Шон Хатсон: Sabres in the Snow

Inside the tunnel, Kleiser stood up and looked behind him. He could see the smoke swirling at the far end of the seemingly endless black tube. Finally, satisfied that all his vehicles were safely through, he sat down once more, sliding the Walther PPk from its holster to check the magazine. It was full. Kleiser pushed the weapon back into position and rubbed his hands together, trying to restore some of the circulation. Christ, it was cold. The driver of the jeep, a youth in his teens known to the captain as pimmel , because of his bald head and long neck wore the familiar fur cap usually reserved for machine-gunners. He had picked it up from a dead engineer a month ago and, despite the fact that he’d had to scrape most of the previous owner’s brains from the inside, pimmel wore it without qualms.

“Do you hate the fucking country as much as I do?” asked Kleiser, shivering.

Pimmel shrugged.

“I don’t know sir,” he said. “How much do you hate it?”

The youth looked at his commander and smiled thinly. He looked much older than his nineteen years but then, two years on the Eastern Front were enough to age anyone prematurely thought Kleiser. He ran a hand over his own grizzled features, touching briefly the scar which ran from the bridge of his nose to his chin. It was deep, a furrow in his skin which would remain a legacy of his encounter with the Russian’s Siberian troops. Most of them were Mongols and they were the hardest fighting troops Kleiser had ever enountered. Nevertheless, he carried one of their twelve-inch knives in his belt, a reminder that even these ‘other’ Russians were vulnerable. The Siberians thrived in conditions such as these. It had been snowing solidly for the past three weeks, the ground was as hard as stone and, in many places, the snow as much as five-feet deep. Leafless trees stood like petrified sentinels on either side of the railway track and Kleiser glanced at them as the jeep emerged from the tunnel mouth.

The snow seemed to have become a torrent and, high above, banks of thick grey and black cloud promised no respite. The temperature was already down to –9° and, with dusk approaching, it looked as though there would be another iron-hard frost. More than once during the retreat, vehicles had been abandoned because their moving parts had simply seized-up due to the cold. During the depths of winter itself, Kleiser and his men had seen petrol freeze in engines as the temperatures dropped to fifty below freezing. That had been two months ago. Though still constantly assaulted by the fierce Russion weather, the Germans had come through the worst of the winter. They knew, from bitter experience, that the thaw would follow in a few weeks and iron-hard, icy ground would be replaced by a continual quagmire of sucking mud and glutinous ooze, as capable of stopping men and machinery as any snow or ice.

All along the Eastern Front, the German armies were retreating. Kleiser stroked his chin thoughtfully and remembered how easy it had been in the beginning. The Russians had crumbled beneath the Wehrmacht’s brilliantly organised attack, the SS man himself had led his unit to within twenty miles of Moscow but then the winter had struck. He exhaled deeply, the memory painful. His breath formed gossamer clouds in the freezing air. That had seemed like a hundred years ago; now it was March 1943 and it was the turn of the Germans to run. Something which Kleiser found humiliating. Ever since he joined the SS he had been taught that the Bolsheviks and Slavs were untermensch, and that much he believed. Their string of victories only served to further anger the young SS captain.

At the age of thirty, Kleiser had risen through the ranks, gaining a reputation for himself in the process. The older officers distrusted his fanatical patriotism, the younger ones feared his ruthlessness but Kleiser didn’t care for the opinions of others. He cared for just two things. The Fatherland and victory. His men, he knew, were of a similar mind, ready to obey any order he gave them. But, whether it was through duty or fear, he had never been able to discover. He looked at pimmel , studying the youngster’s profile for a moment. The lad swung the jeep off the tracks with a bump and Kleiser waved a hand in the air as a signal for the vehicles following to do likewise.

The sheer weight of the half-track behind had smashed the sleepers to matchwood, bending and buckling the rusty rails beneath its weight. Twenty men sat in the huge juggernaut, Sergeant Dietz at their head, his hands firmly wrapped around the butt of the MG34 mounted atop the vehicle. The sergeant was scanning the hills and trees around them, watching for any sign of movement. Vague reports of partisan activity had reached the SS unit during the past few days and Dietz, for one, was taking no chances. He was a large, bull-necked, man with a lisp. His grey hair closely cropped beneath his helmet and he stood above the troops in his section like some kind of ship’s figurehead.

“Shit,” grunted pimmel as the jeep skidded slightly. He fought to regain control of the wheel and eventually succeeded in guiding the vehicle to the bottom of the slope where it bumped to a halt and stalled. He twisted the key in the ignition with a snarl and drove on. Kleiser looked behind him to see the other vehicles slipping precariously down the incline. The last krupp looked as though it would turn over but, finally, the huge wheels got a grip and it bucked forward. Satisfied that all of his convoy were safely on the road, the SS captain waved them forward, pulling his goggles down to protect his eyes from the snow. His lips felt numb and, when he spoke, his tongue seemed too big for his mouth, the words coming with difficulty.

“We should get off this road,” he said. “If any Russian planes fly past we’re sitting ducks.”

“Which way then, sir?” asked pimmel , easing his foot off the accelerator slightly.

Kleiser bit his lip contemplatively then jabbed a finger towards a range of low hills, South of their present position. The driver nodded and swung the jeep off the road, great flurries of snow flying up as the rear wheels spun round impotently for long seconds before gaining a grip.

The other vehicles folowed.

“Do you think we will still win the war, pimmel ?” asked the captain, running his hand over the MP40 which he had across his lap.

“I am not paid to think, sir,” the youngster said.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Kleiser wanted to know.

“I am paid to obey orders, sir.”

Kleiser smiled, humourlessly.

“So you have no personal opinions?” he said.

It was pimmel ’s turn to smile.

“Are you ordering me to answer, sir?” he asked.

“Yes.”

The driver nodded.

“Yes, I think we will still win the war.”

Kleiser lifted the sub-gun and stuck it into his driver’s face but the youth merely carried on driving. There was a crooked smile on the captain’s face.

“For one so young,” he said, “you are a good liar.”

He slowly lowered the MP40.

The two soldiers regarded each other impassively for a moment then Kleiser cracked out laughing.

“I don’t know how you have stayed alive so long,” he said.

“I don’t know why I’ve bothered sometimes, sir,” the driver told him.

Kleiser told him to pull over and, with its engine idling, the jeep remained stationary as the remainder of the column trundled past. The captain shook his head as he ran an appraising eye over the battered vehicles. The half-tracks were rusted, one of them bearing bullet holes, another had almost lost a track when a large lump of shrapnel had struck it during an engagement a week before. The canvas covering on the krupps was holed and ripped in many places, even rotting due to the ravages of the weather. Those hub caps which remained were mottled with rust, as if someone had smeared blood on them and allowed it to dry slowly. One of the ten-ton lorries bumped along on a flat tyre, the driver constantly cursing as he struggled to control the vehicle.