Cauldron of Blood Page 3

  FOUR

  The little group, clustered around the great green-tiled Russian oven which reached almost to the ceiling and now crackled happily with the birch logs they had stuffed into it, were all old friends.

  In happier days before the war, when they had served in Berlin as young officers in the Adolf Hitler Bodyguard, they had called themselves the flat-foot guards, because of the many hours they had spent smashing their gleaming jackboots down on the capital’s hard pavement, marching the goose-step for the Fuhrer or some visiting dignitary from abroad.

  A lot had changed since then. Their faces had become lean and hard. Their skinny chests were covered with a whole cupboard full of tin, and the immaculate black uniform of the Black Guards had been replaced by the camouflaged smocks and dirty field-grey of the ‘front-swine’. Now these many years they had not played soldier and looking around at their battle-hardened faces, already prematurely wrinkled for their ages, von Dodenburg wondered just how many of the old flat-foot guards could still do the goose-step.

  There was Gerd Bremer, an enormous man, with shoulders like a big peasant’s wardrobe. Now he was captain in the panzer-grenadiers, with his broad chest covered in tin, though von Dodenburg noted a little maliciously, Gerd had not yet managed to cure his ‘throat-ache’. He had still not won the coveted Knight’s Cross, as had all the others. Next to him on the wooden bench, nursing his steaming hot vodka punch, was his superior officer Kurt Meyer, already a lieutenant-colonel, and known throughout the SS as ‘Panzermeyer’. As always, the common soldier’s rifle, which he always bore in combat, leaned against the bench at his side, ready for instant action. Even among his old comrades, Panzermeyer’s lean wolfish face was tense, the dark eyes blazing with animation, as if he were constantly battling with himself in an attempt to keep his nervous, highly active body still.

  Witt, Hansen, Kruger, all older men and full colonels, were present too, allowing the younger members of the flat-foot guards to have their say, enjoy this evening out of war after the misery of the last few terrible days of retreat.

  But it was to the face of the smallest member of the little group that von Dodenburg’s eyes kept stealing, for if anyone could help him it would be Jochen Peiper, the youngest colonel in the whole of the Waffen SS.

  The twenty-seven year old officer with the lean vulpine face, so handsome that von Dodenburg thought he had missed his profession — he should have been a movie star instead of an SS officer — was always silent and withdrawn in the presence of the others. For the Vulture and others who did not know him well, Peiper seemed an arrogant swine. But that was not the case. He was a withdrawn, almost secretive man, not given to the heartiness and easy confidences of his comrades. Peiper was an officer, who listened, learned and kept his own council. For three hours now they had been drinking the steaming hot punch, pouring it directly from the pail which was perched on the top of the big oven, stamping heavily with their booted feet on the floor when it was empty, for the sweating, white-coated orderly to bring up yet another. Now it was time, von Dodenburg thought, his head spinning slightly though he had tried to limit his consumption of the fiery spirit, to broach the subject which had brought him here to the 1ST SS Corps’ HQ.

  ‘You were saying, Gerd,’ he addressed the big panzer-grenadier captain, ‘that in the Bodyguard these days, you even take back your dead with you, if it’s at all possible.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bremer frowned at being reminded of that unpleasant subject. ‘The Popovs have unpleasant little habits with the SS of the Bodyguard. It’s the armband that does it.’ He indicated the ‘Adolf Hitler’ scrawled across his sleeve in white lettering. ‘More than once we’ve found our dead with their tails cut off and thrust into their mouths. Yes, we try to get them back and if any one of the boys is too seriously wounded to be moved, we deal with him ourselves rather than let him fall into Popov hands alive.’ He curled a big finger and clicked it back and forth as if pulling the trigger of a pistol. ‘Back of the neck shot.’

  ‘And prisoners, who land up with the Ivans?’ von Dodenburg asked, steering towards the subject which was paramount in his mind this evening. ‘What do you do about them?’

  ‘In the Bodyguard, we never let ourselves be taken prisoner,’ Bremer replied proudly.

  There was a rumble of laughter from the others. ‘Come off it, Gerd,’ Witt chuckled, his fat crimson face wreathed in steam from the beaker of punch he held beneath his nose. ‘Don’t try to pull our pissers. The Bodyguard loses men to the Ivans just like all our SS units do.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what we do in the Bodyguard,’ Panzermeyer burst out in that harsh, uncontrolled voice of his that grated on the nerves of everyone present. ‘We form a battle-group and we go in after the poor sods. We carve them out. In the Bodyguard, we don’t leave prisoners in the hands of those murdering red bastards.’

  ‘And what about Sepp? What does he say?’ von Doden-burg queried.

  Panzermeyer shrugged impatiently. ‘Was man nicht weiss, macht man nicht heiss. We forget to tell him. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘Why are you asking all these questions, Kuno?’ a calm Berlin voice asked. It was Jochen Peiper, speaking for the first time that long drunken evening. ‘You know in the old days you were always against talking shop in the mess.’

  Von Dodenburg took the plunge. ‘Because, Jochen, some twenty odd of my men including Wotan’s top sergeant and two very good NCOs are now somewhere in the Kessel. It can be only a matter of a day or two before the Ivans catch them.’

  ‘And the Vulture?’ Bremer asked with a grin on his broad dark face. ‘What does the tame warm brother commanding the Wotan have to say on the subject?’

  Gloomily, von Dodenburg told them and they laughed sympathetically. ‘Typisch!’ Panzermeyer rasped. ‘Officers like that should never have been allowed to transfer from the field-greys to the SS. All they’re out for is personal glory. They have no thoughts for their men.’ He glowered at his punch. ‘Glory-hunters!’

  ‘You could disobey orders and go in and find them yourself, Kuno,’ Peiper suggested carefully.

  Von Dodenburg shook his head. ‘Impossible. The Vulture guards what is left of our armoured vehicles as if he damned well paid for them himself out of his own pocket. Not a chance.’

  For a while the conversation died away and then picked up again as the orderly, red-faced and panting, came racing up the wooden stairs with yet another bubbling pail of steaming punch, but all the while von Dodenburg felt Peiper’s eyes on him, watching him curiously in that half-mocking manner the young colonel affected.

  But it was only when Peiper went out to urinate at the thunderbox in the yard and von Dodenburg accompanied him that the former spoke out. Standing there in the freezing cold with the sky a bright hard silver, Peiper said: ‘Kuno, anyone in our bloody business knows that we officers live on sufferance. We are nothing without the poor humble stubble-hopper. They win us our tin. They give us the glory. They provide us with the classy receptions at the Fuhrer HQ. It’s their guts and their blood that does everything.’ He buttoned up his flies and stared at the gleaming immensity of the Russian night sky as if he could see something up there known only to him. ‘Loyalty must therefore work both ways — up and down.’ He turned and looked Kuno von Dodenburg straight in the face, his gaze solemn. ‘I’ll go in there, Kuno, and carve them out for you. But give me an excuse, that’s all I ask of you. Give me an excuse to do so — and give me it soon.’

  And with that he turned and strode back to the noise of the Kameradschaftsabend, leaving Kuno von Dodenburg to stare at his proud narrow back in open-mouthed surprise....

  *

  Seven hours later, von Dodenburg found the excuse. His face pale, bags under his lacklustre eyes, his head throbbing painfully, it winged its way into the little Russian peasant cottage, which served as his HQ, as if handed to him on a silver platter. And it was the Vulture himself who unwittingly presented him with it.

  ‘Do you know anything about the m
an?’ he barked, bursting into the hut, slapping his riding cane angrily against the side of his oversized cavalry boots. ‘What the devil was he doing up here in the first place? The front is not the place for civvies, especially civvies of that kind.’

  Hastily von Dodenburg scrambled to his feet, his temples doing an agonizing jig as he did so. ‘What man, sir... What front?’

  The Vulture pulled a crumpled copy of the Schwarze Korps out of the pocket of his enormous, baggy cavalry breeches. ‘This particular brown current-crapper.’

  Von Dodenburg stared at the picture of a fat SA man in brown uniform, with the triangular badge of the Blood Order on his chest, the rare Party decoration granted only to those few who had shed their blood for the National Socialist cause prior to 1933. ‘Why,’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s Munich-Kirn!’

  ‘Exactly. One-time a baker’s journeyman, now thanks to the generosity of the Greatest Captain of All Times,’ he sneered at the grandiose title bestowed on Hitler by Propaganda Minister Goebbels, ‘Gauleiter of Baden.’

  Everyone knew the story of how when during the Munich Putsch, Hitler and the Party leaders had been fired on by the police, the brave baker’s journeyman Kirn had sheltered Hitler from the police bullets with his own body, as the Fuhrer had lain injured on the cobbles. Munich-Kirn, as he had always been called since that day in November 1923, was part and parcel of the National Socialist legend. There was not a schoolboy throughout the Reich who did not possess a photograph of the ‘man who had saved the Fuhrer’.

  ‘And what is supposed to have happened to him, sir?’ von Dodenburg asked.

  ‘The fool was visiting troops from Baden. You know how these golden pheasants are. They get drunk with the rear echelon stallions kilometres behind the line, get their photograph taken distributing cigars to the troops and fly home again back to mother, believing they’ve done their bit to make final victory possible.’ The Vulture’s ugly face contorted with disgust. ‘Well, unfortunately for Munich-Kirn, he got caught in the Kessel with his flannel knickers pulled down. Now the Fuhrer HQ is screaming blue murder. The Fuhrer personally wants a report. So every unit that managed to escape from the Kessel is being asked by higher headquarters if they saw anything of the fat fool.’ He looked enquiringly at von Dodenburg.

  Von Dodenburg shrugged, his brain racing now as a plan began to form in his brain, ‘No, Colonel, I never saw anything of him.’

  ‘Natürlich,’ the Vulture rasped derisively. ‘Only those idiots or rear echelon stallions would be foolish enough to think that a man like that could survive within a Kessel. If the weather didn’t finish him off, the Ivans would. That brown uniform of the golden pheasant would do it. They hate those Party officials with a passion.’ He crumpled up the newspaper and threw it neatly through the open door of the cannon-stove. ‘Munich-Kirn is undoubtedly dead, passed on to that great Valhalla of the National Socialist cause.’

  And as if to symbolize the passing of the Gauleiter, the photograph on the front page of the newspaper was consumed by the roaring flames, as the Vulture departed with the sneer of contempt firmly set on his ugly face for the rest of that grey day.

  Five minutes after he had gone, an excited von Dodenburg was talking to Jochen Peiper on the field telephone, explaining to him what had happened and how this might be the opportunity that they were both waiting for.

  Peiper listened in complete silence and when finally von Dodenburg, gasping for breath after the hurried explanation, finished, the young SS colonel lived up to his reputation for being laconic. ‘Said and done, Kuno,’ he barked. ‘I’ll have the task-force on its way by midday. Over and out!’

  Even before von Dodenburg had time to thank him, the line went dead in his hand....

  FIVE

  ‘Cossacks,’ Matz whispered hoarsely.

  ‘Cossacks,’ the Golden Pheasant quavered. ‘Oh my God!’ he mopped his fat face which was lathered with sweat in spite of the cold of the loft.

  Next to him the Butcher licked his lips nervously. He knew better than the trembling Golden Pheasant what the Cossacks would do to them, if they were caught. They never took prisoners and before their captives died, the Russian cavalrymen still indulged in the frightening little games of their half-wild forefathers.

  Schulze, who was supporting Matz on his broad shoulders while the one-legged corporal peered out through the hole made where he had removed the roof-tiles, whispered, ‘How many of them are there, Matzi and what are the banana-suckers up to?’

  Matz raised his head cautiously and looked down at the Cossacks. The cavalrymen had left their mounts a couple of hundred metres to the rear under the cover of a group of pine-trees. Now in true Cossack fashion they were crawling towards the kolhoz, drawn sabres stuck down the back of their bandoliers or in the case of their leader, a huge bearded monster, clasped between the teeth.

  Even as he watched, the hundred-odd Russians started to spread to left and right of the long low farm building, crawling ever nearer until in the end they would spring to their feet and, with that eerie battle cry of theirs, come charging through doors and windows, sabres flashing.

  ‘About a hundred I should say,’ Matz whispered. ‘They obviously know this place is occupied and they’re making a real performance of it.’

  ‘How far are they off?’

  ‘Two hundred metres at the moment. In about ten minutes they’ll come in, Schulzi.’

  ‘All right, down Matz.’

  Schulze’s brain raced. Up in the loft they were trapped. Even if they escaped detection up there, the Cossacks, he knew, would set the whole place alight. They always did — it was part of their traditional scorched earth policy, and the exhausted survivors of the Wotan were in no position to make a fight for it. Even if they did manage to surprise the Popov mare-lovers and break out, it wouldn’t be long before the Cossacks, mounted as they were, caught up with them. Then there would be a massacre.

  Schulze creased his brow in a worried frown, while the others stared at him anxiously, knowing that time was running out rapidly and the big NCO had to find a solution to their problem soon — damn soon!

  Suddenly Schulze remembered the half-wild cannibals down below. They did not deserve to be saved. Couldn’t he somehow use them as a blind to give the Wotan troopers time enough to get out, scatter the Cossacks’ horses and make a bolt for it? He swung round on the shivering Golden Pheasant. ‘Listen, you’re our expert on the loft. Does it run the whole length of the building?’

  ‘Yes, yes. But why do you ask, Sergeant?’

  ‘Schnauze!’ Schulze snapped and turned to Matz. ‘Matzi, get the lads together. Double down to the end there,’ he pointed at the gloom-shrouded far end of the building. ‘Get the tiles off and be prepared to make a bolt for it, as soon as I give you the word.’

  ‘What you gonna do, Schulzi?’ Matz asked apprehensively.

  ‘Play with myself!’ Schulze answered contemptuously. ‘What yer think I’m gonna do? I’ll tell yer, I’m gonna do what I always does — save yer stinking skins for you. Now on yer way!’

  ‘Watch yerself, you old arsehole,’ Matz said.

  ‘I will.’ And with that Schulze had opened the trap and without waiting for the ladder to be lowered, dropped heavily to the floor.

  With surprising speed for such a big man, he doubled down the corridor towards the sound made by the half-crazed cannibals, knowing he was making a hell of a noise, but not caring. He had only minutes to pull off his scheme. Outside the door, he skidded to a halt, took a deep breath and formed his big face into a huge happy smile — though he had never felt less like smiling. He threw open the door and was once again confronted by that terrible sight of headless cadavers, arms and legs stripped of flesh, quartered stomachs, human tripes, with the cannibals everywhere, their beards and hands gory with blood, as they gnawed at the half-cooked horror.

  ‘Boys, you ‘re saved!’ Schulze cried. ‘The SS is here! We’ve carved you out of the Kessel at last!’

  The cannibals look
ed at him in mute astonishment as if he had just dropped in on them from the moon, skinny hands still clutching the pieces of human meat.

  ‘Have yer got tin ears!’ Schulze roared desperately, trying to overlook the horror of that terrible room. ‘The SS have broken through. They’re waiting for you outside with korn and good German salami... Hurry up, get it now!’

  The ‘salami’ did the trick. Like a pack of wild animals, still clutching their ghastly food, as if they were still not certain that they were going to be fed, they burst by, flattening him against the door in their haste and pelted down the corridor to the main door.

  Schulze swallowed hard, then he too was running after them, already taking in the first shouts of surprise in Russian and the dry crack of a pistol. He clattered up the ladder. Stooping low, the noise of the slaughter taking place outside muted somewhat by the heavy snow lying on the tiles above him, he doubled awkwardly down the loft, heading for the patch of white light which indicated the spot where the tiles had been removed.

  They were all there, waiting for him.

  He gave no explanations, but gasped. ‘Matz, you’re a cripple, take fat guts here,’ he indicated the Golden Pheasant, ‘and the Butcher. Set off for their horses. I’ll bring up the rest of the lads as soon as the Cossacks enter the building. But for Chrissake, don’t set off the alarm.’

  ‘Will do, Schulzi.’ Matz answered urgently. A second later he was on the roof, while behind him a couple of the Wotan troopers pushed the Golden Pheasant’s bulk on to the roof. The Butcher followed. Schulze counted off sixty seconds, trying to control his heaving chest, then he pushed his head above the roof.

  The Cossacks were all inside the house now, save for those who were holding the horses, somewhere out of sight in the trees. To the right, the Golden Pheasant, Matz and the Butcher were making their way cautiously towards where they were hidden. He nodded his head in approval. So far so good. But time was running out. The screams and curses in German coming from down below, told him the Cossacks had already dealt with the first bunch of cannibals who had rushed for the door and were now hunting down the terrified survivors in the corridors. They had to be off.