Reign of Hell (29 page)

‘But I can’t get my helmet on!’ I said. ‘I can’t move my head!’

‘A German soldier shouldn’t want to move his head.’ He picked up a rubber stamp and thumped it on the form. ‘Where else do you need to look but straight ahead?’

It was obviously no use arguing with the fellow. I slid my eyes away to the pile of forms. One red form and a rubber stamp, that was all it required . . . Slowly, I stretched out a hand.

‘Oh, no, you don’t!’ The orderly had turned, quick as a flash, and caught me in the act. ‘Go and get yourself decently torn to shreds, and then perhaps I might think about it.
Until then, get the hell out of here and stop pestering me’. There are sick men waiting to be seen to.’

A couple of sergeants picked me up and frogmarched me outside. They threw me to the ground and beckoned to a nearby military policeman.

‘Hey, you! Just keep an eye on this skyving bastard. Make sure he doesn’t try any more funny business.’

Furious, I scrambled to my feet and found myself facing straight into the barrel of an automatic rifle.

‘Funny business, eh? You been trying it on, have you?’

‘Trying it on!’ I said, indignantly. ‘I’ve got a bullet pressing on my spinal cord and the swine refuses to send me to hospital!’

‘That’s hard luck,’ he said. ‘That’s real hard luck . . . I suppose you was trying to nick one of them little red passports to a free holiday?’

I raised my eyes from the barrel of the rifle and saw that the man was a corporal. I relaxed slightly. You stood a fair chance with a corporal. You could sometimes even talk to them like human beings.

‘I reckon a man’s entitled to it,’ I said. ‘After five years of war.’

There was a pause. He could shoot me for that, I thought. It all depended upon whether he was a Prussian or a Porta. Slowly he lowered the rifle.

‘I guess you’re right,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, mate, everyone’s got the same idea. You’re the fourteenth what’s tried it on in the last hour . . . I’d try it on myself if I thought I’d get away with it. But not a hope. Not a hope in hell.’

‘Bastards,’ I said. I felt cautiously at the hole in my throat. I was glad to note that it was still bleeding. ‘I suppose I’d better try to rejoin my company,’ I said. ‘Though I doubt if I’ll ever make it. I’ll probably get gangrene long before I get there.’

The corporal slung his rifle over his shoulder and we set off together.

‘You’ll be lucky,’ he said. ‘You’ll be lucky if you’re alive long enough to get gangrene. Between here and Warsaw the
whole place is crawling with MPs. You know what for? To shoot deserters.’

‘I’m not a deserter,’ I said.

‘Everyone’s a deserter, these days. They catch you strolling about the countryside all by yourself, they’ll shoot you soon as look at you. That’s the way it goes. Shoot on sight, that’s what we been told. Seems like half the bleeding Army’s running in the wrong direction. Still—’ He closed one eye and pulled a cunning face. ‘Don’t you worry, mate. You’ll be all right with me. I’ll see you through it.’

We walked the road together, swinging along quite cheerfully. No enemy aircraft came to disturb us. For nearly half an hour we were by ourselves, following in the wake of the retreating army, picking our way through the trail of carnage and desolation. I forgot about the bullet pressing on my spine, and for a while we played at kicking a stone in and out among the corpses and the wrecked vehicles, laughing like children on their way home from school. At one point we were interrupted by a convoy of trucks. An impatient sergeant in a large Krupp stinking of petrol fumes, leaned out of the cabin and yelled at us to get off the road. But at the sight of a military policeman he instantly withdrew his head and sent the vehicle careering onwards in a cloud of dust.

‘Deserters,’ said my companion; and he shrugged a careless shoulder. ‘They’ll never make it, poor fools. There’s a road block somewhere ahead. They don’t stand a chance.’

We sat down under a hedge to rest our legs, and the corporal pulled out three packets of Camels and insisted on giving them to me.

‘You take them,’ he said. ‘I can get plenty more . . .’

There was no reason to break our necks to arrive anywhere. We sat smoking and chatting together for almost an hour, until a column of SS tanks appeared and covered us in a spray of mud and oil from the churned-up road.

‘Bastards,’ said the corporal. ‘They’ll get what’s coming to them when they reach the roadblock . . .’

Another thirty minutes and we ourselves had reached it. The road was swarming with MPs, and a tight-lipped captain
came towards us. Thanks to the intervention of the corporal, I was allowed to pass safely through this ante-chamber of death and go on my way unmolested. I could see that many others had not been so fortunate.

I reached the far side and turned to wave goodbye to my erstwhile companion. He had taken up his position behind the barricade, and suddenly he was no longer the man with whom I had smoked and talked and played at football, he was a military machine primed to kill. I raised my hand in a farewell gesture. His eyes flickered very slightly in recognition, but he did not return my salute.

I continued my journey alone, under skies that were grey and menacing.

¹
Halt! Who goes there?

‘
We live all our lives in close proximity with death. Let us therefore turn that fact to our advantage. Let us learn how to make full use of it . . . If the future of the German race is to be assured, there must be room for expansion: Europe must be wiped clear of the inferior nations
. . .’

Himmler. Talk given to SS Generals at Weimar on
12th December 1943.

‘It is a stain on the honour of the German Army that a single Pole should still be left alive in Warsaw!’ Himmler turned in cold fury upon Obergruppenführer Berger. ‘Why have you not carried out my orders? Did I not tell you to destroy them down to the last man, woman and child? So! Why has it not been done?’

Berger wiped his perspiring forehead with a hand that trembled.

‘Reichsführer, we have done all that we can. The losses have been appalling. The uprising in Warsaw has already cost us the lives of two thousand German soldiers—’

‘Don’t talk to me of losses! I am not interested in your tales of woe. Results are the only things that matter. You think the Fatherland should sit down and weep for every soldier killed in battle? On the contrary! It should be proud that it has sons who are willing to lay down their lives for their country!’

‘Yes, indeed, Reichsführer, but—’

‘But me no buts!’ Himmler made a fist and brought it crashing down on to a table. ‘I gave you an order, and I expect that order to be carried out. Raze Warsaw to the ground! Wipe it off the face of the map! It has no place in the German Reich. It has forfeited all claim to such an honour! Do I make myself quite clear? Because if not,’ said Himmler, with a glacial smile, ‘it can always be arranged to have you transferred to the Russian front. There is no room in the SS for those who are scared to spill a little blood. Blood, my dear Berger, is the currency of war. And it is from
rivers of blood that strong nations are born . . . Remember that, and act accordingly.’

The Reichsführer swept from the room. Berger put away his handkerchief and crossed rapidly to the telephone.

‘Dirlewanger? This is Berger speaking. Why the devil haven’t you carried out my orders? I thought I instructed you to raze Warsaw to the ground? Why the devil is it still standing?’

There was a guarded pause.

‘Well?’ snapped Berger.

‘My dear fellow,’ said Dirlewanger, ‘I assure you we have done the best we can. Perhaps you are not aware that we have suffered ninety per cent losses trying to exterminate this place?’

‘I am not interested in your losses! If you think the task is beyond your capabilities, just say so and I can easily arrange to have you transferred to the Russian front. Otherwise I give you forty-eight hours in which to complete the job. By the end of that time I shall expect the name of Warsaw to have disappeared once and for all from the face of the map . . .’

Warsaw. Gregor and Porta were reclining on the wreckage of a burnt-out JS
¹
tank. They were passing a bottle of vodka between them. Porta had his feet propped nonchalantly on the charred remains of a Russian major, and Gregor was using the upturned hand of a dead man as an elbow rest.

‘It’s a known fact,’ said Porta. ‘Churchill’s got a list of every Nazi in the country. He’s sworn they’re all going to be hanged.’

‘He can skin ’em alive and tear their guts out as far as I’m concerned,’ said Gregor, vindictively. ‘Serve ’em bloody well right.’ He took hold of the vodka bottle and squinted at it thoughtfully. ‘What I can’t understand,’ he said, ‘is why Adolf had to go and pick on England in the first place.’

‘He couldn’t stand Churchill,’ explained Porta. ‘It’s a known fact.’

Gregor downed another quarter of a pint of neat vodka.

‘God will punish the English,’ he said, righteously. ‘That’s what the Kaiser said.’

‘Adolf thinks he is God,’ said Porta.

He leaned back with his hands behind his head. He crossed his legs one over the other and one of the Major’s feet dropped off. Gregor stared dispassionately at it as it rolled into the gutter.

‘Know what?’ he said.

‘What?’ said Porta, with his eyes closed.

‘I reckon I’ll be bleeding glad when it’s all over,’ said Gregor.

Porta shrugged.

‘Who won’t? Might get a bit of peace and quiet at last.’

Gregor picked up a spent shell and flung it moodily at the blackened remains of the foot lying in the gutter.

‘Maybe now we’ve had the arse kicked out of us all the way round Europe and back, they won’t be quite so keen on picking quarrels no more.’

‘You wanna bet?’ said Porta, cynically. ‘It’s them up top who picks all the quarrels. It’s easy, ain’t it? They pick the quarrels and we do all the dirty work for ’em. They don’t hardly know there’s a war going on, they don’t.’

Gregor selected another shell.

‘It’s all a bleeding con trick,’ he said.

‘You’re right it is,’ agreed Porta. ‘Whole of life’s a bleeding con trick, ain’t it?’

Over on the Praga side of the town they were fighting a battle for the Kommandantur in the Place Adolf Hitler, where Armija Krajowa and his partisans had installed themselves. They had slaughtered all the personnel and were now themselves being subjected to a fierce barrage by German troops, who had been trying unsuccessfully to dislodge them for the past couple of hours. The Poles were returning the fire with captured German guns, and as we listened the battle began to increase in intensity. Shells started to fall uncomfortably close, and Porta sat up and swore as a flying splinter embedded itself in his cheek.

‘This place is getting to be unhealthy,’ he complained. He snatched the precious bottle of vodka from Gregor, swung himself off the wreckage of the tank and set off down the street. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

We had barely taken half a dozen steps across the square when a hail of machine-gun fire sent us diving for the nearest doorway. We crowded inside, trampling our way through the usual scattering of corpses.

A couple of young girls went running past, their skirts flying high in the air. Tiny, risking his life, poked his head out of the doorway and whistled at them. This instantly provoked another stream of bullets from the far side of the square.

‘Damn you, get back!’ snapped the Old Man.

We retired hastily behind our stockade of human sandbags.

‘For crying out loud,’ said Porta, as half the ceiling collapsed on top of us and covered everything in grey powder. He clutched anxiously at his vodka bottle. ‘We can’t stay here all day. There’s nothing to eat.’

The Old Man glared at him.

‘We’ll stay here until I say we go!’

There was a fresh burst of machine-gun fire. Porta’s vodka bottle was shattered. He gave a yell of rage, but it was drowned out by an agonised scream from a corporal of the Pioneer Corps who had attached himself to us earlier in the day. I turned in time to see a jet of thick purple blood spurting from his mouth, and then he fell forward on to the barricade of corpses.

‘This is no longer a joke,’ snarled Porta, hurling his broken bottle into the street.

‘It’s coming from that house over there,’ I said, pointing.

Porta turned furiously on me.

‘If you can see where it’s coming from, why don’t you go and do something about it instead of standing there like a fart in a bleeding trance?’

‘I was only trying to be helpful,’ I said.

‘Helpful, my arse! You’re worse than bloody useless!’

‘So what do you want me to do?’ I said, frigidly. ‘Go across and ask them to stop?’

Before Porta and I could make matters even worse by coldbloodedly attempting to murder each other, Tiny had suddenly snatched a couple of hand grenades from his pouch and gone bounding over the barricade and across the street. He dived for cover behind an overturned car, and as he did so a grenade was thrown from one of the windows of the house and landed directly in front of him. Tiny promptly scooped it up and sent it flying back again. There was the sound of an explosion, and the entire front of the house was torn away. Three men scrambled unhurt out of the rubble and attempted to make a run for it, but the Legionnaire eliminated all three with one burst from his sub-machine-gun.