Free SS General by Sven Hassel

gas mask case knocking against a rifle. Porta turned and moved back a few paces, his hand making an imperative gesture to me to get down and stay down, which I relayed to Tiny, a few feet behind me. We sank into the snow and waited. I saw Porta crouch behind a bush and raise his submachine gun.
    Tiny's hand gripped my arm. "What's the stupid jerk doing that for?"
    "Christ knows," I muttered.
    "He fires that and we'll all be done for."
    No more than a few yards away, five solid black shapes emerged from the shelter of a thicket and began treading single file through the snow. They were Russians, but too big and bulky in build to be the dreaded Siberians. They passed very close to us. I could hear the thud of their boots and the swish of the snow. I held my breath, wondering if they would notice our tracks, but, thank God, it was too dark. They moved on, straight across our path, and I felt Tiny relax at my side.
    As we got to our feet, Porta farted; a sharp crack like a gunshot. The sound traveled clear and fast through the still night air, and Tiny and I were straightaway back on the ground.
    "For crying out loud!" I protested. "Another one like that and we'll have the whole of the Red Army down on us!"
    "I can't help it," said Porta with dignity. "It's the way I'm constituted. I've always been like it. The least bit of excitement and it goes to my bowels."
    "Well, just try and control it!" I snapped, in no mood to humor his physiological weaknesses. "It's like a goddamn cannon going off!"
    "Stick a cork up your ass," suggested Tiny.
    "Germany's secret weapon," I said sourly. "The human champagne bottle. Turns his back on the enemy and wipes out whole regiments at a fart."
    "Oh, cut it out!" snarled Porta.
    We crept on toward the river. We were almost on top of the Russian trenches now and had to crawl on our hands and knees. We could see the enemy machine guns looming up ahead, and Porta got caught on some barbed wire and exercised his ear-splitting physiological weakness for so long as we tried to rescue him that Tiny lost his nerve and threatened to cut his throat if he didn't stop. It was as much as I could do to prevent full-scale combat on the spot, and I whispered myself hoarse telling them to keep their raucous voices down.
    We yanked Porta free at last, only to stumble almost immediately on an enemy battery, where a sentry demanded to know the password. We froze into horrified silence. Finally, for want of anything better, Porta shouted back an obscenity. The sentry promptly replied in kind. We stood there, waiting to be shot, but nothing happened. Either the Russians were in the habit of using pornographic passwords, or the sentry had been so insulted that he could no longer be bothered with us. In any event, after a few more seconds' hesitation we moved on into the darkness and were allowed through with no more questions asked.
    Another ten minutes and we were nestling together in a deep, dark shell hole, Tiny shading the flashlight with one hand while I held the map and Porta licked the end of a pencil stub and laboriously marked in all the Russian positions between point X and Yersovka. Our mission was completed. It was now only a question of returning safely to our own lines.
    We stayed in our shell hole a while, sharing our last cigarette between the three of us, huddling into our coats and listening to the silence. Occasionally it was broken by the distant sound of gunfire, but for the most part the night was still and untroubled. The snow had stopped falling and the sky was crisscrossed with searchlights. We were reluctant to leave the comfort of our nest, but the colonel had given us six hours and we had in any case to beat the dawn if we wanted to survive.
    We moved off again into the treacherous night. With the velvet-black sky above, and the thick untrodden snow underfoot, deadening all sound, we could run into an enemy patrol at any moment and never even know what had hit us. We came at last to a point