Cauldron of Blood Page 4

  ‘All right — in twos,’ he commanded hastily. ‘Not a sound if you can help it, or those Popovs’ll have the nuts off yer with those long penknives of theirs. Circle left and right of the woods in alternate pairs. We’ve got to get those nags of theirs or we’ve had it. Follow me!’ He heaved and went straight through the hole in a flash. He grabbed the edge of the broken tiles just in time or he would have gone shooting down the length of the snow-slick roof.

  Hastily he lowered himself to the guttering. A quick glance left and right. Nobody! He dropped and landed almost noiselessly on his hands and knees, the man who was to go with him dropping at his side the very next instant.

  ‘Come on, Sepp,’ Schulze breathed to the big Bavarian, ‘we’re gonna nobble the nags.’

  ‘I don ‘t like horses,’ the burly Bavarian answered. ‘I was a brickie.’

  ‘I thought all you Bavarians were shit-shovellers from the farm. But come on you Bavarian barn-shitter, let’s not stand around talking. The air’s decidedly unhealthy out here.’

  Together they doubled heavily through the knee-deep snow, running directly towards the patch of trees in which Matz had reported the Cossacks’ horses, pursued by the hideous cries of agony inside the farm where the Russians were completing the slaughter of the cannibals.

  Five minutes later, they skidded to a stop at the first line of trees. Schulze controlled his breathing with difficulty and put his finger to his lips in warning. Turning his head to the wind and loosening the flap of his fur hat, he listened hard, while to left and right the little groups of troopers disappeared into the wood. Then he heard it, the shiver of metal equipment and the shudder of horses breathing out hard, obviously disturbed by the screams coming from the farm.

  ‘There,’ he mouthed soundlessly, pointing with his finger to the right.

  The Bavarian nodded his understanding and tapped the steel butt of his schmeisser machine pistol. Hastily Schulze shook his head and drew out his entrenching knife. The Bavarian smiled wickedly, revealing a mouthful of yellow teeth. He did the same. Together they entered the trees, splitting up automatically, as they had been trained to do, circling round the spot from which the sounds had come.

  Gingerly, as if he were advancing across egg-shells, Schulze put down his feet carefully, veteran that he was, placing his heel first before dropping his whole weight on his toes. That way he reduced the noise he made to a minimum, though he was glad that there was a faint wind which rustled the snow-heavy pine branches, sending flakes showering to the ground every now and again and thus drowning any sound he might make.

  Now he could smell the Popovs: that typical stink of theirs, made up of the coarse black tobacco they smoked, rancid fat, and unwashed sweaty bodies. The Ivans weren’t far off now. Suddenly he became aware of voices. He nodded, his face set and hard, eyes wide and staring as he prepared himself for what he must now do. There were more than one of them. Good that he had sent the Bavarian barn-shitter on the other flank.

  He knelt. Carefully he parted the pine branches in front of his face, ensuring that he didn’t dislodge the snow which rested on them.

  There were three of them. Big fellows, clad in ankle-length grey coats with the wide skirts of the Cossack cavalry, their chests criss-crossed with ammunition bandoliers, black fur caps set at a rakish angle on their black curly heads. For one long second, Schulze studied the three unsuspecting Russians, as they stood there in front of the hobbled horses. Which one would it be, he asked himself.

  He made a decision. The one on the left was busy with a small clay pipe, packing it full of tobacco, reaching for his matches with his free hand, completely absorbed with the simple task in the manner of pipe-smokers the world over. Both his hands were occupied. It would be him. The couple of moments of surprise which would result from his own sudden appearance, should give him time to croak the poor Ivan swine and enable the Bavarian barn-shitter to spring his own surprise on the one on the left. With a bit of luck they’d be able to nobble the one in the middle before he started to sound off.

  Schulze counted to three. Next instant, he had flung himself in a shallow dive at the pipe-smoker’s legs. The man went down, pipe falling from his fingers into the snow, scattering ash and tobacco everywhere. Next moment Schulze’s trench knife flashed. The Russian howled piteously. His spine arched like a bow-string. Thick dark-red blood jetted abruptly from his gasping mouth. He fell back, dead.

  In that same moment, the Bavarian came running out of the trees. But the Russian on the right did not react in the way that Schulze expected. He did not fumble for the rifle slung over his shoulder. Instead he lashed out with the black leather knout around his wrist. The cruel lash caught the running Bavarian right on the face. He staggered to a stop, an ugly weal appearing on his cheeks almost immediately. Next instant, the middle one of the three sprang at Schulze and he was instantly concerned with saving his own neck. The Bavarian barn-shitter would have to do the best he could himself.

  Schulze’s knife flashed. The Russian, a thick-set dark-skinned Cossack with a great flowing black moustache, was quicker. His knee came up. At the same time he smashed down his hand on Schulze’s wrist. The two connected on the upraised knee, which acted as a kind of smith’s anvil. Schulze howled with pain as his wrist was slammed against the bony knee. The knife tumbled into the snow. Just in time he sprang back, as the Cossack’s other knee flashed upwards aiming at his exposed chin. Blindly Schulze’s left arm cut the air and connected. The Russian smashed into the nearest tree. But he did not go down. Instead, recovering almost immediately, he reached up with both hands and holding onto the branches there, lashed out with his heavily booted feet.

  Schulze howled once more as the spurs cut cruelly into his flesh. He went down on his heels, blood streaming from his torn face. The Cossack dropped and rushed at him, one foot raised in the fashion of the old-style country wrestler. Desperately Schulze caught it and twisted with all his strength. The Cossack yelped with pain and dropped to the snow at Schulze’s side. The German dived from his crouched position and landed on the prostrate Cossack with his full weight. Blindly, while the Cossack writhed and twisted beneath him to escape, his outstretched fingers sought the other man’s flared nostrils. Suddenly he had them. He did not hesitate one second. With all his strength he poked them upwards into the wetness, crooked the finger-tips, and tugged!

  The Cossack’s body shook violently with almost unbearable agony. Schulze held on for all he was worth. The Cossack twisted left and right, sending the snow flying in white rain. Schulze felt his hot blood soaking down his fingers, along his hand and down into his sleeve but still he did not let go.

  Below him the Russian, his face purple, his eyes rolling crazily in his tortured face, mouth gaping and gasping for air, tried with the last of his strength to tear away those terrible fingers. But Schulze was stronger. ‘Die, you bastard... DIE!’ he cursed through gritted teeth, the sweat pouring down his brick-red face in spite of that freezing cold. ‘FOR CHRISSAKE DIE...’

  Finally the Cossack’s body went limp. Schulze held on another moment, no longer able to bear those terrible eyes staring up at him accusingly, knowing that the Russian was choking to death in his own blood.

  Only when the second Russian slammed into his back, did he realize the danger he was in. He let go and rolled around straight under the hooves of the nervous whinnying horses. The Russian came after him, ignoring the danger the excited horses presented. A stallion reared up on its hindlegs, eyes wild with fear, hooves flailing. Schulze dodged them, just in time. The Russian was not so fortunate. The flying hooves caught him in the face. Something snapped like a dry twig underfoot in a hot summer. He reeled back screaming, his face a mass of blood.

  Schulze did not wait for a second invitation. As the man lay whimpering on the floor, his hands pressed to his bloody face, he scrambled to his feet. A quick breath and his cruelly-nailed dice-breaker smashed down hard, heel first, into the man’s face. His head clicked to one side; he was uncon
scious — or dead.

  ‘Come on, Sarge!’ Someone gasped. It was the Bavarian, scratch-marks disfiguring the whole left side of his face, but his bayonet was red with blood and Schulze did not have to ask how his little battle had gone.

  ‘Untether the horses!’ he gasped, stepping over the prostrate Russian to slash at the ropes which held the excited twitching stallion.

  In an instant it was gone, mane streaming, galloping madly across the snowy waste, determined to get away from these strange creatures, who had filled its nostrils with the smell of blood.

  Now the rest of the Wotan troopers came running heavily out of the trees and were doing the same, slashing and hacking at the tethers with their bayonets and trench knives, while Matz and the Butcher covered them, lying full length in the snow, weapons directed at the kolhoz.

  ‘Tempo... tempo....’ Schulze gasped, cutting another horse free and with a mighty slap on its gleaming steaming rump sending it off after the others, which were now streaming across the steppe everywhere. ‘It won ‘t be long...’

  The chatter of Matz’s machine pistol drowned the rest of his exhortation. He swung round and stared at the long low building. The first Cossacks were pouring out of the door, packed with the bodies of the cannibals, flinging themselves instantly into the snow and beginning to return Matz’s fire.

  ‘One more minute!’ Schulze bellowed above the snap-and-crackle of the new small-arms battle. ‘I want every damned nag let loose. Come on, get the lead out of yer asses!’

  He flung himself down into the snow next to Butcher and Matz and in the same instant fired a wild burst from his own m.p. He saw the slugs stitch a patter of white to the front of the prostrate Cossacks, each slug striking up a little flurry of snow.

  ‘We won’t be able to hold them for more than five minutes, Matzi!’ he gasped, ducking as a sudden volley of Russian bullets cut the branches above their heads, showering them with snow. ‘Take off now with the Golden Pheasant.’

  ‘Why don’t we leave the fat shit? It’s no good to us. Only a burden, Schulzi.’

  ‘A golden pheasant is always good for something. You never know,’ Schulze cried, squeezing his trigger again, and thus in the midst of battle made the decision which one day would save their lives. ‘Now off with you!’

  Matz argued no more. ‘All right, fat-guts, let’s put some pepper in our pants and make wind.’

  Next moment they were running blindly to the west, followed by the rest of the Wotan troopers, who had now released the last of the Cossack horses, plunging through the knee-deep snow towards a dark sky, which waited for them in grey snow-heavy, anticipation.

  Schulze gave them exactly five minutes, firing quick accurate bursts every time it looked as if the Cossacks might rise and charge the woods. Then, flinging his last grenade and catching a glimpse of the angry bearded face of the giant who led them, rising to his feet and waving his sabre ordering the charge, he and the Butcher were up too and pelting after the others....

  SIX

  Stolidly, strung out in a long line, they plodded through that vast empty landscape like the last men alive in this world — a trail of insignificant ants across that blinding white carpet. But if it was empty, still that enormous steppe breathed hostility, awesome and brooding.

  The temperature was well below zero and it was unearthly cold. Time and time again an icy wind would race across that limitless plain and lash a million razor-sharp snow particles against their emaciated young faces, thrashing them so cruelly that they cried out loud with pain.

  By now their faces were shining with ice and every breath seemed like the blade of a sharp knife stabbing at their lungs. But while their upper bodies froze, their legs burnt with the sheer agony of every fresh step, lifting the snow-heavy boot from the white mire, placing it down, and forcing it to move yet another miserable half-metre. Indeed, it was only the iron discipline of the Wotan which kept them going and the efforts of Corporal Matz and Sergeant Schulze.

  Matz at the head of the column, supporting a semi-conscious Golden Pheasant for half the time, and Schulze bringing up the rear, seemed inexhaustible. Bullying, striking, cajoling, joking, pleading, the two of them kept the rest moving, ordering them not to swallow the hard snow to satisfy their raging thirst, dragging those who slumped down into the snow to their feet and kicking them on their way, carrying the weapon of some sobbing youth who moaned he could go on no longer, watching the tears freeze like pearls on the boy’s sunken face.

  Thus they struggled west, finding their way across this cruel endless landscape the best they could: green moss on the trunks of a group of birches indicating north, a sudden glimpse of the sun, a cold pale yellow ball sliding momentarily from behind the leaden clouds, and a quick estimate of where south lay by means of Schulze’s watch, acting as an emergency compass; a line of regularly bent trees on a ridge-line, an indication where north lay, for from there came the prevailing wind. On and on. Ever westwards.

  The Butcher, the most powerful man, apart from Schulze, in the whole force, husbanded his strength. Head tucked into his collar against the biting wind, his eyes narrowed to slits so that he did not have to see the wildly swaying young men all around him, he did what old heads always did in situations like this: he formed mental pictures of other and better times in order to forget the miserable present.

  At first it was women. Blondes with enormous breasts, clad in black stockings, who reclined lasciviously on silken sheets, exposing their well-rounded charms and secret places to him in complete, seductive abandon. Red-heads, wild with passion, their bodies covered with sweat as he pumped them full of his salami, whimpering and giving little screams of pleasure, ripping their nails along the length of his back in their ecstasy. Brunettes, dark eyes full of strange promises, who refused to let him touch them, but who indulged him in all kinds of wild-slow unknown perversions....

  But then the Butcher’s stomach started to rumble, and he forgot the women. Now he kept himself going by thinking of food: great steaming mounds of sauerkraut and huge red pig’s knuckles, heavy with yellow fat; heaped plates of boiled potatoes, surrounded by metres of succulent juicy wurst, cauldrons full of thick green pea-soup, in which swam whole sides of salt bacon....

  His eyes virtually closed against the icy wind, his stomach rolling enormously, he sniffed, the delightful visions forgotten now. He could smell something: something that had that sweet-sour odour of charred food. There was no mistaking it. It was the smell of the bottom of the great cauldrons they had used in his days as an apprentice butcher, to boil down the poorer quality pork after they slaughtered the pigs on Monday. Invariably the stuff got burnt.

  He opened his eyes, big nose twitching like that of a blood-hound attempting to scent a fugitive. He surveyed the blind-white plain, stopping in his tracks to do so, so excited at the thought that there might be food close at hand that he forgot the rest.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ Schulze grunted, coming level with him. ‘You look as if yer gonna shoot yer wad in a mo.’

  The Butcher did not answer, his eyes sweeping the horizon, following the hills to his right around to the group of stark-black skeletal trees to his immediate front.

  ‘Well, come on,’ Schulze snarled angrily, digging him in the ribs. ‘Piss or get off the pot! What’s up?’

  ‘Look,’ the Butcher exclaimed in sudden excitement. ‘Over there!’

  He pointed a gloved hand that shook slightly at the trees. A faint black trail of smoke was rising above them, caught immediately by the wind as soon as it cleared the protection of the trees and dispersed at once.

  ‘Smoke,’ Schulze said.

  ‘Food!’ the Butcher croaked, suddenly hoarse with excitement.

  ‘Food? How do you know that, you greedy chowhound?’ Schulze rasped angrily.

  The Butcher grasped him by the lapels and as big as Schulze was the other man nearly swung him off his feet, he was so excited. ‘I know, Schulze, because I can smell it! I can smell, it, do you hear! The
re’s grub over there....’

  It was a small convoy, a couple of halftracks, three tractors and a truck, black against the melted snow, which dripped in sad monotony. The thin smoke still drifted into the sky, although it must have been hours since the vehicles were surprised by the bombers which had destroyed them.

  ‘Ours?’ the Golden Pheasant queried in a small voice, for he like the rest of the men standing on the ridge-line looking down at the wrecked trucks and the dead bodies scattered all around them, was awed and somehow depressed by the sight, as if he had never seen a dead soldier in his life before.

  ‘Yes,’ Schulze answered tonelessly, taking his eyes off the ghastly tableau to his immediate right: charred bodies heaped together indiscriminately, a clawlike hand held upright by the frost, a pair of unblinking resentful eyes, a bloody stump of what had once been a leg. ‘The poor shits must have been making it west when they got hit. Probably Popov Stormovik dive-bombers.’

  There was a heavy silence, broken a few moments later by the Butcher saying, hardly able to control his voice, ‘But there’s grub down there, Schulze.’

  The big sergeant repressed a curse of anger. Of course, the big greedy swine was right. Food was the most important thing now; it would give them the energy the men desperately needed to keep going across this terrible freezing waste. ‘Matz, post a couple of sentries up here. The rest of you, follow me. We’re going down.’

  Led by the Butcher, who sniffed the air like a dog scenting a juicy piece of meat, they slithered down the slope eagerly, half up to their waists in deep snow at times and commenced the ghastly business of searching the wrecked halftracks and other vehicles, even turning out the pockets of the stiff, hard-as-wood corpses in their burning desire for food.