Reign of Hell (30 page)

‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ said Gregor.

We fled from the house and round the corner of the square into a narrow street which was filled with smoke and the stench of burning flesh. The men of the SD had blown up the central prison and all the prisoners. Warsaw must be wiped off the face of the map. Every man, every woman and every child must be exterminated . . .

Porta was complaining about his belly. It was almost two hours since he had last eaten, and even the Old Man agreed that he could scarcely be expected to go any further without stopping off somewhere for a refill. There was only one place to stop off in Warsaw, and that was at the Sign of the Welcoming Goat. It was a bistro which had been discovered by Porta within an hour of his arrival in the town. It was small, filthy, noisy and overcrowded and it stank of sweat and unwashed feet, but Porta had come to some sort of an arrangement with Piotr, the vast red-bearded Ukranian to whom it belonged, and he made sure we had the best of whatever was going.

We seated ourselves at an unscrubbed table which was covered with the mouldering remnants of yesterday’s meals. Piotr came to take our order.

‘I think we’ll try the duck today,’ said Porta.

A military policeman at the next table swung his head round sharply, his eyes bright with suspicion. He need never have worried. The duck was only a crow, boiled until it tasted like an old dish cloth. It was served with cutlet of dog, and followed by a particularly foul-smelling fish preserve. Each delicacy was washed down with a strong red wine. This was part of Porta’s financial arrangement with Piotr. How he ever came to make such an arrangement, we never found out. We always maintained a discreet silence on the subject. It never did to inquire too closely into Porta’s commercial affairs, particularly when you yourself were reaping the benefit. On any reckoning, boiled crow and cutlet of dog were preferable to a slice of sewer rat or a leg of mouse.

Not far away from us was an Army padre. He studied us a while, but seemed more interested in an officer who was slumped in a corner by the stove drinking beer. His eyes
returned again and again to this man, and in the end he rose and walked across to him.

‘Excuse me, Captain—’ He pulled up a chair. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’

The officer looked up from his beer glass. His head and one eye were swathed in layers of bloodstained bandages. Half his face had been badly burnt, the skin was red and puckered and the features were all distorted. His uniform was tattered and torn, covered in mud and blood and oil. The hand holding the beer glass was shaking. The padre sat down with a gentle pious smile.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if you would let me help you?’

‘Help me?’ The Captain threw the last of his beer down his throat and called across to Sofja, behind the bar, for a refill. ‘How the devil can you help me?’ he demanded. ‘Unless, of course, you have a regiment to offer me?’

‘I did not mean that sort of help, my son—’

‘No?’ said the Captain. He twisted his lips into a parody of a smile. ‘A new face, then? How about a new face? I mislaid the old one somewhere. Rather careless of me. That’s why they won’t issue me with another one, you understand. A man is given only one face in his lifetime. It’s up to him to make sure he looks after it. Don’t you agree?’ He raised his beer mug. ‘Your health, Father. May your beauty never desert you.’

The padre shook his head gravely.

‘Beauty is not external,’ he said. ‘The Lord does not look upon a man’s outward appearance. He does not judge a man by the quality of his flesh, but by the quality of his soul.’

‘Spare me the sick-making sentiment, for God’s sake!’ The Captain banged down his glass on the table. He wiped a hand across his mouth and rose somewhat unsteadily to his feet. ‘Go and prate elsewhere! You offend me with your pious gibble gabble. Go out there and get half your head blown away, and then come back and tell me what it feels like. I might be a bit more willing to listen to you.’

He staggered out of the bar, and the door swung shut behind him. The padre remained silent a moment, then he,
too, rose to his feet. He made a brief sign of blessing to everyone in the room.

‘God be with you,’ he murmured, and followed the Captain out into the street.

‘Daft old goat,’ said Porta.

He reached across the table for the bottle of vodka, but before he could pick it up there was the sound of an explosion and all the lights went out. The door was blown off its hinges and was carried across the room by the blast. Tables and chairs were overturned, windows shattered and men thrown to the floor.

We lay for a moment where we had fallen. Flakes of plaster rained down upon us from the ceiling, and the floorboards quaked beneath us. Slowly, the smoke and the dust began to clear. We crawled cautiously to our feet and looked about us at the damage. Piotr rose up ghost-like from behind the bar, his head and shoulders covered in plaster. Through one of the gaping windows we could see across the street to the Radio Building. Polish partisans had set up a mortar on the roof, and half a dozen German soldiers were engaged in a mountaineering expedition up the side of the building. They went hand over hand up a length of rope which had been attached to the railings on one of the balconies.

While Piotr and the Old Man struggled to put the door back on its hinges, the rest of us began setting up the chairs and tables, trying to figure out the cost of broken glasses and bottles. Tiny stepped outside to have a closer look at the progress of the mountaineers and returned with the information that the rope had been cut and that there were half a dozen bodies lying on the pavement.

‘What about the padre?’ asked the Old Man. ‘He must have walked right slap into the middle of it.’

Piotr clapped a hand dramatically to his forehead.

‘I should have warned him! Fifteen hundred hours, every day, regular as clockwork, it’s always the same, boom!’ He thumped a fist on to the nearest table, which promptly collapsed. ‘I should have warned him.’

‘Well, where is he?’ said the Old Man. He turned to Tiny. ‘Did you see him?’

Tiny shrugged a shoulder.

‘I didn’t stop to look. There’s too much going on out there for my liking.’

‘That’s the end of it,’ said Piotr. ‘They’ve finished for the day. They won’t start up again. Not unless the Army comes along and starts interfering with them.’

We clattered down the stairs in search of the padre and found what was left of his body lying in a pool of blood only a few yards away. I remembered the Captain, with his ruined face and his bloodstained bandages.

‘Your health, Father. May your beauty never desert you . . .’

But the Lord does not judge a man by the quality of his flesh, but by the quality of his soul—

‘Just as well,’ I muttered, as I stared down at the mangled remains.

‘Just as well what?’ demanded the Old Man, bending over the body and searching for the identity disc and personal papers.

‘Just as well,’ I said, ‘that the Lord’s not too fussy about appearances.’

The Old Man frowned.

‘That’s not funny!’ he snapped.

‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ I said.

A Kubel suddenly drew up with a loud screech of brakes. A major stepped out, followed by a little rat-faced corporal.

‘What is that?’ he said, pointing his cane at the remnants of the padre scattered about the road.

The corporal approached cautiously.

‘It’s a body, sir.’ He bent down to make a closer inspection. ‘A chaplain, sir, I think.’

The Major looked pained.

‘A chaplain?’ he said. ‘Dear God, is nothing sacred any more?’

He strolled nonchalantly across the road and poked about with the tip of his cane. The head and trunk of the body
rolled over to face him. There was a long pause. The Major raised his eyes, unseeing, in the direction of the Vistula. I saw his adam’s apple move. He cleared his throat and tucked his cane back under his arm.

‘Corporal,’ he said. ‘Stay behind and make sure this man receives a decent burial. We can’t leave a parson lying about in the middle of the road like this. It’s not seemly.’ He climbed back into the Kubel and seated himself behind the wheel. ‘I leave it in your hands, Corporal. See to it that my orders are carried out.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The corporal saluted smartly and the Kubel shot off up the road. The minute it was out of sight he dropped his hand and sent a coarse, two-fingered gesture winging after it.

‘Decent burial, my flaming arse! He’ll get exactly the same as anyone else, no more and no less!’ He turned and spat into the gutter. ‘Two-faced old git! What’s a bleeding parson?’

Tiny stepped forward and waved the man out of the way.

‘Off you go, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ll give him his decent burial. You can piss off out of it.’

He collected up the mangled remains of the unfortunate padre and dragged him down to the river. There was a loud splash, and then silence. Seconds later, Tiny returned with a pair of boots in one hand and a crucifix in the other.

‘Where did you get those from?’ said the Old Man, suspiciously.

‘These?’ said Tiny. ‘I found ’em, didn’t I? Found ’em down by the river . . .’

We began to make our way back to rejoin the Company, but by now the Poles were attacking in force from the direction of the Momoro Bridge and we were unable to get through. We were forced to hole up for a while in the ground floor of an abandoned house, with shells exploding all about us. The tower of a nearby church received a direct hit and went thundering to the ground. It was only with the greatest difficulty that the Old Man was able to keep Tiny from running out to examine it, to see if the cross were made of gold. A couple of shells demolished the building next door
and brought the ceiling down on our heads. The top floor was in flames and in danger of collapsing. We were finally driven out by the smoke. The streets were on fire all round us. Heavy artillery was pounding the whole area, and buildings were caving in on every side with a roar of falling masonry.

We caught up at last with the rest of the Company, which was in a state of considerable confusion. It was in the process of being reformed under the command of Lieutenant Löwe, who had one hand heavily bandaged and whose face had been splashed on one side with burning petrol.

It was noon on the following day before we were pulled out of the battle area and allowed a few hours’ respite. Men’s thoughts turned instantly to food, and Tiny, Porta and I were the unfortunates selected by the second section to go in search of it. The field kitchens were some distance away, and in order to reach them we had to retrace our steps through areas that were under constant bombardment.

We managed to collect the mess tins and plunged back with them into the chaos of bursting shells and flying bullets. A sheet of flame suddenly reared up in front of us and we fell back, choking. Turning down one of the side roads, we heard a shell land on the roof of a nearby building and we had to hurl ourselves to the ground to escape the falling rubble. We turned the corner and were instantly met with a hail of machine-gun bullets. Only a few yards further on, a rooftop sniper with an automatic rifle began taking pot shots at us.

‘For God’s sake!’ roared Tiny, almost beside himself with rage. ‘Knock it off, can’t you?’

To our amazement, the firing immediately ceased. I gazed upon Tiny with a new respect.

‘You must try that again some time . . . I wonder if it would work with T34s?’

There were three field kitchens set up in the Place de la Vistule. Three field kitchens and three queues each half a mile long. We tagged on at the end of one, and settled down, disgruntled, to await our turn.

‘What’s on the menu today?’ yelled Porta. ‘Stewed sock and dumpling?’

The cook looked sourly down the line at him. He and Porta were old enemies.

‘You’ll find out when you get here,’ he said.

Someone turned round and volunteered the information that it was bouillabaisse. A derisive cheer went up. Bouillabaisse was a polite term used to describe a mess of rotting fish bones floating in a pool of greasy, grey liquid. Still, it was better than Porta’s stewed sock and dumpling, otherwise known as ragoût of beef. Even the smell of putrefying fish could make a man lick his lips after almost twenty-four hours without food.

We moved tantalisingly slowly towards the head of the queue. Porta began to tell us about a real bouillabaisse he had once eaten in France. He described it in mouth-watering detail, dwelling morbidly upon each mouthful, until, you could smell it and taste it. I closed my eyes and I felt it slowly slipping down my throat, towards my grateful belly. Even such a rare treat as Piotr’s roast crow and cutlet of dog could not altogether satisfy the constant craving.

The sound of an explosion brought me sharply to my senses. I opened my eyes and found the place full of smoke. All round me, men were milling in panic with their empty mess tins.

‘The bloody food’s gone up!’ shouted Porta.

A stray shell had landed in the centre of the square. Porta’s enemy, the cook, had been dismembered. But never mind him – it was the bouillabaisse that mattered. We stared down at our feet in unbelieving horror. Across the square ran a stream of greasy grey liquid, carrying its cargo of festering fish bones down to the gutter . . .