LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      The Sergeant glanced curiously at the captain as he surveyed the tank through the field-glasses. He noticed a muscle moving in the Captain’s jaw-bone, the needles of his close-clipped hair, the small cleft in his chin. Not a man to argue with, this one.

       But who are you? Where have you come from?

      The Captain lowered the field glasses: “You’re right, Sergeant.”

       What had he said?

      “We can’t capture it. We’ll have to destroy it,” he remarked conversationally, apparently overlooking the fact that all they possessed between them was a Schmeisser machine-pistol and a 9 mm Walther pistol.

      The Captain pointed and the Sergeant raised his head to follow the line of his finger.

      A Panzerfaust, a grenade launcher, lay on the wheat-coloured grass fifty yards from the foxhole.

      He wants me to go and get that? No, my friend, those days are long past. We fight only to survive. Wait till you’ve been two years on the steppe.

      “Cover me,” the Captain snapped.

      The Sergeant was ashamed of his suspicion. “With a machine pistol, Hauptsturmführer?”

      “At least it’s better than the Walther,” the Captain said.

       God in heaven, he was making jokes!

      “But they’ll spot you. One burst and they’ll have you.”

      “There’s some cover over there,” the Captain said. Some scrub on which the first frost of autumn was just beginning to melt.

      And then he was up and over the edge of the foxhole, wriggling flat-bellied over the grass.

      The turret of the T-34 swung round.

      You’ll dirty that precious uniform, the Sergeant thought inconsequentially. But they hadn’t spotted him. Not yet. The Sergeant raised the Schmeisser. Did the idiot want a bullet scar on the other cheek? Or through his chest?

      The Captain was ten yards from the grenade-launcher when a machine-gun opened up from a belt of woods to his left. He flung himself to the ground and stayed there until the burst spent itself.

      The Captain raised his head — For Christ’s sake keep down! — then his shoulders. As the machine-gun opened up again he scuttled behind a boulder.

      Instinctively the Sergeant aimed the machine-pistol in the direction of the machine-gun. But what was the point? They were well out of range. Vaguely the Sergeant wondered what they were doing there. How they had got there. Had the Ivans secretly mounted yet another attack? Had the tank lumbered up merely to give the machine-gunners some target practice? Usually, the Sergeant thought grimly, they preferred prisoners for target practice. But what fighters. Even the Waffen-SS had to admit that.

      The barrel of the gun on the tank swung lazily in the direction of the Captain hidden behind the boulder. One shell and both boulder and brave Captain would be no more. But they didn’t fire. Giving the machine-gunners some sport, the Sergeant decided. And after the Captain, me … Why in God’s name had this crazy two-man reconnaissance mission been mounted in the first place?

      An aircraft with gull-shaped wings and a silver belly flew overhead. A Stuka. Perhaps one burst from its cannon might change the situation. But the Stuka flew away across the steppe — the infinite steppe — in the direction of the Dnieper.

      Their only chance was if the Captain could make it back to the fox-hole. Then, if the machine-gunners are fool enough to move nearer, I’ll have them with the Schmeisser.

      If … Peering over the top of the fox-hole the Sergeant realised that the Captain was indeed on the move. In the opposite direction. Towards the grenade-launcher.

      And had reached it!

      As bullets whipped over his head the Captain rolled into a hollow.

      Now the tank must finish him off.

      The Sergeant saw the snout of the Panzerfaust protruding from the hollow. Its grenade was said to be capable of punching a hole through eight inches of armour-plate. But the tank was beyond its effective range. Still, it was worth a try.

      Machine-gun bullets plucked viciously at the ground around the hollow.

      Then the Captain fired the grenade-launcher.

      The Sergeant had no doubt of this because he heard the grenade clang against the tank’s armour. The hollowest clang of them all. A dud.

      So this is how I am to die, the Sergeant thought. After two years of battle, after glorious victories and a few defeats, I am to die here in a foxhole.

      For what? he wondered, failing at first to hear another sound on the crisp autumn air. But when the machine-gun stopped firing he heard it. The Stuka had returned. And was diving as only a Stuka can dive. It opened up with machine-gun and cannon.

      The shells and bullets fell short but when the Sergeant again peered over the edge of the foxhole the T-34 was on the move heading for the cover of the woods. And the machine-gun was silent.

      The Stuka climbed, wheeled, prepared for another attack. But as it came into a screaming dive the tank had reached the woods.

      Inside the Russian tank the two German SS officers, instructed by Sepp Dietrich to put Kurt Wolff’s courage and initiative to the test, nodded at each other before abandoning it for their own armoured car.

      When they reached the German machine-gunner he stood up and said: “Excuse me, Gruppenführer, I know I shouldn’t question an order but what was that all about?”

      He never found out because one of the officers blew out his brains with a Luger pistol.

      * * *

      Kurt Wolff’s principal regret in his youth — he was only twenty-two now — was that he hadn’t been born early enough to be a fully-fledged member of the SS in those exciting, formative years of the struggle.

      But he was old enough to remember the Congress of Victory, the Nazi rally at Nuremberg, in September, 1933. He was twelve years old then and he was wearing a black vest and shorts, marching in the Zeppelinwiese, with sixty thousand members of the Hitler Youth, in intricate formations that spelled out in black, red and white slogans, BLOOD AND HONOUR or GERMANY AWAKE.

      In the centre of the formations was a swastika.

      Military bands thumped out Lehar and Beethoven, flags fluttered in the late summer breeze. Then the finale: Sixty thousand knives simultaneously drawn like a flash of summer lightning.

      Wolff was not an emotional man but he was still deeply moved when he gazed at the photograph of the rally, saw the child-like trust on the faces of the boys. Ten years later, how many of those boys had died for the cause?

      He remembered the scene in the Luitpoldhalle after the display. At the back of the stage the German eagle clasping a swastika; at the sides of the hall a hundred or so SS resplendent in the black and silver uniforms.

      One day, the twelve year-old Wolff had thought, I will wear that uniform. And I will fight the Führer’s enemies. I will die, if need be, for the man who has made my country great again. I will die for my God!

      A fanfare of trumpets had heralded the arrival of Hitler. Beside him were two men whom Kurt hadn’t recognised. (They were Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Central Security Office.) But he was to know them well in the years to come.

      Then all the lights had been switched off. Snap. Total darkness. And a single beam of light picking out the figure of Adolf Hitler. And spotlights finding the SS men in silver and black as they lowered their drawn swords.

      Kurt didn’t understand a lot of what the Führer said — perhaps he shouldn’t even have been in the hall — but it was more exciting than anything he had heard anywhere else. A super breed of men was emerging; one day

Скачать книгу