Free Reign of Hell by Sven Hassel Page A

away from Lenzing’s head.
    ‘He moved!’ screamed Kleiner. ‘The stupid cowardly bastard went and moved!’
    By this time, Lenzing was trembling all over from head to foot, and Kleiner himself looked as if all his bones had turned to jelly. His knees caved in and he kept wavering from side to side. He took a third, shot, with his hand dancing about like a snake in a high wind. The beer bottle bounced off Lenzing’s head and crashed to the floor, but theshouts of jubilation were silenced by an acid voice which spoke from the doorway.
    ‘Would someone be kind enough to tell me what the hell is going on in here?’
    Slowly, Kleiner turned his head. From all over the room, men crawled out of their shelters and staggered to their feet. Lieutenant Löwe stood with his helmet pushed down over his eyes, his thumbs stuck in his belt, coldly regarding them all. He jerked his head at Lenzing.
    ‘Get back to your quarters. I’ll deal with you later.’ He waited until the terrified boy had left the room, then kicked the door closed behind him. ‘Sergeant-Major Kleiner,’ he said. ‘You have obviously been hiding your light under a bushel. I had no idea you had such a passion for firearms. We shall have to make better use of your talents . . . As from this moment you are transferred to the anti-tank section. I shall expect great things of you.’ His lip curled distastefully. He let his eyes travel slowly over the rest of the assembled company. ‘You realise,’ he said, ‘there is one reason and one reason only that I am not hauling the whole miserable puke-making lot of you up before a court martial and having you packed straight off to Torgau? We’re in the fifth year of the war, and we’re on the verge of disaster, and by God I’d rather keep you out here to get your heads blown off by Russian artillery than send you back to the comparative luxury of a military prison. I may as well tell you here and now that I don’t give a damn if every man jack of you ends up with your guts hanging down between your legs and both your arms blown off. It’s not going to be any use coming whining to me about it. As far as I’m concerned, you stay out here and you fight until you drop. And when you drop, you die, because believe you me there’s not going to be anyone hanging around long enough to stop and pick you up again.’
    He turned abruptly and left the room, slamming the door behind him. There was a shocked silence. Suddenly, no one was drunk any more. Perhaps at that moment, for the first time, they were realising what it meant to lose a war. Perhapsthey knew, then, that Löwe had not spoken in vain, and that they were all under sentence of death.
    Kleiner collapsed heavily into a chair and lay there, sweating, with his legs sprawled out before him, his arms dangling down to the floor. His revolver slipped out of his grasp and he let it lie where it had fallen. Grimly, Hofmann picked it up and thrust it at him.
    ‘Best hang on to that,’ he said. ‘Might come in handy one day for shooting yourself with . . .’
    The following morning we took up a position alongside the 587th Infantry Regiment, relieving the 500th, which was a disciplinary regiment composed not of criminals but almost entirely of disgraced officers. All the WUs, 1 no matter to which regiment they belonged, had to wear a red badge on their backs. Thus, they were easily distinguished.
    We found the front line at that point almost uncannily quiet. The first of the Russians’ trenches was over on the far side of the marshes, and the no-man’s-land between them and us lay silent and deserted. The day we arrived was a Thursday. According to those who had been in the area some time, this was the day when the vodka rations were dished out to the Russian troops; one and a half litres per man, generally consumed in less than an hour. We were informed that we could look forward to an eventful night.
    Here, in the very midst of the marshland, the mosquitoes swarmed