SS General (28 page)

"Let that be a lesson!" He whipped around again on Tiny. "As for you, I shall deal with you later. I've had my eye on you for a long time. You're a troublemaker and a coward and you're not fit to be a soldier." He glared at Tiny, daring him to open his mouth, while Tiny stared straight ahead with an expression of abstract imbecility on his face. "All right!" The general put away his revolver. "Find a volunteer and go back and see if there are any survivors. Rejoin us at Gumrak. And make sure you do the job properly. Remember, I shall have my eye on you from now on!" With which parting shot, he strode away again.

Tiny at once turned to me. "You're the volunteer," he said.

I swung around, indignant. "Like hell! I never opened my mouth!"

"What's that got to do with it? He said to find a volunteer, you heard him."

"Well, I'm not the man you want!" I snapped.

Tiny looked at me with narrowed eyes. "You refusing to obey orders?"

"I'm refusing to volunteer," I said.

There was a moment's pause. Tiny tried again. "I'm
ordering
you to volunteer," he told me.

"All right," I said. "So I'm refusing to obey orders."

Tiny drew a deep breath. "I shall tell the general. I shall tell him I found a volunteer and the volunteer refused to do it and that's refusing to obey orders. I don't care how you look at it, it's a downright refusal. You saw what happened to that guy just now, didn't you? That's what'll happen to you when I tell the general about you refusing to be a volunteer when I told you you'd got to be a volunteer and when he'd just told me to find a volunteer and when . . ."

"Oh, all
right!"
I shouted. "I'll be a fucking volunteer!"

Tiny hesitated, then ventured, "You mean you're offering to come with me and see if there's any survivors?"

"Only under pressure."

"That's OK. Just so long as you're doing it of your own free will. Come on, let's get going."

Porta, who had been hovering nearby, awaiting the outcome, now put in a word of his own. "Just bring my bed back with you, will you?" he said casually. "We got out in such a hurry I left it behind. I guess it should still be there."

Porta had made everyone's life a misery, carrying his camp bed around with him. Even the general had been unable to separate them.

"For my part," I said with dignity, "I have no intention whatsoever of dragging a bed all the way to Gumrak. You and your bed can go and get screwed."

"Yeah, that goes for me too," Tiny backed me up. "You Berliners," he told Porta with distaste, "you got your asses too high off the ground. A damn sight too high. You want to come down to earth a bit and join the rest of us."

"I can't break the habits of a lifetime," protested Porta. "We're used to sleeping in beds, where I come from. I don't know what you people in the provinces do, but in Berlin we're accustomed to all the refinements of life."

"Provinces?" repeated Tiny, outraged. "I don't live in the provinces! I'll have you know we've even got an opera house in my town!"

"Opera house!" jeered Porta. "More like a mud hut for the peasantry!"

We parted on less than amiable terms. Tiny went charging off into the snow, yelling at me to follow him. He went so fast that I couldn't keep up, but each time I stopped to draw breath, he yanked me forward by the shoulder and gave me a kick up the backside. "Get a move on, you lout of a Swede!"

"Danish!" I roared.

"Hell, what's the difference?"

There wasn't any difference, as far as he was concerned. Swedish, Danish, it was all the same. And in the circumstances, it seemed hardly worth arguing.

There were, of course, no survivors. We found one or two bloodied heaps still dotted about in the churned-up snow, but nothing that was even remotely recognizable as a human being. Even the famous bed was in pieces.

"Let's get back," I said anxiously. "Before the Russians spot us nosing about."

"All right, all right, don't be so impatient! I've not come all this way for nothing. I'm not going back empty-handed."

"But there's not a thing here!" I said.

"I'm not going back without nothing," he replied, stubbornly. "He wanted his bed, so he's going to have his bed."

"Christ almighty!" I snapped. "What's the use of a bed in a thousand pieces?"

Tiny crawled about the ground collecting the bits, deaf to all appeals, ignoring all threats. A Russian machine gunner started up and I dived into the nearest hole and cowered. Tiny calmly carried on with his task. The machine gun stopped, and I was about to stick my head out and tell Tiny to get a move on when a searchlight was turned on us and Tiny and his remnants of bed were revealed in all their idiocy. From the Russian lines came loud shouts and bursts of laughter. I fell back into my hole and Tiny raised a clenched fist and shook it above his head. "Turn that light off, you stupid bastards, you're blinding me!"

To my astonishment, they switched the searchlight off without a murmur.

"I'm getting out of here!" I yelped, and I bounded out of the hole and set off at a run before the Russians had time to come to their senses.

I could hear great roars of merriment coming from their lines, but I felt their sense of humor was probably fickle and could change at any moment to violence.

We reached Gumrak without further incident, and Tiny gloatingly handed Porta a neat pile of iron fragments and strips of canvas. "Here you are," he said.

Porta looked at them a moment. "What in heaven's name is all this?"

"The old war chariot," said Tiny airily. "Your bed what you asked for. Risked my neck getting it for you. Stinking Russians tried to shoot me up, didn't they, Sven?"

"I wouldn't put it as strongly as that," I said sourly. "I think they were all roaring drunk."

SS Brigadenfuhrer Paul Augsberg presented himself at Sixth Army Headquarters and demanded to see General Paulus.

"Sir!" He began respectfully enough, but his tone made it clear that he had come for a purpose and had no time to waste. "I consider it absolutely essential that the order be given immediately to break through the Russian lines. Trying to carry on the fight like this is sheer lunacy and everyone knows it. As things stand at present, we've got just about enough tanks and heavy artillery to get through. Only give me the word and I'll prove it to you! But leave matters as they are and before many more days are over we shan't have a cat in hell's chance of getting out. Look!" He jabbed a finger vehemently into the general's wall map. "This is where we should make the attempt--here, near Kaslanovska. The enemy lines are stretched pretty thin at that point. We'd stand an excellent chance of breaking through."

"General Augsberg," said Paulus with a smile, "you know perfectly well you're asking the impossible. The Fuhrer has stated his orders quite clearly; we are to maintain our position here and fight it out."

"Fight it out? Fight it out? What the hell with? Dead men and snowballs?"

Paulus lightly hunched a shoulder.

General Augsberg leaned toward him across the desk. "Well, all right, then! If Hitler says we've got to stay here, we've got to stay here--but at least let's tell the Russians we're willing to come to terms!"

Paulus shook his head. "No terms, General Augsberg. The Fuhrer was quite categorical. We stay here and we fight."

Augsberg straightened up. He stared down at Paulus with pinched nostrils and raised eyebrows. "To what purpose, may I ask? Are we deliberately trying to push the men over the edge? Do we really want them to turn against us and get rid of us that way?"

"No fear of that, General. German soldiers would never rise up against their officers, the habit of obedience is far too deeply ingrained in them. The whole of our country's fortunes are based upon an unbroken chain of obedience, from the lowest link to the highest."

"Blind obedience!" snapped Augsberg. "Unthinking and unreasoning."

"Perhaps so, but that is, nevertheless, the quality that will finally carry us through to victory. Things may look black at the moment, but don't allow a minor setback to demoralize you, General Augsberg. We shall triumph in the end. The German nation never does anything by halves."

"It would appear not," said Augsberg bitterly. "Certainly nobody could ever accuse us of being defeated by halves at Stalingrad--a good full-blooded no-nonsense massacre!"

He turned abruptly and left the room, striding angrily along the great wide corridors of the GPU building. Around the area that housed General Paulus and his staff were stacked the bodies of German soldiers. Frozen corpses, piled high against the walls in the manner of sandbags. Good soldiers of the Fatherland even in death.

General Augsberg walked on, through passages where the sick and wounded lay dying side by side on the stone floors. He passed through the room next to the operating theater. It was full of corpses and amputated limbs, tossed carelessly about the floor. There were one or two bodies that might or might not have been still alive, but had been abandoned by the surgeons as hopeless cases. In a corner, huddled into himself, his gaze vacant and his eyes full of tears, was General von Daniels. His lips moved silently, his lower lip trembled. General von Daniels had lost a whole division. The 176th Infantry, all seventeen thousand men, had been wiped out by the Russians, and their commanding officer now sat weeping for his dead men and his vanished hopes, with a mind that was shattered beyond repair. General Augsberg paused beside him for a moment, then shook his head and walked on.

He passed other officers, sliding along in the shadow of the walls; guilty faces over guilty shoulders--high-ranking officers who had obeyed the command to fight to the last man and the last bullet, who had sent their military police even into the hospitals, dragging out the wounded to fight for the Fatherland, and who now, having thrown away thousands of other men's lives, were bent on saving their own. Their sights were set upon the distant Volga, upon escape at all costs from the last-ditch fighting and the growing mounds of bodies.

General Augsberg crossed a courtyard and continued across a pile of black and still smoldering ruins. Below him, in a long, thin, straggling line, was a reluctant column of soldiers. They were dressed in rags, their heads sunk low on their chests, their feet dragging. General Augsberg stood watching them. The German Army, en route to God knows where to do God knows what. They would simply fling themselves into the snow, and fire haphazard until their ammunition ran out. Their deaths would be inevitable and pointless.

The last man trailed out of sight. General Augsberg seemed suddenly to make up his mind. He walked on with determined tread through the rubble.

Retreat

It was early in the morning when General Augsberg appeared in our midst. He tossed a bag of provisions at us without a word, then very deliberately began clearing his pockets of all personal papers and setting light to them. We watched him wonderingly. His face was set hard, his lips pursed tight together. Not until he had set fire to the last of his papers did he turn and address us.

"Right!" His eyes flickered over us, resting on a man here, a man there, as if trying to gauge our possible reactions. "I have a simple proposition to put to you: either you can stay here and wait for the Russians, or you can come with me and try to fight your way through to our front line. The choice is yours. If you stay here, you'll almost certainly die. On the other hand, if you come with me, the prospects are scarcely any brighter. If you do decide to come, you travel light. We carry nothing but arms and ammunition. It'll be hard going and we probably shan't make it. You might prefer to stay here and take your chance with the Russians. If so, I shan't blame you. I'm not offering anyone a joyride--just a fighting chance. And some may not even call it that. Some may call it suicide. I won't know until I'm out there." He paused. "All right," he said. "That's all. I'm on my way."

He turned and walked out, into the first red-gold rays of the rising sun. There was a moment's silence, and then the Old Man slowly stood up, stretched, pressed his hands into the small of his back, picked up his submachine gun and ambled off with easy, bowlegged gait in the wake of the general. One after another the rest of us followed, until we stretched out in a column, about eight hundred men, the remnants of an assortment of regiments. We even had a couple of pilots with us. Their Condor had been shot down but they had landed behind German lines, and they now joined us in our bid for life. They were marching just in front of me, and I looked with increasing envy at their fur-lined flying jackets and their sealskin boots. I was wearing a variety of rags, like everyone else, and I had forgotten what it was to feel warm and comfortable. In addition, I was carrying a machine gun and its tripod over my shoulder, and it was carving into my thin flesh and protruding bones. After a few miles I tossed the tripod impatiently into the snow.

"Silly thing to do," the Legionnaire chided me. "You'll be feeling the need of that sooner or later."

I sloughed off his warning. The tripod remained in the snow.

We reached the main Stalingrad-Kalach road, where vast columns of tanks were en route to Stalingrad. Their observation panels were open, and their crews were singing and shouting like overexcited schoolboys on a coach trip.

There had obviously been an accident on the railroad line. It was blocked by a string of overturned carriages. One entire coach was crushed, two were rammed into each other, one was standing on end. Some way off from the track lay the burned-out wreckage of the engine.

We stopped to survey the scene, and Augsberg called the Old Man over.

"Take your group across first," he told him. "We'll give you covering fire if it really becomes necessary, but try to get over without being seen, it's probably our only chance. Once you're over, don't wait for the rest of us. Carry on to Yelarionovsky, we'll meet up there."

The Old Man came back to us, waved a hand and pointed. We negotiated the road successfully and ran like hares across the plain. Twice I fell under the weight of the machine gun, and twice it needed all my willpower to stagger upright and carry on. The third time it happened, I just lay in the snow and moaned, but the Legionnaire kicked me to my feet and pushed me ahead of him, running after me and thumping me in the small of the back whenever I showed signs of slowing down. He himself was unbreakable, he had been schooled in exile in the deserts of the Foreign Legion, and all my tears, my curses, my threats, left him quite unmoved.