Reign of Hell (17 page)

‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know, sir.’ Porta removed his top hat and held it respectfully before him like an undertaker. ‘I’ve never been to one, sir.’

‘Don’t be impertinent, Corporal! How long have you been in the Army?’

‘Too long, sir. Far too bloody long.’

The Major’s eyebrows snapped together.

‘Be more precise, Corporal!’

‘Yes, sir.’ Porta stiffened his legs and clicked his heels. ‘Permission to consult my military papers, sir?’

The Major made an impatient noise in the back of his throat. I saw Lieutenant Löwe hastily convert a broad grin into a smothered yawn.

‘Are you a bloody cretin, Corporal?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Porta bowed his head, apologetically. ‘I was once examined by an army head-shrinker in Potsdam, sir. He gave it as his considered opinion that I was congenitally feeble-minded. He said in his opinion I was incurable. He said I oughtn’t to be let loose with other men. He said I—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Corporal, shut up!’

The Major gave up the unequal struggle. He turned on his heel and stalked away, followed by Lieutenant Löwe, who was struggling again with a yawn. Porta smiled, thoughtfully. He replaced his top hat and winked at Lenzing, who had been watching him with a certain reluctant admiration.

‘That’s the way to do it,’ he said. ‘Drive ’em stark staring raving bloody bonkers if you keep on long enough . . .’

The order for action came through and the Pioneers tightened their belts and prepared to move. The Major, busy sending men to almost certain death, sat in security in a dugout and chewed on a big cigar. The Russian artillery sounded strong and healthy compared with the feeble and spasmodic bursts of fire from our own depleted guns.

We watched as the first of the five companies were sent into the field to be butchered. They were commanded by a lieutenant who had the grey, sunken eye of a nonagenarian set in the smooth face of a young boy.

We watched as they emerged from the trenches and went running straight into the mouths of the enemy guns.

‘Bloody suicide,’ said Barcelona, standing at my elbow.

‘Bloody murder,’ I said, thinking of the Major in his dugout smoking his big fat cigar.

They were blown to pieces before they had advanced more
than a couple of hundred yards. Only one small group, headed by a sergeant, succeeded in reaching the objective. Coldly and calmly, with apparent indifference to the hail of gunfire all round them, they tossed their grenades into the enemy lines and ran for cover.

When the dust had settled, there was no sign of the sergeant and his men. Only a wide sweep of devastated land, and here and there a headless body, a human trunk with no arms and legs, a pile of twisted metal, a heap of charred flesh. It was not enough for the Major. He called up the second company, commanded by a Lieutenant Kelz, and sent them off in the wake of the first. They traced the same path, running through the same smoke and the same bullets, running through hell to be killed by the Russians, trampling underfoot the scattered limbs of their dead companions. A handful survived. Barely a handful. A few scattered men forced a small breach in the enemy lines and went down fighting.

The Major chewed his big fat cigar to ribbons and frenziedly called upon the next company. Their commanding officer was young and new and keen. Fresh out of the school at Gross Born and eager and willing to die for a lost cause. He raised his arm above his head and went galloping off into the arena, yelling at his men to follow him. Like well-trained performing animals, they did so.

The first salvo caught the young officer in the stomach. The second sliced off both his feet at the ankles. He went on running on the two bloodied stumps for several yards, still waving his arms and screaming encouragement. No doubt as he died he had visions of the Holy Iron Cross . . .

The attack was repulsed. The flame-throwers were thrown into the action, but before they had reached half-way a rolling sea of phosphorus came belching forth to meet them from the Russian lines. They ran in circles with their clothes on fire, they lay writhing like snakes on the ground and the flesh fell off their bones and stripped them clean and white. Only six men returned from the inferno. One was the lieutenant who had led them.

‘I’m sorry, sir.’ He stood downcast before the Major, his face blackened with smoke, his uniform charred, his hair and his eyebrows singed. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but it’s just not possible to get across—’

‘Not possible? Not possible? What the devil do you mean, not possible?’ The Major snatched the ruins of his cigar from his mouth and crushed them underfoot. ‘By God, I’ll have you shot for this! Cowardice in the face of the enemy! You’re a disgrace to the German Army!’

‘I’m sorry, sir. We did our best—’

‘Best? You call that your best? It’s a bloody disgrace!’

‘In that case, sir, permit me—’

A shot rang out, and the Lieutenant crumpled up at the Major’s feet. His revolver fell from his hand and went clattering across the ground. The Major made a noise of exasperation. He glared round at the few remaining officers and his glance fell on the youngest of them.

‘Dietel! Lieutenant Dietel!’

‘Sir?’

‘Get out there and show those bloody Russians that the German Army is still a force to be reckoned with! Show me, for God’s sake, that I still have at least one officer who can be relied upon to carry out an order!’

Dietel was not of the stuff from which reckless fools are made. He had no wish to throw away his life on a hopeless mission. But an order was an order even when it was a death warrant, and he had no choice but to obey. He walked tight-lipped to the door. The Major clapped a benevolent fatherly hand upon his shoulder.

‘Show them what we’re made of, my boy! No need to be scared of the scum!’

Lieutenant Dietel and his men set out on their last journey, covered by our machine-gun fire. Before they had gone even a quarter of the way, they were in trouble. The Major instantly condemned Dietel as a fool and a coward, who would be shot on the spot if he dared come back alive. He turned savagely on yet another officer.

‘All right, Plein, it’s up to you! Get out there and clear
up the mess that those snivelling swine have made of things!’

Lieutenant Plein hesitated just one second, and then quite suddenly he plunged forward into the chaos, roaring at his men to keep up with him. Through the smoke and the flames we saw him striding onward. Shells exploded at his feet, bullets whistled past his head, and still he was there, in the midst of it all, fighting like a demon, screaming at a heap of corpses to get up and walk, shooting at a sergeant who tried to run away, advancing ever nearer to the Russian front line.

The enemy flame-throwers were wiped out. We saw Lieutenant Dietel blown to pieces. We saw Lieutenant Plein and a group of men reach the first of the trenches and engage in savage hand-to-hand fighting. The Siberians were like robots, trained to kill or be killed. They fought with a cold determination, unemotional, impassive, indifferent to either life or death. Plein and his men were having their last fling. They seemed intoxicated with the heady joy of slaughter. Corpses began to pile up, one on another, German and Russian indiscriminately. Men with their throats slit, men with their bellies ripped open, men with their heads hanging by a thread from their shoulders.

When the killing was done and the small band had been obliterated, the Siberians calmly wiped their knives clean of blood and took up their positions over again. Only one man survived to regain the German lines, and he dropped dead at the Major’s feet even as he opened his mouth to make his report.

‘Fools!’ screamed the Major. ‘Fools and cowards! Nothing but incompetent fools and cowards!’

He stormed away to the field telephone, and we heard him yelling and hectoring down the line, complaining that his battalion was made up of fools and cowards and that he would need far better artillery support than he had been getting up until now if he were ever to stand any chance of achieving a breakthrough. He haggled like an old woman in an eastern market-place over the number of mortars he
would need before he would consent to launch another attack.

‘Ten? Did you say ten? Don’t be so bloody ludicrous, man! What kind of support do you call that? It wouldn’t hurt a flea . . . Make it twenty and I might consider it . . . I said make it twenty and I might consider it . . . Well, all right, fifteen then. If that’s the best you can do. Make it fifteen, and God help you if you let us down!’

He threw away the receiver and rounded up the shreds of his battalion for his final onslaught. The first of the grenades started to go over, and the familiar débris of men and armaments began spouting into the air on the far side of the battlefield. The Major stood counting, with one arm raised. As he reached fifteen, he abruptly dropped his arm and leaped forward into the fray. He slipped and fell, scrambled to his feet, waved an arm over his head and ran on with the remnants of his Pioneers streaming after him.

This time, the attack succeeded. The Russians fell back under the onslaught. Hand grenades were tossed into communications trenches and bunkers. Explosives were thrust into the gaping mouths of cannons. Sub-machine-guns chattered and barked, men decapitated one another with spades and shovels and ran one another through with bayonets. The Major was discovered with a fresh cigar in his mouth, lying on his back by the side of a Russian officer. Both were dead. They were but two among a thousand who had died that day.

Before we could consolidate the hard-won position, a new attack was launched by the Siberians. Hordes of them descended on us from nowhere, little slant-eyed men, thickset and broad-shouldered, with short legs and long arms, shouting in raucous voices in praise of Stalin. We fought them in the trenches and out of the trenches, slipping and squelching in the blood and guts of the dead, but the Siberians were stolid and immovable and slowly but surely they pushed us back the way we had come.

All about me men were stumbling, falling, sobbing as they ran. A grenade rolled towards me and I narrowly escaped
treading on it. I jumped sideways like a startled horse, snatched it up and hurled it into the midst of a pack of oncoming Siberians. The blast threw me sideways and I landed in a crater, directly on top of a fresh-killed body, lying nose to tail in a pool of its own blood with its head hanging limp and its belly ripped open and spilling out its contents over my feet. I gave a shrill scream of horror and scrambled out again. I began running in mindless panic, but it seemed that the Siberians were all round us, they were firing from all directions at once and I could see no road to safety. And then suddenly I caught sight of Porta, moving backwards and firing from the hip as he went, and I stumbled across towards him, in and out of shell holes, sliding and slipping in pools of blood and oil, in my haste to be at his side. I felt calmer the moment I was with him. Porta was one of the untouchables. Porta was indestructible. Impossible to imagine an enemy bullet ever finding its mark in that tough, scrawny body. So long as I was sheltered behind him, I would be all right.

We continued our headlong flight, retreating to God knows where. At one point we came across Parson Fischer, wandering in the wilderness with a gaping hole in the side of his chest through which his lung could be seen. One of his fellow-WUs came crawling across the rubble towards him.

‘Don’t worry, old man, we’ll get you back safely. We’ll see you’re all right. We won’t let you die . . .’

It seemed somehow to be desperately important to this man that Parson Fischer should not die. Perhaps in a way he had become a talisman. A symbol of hope. If he could survive, then so, surely, could the rest of them. As long as Fischer lived, it meant that God had not entirely abandoned them.

A stretcher-bearer came running up, but upon seeing that Fischer was a WU he instantly turned and went off in search of someone more worthy of his help. Morphine was scarce, and it could not be wasted on the likes of Parson Fischer.

‘Let me die,’ said the old man. ‘Leave me here and let me die. I am not important.’

His companion hauled the Parson’s arm over his shoulder and began painfully to drag him towards the illusory safety of a shell hole.

‘You’re not going to die. I’m not going to let you die. I’m going to get you back, I’m going to get you into hospital, I’m going to see that they give you proper treatment if it’s the last thing I ever do . . . Don’t moan like that, old man! For God’s sake, don’t moan! I’m doing my best, what more can I do?’

They fell together into the shell hole. Parson Fischer lay with his head in his companion’s lap, his blood staining the ground. Somewhere near by a shell exploded. Behind them in the forest a machine-gun started up.

‘So how’s it going, old man? Say something to me. Say something to me! Say anything you like, but talk to me, for God’s sake! Don’t leave me here on my own!’

The Parson’s face was grey and sunken. His lips were growing blue. Another shell exploded, a little nearer than the last.

‘It won’t be long now, old man. Is the pain any better?’

Perhaps it was. Perhaps the pain was better. Parson Fischer was silent now. His eyes were closed and his mouth was hanging open. The blood seemed not to be pumping out so fast as it had been.

‘Why don’t you pray, old man? Why don’t you pray for us, eh? It can’t do any harm . . .’

It couldn’t do any harm. It might even have done some good. But the time for prayer had come and gone. Parson Fischer was dead at last.