Reign of Hell (37 page)

‘So what you got ’em for?’ demanded Porta, aggressively. ‘What you got ’em for if we ain’t going to eat ’em and we ain’t going to flog ’em?’

‘I told you,’ said Tiny, tucking an animal under each arm. ‘They’re racing cats, ain’t they? Been specially trained for the job.’

‘Who told you that load of codswallop?’ sneered Porta. ‘Cats don’t bleeding race, they’re not bleeding stupid enough, you stupid git! You’d believe any old rubbish, you would. You’d believe Adolf was made of green cheese, you would . . . Racing cats, my arse! Load of bleeding wank!’

He turned back contemptuously to the two naked girls, and the rest of us turned with him. There was a pause, and then Tiny started up again.

‘I seen ’em,’ he said, earnestly. ‘I seen ’em do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Race,’ said Tiny. ‘They shove dynamite up their arses and
they go like the clappers. Jumps and all, just the same as horses.’

Slowly, we turn back again. We looked with grudging interest upon the cats.

‘This here one,’ said Tiny, jerking his head towards a mangy grey creature with a cauliflower ear, ‘this here one’s beaten all records over four hundred yards.’

‘Yeah? And what about the other one?’ said Heide, looking with disfavour upon the bundle of spitting orange fur which had torn Gregor’s face to shreds.

‘Ah, well, this one,’ said Tiny, ‘this one’s more in the nature of a sprinter, like. Hundred yard dash is more in its line. But it’ll still give ’em a good run for their money. It’ll still put up a pretty good—’

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Porta. ‘Hang on a minute . . . Whose money are you talking about?’

‘Them as lays bets with us,’ said Tiny, simply.

There was a thoughtful silence, as Porta, the financial whizz kid, scraped his one remaining tooth with a filthy fingernail and considered all the possibilities.

‘Yeah, all right,’ he said, at last. ‘All right, we’ll give it a go. There could be something in it.’

We made our way down to the park, where there was a temporary lull in the hostilities, and began clearing an area round the statue of Napoleon. We set up a fine race-course, with a variety of jumps and other obstacles, and prepared the animals for a trial run. Two people held them, while two others tied tin cans to their tails, and on the firing of the starting pistol set light to the fuses. The unfortunate creatures tore neck and neck round the course with the cans clattering and clanging behind them.

‘See?’ said Tiny. ‘They go like a bomb.’

By the time we had set it all up and had a couple of practice runs, a fair-sized crowd of would-be punters had gathered to watch. Porta strode about, self-importantly inviting them to place their bets for the first race.

It very soon became obvious that we were going to need more than two runners if we were to keep alive a healthy
interest in the sport. Tiny and Gregor were accordingly sent out scavenging, while in the meantime one or two people turned up with animals of their own which they were eager to pit against the mangy grey and the spitting marmalade tom. Someone produced an enormous black monster which looked as if it had been crossed with a sewer rat. The bets were laid thick and fast, but the creature proved to be a nonstarter after all. As soon as the fuse was lighted it turned in a manic feline fury and began attacking the tin can with tooth and claw. Finally succeeding in freeing itself, it set off round the course in the wrong direction and caused havoc amongst the other runners. It was immediately disqualified and its owner fined.

Tiny and Gregor returned with a piebald tom and a small white fluffy creature which showed a quite amazing turn of speed. A sergeant from the Pioneers, who had heard of the goings-on from one of his mates, journeyed half-way across town in order to set his sleek tortoiseshell against our mangy grey. The tortoiseshell was an Italian cat, and it had accompanied the Sergeant all the way from Monte Cassino. The Sergeant’s devotion was really quite touching. He carried round a pocketful of stinking sardines with which he kept feeding the beast, and half-way through the first race, when the tortoiseshell was almost two lengths ahead of the rest of the field, he suddenly began shouting about cruelty to dumb animals and had to be forcibly restrained from plunging into the middle of the track and rescuing it. He was a rough, tough, hatchet-faced brute who would undoubtedly have slit his mother’s throat for sixpence, but he and his cat were all the world to each other, and after the first race, despite threats and protests, he withdrew from the field, tucking the tortoiseshell under his arm and offering to shoot the first person who attempted to wrest it from him.

Strange how even the most war-hardened of men can develop such fierce attachments to the most curious of creatures. I once knew a corporal who carried a toad in one of his ammunition pouches instead of ammunition. He used to make it comfortable each day on a nest of damp leaves,
and sometimes when we were resting it would come out and squat like a gargoyle on his shoulder. It was an ugly little brute covered in pus-coloured warts, but the corporal cried like a baby the day it got loose and was run over by a truck.

Another time, I remember, we captured a Russian motorcyclist and his pet rat. A big, black water rat which behaved like a dog and followed the Russian everywhere he went. They used to eat their meals together out of the same mess tin and sleep in the same sleeping bag. We let them both escape, in the end. It was the only way to save the rat from falling into alien hands and turning up in the evening stew pot. It would have broken the Russian’s heart.

After the tortoiseshell cat had been withdrawn from the card we began having trouble with the punters. The big piebald tom beat the mangy grey favourite three times in succession and a cry went up that the grey was being fixed. Someone claimed to have seen Tiny giving it a puff on a grifa
¹
behind the statue of Napoleon. They were probably quite right, and it was on the whole most fortunate that at that point the race meeting was broken up by a sudden burst of enemy gunfire, which sliced the head off Napoleon and sent the mangy grey flying out of Tiny’s arms and running for its life. It undoubtedly saved us from being lynched.

An amusing interlude had come to an end. The lull was over, and it was back once again to the realities of war. We were on fatigue duty that same night, gathering up the wounded and burying the dead. The wounded we carried to the field hospitals set up in the Sadyba quarter of the town. The dead were laid out in neat rows in communal graves. Some of the bodies were scarcely any longer recognisable as having once been human. Some had been gnawed by rats. Some were minus head and limbs. We had erected a ramp and the bodies were rolled down it into the ditch, where we all took a turn at the receiving end. The worst cases were not those which were still warm, or still wet with fresh blood, but those which had lain undiscovered for a period of days in
cellars and basements and were now green and bloated. If you were wise, you manipulated them with the very greatest of care. One incautious move, one impatient moment of rough handling, and the swollen skin would burst like an over-ripe plum, its contents flooding out. And any man caught in the path of such a flood of putrefaction would carry the smell with him for days and even weeks – it would cling to his hair, lodge under his nails, bury itself deep down in the pores of his skin.

We were relieved shortly after dawn, but even now there was to be no sleep. We sat a while on a crumbling bridge in the pale autumn sunlight, listening to the usual early-morning sounds of gunfire and shells, watching the water as it flowed underneath us with its complement of corpses. A few yards further on, an elderly Lieutenant-Colonel from the Medical Corps was leaning far out over the parapet, gazing upstream with vacant blue eyes.

‘Stupid old goat,’ said Porta. ‘He’ll get his bleeding head blown off if he’s not careful.’

Even as he spoke a shot rang out, and a bullet went thudding into the side of the bridge. The Colonel shifted his position very slightly as a grudging concession to the enemy snipers.

‘Hey, you!’ shouted Porta, from the safety of his shelter beneath the rusty iron parapet. ‘If you want to commit suicide, do you mind going somewhere else and doing it? I’ve seen enough dead bodies for one night.’

Slowly, the Colonel turned his head. He stared at Porta in undisguised astonishment.

‘Are you by any chance addressing me, my good man?’

‘That’s right,’ said Porta.

The Colonel straightened up in best Prussian military manner, shoulders pulled back and chest inflated.

‘Do you normally address officers in that fashion?’ he said, chillingly.

Porta looked at his white hairs and his pink-rimmed eyes, and seemed suddenly to take pity on him.

‘Listen, Grandpa,’ he said. ‘It’s for your own good. Just
move away from the edge before you get your brains blown out. OK? It would make us all a helluva lot happier. We’ve been shoving the stiffs underground all night long and we’ve had a real bellyful. So just be a good little Grandpa and do what I ask.’

‘This is outrageous!’ snapped the Colonel. ‘I never heard such insolence in all my life! Has the world run mad?’

He took a step towards Porta, and as he did so a second shot rang out. The Colonel gave a sharp cry and staggered back against the parapet. Before we could reach him, he had fallen over the edge and gone crashing down into the turbulent waters of the Vistula below. One more body in the sea of bobbing corpses. Porta shook his head.

‘Daft old bugger,’ he said.

The Colonel’s body disappeared slowly downstream. The sniper retired, satisfied. We settled down again behind the parapet.

We were not left long in peace. The battle of Warsaw had not yet finished for us. The Fifth Company was sent back into the flames at Wola, where the corpses lay heaped in the gutters and from every tree and every lamp-post hung shreds of human flesh.

Early next morning the Germans launched a full-scale attack against the remaining Polish strongholds, which extended from the Rue Kasimira to the Place Wilson. A rain of fire fell upon the old quarter of the town. Twenty-eight batteries were kept in constant action for over five hours. Three regiments of tanks were sent through the Rue Mickiewicz towards the Place Wilson. The last of the Polish resistance was drowned beneath an ocean of blood, and that same evening General Bor-Komorovski knew that the time had come when he must bow to the inevitable. The German forces far out-numbered him. He had few men and even fewer weapons. Warsaw had been abandoned by both Britain and Russia. No help was coming and he must capitulate.

He drove to the Château Ozarow in a Mercedes that was flying a white flag, and there he negotiated the terms of the surrender. There the Germans agreed that all prisoners of war
should be treated according to the rules laid down by the Geneva Convention.

On the morning of 3rd October, at eight-thirty precisely, the battle of Warsaw came to an end. A sudden curtain of silence fell over the burning city. All that could be heard was the steady crackling of the flames, and now and then the sound of falling masonry as yet another building collapsed. The Place Wilson, recently filled with tanks and soldiers, was now deserted. Not a man, not a dog, not a living soul. The streets were empty. A sheet of paper was tossed high into the air above a burning house. It hung a moment, suspended, then fluttered back into the furnace and was caught by a licking tongue of flame. The shrivelled fragments fell gently to rest on the burnt-out hulk of a tank, where an obscene travesty of skin and bones, which had once been a German soldier, still sprawled in its death agony half in and half out of the turret.

Down in our basement, where we had spent the night, we crouched in terror as the wall of silence was built up round the city. We could understand the sounds of warfare but silence filled us with a terrible fear of the unknown.

‘It can’t be the end,’ I whispered. ‘It can’t be the end . . .’

No one contradicted me. The end had to come, but surely this could not be it? This silence, this emptiness, this total sense of nothing . . . Was this what men had meant when they talked of
the end
?

‘Things will start up again in a minute,’ said the Old Man, confidently. ‘We’d best stay here and wait for orders.’

Things would start up again in a minute. It was a comforting thought. Things would start up again, and we should be back to normal. Meanwhile, we would stay here and wait for orders. That was always best. There must be someone, somewhere, who knew what was happening.

‘It can’t be the end,’ I said. ‘It surely can’t be the end . . .’

‘It’s a trap,’ said Tiny. ‘They’re trying to trick us into thinking it’s all over.’

Another half hour passed. Another hour. The street was still as the grave. The silence, very slowly, was being filled
with half-remembered sounds from a long-forgotten past. The creaking of wood, the singing of birds, the ticking of a watch – all the little, insignificant sounds that for so long had been drowned in the chaos of war.

The sudden collapsing of a roof on the opposite side of the street scared us almost into an apoplexy. Tiny let loose a burst of machine-gun fire, and Gregor vomited all over the floor. He wiped his mouth with a trembling hand.

‘Jesus, I can’t take any more of this,’ he said. ‘I’m going outside to have a gander. I’m not staying down here to be caught like a rat in a trap.’

‘It’s a trick,’ said Tiny. ‘That’s exactly what they want you to do.’