SS General (11 page)

"You did that on purpose!" screamed Heide. "You lousy filthy coward, I'll have you shot for this!"

I jerked my head around and saw his eyes, red-rimmed, burning with the desire to kill. I saw his lips drawn back over his sharp white teeth, I saw a speck of foam at the corners of his mouth. I saw the gleam of metal in his hand and I didn't stop to plead with him. I jumped out of the ditch and bounded back up that cursed slope with Heide howling like a wolf behind me. I flung myself gasping between Gregor and the Legionnaire just as Heide's knife rebounded off the wall above my head. Heide stopped dead in the middle of the gunfire, halfway up the slope, with bullets shaving the very stubble off his cheeks. He raised a clenched and threatening fist toward the impregnable bunker. "You just wait, you bastards! I'll get you yet!"

He made a sudden dive at the wall and succeeded in running halfway up it in his rage. He fell panting onto his back in the snow, picked himself up and made a second furious assault. By some miracle, he found a foothold, a brick that had moved position very slightly and projected perhaps an inch beyond its companions. It was enough for the maddened Heide. He clawed upward with both hands and gripped the barrel of the gun that was sticking out of the loophole. Around his neck, attached by a lanyard, he was carrying a mine. If he were to slip and accidentally wrench out the fuse mechanism, he would be blown to bits.

"The man's mad," declared Gregor shortly.

"He's a bloody Nazi!" I retorted.

The Legionnaire stared upward, shaking his head in reluctant admiration. "Both mad and a Nazi," he agreed, "but a damn good soldier for all that."

Heide freed one arm and pulled the lanyard over his head. With his other hand he gripped the rifle, bending his body underneath him so that his boots pressed against the wall. Very calmly and coldly he pushed the heavy mine through the loophole. In another moment he was back on the ground at our feet, springing up instantly and setting off at a run, yelling at us to follow him.

We took the opposite direction and had scarcely turned the corner of the bunker when the door swung open and a bloodstained figure stumbled out. In one swift movement the Legionnaire smashed his submachine gun in the man's face, rammed his knee into his guts, tossed him to one side and rushed through into the bunker with Gregor and me behind him. We crouched down in a corner, surrounded by boxes of ammunition. Somewhere up above, on another floor, we heard the ceaseless pounding of the heavy guns.

"Hey, you!" Gregor beckoned to Ponz, who was hovering at the entrance. "Go and find Heide and tell him we're in! And make it snappy or he'll start chucking more mines about the place; God knows he's crazy enough!"

"Oh, all right, if I must."

Ponz turned unhappily away, took one step forward and walked straight into Heide. He gave a horrified yelp and tried to sidestep.

Heide pushed him inside to join the rest of us. "What's going on? Why aren't you upstairs killing Russians?" He glared around and singled me out for special castigation. "Sitting down here with your thumb up your ass and your brains in neutral! That's not going to get you anywhere, is it?"

He jabbed his finger into my chest. "You want to be an officer! All right, show us what you're made of. Get up that ladder and have a look around!"

This time I didn't protest. I went up the ladder like a spring lamb, eased open the trap a few inches and peered through. I was surrounded on all sides by sleeping Russians. On their helmets I could see the dreaded letters NKVD. That was more than enough for me. I closed the trap and scuttled back down the ladder.

Heide was waiting for me, his hands on his hips. "Well? I didn't hear any shooting. What happened? You just said hallo and came straight back again, did you?"

I pointed wild-eyed up the ladder. "NKVD," I hissed. "Thousands of 'em!"

Heide frowned. He snatched up a handful of grenades, pulled out the pins, pushed me aside and went tearing up the ladder. The trap was thrown back with a clatter, the grenades went in and Heide flung himself down again even faster than he'd gone up. Seconds later there was a series of shattering explosions. We waited for them to subside, then Heide moved forward. "Right, let's get up there."

This time it was the Legionnaire who led the way. As a matter of precaution, he sprayed the whole area with bullets before we stepped through the trap, but there seemed to be no sign of life. Heide's grenades had done their work. It looked like a slaughterhouse up there, all blood and carcasses.

As we stood on the threshold, I became aware of a cautious movement somewhere to my left. I spun around in time to see a Russian lieutenant crouched down and aiming his heavy revolver. I jumped aside and the bullet scraped the edge of my helmet; in that very moment Gregor opened fire and the man fell back with his face a red mass of pulp with no features. Somewhere else an arm was raised to fling a grenade, but the Legionnaire moved in with his bayonet. These men were wounded, but we had to wade through the blood searching for signs of life and extinguishing it wherever we found it. A Siberian will fight to the death. We had once watched one of our own men get his head blown off as he bent down to offer water to a wounded Siberian. Since that day, we had taken no chances.

As I led the way up the ladder to the next floor, the trap above my head was cautiously eased back and an enormous Mongol face thrust itself forward. I froze in horror to the spot, pressing myself against the wall. The face remained where it was, the slit eyes narrowing in terrified amazement as they saw what was coming up the ladder. For perhaps a couple of seconds we did nothing but stare at each other, and then my right arm shot out, apparently of its own volition, my fingers plunged deep into the man's flared nostrils and I hooked him forward, over the edge of the trap. He crashed to the floor below, where Heide stood waiting for him.

There was no time now for a slow and careful ascent. There were sounds of frenzied activity above us, and I hurled a couple of grenades through the trap and flung myself back down the ladder. They exploded before I could reach the bottom, and the force of the blast lifted me high into the air and tossed me across the floor in a limp heap.

For a few moments I lay semiconscious in a pool of someone else's blood. By the time I found the willpower to sit up and look about me, the dust was beginning to settle and the great bunker was silent. Gregor was drinking from a flask he had taken from a dead Russian gunner. The Legionnaire was sitting on the floor, smoking. Ponz was leaning against the wall looking dazed and vacant. And Heide-- Heide was solemnly washing himself in a bucket of icy water! Scrubbing the grime from his hands and face, sponging down his uniform, cleaning his nails, combing his hair, polishing his equipment. Five minutes' hard labor and he was restored to his normal model self, the perfect Prussian soldier with every last hair in place and even his toenails clean and shining.

The Third Company were called up to hold the bunker. In peacetime it had been used as a workshop for prisoners, and down in the cellars, beneath the foundations, we found a large number of bodies. Some had green circles sewn onto their uniforms, indicating that they had been political detainees; others had black, for various criminal offenses. All had been shot in the back of the head.

Before the Third Company arrived, we combed every inch of that bunker in search of booby traps. The Siberian NKVD were possessed of a fanaticism that made even Heide seem a placid and peaceable soul, and we came across several lethal packages planted above doorways and beneath floorboards. We were terrified of the Siberians. They gave no quarter to anyone, not even to their own side, and were rarely content to dispose of their prisoners by shooting; they more generally tortured them to death. If you were unfortunate enough to fall into their hands alive, the most lenient treatment you could expect was to be hung naked out of a window, attached by wire cords around the ankle. It took a man six hours to die that way, and that was comparatively easy.

Now that we had taken the bunker, the next step was to move on to the steelworks themselves. A light artillery company moved up and were soon settled in with their howitzers. When twenty-four of those things went off in unison, it sounded like the end of the world.

Our first few attacks were strongly repulsed. The Siberians came out and fought us with everything they had; we kicked and clawed each other in nightmare hand-to-hand combat, we twisted bayonets in each other's guts, we blew each other up with grenades and shells, the white snow became crimson with spilled blood and men fought ankle-deep in the mush of human flesh. And still the Siberians held firm. After each attack we had to fall back again, with the loss of a few hundred more men.

On the ninth day, we intercepted one of their radio messages:

KRASNY OKTYABR, KRASNY OKTYABR---CALLING BASE. WE ARE STILL UNDER ATTACK AND FOOD SUPPLIES ARE EXHAUSTED. CAN'T HOLD OUT MUCH LONGER. REQUEST PERMISSION TO SURRENDER.

This was encouraging news. If the dreadnought Siberians were willing to talk of giving in, we knew they must be in an even worse state than we ourselves. Needless to say, the reply they received was categorical: in no circumstances were they to surrender, now or ever; they were to carry on the fight like the good Soviet soldiers they were and rise above the animal demands of their bellies for food.

Another five days of futile fighting, another few hundred lives thrown away, and still the starving Siberians kept us from the door. But their radio appeals were growing increasingly desperate; they had now run out of water as well as food and many of their men had killed themselves rather than go on. Back came the answer, uncompromising as before:

RUSSIAN SOLDIERS, THE TIME HAS COME TO PROVE YOURSELVES! SHOW YOURSELVES WORTHY TO BE MEMBERS OF THE GREAT RED ARMY! HAVE FAITH AND FIGHT ON, STALIN HAS NOT FORGOTTEN YOU! ON NO ACCOUNT ABANDON YOUR POSITIONS.

They held out for another three days. Even with the psychological advantage of knowing their plight, we still could not break them. And then came their last radio message: no more ammunition, request permission to surrender. And the canting reply as before:

COMRADES, THE SOVIETS SALUTE YOU! THE WORKERS ARE IN YOUR DEBT! FIGHT ON! PERMISSION TO SURRENDER IS REFUSED. A RUSSIAN SOLDIER NEVER SURRENDERS.

Shortly before midnight, they came for us. Rushing toward us in a final futile fling, bayonets fixed to their useless rifles, wave upon wave of them were butchered by our machine-gunfire. Those that managed to break through fought like wild beasts, with a strength and a fury that our own men could not match. The Siberians were starving, half mad with thirst, certain to die one way or another. They had nothing to lose any more, they had already lost it, and the first ferocious horde that ran through the machine-gunfire and fell upon us with their bayonets took us by surprise. A Russian officer came at me from the side. I swung around to face him, lashed out in a panic, kicked him to the ground and stuck my bayonet deep into his abdomen. Still he found the strength to lunge at me. I looked down at the glittering eyes in the gaunt face, and the naked hatred unnerved me. With a savage cry of fear, I tore out my bayonet and slashed at his face until the features were obliterated and the light had gone from the glittering eyes. Afterward I felt ashamed, but when we finally broke through into the great hall of the factory and saw numbers of our own men hanging naked by their ankles, I felt a vicious glow of satisfaction for my revenge.

Under the great silent machines of the steelworks Russian soldiers lay dead or dying. We shot all those who were still breathing. They watched as we came, and made no attempt to plead with us. They knew it was useless. One or two, still able to crawl or to drag themselves about the floor, killed themselves before we could reach them. They flung themselves from the windows or down the elevator shafts.

By evening the battle was over and the vast factory of Krasny Oktyabr was in our hands. And yet it seemed a sour victory. Much as we hated and feared them, the Siberians had earned our respect; in the final analysis, they had been beaten not so much by superior forces as by circumstances. From then until the end of the war their heroic resistance was often to be cited as an example to others in tough spots: "Remember Krasny Oktyabr! If they could do it, so can you."

Relaxing in the sudden anticlimax that evening, we lay about on the factory floor, stretched out on benches or leaning against machines. Porta was listlessly thumbing through a newssheet.

"What's happening in the rest of the world?" asked the Old Man, clamping his teeth on his empty pipe.

It was always difficult, after a few weeks of intensive fighting, to drag your mind back to the realities of the general situation and remember that your little sector of the war was only one piece of the jigsaw; that other fronts existed, that men were fighting in other countries, that your particular victory did not mean an end to the hostilities.

"Well, what's going on?" the Old Man asked again.

"Fuck all." Porta screwed the newssheet into a ball and threw it at him. "Same as always. The Navy's sunk practically every enemy ship on the high seas and England's had it."

"I don't get it," Gregor frowned. "Month after month they tell you that. Ever since Poland they've been saying it: England's had it--England's washed up--England's on her knees. Then why the hell can't the stupid bastards throw in
the
sponge and put an end to it all?"

"Just what I say," chimed in Tiny eagerly. "What's the point of carrying on? They haven't got no ships left, have they? Their ports have all been bombed to smithereens, their planes are all out of date and they're running short of manpower, so what's the
point
of carrying on?"

"Pigheadedness, I guess," said Gregor sagely.

"Just plain stubborn," agreed Tiny.

"I wonder how it is," the Legionnaire twisted his lips in a sardonic grin, "that the RAF can keep on bombing German towns night after night in their out-of-date planes with their shortage of manpower?"