SS General (5 page)

All night long we would play blackjack, in a stable where Porta and Tiny were serving a rather futile jail sentence. We were not officially allowed in, of course, but the whole place was falling apart and it was easy enough to bash a hole in the rotting wood and climb through one at a time when the guard was not looking. They had lashed the two prisoners to one of the feeding troughs to stop their escaping--a notion which gave us all the biggest laugh we had had in years. The idea of anyone in their position wishing to escape seemed like one hell of a joke. Nothing to do but sleep all day and play cards all night--what more could a soldier want? Mind you, it was only very recently that they had begun to treat prisoners with such civility. Until a short while before, a man was stood against a tree trunk, his hands tied together, for twelve hours at a stretch. Three hours off, twelve hours against the tree trunk, and this in all weathers, in all conditions, for a total of two hundred hours. You took good care not to get caught in those days.

Tiny and Porta were undergoing punishment for having come to blows with one of the baggage masters, and they were now bemoaning the fact that they were due to be released the following day.

"Should've bust him up good and proper," said Tiny ten times a night. "That way they'd have given us at least three months."

"Don't worry," said Porta. "I'm working on it. Next time we'll make damn sure of it."

"Yeah, we'll make a good job of it next time."

"You bet we will! It only beats me why everyone else don't try it on."

"Perhaps we ought to make a roster?" I suggested. "Take it in turns, so we can all have a bit of rest?"

The two prisoners at once closed ranks and stared at me with intense dislike and suspicion.

"You want a rest?" said Porta. "Then it's up to you to go and get it. This is our pigeon. You keep your nose out of it."

"They'd smell a rat," said Tiny jealously. "You go poach on someone else's ground."

"All right," I said. "Keep your shirt on. It's not my fault if I do something wrong by mistake and they nab me for it, I suppose?"

They went on looking at me, their eyes narrowed.

"You watch it," said Porta at last. "You just watch it, boy!"

There was the sound of footsteps outside the stable. The Old Man glanced through the dust-covered windows.

"Changing the guard," he said. "It's time we were off." He gave me a dig in the ribs. "How about some coffee, eh?"

It was always me. Because I was the youngest, it was always me who had to go and fetch their stinking coffee from the field kitchen. I was not only the youngest, I was also a cadet officer, but that made no difference, I still had to do all the fetching and carrying and be cursed by the cook, who lived in a permanent rage and had a particular hatred of anyone who was likely to better himself.

On the way back I tripped over an unexploded bomb and spilled most of the coffee. That meant I was reviled by Heide as well as by the cook.

"What's this?" he shouted. "Half a cup? Where's the rest gone? Down your greedy gullet, I bet!"

"Piss off!" I said. "Go and get your own lousy coffee if you don't like the way I do it! People leave goddamn great bombs lying about all over the place, what am I supposed to do?"

At that, they all turned on me, shaking their fists and their half-empty mugs of coffee. I trailed back to the kitchen, where the cook threw a spoon at me and told me, in totally unrepeatable language, to go screw myself. I finally had to bribe his assistant before I could get a refill, and even then there wasn't enough to go around and I was the one who had to suffer. Naturally. Being the youngest. There weren't any privileges attached to being young in the Army.

The next day saw not only Tiny and Porta's release, but also the order to prepare the motorized sleds to take a new contingent to the front line. In addition, we had some mail, but the Old Man was the only one of our group to receive a letter. It was from his wife, who drove a No. 12 trolleybus in Berlin. As soon as the Old Man had finished it, we passed it around among ourselves.

Dear Willi:

Why don't you write to us more often? No news for eight weeks and we're all so worried about you. Not a day goes by but you hear someone else you knew is dead, there are now
five pages
in the paper, all death columns. Everyone on edge all the time, and last week I had an accident. Am going to see if I can't change jobs to be a conductor, driving makes me so tired now we have to do twelve hours at a stretch. They can't get the labor is the trouble, there's such a shortage of people. No men anywhere, only ones that aren't fit, all the rest are gone. Hans Hilmert was killed at Kharkov. Two men from the Party came and told Anna, when she fainted they had to take her to the hospital. They've got the children in care. All of us on the block wanted to look after them but it's the Party decides everything these days. You remember the Sockes who came to live next door? He was badly wounded in Greece, they've told Trade as soon as he's a bit better they'll send him home to Berlin. I don't know, though, I wonder. Jochem is doing very well at school, his old one was bombed and now he's at a new one. The whole building went and half the children were killed. They were digging all night long; I was nearly crazy, but thank God, Jochem was OK. The ones that were left, they have to go to the school at Grunewald. It means I have to get up an hour earlier, but Gerda, Ilse and me are taking it in turns. They have to change three times and it's very confusing so they can't manage it alone. I told you about the girl who disappeared back in September? They've now found her body in the grounds of the zoo but not yet her murderer. I have ha your snapshot done larger and in color so now you are with us all the time. When will you get some leave? haven't seen you for more than a year. Where are you' It's awful not knowing, that's the worst. Everyone is talking about Stalingrad, I hope you're not there, it sounds like hell. Hohne, the boy on the fourth floor, that is, came home on leave but after two days he had a telegram say ing to go back to his regiment. He'd only just left and the police came for him, his wife is half mad not knowing what's happened. She spent a whole day at the Kommandantur trying to find out but nobody will tell her This war is cruel, it's so hard on everybody, men fight ing and the women not knowing and even the children getting killed. They've just cut down the rations again Last week I heard they were selling horsemeat under the counter in Tauenzienstrasse, but I got there too late, it was all gone. Tomorrow I'm going to try at Moritz Platz see if I can get some without using coupons. The children need meat, it's not for myself, I wouldn't care for it Willi please look after yourself, because what would we do without you if you never came back? The sirens have just gone again, it'll be the English, they always come between five and eight. We've had three days without them but I knew they'd be back. Can't leave us alone, it seems. Please write to me soon, we all send our love,

Liselotte.

P.S. Don't worry about us here, we're quite all right, only we wonder where you are.

We read Willi's letter lingeringly and lovingly. Mail was scarce in our part of the world and we shared it in much the same way as we shared cigarettes. A letter to one of us was a letter to all. And besides, the burden of a letter from home was almost too much for one man to bear by himself. We were all greedy for news, yet whenever it came it unsettled us.

We prepared the sleds and moved out as darkness fell. An icy wind was cutting across our faces and whipping the frozen snow into great peaks. We heard the guns boom out at Yersovka, where they were bombarding Stalingrad. Rumor had it that an entire Russian division was pinned down in Rynok, and that a factory on the Isle of Barricady had been destroyed. Rumor also had it that the 100th Infantry Division and the Rumanian 1st Tank Division had been destroyed. For the most part, we stolidly disbelieved everything we heard, good or bad. It was, however, a fact that the 2nd Rumanian Infantry Division had bumped into the Russians a few days back and in their panic-stricken retreat down the banks of the Volga the majority of them had been shot by advancing German troops and their bodies left where they fell, to discourage any more such displays. Their commanding officer had been hanged by his feet outside the Spartakos factory and was still rotting there on public view.

Tired and irritable, and so cold that we felt our very blood had frozen, we moved ahead with the sleds. We had to be at the front with the reinforcements by eleven o'clock, before the Russian artillery started up. The bastards were so regular, you could set your watch by them. We knew eleven o'clock was the deadline, but it was hard going across Selvanov and Serafimovitch and you had to be constantly on the alert that you weren't heading into the Russian lines at sixty miles an hour and not able to stop until you were well and truly in their midst.

We traveled thirty-five men to a sled. The one carrying the ammunition was third in the column, that being the least vulnerable position for the most vulnerable of the sleds. Lieutenant Wenck was traveling with the ammunition. Officer though he was, we regarded him with more respect and less scorn than most of his kind. In fact, we almost paid him the compliment of treating him as one of ourselves, he had been at the front so long.

Porta was, as usual, in the lead. He was as good as a mine detector any day, he seemed almost to sense the presence of those little surprise packages the partisans were in the habit of leaving for us everywhere they went. Tiny sat by his side on the front seat, manning the machine gun, a pile of grenades near at hand. Gregor and I were crouched behind Porta, the MG pointing skyward, ready for any attack that might be launched by Russian infantrymen in the area.

It was no joyride, being in a motorized sled driven by Porta. The thing weighed three tons and he flung it up and down, from side to side, with the same recklessness as if he were in a car at an amusement park. We shot up hills like fireballs from the cannon's mouth and fell straight down the other side, landing with a spine-jarring crash on the ground. Porta laughed so much that he several times lost all control and we tore through the snow at seventy or eighty miles an hour, the wind cutting across our faces as we clutched the sides of the sled and prayed, our faces green with suppressed vomit.

"Wheeee!" shouted Porta, as the sled launched itself into space from the summit of a fairly steep hill.

We held our breath and closed our eyes as we waited for the crash. Tiny and Porta roared with exhilaration and the sled hit the hard-packed snow and bounced up again.

"This is the last time I ever travel with you, you brainless bastard!" sobbed Heide, almost choking with rage and panic.

Porta merely flung back his head and laughed. Even as I watched, he took both hands off the wheel and gave his attention to a bottle of vodka he had with him. I turned in despair to Gregor.

"He's drunk," I said. "We shall all be killed."

Gregor was hanging onto the MG for dear life. "I'd rather be killed than suffer this much longer," he muttered through clenched teeth.

Porta laughed again, rather wildly, and had another swig from his bottle. We had all been given supplementary rations of vodka, a liter each, before we left, but Porta, in his usual manner, had ended up with three times more than anyone else.

"Where exactly are we going?" inquired a young and rather superior NCO, who had recently joined us and was fresh out of training.

"To the war, my young friend, to the war!" The Legionnaire, who was the only one apart from Tiny and Porta who seemed unmoved by the crazy cavortings of the sled, patted the boy condescendingly on the back. "You shall see action at last," he promised him. "You shall see men risk their lives and their sanity for little bits of tin to hang on their chest; except that most of them will end up with little bits of wood to stick in their graves instead."

"Yes, yes, I know all that!" said the boy, frowning with impatience. "But where are we going?"

"You'll see soon enough. Don't be so eager. Wait till you get there, you'll probably wish you'd never come."

"What do you mean by that?" The boy turned on the Legionnaire, his blue eyes narrowed. He was a model of National Socialist soldiery; eager as hell to come to grips with the wicked Communist bogeymen and quite unable to picture the degrading butchery that it entailed. "I'm not scared of a load of lousy Communists!"

The Legionnaire looked at him and slowly shook his head. "You may not be scared now, kid, but you'd damn well better be later on--because that's the only way you're likely to survive. Don't underestimate the enemy, they're not quite the little paper dolls they made them out to be at home."

Contemptuously the boy turned his back on the Legionnaire. I sat watching him and wondering how long he was likely to last.

It took us four hours of Porta's switchback driving to reach the rear positions. The temperature was way below freezing point, and although we were packed with newspaper, we still shivered in our thin capes.

There was no fresh snow on the track here, it was a river of ice and the sled zipped along the surface, which was exhilarating on level ground and heart-stopping on slopes or sharp corners. We tore down the side of a steep hill, narrowly missing a boulder which would have chopped us to bits, and found ourselves approaching a hairpin bend at almost a hundred miles an hour. Below us lay the charred remains of the stricken village of Dobrinka. The slightest error of judgment by Porta and we should be thrown hurtling into space toward the jagged brick ruins which waited for us on either side of the track like so many open mouths.

"Hold tight!" yelled Porta. "This could be it!"

It was only too clear that the thick-headed idiot was enjoying himself. The sled shot screaming around the bend, rising vertically into the air as it did so. Men were flung about like skittles, and a young recruit lost his grip and was tossed out into the road, where the following sled ran over him. By the time we regained the horizontal and sorted ourselves out, the incident was over and forgotten. It seemed a silly way to go, to meet your death falling out of a sled, but probably no more pointless than treading on a land mine or running into the face of an enemy machine gun.