The Bloody Road To Death (Cassell Military Paperbacks) Read online

  The Russian officer falls forward and I sink my teeth into his throat. Blood runs down over my face but I don’t notice it. I am fighting for my life. He struggles desperately to tear himself loose, but I clamp my teeth together like a mad bulldog. My mouth fills with his blood. He makes a long rattling noise and a terrible shiver goes through his body. I have bitten his throat out . . . I wriggle under his body and get hold of his Mpi. I turn it towards the others but the magazine is empty. With all my strength I hammer the muzzle into the face of the foremost of them. With a shrill scream he collapses. His face is a bloody ruin.

  By Sven Hassel

  The Commissar

  OGPU Prison

  Court Martial

  The Bloody Road to Death

  Blitzfreeze

  Reign of Hell

  SS General

  March Battalion

  Liquidate Paris

  Monte Cassino

  Assignment Gestapo

  Comrades of War

  Wheels of Terror

  The Legion of the Damned

  THE BLOODY

  ROAD TO DEATH

  Translated from the Danish by Tim Bowie

  A WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON EBOOK

  First published by in Great Britain in 1977 by Corgi

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

  Copyright © Sven Hassel 1977

  Translation copyright Transworld Publishers Ltd. 1977

  Translated from the Danish by Tim Bowie

  The right of Sven Hassel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 0 2978 5732 7

  Orion Books

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper St Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Born in 1917 in Fredensborg, Denmark, Sven Hassel joined the merchant navy at the age of 14. He did his compulsory year’s military service in the Danish forces in 1936 and then, facing unemployment, joined the German army. He served throughout World War II on all fronts except North Africa. Wounded eight times, he ended the war in a Russian prison camp. He wrote LEGION OF THE DAMNED while being transferred between American, British and Danish prisons before making a new life for himself in Spain. His world war

  books have sold over 53 million copies worldwide.

  ‘Because of the magnitude of our losses at Stalingrad and the catastrophic shortage of reserve troops, our Führer has decreed that the period of pregnancy shall with immediate effect be reduced from nine to six months.’

  Obergefreiter Joseph Porta speaking to Obergefreiter Wolfgang Creutzfeldt, Salonica, spring 1943.

  Dedicated to my battalion commander and friend, now a General in the West German Armoured Corps, Horst Scheibert.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  THE CACTUS FOREST

  THE FLEAS

  ESCORT DUTY

  DARJEELING TEA

  DEMON HEIGHTS

  THE COMMISSAR

  WAS IT MURDER?

  If I am not very careful, that damned man Himmler will soon have all my friends inside his concentration camps.

  Göring to Generalfeldmarschall Milch,

  22nd September, 1943.

  Singing at the top of his voice Torpedomaat Claus Pohl leaves the brothel ‘The Sign of the Shaking Bed’ in Pyrgos. In the distance can be heard the noise of a free-for-all between a group of German sailors and some Italian Alpine troops.

  Claus Pohl grins happily and decides to take a hand, but changes his mind quickly as his eye falls on a pretty girl whom he has noticed earlier that evening.

  ‘Hey, Liebling!’ he shouts, his voice echoing in the night quiet of the street. Wait for the Navy! It’s dangerous to drop out of convoy!’ He puts his fingers to his mouth and lets out a piercing whistle, putting the local cats to flight.

  The girl looks back and smiles provocatively.

  Claus increases his pace. He has been disappointed at the brothel. There were more customers than the ladies could cope with. He whistles again, and is so engrossed in the girl, that he does not notice the figures of men who have emerged from a side-street and are following him.

  The girl turns down a little alley. When he reaches it she seems to have vanished into thin air.

  Four men make a ring around him.

  ‘What the hell!’ he shouts, snatching for his P-38.

  A noose, thrown expertly from behind, loops tightly around his throat. He chokes and falls to his knees, his arms thrashing wildly. His round sailor’s hat rolls down the street like a runaway wheel.

  A boot sinks into his crotch, a pistol butt crashes down on the back of his neck.

  Next day Torpedomaat Claus Pohl is found by some Greek civilians, who alert the police. His naked body is lying in the gutter, only a few yards from German HQ. Identification is very difficult, and the identity of the corpse is first revealed when his flotilla reports Claus Pohl missing.

  The case is treated as an unimportant routine investigation. Naked corpses of German soldiers are turning up in Greek gutters every day.

  Two hours later three Greek prisoners are hanged publicly as a reprisal.

  THE CACTUS FOREST

  THE section stands looking at the corpses, which have bloated grotesquely in the hot sun. The body of a Leutnant sprawls across the stonework of the well. His tongue has been torn out and his mouth is one great clot of blood.

  ‘Must’ve hurt like hell, that,’ nods Porta, pointing at the dead officer. ‘Been a quiet chap – if he’d lived through it,’ says Buffalo, passing his tongue over his sun-cracked lips.

  ‘Over in the bleedin’ orchard, they’ve tied some on ’em to a coupla pulled-down trees an’ let the trees go. Rippin’ idea ain’t it?’ says Tiny, slapping at the flies with the sleeve of a Greek uniform.

  ‘I’ll cut their fucking joy-sticks off,’ promises Skull and draws a parachute knife from his boot-top.

  ‘And you a bloody NCO,’ jeers Porta. ‘Trouble with you is you haven’t seen enough dead uns yet.’

  ‘The bleedin’ partisans’ve got to be let ’ave their bit o’ fun,’ considers Tiny. ‘Us bleedin’ Germans could’ve stayed at ’ome, couldn’ we?’

  Porta prizes the dead Stabszahlmeister’s rigid jaws apart. His forceps glitter in the sun and Porta is two gold teeth richer.

  Tiny acquires a full cigar-case. With a heavily put-on city director air he lights a fat Brazilian cigar, and moves into the shade cast by an overturned Kübel,1 first pushing the bloody corpse of the driver to one side.

  ‘Even the dead have a use during a war,’ says Porta. ‘They take up the attention of the flies and keep ’em away from us who’re still alive.’

  ‘So many flies,’ says Gregor wonderingly, as a heavy swarm rises buzzing from the body of the dead driver.

  Porta opens a tin of tuna and shovels the contents in
to his mouth with a bayonet. ‘Tuna is good for you!’ It says on the outside of the tin.

  Behind the long building we find ten Blitzmädel2. They are dead, and laid out neatly in a row. They have not been dead for more than one or two days. The smell isn’t very bad yet, and the birds have only pecked out the eyes of two of them.

  ‘They’ve ’ad some fun with ’em first,’ says Tiny lecherously, lifting up a blue-grey military skirt. ‘This tart ’as lost ’er frillies!’

  ‘Shut it, pig!’ the Old Man rages at him. ‘Haven’t you any pity at all for these poor bitches?’

  ‘Jesus wept, I don’t know any of ’em,’ protests Tiny. ‘Want me to cry me rotten eyeballs out for every dead ’ore I runs across when there’s a bleedin’ war on? Do you?’

  ‘If I’d been with them partisan boys,’ laughs Buffalo, his whole fat body wobbling, ‘I’d’ve took the arse with me an’ fixed up some real Kraft durch Freude3 a couple of times a day. Sex is healthy, they say in the States.’

  A shrill scream makes us jump and grab for our weapons. Down the hill a woman comes racing, stumbling, followed by a fat little man waving an axe above his head.

  The Legionnaire’s Moorish knife flashes like lightning through the air and sinks into the man’s chest. He continues running for a few strides then falls like a log.

  To our amazement the woman throws herself sobbing across his body, and screams Bulgarian oaths at the Legionnaire.

  ‘She says you’re a goddam murderer,’ explains Buffalo, who understands a little Bulgarian. ‘They were just havin’ their daily bit of fuss, and the axe was part of it.’

  ‘Holy Allah!’ groans the Legionnaire wiping his Moorish knife on his sleeve. ‘Who in the world could have guessed it?’

  A chattering Krupp-Diesel rumbles into the sun-baked village. A party of excited ‘500’s’4 jump down from it.

  ‘They’ve slaughtered the whole bloody battalion. We’re all that’s left,’ shouts a feldwebel, sweating with dirt all over his face.

  ‘Who has?’ asks the Old Man expressionlessly.

  These bloody heathens,’ the feldwebel screams, raging. ‘Our battalion got here from Heuberg only a few days ago, and in the very first engagement we fell into an ambush. I dropped behind with my section and got away.’

  ‘You ran for it, in other words,’ grins Porta, sarcastically. ‘Our Adolf wouldn’t like that. If,’ he was to hear of it, that is.’

  ‘Can we join you lot?’ asks the feldwebel, ignoring the jibe.

  ‘Have you got weapons?’ asks the Old Man, brusquely.

  ‘Only carbines with twenty rounds a man,’ answers the feldwebel. ‘The Prussians aren’t too generous with 500’s.’

  ‘Juice in it?’ asks the Old Man, nodding his head at the Diesel.

  ‘No, it’ll only go downhill.’

  ‘Then we’re all right,’ laughs Porta happily. ‘The Greater German Wehrmacht is used to things movin’ in that direction.’

  ‘Stay if you like,’ shrugs the Old Man, ‘but remember I’m in charge!’

  ‘Shall we turn in our pay-books?’ asks a young 500, offering his.

  ‘Wipe your bleedin’ arse on it, son,’ suggests Tiny, assuming a lofty air.

  ‘We’re hung up by the balls,’ the Old Man tells the feldwebel. ‘Our battlewagon’s a burnt-out wreck, so it’s foot-slogging for us, and a walk over the mountains.’

  ‘Know ’em?’ asks the feldwebel, with a sour smile.

  ‘No!’ the Old Man is laconic.

  ‘They say it’s the arsehole of the universe up there, and two days is a long lifetime,’ says the feldwebel, looking worriedly at the black mass of the mountains. ‘Snakes, scorpions, giant ants and God knows what else. Cactus with enough poison in ’em to stock a chemist’s bloody shop!’

  ‘Got a better idea?’ asks the Old Man, biting off a chunk of chewing tobacco.

  ‘No, I’m workin’ for you now!’

  ‘All your lot got battle experience?’

  ‘Only a few,’ the feldwebel laughs tiredly. ‘The rest of ’em are swindlers an’ thieves. There’s a cunt-stealer among ’em, even!’

  The Old Man sighs and sends a brown stream of tobacco juice at the well. He shrugs his Mpi5 to a more comfortable position on his shoulder.

  ‘Tell your coolies, we’re on drumhead!’

  ‘Drumhead court-martial, eh?’ the feldwebel rolls it round his tongue.

  ‘No misunderstandings?’ asks the Old Man, sneeringly.

  ‘You wouldn’t think it,’ laughs the feldwebel, wickedly.

  ‘Glad we understand one another.’

  ‘What about a couple of Mpi’s or an LMG6’ asks the feldwebel, offering a packet of Junos7.

  ‘Think you’re in a damned arsenal?’ growls the Old Man, turning on his heel and kicking at a helmet which flies through the air and drops on a corpse. ‘You drop your equipment anywhere,’ he scolds. ‘No discipline any more! How the hell can an army fight a war with its bloody equipment spread all over the map of sodding Europe?’

  ‘God, but you’re in a bad mood today,’ remarks Porta, opening his third tin of tuna.

  The Old Man does not answer, but swings his Mpi over his shoulder, lights his old silver-lidded pipe and wheels over to the ammunition-trailer where the feldwebel has seated himself, together with some of his unit.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asks the Old Man, grumpily.

  ‘Schmidt,’ a short pause, and, ‘line regiment,’ he adds.

  The Old Man takes his pipe slowly out of his mouth, and spurts a tobacco-darkened stream of spittle to one side.

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘I thought you’d be interested.’

  ‘I don’t give a sod if you’re a feldmarschall!’

  The Old Man stalks over and sits down with the rest of us, demanding his share of Porta’s tin of tuna.

  ‘Hell I’m tired,’ groans Gregor despairingly, wiping his sleeve across his dust-masked face. ‘Here we go, the flower of Germany, lettin’ the untermensch piss all over us. My general and me, we wouldn’t ever have let that come about. If we’d had him an’ our monocle with us the missing links’d really have had something to worry about!’

  ‘If things go on as they are Greater Goddam Germany’s gonna get wiped off the map,’ says Buffalo, darkly, ’an’ us Germans ’re gonna drop back into bein’ the background characters in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.’

  ‘We’ll be the wicked ogres they frighten the nippers with after dark,’ nods Porta.

  ‘Pissy bleedin’ outlook, ain’t it?’ sighs Tiny despondently, packing banderoles of cartridges glumly into the ammunition boxes.

  From the mountains to the north artillery fire is audible.

  ‘The neighbours are a’knockin’,’ sings Porta, turning a body over on its back to look for gold fillings.

  ‘You take the heavy mortar,’ roars Barcelona to one of the 500’s. Barcelona is a feldwebel but doesn’t get much of a chance to pull rank when he’s with us.

  ‘What about the blackbird there?’ asks Heine, pointing with his Mpi at the padre who is sitting drawing circles in the dust of the road.

  ‘He can go when we go, or he can stay where he is,’ says the Old Man indifferently.

  ‘Chase the black bastard out of it,’ suggests Tango, a Rumanian-born German, who has been a teacher of dancing in Bucharest. Whenever he gets a break he dances tango steps to an internal orchestra of his own.

  ‘Let’s liquidate the bleeder,’ shouts Tiny. ‘The ’eavenly bleedin’ reps down ’ere on earth always bring bad luck!’

  ‘Yeah, let’s turn him off. I never see a blackbird get a ticket for the one-way trip,’ chuckles Buffalo, his rolls of fat wobbling in wicked glee.

  Til tell you when I want anybody liquidated,’ the Old Man decides, coldly.

  ‘I’m going to keep an eye on him anyway. Soul and body don’t always keep in step,’ says Tango, circling in a few dance steps. ‘The 44th sorted out a sky-pilot once who had no more connec
tion with the heavenly host than the devil himself has!’

  Everybody stares at the padre.

  ‘Let me open the bleeder’s throttle for ’im!’ says Tiny, touching the edge of his combat knife.

  A squadron of He III’s roars over us. One of them circles and returns.

  ‘That’s all we need, for them to take us for some of the heathen,’ says the Old Man, looking nervously up at the fighters.

  ‘Jesus, they’re droppin’ their shit!’ howls Buffalo, dashing between the houses.

  ‘Shrink!’ warns the Old Man, creeping into shelter behind the coping of the well.

  I follow Porta down into the well itself. The water is icy. I almost drown before he gets hold of me. We hang on to the bucket.

  There is a crashing and rumbling above our heads. Machine-guns chatter. The whole squadron is attacking us. It seems like the end of the world.

  The planes do not leave until the entire village is gone.

  Strangely, not one of us is even wounded. Air attacks are nerve-racking but not really effective. Imprecise.

  ‘Long as you’re not where the bombs drop, there’s no worry,’ grins Porta, sitting down on the sand in the very same place he sat before the attack started.

  ‘What about stopping here?’ suggests feldwebel Schmidt. ‘The Division’ll pick us up.’

  ‘Will the Division fuck?’ cries Porta scoffingly.

  ‘Merde dors! They have more than enough to do,’ sighs the Legionnaire. ‘What is a section to them?’

  ‘We ain’t worth as much as a lump o’ dried cat-shit,’ states Tiny, throwing a stone at a cat which is sitting, washing itself, on the corpse of a German soldier.

  ‘Jesus!’ shouts Porta angrily. ‘Even the cats down here round the Black Sea have lost all respect for the German Army! Where’s it all going to end?’