March Battalion (9 page)

And then, suddenly, silence. The shooting stopped. There was no more need for it. The Russians were fleeing before us and we rounded them up like so many sheep, pushing them on towards the German lines. A sense of madness, of sheer exhilaration, almost a blood lust, overcame even the least aggressive amongst us. It was inevitable, and, indeed, necessary to survival in this kind of warfare.

And then, with a harsh metallic cry, our exultation shattered. The tank was hit by a shell from an anti-tank gun with such force that for a moment the vehicle was out of control. By some curious miracle, the grenade did not penetrate the outer rim of steel.

'Get the hell out of here!' shouted Alte, his eye still glued to the observation panel.

The anti-tank gun was obviously in the immediate vicinity and we lived the next few seconds in agonized expectation of another grenade. None came. Perhaps some kind soul had put the gun out of action for us. At any rate, we forged ahead with the tank still intact and made for our own lines.

We were sent off to a new position on the outskirts of Novoajdar, but had barely arrived there when Lt. Ohlsen's voice crackled across the radio ordering us to turn about and take a different direction.

'Jesus Christ,' muttered Porta. 'This war gets bloody boring at times.'

We moved off again, Little John doing his best to comfort his newly-adopted son, who was crying fit to break your heart. Our Tigers joined up with a group of armoured cars that had been sent on ahead in support of an infantry regiment. We were to remain stationary, in wait for the enemy troops. The cold was intense. Little John had given his jacket to the boy and was now running m circles outside trying to keep warm.

Suddenly, from nowhere it seemed, a hail of grenades rained down on the assembled tanks. The cries of the wounded mingled with the sound of explosions. Little John gave a blood-curdling shriek and hurled himself back into the tank. His right ear had completely disappeared. His face was awash with blood.

'My ear!' he was bellowing. 'The buggers have nicked my sodding ear off!'

'Does it hurt?' I unwisely inquired.

Little John turned on me in a fury.

'What do you think, you stupid flaming bastard?'

It was a foolish question, of course. I realize that. Once again, we were in the thick of the action. The tanks moved forward through a barrage of shells and grenades. Houses burnt, men screamed, the noise of cannons and machine guns filled what for a short while had been a beautiful silence.

'Something big brewing this time,' mused Alte. 'I don't like look of it.'

When Alte said he didn't like the look of anything, then you knew it must be pretty bad. Veteran of the front line that he was, he could sense the danger in a situation long before the rest of us had even realized that a situation existed. Lt. Ohlsen came through again.

'What do you make of it, Beier? What do you think?' Alte shook his head.

'Not too good, if you ask me. Ivan's preparing for some piece of tomfoolery ... it's just a question of what and how. The damned smoke's so thick it's like a fog out there. You can't see more than a few yards ahead.'

'Well, keep your eyes skinned.'

'Will do.'

The company of tanks advanced cautiously. One by one we crossed a small wooden bridge that creaked and groaned under our weight. Radios crackled incessantly and men spoke nervously of attack. There was an uncertainty abroad that night, and it set all our nerves on edge.

An attack in the dark is a terrifying ordeal for a tank regiment. Here we were at a most particular disadvantage in that the road we were on was narrow and winding, and on either side of it lay treacherous marshland. It was obvious that the Russians had us in their sights for their bombardments followed us with nasty precision.

One of the tanks left the track and became stuck in the boggy ground at the side of the road. We tried hoisting her out with cables, but she was too deep in the mud and the cables snapped under the pressure. Major Mercedes came running up to us, using language unbefitting to an officer; demanding, in effect, what the hell we were playing at. He set to work himself, fixing a new cable. He was wearing thick gauntlets, like a docker.

Before we had a chance to try out the new cable, the Russians brought their heavy artillery into action. The Major was up and inside our tank with a turn of speed I should frankly not have thought possible for a man of his bulk. We closed up the side panels and the tank reverberated unpleasantly under the bombardment. The Russians were hurling all they had against us. Not surprisingly, Little John's adopted son began to scream with fear, and it was all we could do not to join him in a demented chorus. Barcelona's voice came over the radio:

'Old Man! Can you see anything?'

'Damn fool question,' grunted Porta.

'Not a flaming thing,' replied Alte, cheerfully.

'Where the hell are they attacking from? The whole of the Fourth Company have already been wiped out.'

There was a sudden and unnerving silence. In our panic we began firing blindly into the darkness. Our own infantry remained quiet, doubtless waiting to see what would happen next. The initiative was with the Russians now.

It started up again, with renewed fury. It was as if a volcano had erupted, belching out not rocks and fire but shells and bullets and grenades. The air was full of the sound of death. It came at us from all sides, and we sat silent and horrified in the midst of it, trapped in a steel box that could explode and send us sky high at any moment. No one attempted to speak. Probably no one was capable of it. We just held on tight as the tank shuddered and heaved beneath the onslaught. Our eyes were wide open, our throats were dry and painful. We felt ourselves to be alone in the inferno, cut off from the rest of the world. It seemed only a question of time, of minutes or even seconds, before a missile found its mark and 1,500 litres of petrol went up in a solid sheet of flame. We knew how it would be. We had seen it happen to our friends and comrades, and we had no illusions as to the manner of our death. It was usual for tank crews to end up as charred skeletons: only ten per cent of us survived the war.

All about us, shells were thudding down and great gouts of earth were catapulting into the air. Death seemed to cling at the nape of our necks, to plant clammy cold feet up the length of our spines. We could have retreated, but the thought did not occur to us. We were not heroes, we had no desire for heroism. An iron discipline had been drilled into us, it had become an integral part of us over the years, and it was that alone which kept us at our posts in the middle of hell. That, and fear for our own skins. We fought not for Hitler, not for the Fatherland, but simply to stay alive. It was a case of probable death at the hands of the Russians as against certain death before the firing squad if we dared to withdraw. Again, we were familiar with the story. We had known other crews in other tanks who had broken under the pressure of extreme fear. We had not blamed them, but they had met their death fast enough at dawn the next day. 'Desertion in the face of the enemy'. We were always given the full details. It was the best method of discouraging others from following their example.

A fresh blast hit the tank. The boy suddenly screamed. He hurled himself to the ground, kicking, gnashing his teeth, foam specking bis lips. Before we could restrain him he had dashed his head against the breech of the machine gun. Little John snatched the child into his arms while the rest of us stared, aghast, at this new horror in our midst. Heide groped nervously for his revolver. The child arched his body, threw back his head, jerked himself out of Little John's arms and went crashing to the floor.

'Do something!' ordered Little John, frantically. 'Don't just bloody stand there! Do something!'

Alte bent over the child, then slowly shook his head.

' There's nothing we can do. He's dead.'

Bruised and torn and bleeding, the little body lay still on the oily floor of the tank. It looked like nothing so, much as a bundle of empty rags, Little John stared, as one unable to believe the evidence of his eyes. He suddenly hit himself hard on the forehead with a clenched fist and let out a roar of desperation.

Before any of us could move he had gathered the child's body to him and was up and out of the tank, brandishing his revolver and shooting wildly in all directions.

'Come and get it, you lousy stinking load of swine! '

We stared out at him, mesmerized. He never was a pretty figure to look upon, but now, with a bloodstained bandage flapping over his forehead and a dead child clutched to his chest, he was quite horrifying.

'He's gone barmy,' muttered Porta. 'He won't last two seconds out there.'

'I'll get him.'

The Legionnaire, swift, silent and surefooted, followed Little John out of the tank. With one well-placed blow he had knocked him senseless, and Heide and Porta between them managed to drag his body back to safety. The child fell from his grip and remained lying in the road. The Legionnaire left it there without a backward glance.

Once more we entered upon a period of watching, listening, waiting ... From somewhere ahead of us, a mass of tattered and bleeding humanity emerged from the, trenches. It was our infantry.

Slowly a grey dawn began to break. A damp and stifling mist hung in the air, but at least we could see what was going on. Flares were being sent up from behind the Russian lines; green and white. We knew what that indicated: it was the signal for attack. Little John had regained his senses and was vaingloriously threatening to kill all and sundry. It looked as if his hour had not come.

The attack began. Wave upon wave of Russian infantry swarmed across to our trenches. We heard their exultant cries of 'Uhrae!' as they rushed in for the kill. They stretched as far as the eye could see, and our own infantry were no more than tiny islands in the enemy ocean. Abandoning their positions, jettisoning cannons and machine guns, they fed for their lives. There was nothing else they could do against such an onslaught.

It was a day of mist and grey, overhung skies. A day like many others. And yet, for thousand upon thousand of men in that section of the front it was to be their last day on earth. No one ever dared calculate the exact number of losses that were incurred. Both sides suffered, and both sides destroyed the casualty lists rather than face the truth. The battle of Lugansk had been too dear. The official communique stated, simply: 'Local attack in the Lugansk sector repelled by our artillery. Position held.'

The voice of Mercedes came over the radio: 'All Tigers to go into the attack with everything available. Make for the railway embankment 400 metres ahead... Good luck.'

The railway line and the embankment were a chaos of overturned trucks and locomotives. Long sections of the track were buckled or had been viciously ripped up, so that now they pointed heavenwards like accusing iron fingers. Signals flapped aimlessly, burning oil drums added to the chaos. The body of a German soldier, propelled no doubt by the force of an explosion, was impaled on an upturned rail and now swung back and forth like a human weathercock.

From the top of the embankment we had a balcony view of the entire scene. The Russian infantry stretched out to the horizon, the massed khaki interspersed here and there by anti-aircraft batteries and anti-tank guns drawn by horses.

'God in heaven,' murmured Alte. 'It doesn't seem possible there could be so many of them.'

The Tigers moved in to attack. From afar they must have resembled some strange and hideous pack of prehistoric monsters. There was no time, now, to reflect and be scared. Mechanically we set about our task of destruction. The earth trembled beneath us, the heavy guns roared and blasted. Stream upon stream of bullets tore their way into the mass of enemy soldiers. For a moment, the great sea hesitated. A ripple ran through it and then a tidal wave as those nearest the tanks turned to flee. Many were crushed in the general panic. Many more were shattered by the heavy shells that landed in their midst, throwing up great geysers of earth and humanity.

Inside the tanks we were half suffocated. The air was hot and acrid, burning our eyes and our throats. Heide worked like a maniac, loading and reloading the gun. His heavy gauntlets were singed, and a cloud of smoke rose up from them. Several times our clothes caught alight and we had to beat out the flames with our bare hands. Our faces were black, we were bathed in sweat. In normal circumstances we should have found the conditions unbearable, but now we scarcely noticed. The tank rocked and vibrated, and the fury of the chase was upon us. We knew it of old, but always it burst upon us as a new experience. Danger was forgotten, death was forgotten, the very war itself was forgotten. We knew only that we had to kill. The figures in khaki were no longer men, no longer soldiers like ourselves, but wild beasts to be hunted and crushed. We were the hunters, hunting and killing for the sheer, primitive joy of it. We laughed aloud as we crushed our prey beneath us. We shouted in triumph as we saw them cowering in their holes, and we turned towards them and we blasted them out of existence.

We worked bareheaded and barechested, caps and tunics abandoned. Teeth shone white in oily, grimed faces. Eyes gleamed dementedly. Little John was howling like a wolf. We killed and killed again, with every weapon at our disposal, with cannon, machine gun and flame thrower. And the Russians turned on us, wounded animals at bay, and fought back with desperate fervour. Mortally wounded, they still hurled everything they had into the battle. But their revolvers and their rifles had no more effect than pea shooters. Even the anti-tank guns were useless at any range less than a hundred metres. Some of them, indeed, hurled themselves upon us in suicidal attacks with Molotov cocktails and magnetic bombs, but it's difficult to make a magnetic bomb stick to a tank, and the Molotovs generally did more harm to their own side than to ours.

'Tigers, pull your bloody fingers out!' roared the Major over the radio. 'We haven't got all day to waste mopping this lot up!'

Incensed, we pressed on with an even greater fury. Now the Russians were fleeing before us, our shells exploding in their midst, broken bodies hanging puppetlike in the air and thudding down upon the tanks. The hum of the ventilator showed that the fan was still functioning, but nevertheless the stench of blood and sweat and burning humanity was enough to turn your stomach. At one point Alte turned his head aside and vomited. Some of it caught me in the face. I wiped it off with the back of my hand and never realized until much later.