Reign of Hell (23 page)

‘So – ah – what do you suggest we should do, sir?’

‘Ah, well, now – as to that—’ The Colonel tipped back his helmet and mopped at his furrowed brow with a ragged handkerchief. ‘That, of course, is a matter of some concern, is it not?’

‘It is indeed, sir,’ agreed the Old Man, gravely.

There was another pause. The Colonel looked grey and ancient. He looked like a half-buried corpse. I felt almost sorry for him.

‘You know what?’ said Barcelona, suddenly. ‘I just had an idea.’

We turned, hopefully, to look at him. Barcelona didn’t very often have ideas, but when he did they were sometimes worth listening to.

‘Well, look,’ he said, ‘Here are we – and here’s the river – and here’re the Russians. Right?’

‘Right,’ said the Colonel, with a fine grasp of the situation. ‘We are surrounded.’

‘So what do we do?’ said Barcelona. ‘We attack a Russian section – we obliterate them – we take their uniforms. We make our way down to the river. We see if the bridge is still standing. If it is, we go across. No one stops us. They think we’re Russians. If it isn’t—’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Porta here can speak the lingo. He can ask around, find out if there’s any other way across, find out what’s happening. And if all else fails, we can build our own bridge. Orders from up top. Simple. Who’s going to argue with us?’

‘Hey!’ shouted Tiny. ‘That’s not such a bad idea!’ He turned excitedly to the rest of us. ‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘Put on Russian uniforms and we could march all the way to Berlin in ’em!’

‘Except that if I’m going to be the one to do the talking,’ said Porta, who always was the one to do the talking in any situation in which he found himself, ‘then I insist on being a colonel.’

‘Be what you like,’ said Barcelona, ‘just so long as you get us across that river.’

The Colonel by this time was looking pretty worried. As well he might: Porta and Barcelona were quite capable of attempting to put the plan into practice. The Colonel cleared his throat.

‘We’d better be pushing on,’ he said, nervously. Doubtless he had visions of being arrested in Russian uniform and shot as a spy, though it could scarcely have been any worse than being arrested in German uniform and shot as an enemy combatant. ‘You know, Sergeant,’ he said, in a low confidential voice to the Old Man, ‘some of these chaps of yours are enough to make one’s blood run cold . . .’

We plunged back into the forest, deeper into the towering trees and the matted undergrowth. The rain had stopped and steam was rising from the marshy ground. The mosquitoes
were everywhere, they followed us in a great buzzing cloud and were enough to drive a man mad. Tiny suddenly paused in the act of swiping them away from his face and held up a warning hand.

‘Russians,’ he said.

We froze. None of us could make out anything other than the normal forest sounds, but he was a vainglorious fool who argued with Tiny on such matters.

‘Let’s make a dash for it,’ hissed Kuls, who was now wearing two Red Cross armbands on both sleeves, just to make quite sure that no one could mistake his occupation.

‘Don’t be a damn fool!’

The Old Man held him back. We stood listening, and Tiny silently pointed a finger. We inclined our heads in the direction he indicated, and slowly I began to make out a series of sounds which had nothing to do with the rustling of leaves. They were the sounds of rifles clicking, the sounds of men’s voices, the sounds of heavy boots in the undergrowth . . .

‘In there!’

The Old Man made a dash for the side of the path, where vast mounds of leaves had piled up. He tore away the top layer with his hands, then used his bayonet to dig his way through the soft, moist earth beneath. He was very soon buried up to the neck, and the rest of us were burrowing after him like oversized moles.

‘Are you sure this is altogether wise?’ panted the Colonel.

Wise or not, it was too late now to do anything else. We curled up nose to tail in our peaty nests, with the leaves thick above us and the earth closing in all round. The Russians were very close. I heard the safety catch click on a rifle. I could feel the heavy footsteps as they passed by. I could hear the voices as they talked.

‘Njet germanski! Job rwojamadj Piotr.’

Under the earth, I felt that I was suffocating. I had left myself a small passage for air, but now I became obsessed with the idea that the hole had closed up, that I was slowly
poisoning myself with my own exhalations. The sweat began to pour down my back and my chest. I was bent double like an embryo in the womb, my knees tucked up to my chin, my arms wrapped round my legs. Panic swamped over me, my lungs were bursting, I could bear it no longer, I had to get out . . . I sank my teeth hard into the butt of my revolver, pressed as it was against my mouth. Bright lights darted-like multi-coloured fish before my eyes. I could feel something crawling over my face and up my nose and any moment now I was going to sneeze . . .

Overhead, the Russians were crashing about in the undergrowth and shouting and laughing at one another.

‘Job twojemadj!’

They were striding along the path, prying and poking our bed of leaves. I was suffering from hideous cramp in both arms, but there was no room to move even so much as a finger. Somewhere outside, a shot was fired. I thought for a minute we had been discovered, and my mind was filled with waves of terror as I imagined the tortures they would inflict upon us if they caught us like this, buried beneath the earth and unable to defend ourselves. A living death. Would it not be wiser to break free and run for it, now, while one still had the chance? Better to die in the sweet, fresh air than to slowly suffocate in an underground coffin.

‘Ruski veks Stoi!’

How many more of them? How long before they gave up the search and left us in peace? My bladder was bursting, it was sending hot, shooting pains up through my body. Slowly and guiltily I let the burning urine dribble down between my legs, and the relief it gave me was so intense that it momentarily blotted out all my other problems.

Up above us, but moving further away, there were more cries, more shots. They must be firing on anything that moved; crows, mice, even mosquitoes.

I took a deep breath of stale air and felt my pulse beating in desperate protest. I knew, now, how an apple must feel when it was put into a hay box. I remembered at school putting
apples into hay boxes. If you left them there long enough, they started to cook, and that was what I was doing. Surely anyone outside must be able to see the steam rising . . .

‘Hey, that’s funny,’ said Porta. ‘Where’s Sven?’

‘I’m down here,’ I said.

‘I’m down here!’

I struggled desperately to move my head and clear a passage through the leaves, but I seemed to be paralysed from the neck down. I tried shouting for help, but my voice was drowned and they didn’t hear it.

‘He must be somewhere about,’ said Tiny, and he brought one of his hefty great boots crashing down on top of my head.

They hauled me out and shook me, punched me in the chest and slapped me in the face. Kuls ran about with his Red Cross armbands telling the others what to do several seconds after they’d already done it. Very soon I began to feel almost normal and even became aware of the warm damp patch in my trousers.

‘I thought you was a goner,’ Tiny amiably informed me.

We marched on our way, through the never-ending forest. We had long since exhausted all our rations, and our bellies were beginning to scream aloud with hunger pains. Porta, in particular, found the deprivation hard to bear. He began making up menus in his head and reciting them out loud to the rest of us. At last the Old Man could bear it no longer and curtly told him to shut up, whereupon Porta retired in a magnificent sulk and didn’t say a word to a soul for almost ten minutes.

At nightfall a halt was called. We settled down under the trees and through sheer exhaustion fell asleep at once. Private Abt was to take the first watch. He was almost sick with fear. Every shadow, every blade of grass made him jump. His thigh was throbbing, and he was convinced by now that his wound was gangrenous. Cautiously, from one of his pockets, he pulled out a small square of paper which he had been keeping secret for many days. It was a piece of blatant enemy propaganda, dropped by an aeroplane to be picked up by a gullible fool such as Private Abt. He turned his back on his
sleeping comrades and by the light of the stars read the paper yet again.

‘
SAFE CONDUCT
,’ it said. ‘This permit guarantees safe passage to any member of the German forces who wishes to transfer his allegiance to the Russian Army. (Signed) M. S. Malinin, Divisional General. K. K. Rokossovski, C-in-C, Russian Forces in Poland.’

Abt folded the paper and replaced it carefully in his pocket. He opened his ammunition pouch and took out a morsel of dry bread, upon which he thoughtfully chewed for several minutes. At last he made up his mind. He sidled away into the trees, and there he took to his heels and began to run as if all the devils in hell were after him. His gangrenous leg was forgotten. He tossed his revolver and half a dozen hand grenades into the bushes. He tore off his belt and his ammunition pouches, and discarded his helmet and his rifle. Head down, he pelted through the wood towards the village occupied by Russian troops.

‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I’ve come to join you! I have a safe conduct from your generals!’

Two Siberians stood watching as he staggered up to them through the long, tough grasses of the marshland. He was waving a filthy grey handkerchief over his head as a sign of good intent, and anyone could see that he was unarmed. It must have been obvious, even without all his screaming and shouting, that he was a German deserter.

The Siberians raised their sub-machine-guns and prepared to fire.

‘Don’t shoot!’ screamed Private Abt. ‘I’m not a Nazi!’

He stood before them, waving his flag of truce in one hand and his safe conduct in the other. Coldly and deliberately, the Siberians blasted him out of existence. He still screamed for mercy as he fell.

The wind caught the handkerchief and tossed it high up into the trees. The safe conduct scuttered along the ground and was lost in the undergrowth.

It was Barcelona who discovered that our would-be deserter had finally left us.

‘Why the pissing hell didn’t we shoot the bastard while we still had a chance?’ grumbled Porta.

It was small solace that by now, if he had succeeded in reaching the enemy, he would almost certainly be dead. The alarm had been raised, the Russians would be out looking for us, and we could ill afford to take any chances.

We pushed on as fast as we could during the rest of the night and the following morning, hacking our way through the dense undergrowth, tearing ourselves to ribbons on thorns and twigs, sliding down muddy slopes, wading waste deep through evil-smelling bogs. Towards mid-day, we came to a clearing with a broad, winding path running across it. The path was full of soldiers on the march. They were Russian soldiers, going west.

Silently, we withdrew into the shelter of the trees. If we didn’t cross that particular path, it would mean a detour of several miles and the strong possibility of losing our way in the vastness of the forest. There was nothing to do but stay hidden in the bushes, to wait until darkness and hope that by then the troop movements would have ceased.

Dusk came, and there was no let up. The traffic was as heavy as ever. We waited another hour. By now it was dark, and it looked as if the entire Russian Army was on the march and likely to be so throughout the night.

‘Fuck hanging about like this,’ muttered Porta. ‘We’ll be here till bleeding Doomsday at this rate. My belly ain’t going to stand the strain much longer.’

‘So what exactly,’ said the Old Man, in frigid tones, ‘do you intend to do about it?’

Porta stared out thoughtfully at the road. He gazed up at the night sky, which was starless and cloud-covered. He looked back again at the road, and before anyone could stop him he was up and off, shooting across from one side to the other almost under the wheels of a truck. We waited for the panic and the shooting to begin, but the convoy continued peaceably on its way.

‘How about it?’ said the Legionnaire. ‘Is it worth a try?’

The Old Man hunched a shoulder.

‘Where one can go, I suppose the rest can follow . . .’

In half an hour, we were all safely across. I, in my panic and haste, caught my foot in a rut and fell straight into the path of an oncoming T34. I managed to twist out of the way only seconds before disaster overtook me, and I lay cowering in the ditch while the vehicle lumbered past and showered me with mud from head to foot.

We pressed on, deep into the dark forest, thankful to be on the move again after spending the last few hours hunched up in the bushes. We marched through the night, and towards dawn we began to make out the sounds of the river, lapping against its banks somewhere below us. We were approaching the edge of the wood, moving single file along a narrow path. Tiny and Porta were in the lead. They were laughing and tossing casual remarks over their shoulders as if they were out for a Sunday afternoon hike and thousands of miles away from danger. I was never quite sure whether those two had nerves of steel or simply lacked any imagination. But for all their apparent insouciance, they remained very much on the alert. We suddenly saw Tiny drop to his knees and gesture behind him to Porta to do likewise. The Old Man held up a warning hand. The column came to a halt. Slowly and silently, we edged our way forward on our bellies, inch by painful inch over the rocky ground.