigers and Panthers, that we dared accept their challenge. Both the Russian and our infantry kept under cover during this roaring battle of the land battleships, the greatest tank battle of the war. Darkness fell, but despite appalling losses of men and material the fight continued across the Ukrainian steppe. We had a few hours' badly needed sleep while the supply crews replenished the tank, then we were shaken awake, tottered, still half-asleep, to our tank, where the supply men hung our equipment on us and helped us aboard. Dimly I saw a Feldwebel lift Stalin the cat up to Porta; then the motor started with a roar.

When, after four days, there at last came a pause in the battle, the 27th Tank Regiment was almost annihilated. The burnt out wrecks of our tanks littered the steppe. Of forty tanks we had two left. Out of the whole regiment's four hundred there remained eighteen. Most of the crews lay charred and dead in their tanks. Everywhere for a depth of two or three miles were T34's still burning.

Those who escaped a hero's death by burning and reached hospital only half-roasted shrieked with the pain, not for days but for months, some for years.

They were to bring up fresh tanks and crews during the night. Our still serviceable tanks were to be kept ready, together with those from other regiments. We tried to sleep while there was still time, sitting in the tank, our heads leaning against periscopes and guns; and the next day the tank battle continued, and it went on day after day.

A continual stream of fresh cannon fodder came from the reserve battalions in Germany and the depots in the occupied countries, boys of seventeen and eighteen with six weeks' training behind them. They were very good at drilling and saluting smartly, and they died doing it. Others were elderly men of fifty, come from the concentration camps. Hitler was scraping the bottom of his barrel. The hospitals also had to provide their miserable quota--pale, thin, often feverish wounded suddenly told that they were well and fit to be discharged; and, I suppose, bandages are no obstacle to being slaughtered.

In Kubjansk on the Oskol River a T34 and we fired simultaneously. Both shells went home; but the Russian tank took fire, with its turret stripped off, while we escaped with five links torn from the near track and two rollers damaged. This was a stroke of bad luck, for the company was on the point of withdrawing, and thus we had to be left to our own resources behind the enemy lines. We hid in some bushes till it grew dark and then we set about replacing the damaged section of the track and the two rollers. It was a fantastic labor and most nerve-racking, for the whole time we had to keep an eye on the endless stream of Russian tanks thundering past along the road only a hundred yards away.

It was far into the night before we had the tank ready to move. Then we had to await our chance. Porta and I sat in the turret wearing Russian caps, ready to reply in Russian if we were accosted. We had smeared our markings with mud. At the right moment we moved in behind three T34's, and thus we drove for mile after mile, till we were just behind the battle line; there our three companions swung leftward toward a village, and we continued straight on. There was a shell in the breach ready to be fired at the first who interfered with us, and Stege stood ready with several more to send after it. The machine guns and flame thrower were likewise ready for instant action. We reached our regiment.

At daybreak the alarm was sounded again, and our platoon was sent to hunt down some T34's and KW2's that had broken through our lines and were then making havoc in the rear. They had roused a whole battalion from its slumbers in its rest billets in Isjum, and by all accounts were behaving like a herd of obstreperous wild boar.

Like hounds that had picked up the trail our two tanks stormed through a little wood in which were the marks of broad tracks that could only have been those of T34's or KW2's. From the top of a rise we saw them on the fringe of a village a good two miles away. According to the map that must have been the village of Svatov. We could see only the three T34's and presumed that the others had gone elsewhere to do more damage. As soon as the three had disappeared in among the houses we went full pelt down the hill to come up behind them. We drove round behind a pond and into some thick bushes in which we hoped we would be able to get up close before they discovered us. Our second tank took up position behind a long building, a school or something of the kind, to lie in wait, and we then drove forward till we were only fifty yards from two T34's.

The Old Un crawled down beside me to make sure that I had set the gun right, for a bad shot would have meant our death. Then the shot roared out. The breach flew back and Stege flung the next shell into the barrel. Swiftly the turret swung round till I had the second T34 in the periscope. Again the gun roared and at that short distance the shell literally stripped the turret off the T34. The two T34's were in flames as we plunged out of the bushes at full speed to go to the help of our companion who, judging by the violent firing, was obviously getting it in the neck. We had only gone a couple of hundred yards up the road, however, when we caught sight of one of the KW2's, which are mighty brutes of ninety tons with an armament of five machine guns, a flame thrower and a 15-cm. gun protruding from a huge turret. It had halted athwart the road and was letting its machine guns play through the village. It was also firing its great gun, so that our ears sang and the great shell was like a hurricane rushing through the air.