The Commissar (4 page)

‘Stop your complaining, son,’ says Porta. ‘World wars are as world wars have to be, and not the way
you
want ’em to be. Now we have smokeless powder, and that is what we have to live with.’

‘You can’t explain any bleedin’ thing to ’
im
,’ rumbles Tiny. ‘’E thinks with the tip of’is old John Thomas, ’
e
does!’

I stare until my inflamed eyes hurt with staring. I turn the sights slowly and catch sight of the muzzle-flash of an 85 mm. Without removing my gaze from it for a second I adjust the sights. Lines and figures dance before my eyes. The long barrel of the gun sinks, as if it were nodding a greeting to its target.

The Old Man steadies his night-glasses on the rim of the turret.

‘Heaven have mercy on us,’ he mumbles. ‘It’s a whole PAK
*
battalion!’

‘Shovel shit at ’em, then!’ shouts Porta from the driving seat. ‘Else
we’ll
get shat on, an’ from a great height. Gettin’ shot up ain’t nice, let me tell you.’

All my attention and energy is concentrated on the busy gunners on the far bank. Four muzzle-flashes illuminate the small bushy-topped trees with a ghostly blue and blood-red glare. For a second I see the PAK gun-crews clearly. Shells whine across the flat terrain and explode in the avenue, tearing up blue-grey cobblestones and sending them flying
to all sides like new, runaway projectiles.

Explosions roar, thunder and crash. The few remaining windows tinkle to bits.

A human shape whirls up into the air. It looks like a woman, but the incident is merely an intermezzo in the hell of explosions.

‘What a trip
she
got,’ sighs Porta. ‘Qualified her for the air-to-land forces, that did.’

I am only half-listening to Porta, so taken up am I with my target.

The long gun-muzzle, with its new smoke-shield, turns slowly and silently. I make a fine adjustment of the sights, and zoom in on the bustling men over there. Now I can see the Russian battery commander quite clearly. He looks like an actor on stage, illuminated by blue light-beams, rather like spotlights.

‘Weird,’ I mumble, unconsciously, almost enjoying the sight of the tall, slim officer in his ankle-length grey-brown cloak. His fur cap is cocked cheekily over one eye. He corrects the fire of his battery, completely unaware of our new optical sighting device which can see through fog and darkness as if it were clear daylight. ‘Weird,’ I repeat, and feel wildly exultant over the fact that I am the one who is going to decide just how long the tall Russian officer will remain alive.

‘What d’you say?’ asks the Old Man, leaning down inquisitively from the turret hatch.

‘Dreamin’ about ’is field-marshal’s baton ’e is,’ jeers Tiny, with a hoarse laugh.

‘Gone to sleep, have you?’ asks the Old Man angrily, hitting me hard on the shoulder with his night-glasses. ‘What’re you waitin’ for, then? Why don’t you fire? Fire, I said! Fire, damn your eyes! Shoot their arses off!’

I grip the firing release with unnecessary force . . .

With an earsplitting crash the gun goes off. A yard-long flame licks from the muzzle. The enormously heavy vehicle is pressed back on its tracks, as if it were bobbing a curtsey to
the projectile which leaves its gun-muzzle.

‘Loaded, safety off,’ rumbles Tiny, as the breech clangs shut. The hot shell casing clatters over the steel deck plates.

With an oath Tiny kicks out at it, sending it flying toward Julius Heide. It hits him in the back of the neck. Heide jumps to his feet, violently angry, and rushes at Tiny with a stick-grenade swinging in his hand.

‘I’ll smash your skull for you some day, you stinking Hamburg sewer-rat,’ he hisses, white with rage, and strikes at Tiny with the grenade.

‘Stop that and shut up,’ orders the Old Man. ‘When this lot’s over you can
kill
one another for all I care. Until it
is -
stay soldiers. Why,
why
did I ever let them wish 2 Section on me? God curse the day!’

‘You love us really,’ grins Tiny, pleased. ‘If we was to take you serious an’ leave you, you’d be dead as a smoked ’errin’’angin’ in the chimney-place ’fore we was out o’ sight. Drowned in tears you’d be, an’ never see ’ome no more.’

I press my eyes to the sight, and follow the course of the shot. A gout of snow and flame goes up close to the bushy-topped trees.

Khaki-clad forms fly up into the air. A gun-carriage is thrown away to one side, taking a whole row of bushes with it.

The Old Man is firing orders into the radio, to the other vehicles of the section. Panthers and P-IVs stream into the broad avenue, and down the side streets, with popping exhausts. Broad tracks scream and clatter over the blue-grey cobblestones. Sections Three and Five halt on each side of the street. They are so close to the walls of the great houses lining it that they scrape plaster from them, with a tearing, nerve-wrecking sound.

A window on the second floor opens. An old woman with a comical old-fashioned nightcap on her head screams with hysterical rage, and shakes a clenched fist at us threateningly.

‘
Ssvinja
,’ she shouts, and throws some object down at the
nearest tank. It explodes with a roar. A blinding sheet of flame goes up.

‘The mad bitch is throwin’ grenades,’ shouts Porta. He shakes his head at the fact that anyone could be so foolish.

‘Soon put a stop to that,’ snarls Heide, murderously. He throws open the radio hatch and presses his mpi butt into his shoulder. Coldly he sends three short bursts at the furious woman in the green nightdress.

With a rattling scream she falls from the window and splashes onto the snow-wet cobblestones. As she falls her old-fashioned nightcap comes off. It flutters down a little behind her body and lands, like a wounded bird, on our gun-barrel.

‘Jesus,’ yelps Tiny, stretching his neck up, ‘that’s a lucky omen. I remember when me and the Yid furrier’s son David from ‘
Ein
’
Oyer Strasse
was beltin’ along one time on delivery bikes with a load o’ fur capes. As we passed Zirkus Weg, some sod slung a used pro’ out a third-floor winder. ’Er drawers come off on the way, float down light an’ pretty an’ land, neat as you please, right smack on me ol’ nut. There was a couple dizzy coppers on bikes breathin’ down our necks. They’d seen us “borrowin’” the capes from “Alster ’Ouse”. Any rate as soon as the cops saw this fuckin’-machine comin’ down from the third floor they drop us an’ we get away clean. So that bleedin’ nightcap’s gonna bring us luck!’

Barcelona’s Puma opens fire. In the next few minutes 2 Section sends a storm of high-explosives into the Russian anti-tank position.

A cloud of dust and all kinds of debris lifts on the far side of the river. The earth has been literally shaved clean of everything standing up.

The countless Maxims fall silent. As the cloud of dust dissipates, we see a huge pile of scrap where the PAK battery used to be.

‘That’s that,’ says the Old Man, lighting his silver-lidded pipe. He pushes his helmet back tiredly, and rumples his shock of greying hair.

‘Hell, I’m
itchy
,’ he swears, scratching his head violently with both hands. ‘It’s these blasted leather helmets.’

Tiny rubs a grimy hand across his soot-streaked face, and fishes a fat cigar from his gas-mask pouch. With the flamboyant gesture of a movie gangster he lights it and blows the smoke down Heide’s neck.

Porta passes the vodka bottle over his shoulder. Tiny takes the first long pull at it. I have hardly set the bottle to my lips when there is a deafening explosion. A 120 mm at least.

‘’Oly Mother o’ Kazan, Jesus’n Mary!’ coughs Tiny, dropping his cigar in alarm. ‘That musta took ’arf the bleedin’ world with it!’

‘KW-2,’ says Heide, superciliously.

The Old Man whirls round in the turret, searching for the source of the threat.

The night is ripped open again by a crashing shot from the KW-2’s 120 mm gun.

One of 3 Section’s P-IVs is hit. It is thrown like an empty cardboard box along the street. There is a gaping hole in its flank. Two of the five-man crew tumble from the wreckage; they are living torches. The P-IV goes up into a huge fireball. Chunks of tracks and armour rain down on us.

‘Where the hell
is
that Commie bastard?’ comes Barcelona’s hysterical scream over the communicator.

The Puma come whirling up over the hill and into cover behind the rubble of a former cannery. The rest of the section scatters in all directions. The KW-2 is slow-moving but its shells make scrap-iron of anything they hit.

Porta is the first to grasp the situation clearly. There is reason behind the selection of the quickest-minded men in a tank company for the job of driver.

‘Back o’ that house,’ he shouts, speeding up his vehicle. ‘The shit’s down there. Jesus what a gun. A Cossack with a jack on could lie on his back in comfort in the muzzle of it!’

‘Yes, devil take me,’ cries the Old Man, in alarm. ‘There the beggar is. Standing there lookin’ at us. Gun round 70
degrees. Pointblank at 80 yards. Turret five o’clock. Got it?
Move
man, damn you!’

‘Got him,’ I whisper, feeling a cold shiver run down my spine as I make out the giant, grey-white silhouette, with its bulldog-like gun sticking out of the huge turret.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ Barcelona’s voice comes over the radio. ‘Lookit that bastard there? If he gets us, with just one, our feet won’t touch till we hit the
Potsdammer Platz
in Berlin’n get scraped off it by the Eytie street sweepers.’

I hold my breath anxiously as I sight in on the armoured monster. Its clumsy turret is beginning to turn slowly. There is no doubt it is us he is after.

‘Fire!’ I give myself the order.

Before the muzzle-flash has died away our shell strikes the KW-2. It explodes on its armour in a shower of glowing splinters. Harmlessly! We have forgotten we were loaded with HE.

‘I give
up
,’ shouts the Old Man furiously, banging his fists on the turret ring. ‘That greenhorn trick’ll get you a court! I’ve no
time
for you lot any more!’

‘Oh, great!’ Porta bellows with laughter. ‘Hit ’im bang up the jacksey, an’ you’re loaded with HE, an’ don’t even tickle his piles up for ’im. Try hittin’ him with a marker this time, an’ splash some paint up his arse. He’d like that I reckon!’

‘Jesus’n Mary, what’s up then?’ asks Tiny, chewing violently at the butt of his dead cigar.

‘I’ve had it! I’ve bloody well
had
it!’ screams the Old Man, blue in the face with rage. ‘What’s
up
? You loaded with HE, you habitual criminal oaf, you! You mad-brained, illiterate, anti-social ape! HE he throws at the world’s biggest bloody tank! I
won’t
stand it any more!’

‘’Old up now Old Un’. You’ll ’ave a stroke an’ drop dead if you go on like that,’ says Tiny in a fatherly tone. ‘Anybody can make a mistake. Even in a world war small mistakes can ’appen. ’Ere’s an armour-piercin’ S-shell,
see
? We can get it off at ’im ’fore ’e’s woke up. The neighbours ain’t all that
quick off the mark where’eadwork’s concerned. We seen that plenty o’ times. It’s us Germans as ’as got it up top in this man’s war!’

‘I’ll get you a court-martial,’ the Old Man promises him, white with rage, ‘
and
I’ll take you to Germersheim personally, when they give you life!’

‘Arse’oles to that,’ grins Tiny, carelessly. ‘They’ll let me out anyway when Adolf’s lost the final victory.
An
’ they’ll probably make me
Bürgermeister
in some funny town somewhere or other.’

‘If that should come about I’d like to live in the town you get to
be Bürgermeister
in,’ grins Porta. ‘It’d be fantastic! An’ it’d certainly go down in history as the best practical joke ever played in Germany. Send him to Germersheim, Old Un’, so we can get to see a
Bürgermeister
nobody’s ever seen the like of before.’

Barcelona and I fire together. Our S-shells strike the huge vehicle simultaneously, tearing the turret half-off. The commander appears in the hatchway just as the gun of the Legionnaire’s P-IV spits out a long muzzle-flash. The Russian is cut over as if by a circular saw.

‘
Panzer, Marsch
!’ orders the Old Man, and stamps impatiently on the steel plating of the floor.

Our tank swings out and rumbles thunderously after the Panther. We leave behind us a hell of flame.

We crunch over furniture thrown from the houses by blast. A body lying spread-eagled across the tramlines, with a Schmeisser gripped in one hand, is minced under our tracks. Two turkeys dash from a pen, and run in front of us, heads bobbing.

‘Jesus Christ and all the prophets,’ shouts Porta, in a strangled voice. ‘There goes, God help me, our Christmas dinner! Suspend the world war a minute. Those two
tovaritsch
turkeys are more important!’ Before anyone can stop him he has pulled the tank to a halt and has the driver’s hatch open. ‘Come on Tiny, leave them shells be! Roast turkey’s in the offin’!

‘What’s in what bleedin’ oven?’ asks Tiny, opening the side hatch without considering the bullets which are flying around outside. ‘Jesus’n
Mary
!’ he shouts happily springing out of the tank.

Before the Old Man has time to react, Tiny’s huge, filthy ackboots are splashing up mud as he chases after the terrified birds.