"Haul ass, you lousy Kraut bastards," the big Ami sergeant yelled against the howl of the wind. "Make schnell!"
The guards herding the long column of prisoners ever eastwards took up the relentless chant once more in their pathetic German, "Make schnell, Krauts... LOS!"
The column shuffled off, too weary, too hungry, too frozen to be still frightened of their white-helmeted guards who waded into them at periodic intervals if they thought the prisoners too slow slamming their cruelly brass-shod rifle butts into the Germans' skinny ribs or digging their bayonets into them.
Like some great, stinking serpent the prisoners wound their way among the frozen snow dunes, trying to find the road whenever possible, giving off an overpowering stench as they evacuated their bowels time and time again, leaving their steaming trail of wet, yellow faeces. All of them were suffering from what they called the 'thin shits' because they had used the frozen, dirtied snow to quench their thirst.
Obersturmbannführer Kuno von Dodenburg, once commander of the elite SS Assault Regiment 'Wotan', fought his weary way forward with the rest of the POWs. His eyebrows were glistening white with hoar frost, his emaciated, pinched face an ugly purple, and every time he breathed, it was as if someone had plunged a sharp knife into his frozen lungs. All around him the survivors of the beaten army – tank men in their black uniforms, sailors in floppy, beribboned caps, Luftwaffe paras in camouflaged coveralls and ordinary infantry in shabby ankle-length greatcoats –struggled to keep up. For all of them knew once they had dropped, they would remain lying there until they perished and the drifting snow covered their skinny bodies. This bitter December, their captors knew no mercy.
Again the numbness caused by the freezing temperature had worn off and his wounds – thank God they had ceased bleeding – had commenced hurting once more. The pain was almost too much to bear, but he was determined to keep going. Once they had reached the Reich and the makeshift Wehrmacht hospitals and camps on the other side of the border, he knew the rabble all around him would need leadership. Otherwise all of them would be condemned to an early death on the starvation rations their Ami guards allowed them. He had seen it all before when he had been a temporary prisoner of the Ivans – the Russians –the year before. For them to survive they needed someone to lead them and stand up to the guards. It was the only way to get out of the mess they had now found themselves in. "March or croak, comrades!" he had encouraged hoarsely more than once when they had been tempted to give up, lie in the snow and wait for death to take them.
He breathed out hard with exasperation and the next moment wished he hadn't. The icy breath ripped at his lungs like the blade of a razor-sharp stiletto. He knew there was no hope for him. Not only was he in the SS – "those Nazi bastards who murdered our guys in cold blood," as the big red-headed sergeant in charge had snorted more than once ever since they had commenced this death march to the Reich and the POW camps – but he was also the former commanding officer of the most feared regiment in the whole of the SS. "A Kraut Al Capone," he had told himself bitterly, "with a Tommy-gun under each arm, only too eager to waste some poor innocent Ami."
In the American field dressing station to which they had taken him immediately after his capture to patch up his wounds, they had made it amply clear what the fate of Obersturmbannführer von Dodenburg of SS Assault Regiment Wotan was going to be. His wounds had been treated without benefit of any kind of anaesthetic. As the fat, harassed little Jewish doctor who had tended nervously to his wounds had whispered in Yiddish so that the rest of the place's nursing staff couldn't understand: "Sorry, Colonel, I've been ordered not to give you a shot. You'll have to grin and bear it, I'm afraid." He had wiped the sweat from his plump cheeks and continued his probing as if he was feeling the pain just as acutely as the tall, lean German officer with the harshly handsome face stretched out on the stretcher in front of him.
Von Dodenburg had nodded, not trusting himself to speak, as the American doctor's scalpel had penetrated ever deeper into the raw, bloody wound, the blood pouring down his skinny ribs unhindered, for none of the aid men were making any attempt to staunch the flow. Obviously, they too had been ordered to make life hellishly tough for their high-ranking SS prisoner.
Finally it had been all over. Carelessly, an orderly had dusted the wounds with sulpha powder and bandaged them up, while the fat Jewish doctor tut-tutted and constantly shook his head, as if he were saddened by the whole bad business. His body lathered in sweat, despite the freezing temperature outside, von Dodenburg, exhausted, had fallen back onto the blood-soaked stretcher, But not for long.
It had been 'rounds' shortly afterwards. The tall, angry-faced colonel in charge had come bustling into the tent filled with wounded, both German and American, followed by his junior doctors and the sister in charge. Underneath the hissing white glare of the lantern hanging from the central pole of the tent he had stared in a bored manner at the check-list which the sister had presented him. He had seen it all before ever since Normandy. His concern was to get the 'bodies' (he always thought of his patients as 'bodies') capable of fighting again, fit for another spell in the line. Otherwise his sole concerns were his weekly booze ration of scotch and the nubile body of Nurse Smithers who was his current 'GI with the built-in foxhole', as crude men referred to the US Army's female soldiers.
Suddenly he started. Behind his steel-rimmed GI glasses, his grey eyes hardened and then became angry. "What the frigging Sam Hill is this, Finkelstein?" he demanded.
The fat Jewish doctor looked apprehensive. "What's that, sir?" he had asked timidly.
The colonel had glared at him. "Don't bullshit me, Finkelstein," he had snarled his face growing an even deeper red with anger. "You know what the Christ I'm talking about. I know, goddamit, you're not one of us. But you can understand English plain and simple, don't yer!"
Tamely, ignoring the insult to his race, Finkelstein had nodded but said nothing until the colonel cried, "Put a 'sir' on that, Finkelstein!" he threatened, "Or I'll send you up to one of the fighting battalions. Surgeons don't survive long up there." He had smiled maliciously, obviously noting the sudden look of fear on the junior doctor's face.
"Sir," Finkelstein said, red-faced and embarrassed at this dressing down in front of his patients.
"Good," the colonel had relaxed a little. "The trouble with you and your, er, fellow co-religionists," he pontificated, "is that you've not got enough fighting spunk. That guy," he indicated a semi-conscious von Dodenburg, who had raised his left arm and was showing the black tattoo mark of the SS under it, "is a big shot Nazi who has probably murdered a whole shoot of your, er, people. Yet you pussy-foot around with him when everybody knows that all the guy deserves is a swift polka at the end of a length of hangman's hemp."
Finkelstein said nothing, but looked at his feet in an embarrassed sort of way.
"And that's why," the colonel poked a finger at Finkelstein's plump chest as if accusing him personally, "you Jews have always been persecuted throughout your history. You've never learned how to hit back. You've always believed in turning the other goddamn cheek – and see what it's got ya." He let his words sink in before adding, "Well, me, I'm a doctor, I know, but I'm also a red-blooded American, who doesn't forgive a wrong that easily. So I want that Kraut dressed and out of my hospital in five minutes flat, or there'll be trouble – plenty of trouble for somebody." So saying he had swaggered away followed by his entourage, slapping his riding boots with the leather swagger stick that he affected.
Five minutes later, as the hospital commandant had ordered, von Dodenburg, swaying badly, his face twisted in a grimace of acute pain, was standing in the howling snowstorm outside. Opposite him, a worried Finkelstein looked anxiously at his one-time patient before reaching into the pocket of his bloodstained white overall and bringing out two packages. "More sulpha powder," he whispered so that none of the men inside could hear him, "and something to deaden the pain... Oh, yeah, and a few smokes." He tendered a dazed von Dodenburg a battered, half-full pack of Camels. "The best I can do under the circumstances, I'm afraid."
Despite the acute pain that ran through his emaciated body in electric shock waves, von Dodenburg was moved. "Thank you, doctor," he croaked and reached out his hand slowly, "Do you mind shaking the hand of an SS killer, Doc?"
Finkelstein took the hand a little hesitantly. "You're a sick man after all," he had said. "It's my job as a medic to treat you, whoever or whatever you are. Good luck, Colonel."
Von Dodenburg had wondered what Reichsführer Himmler, the head of the SS, would have thought if he had been able to see that little scene, with the snow whirling around the tents and the big, wounded colonel towering above the fat, undersized, obviously Jewish doctor. Now he grinned weakly at the memory. But at that moment he had had no time for amusement, for, abruptly, the head guard, the US Military Policeman the other guards called Red, had appeared out of the snowstorm bellowing that cry which von Dodenburg was going to learn to hate, "All right, you Kraut bastard haul ass!"
The American colonel commandant's attitude towards the beaten Germans, especially those of the SS, had made up von Dodenburg's mind. Ever since his surprise capture, he had been unable to make plans: he had been too weak and miserable at the knowledge that his beloved regiment had been wiped out, save for a handful of soldiers under Sergeant Schulze's leadership who had managed to survive the debacle and escape.
His manner of release from the American military hospital, when he knew that his wounds needed far more attention if he wasn't going to succumb to gas-gangrene that stinking killer created in untended dirty wounds, had made up his mind for him at last. It wasn't because he was concerned about his personal future. He knew that in the end his life was forfeit; after all, he had commanded the most infamous regiment in the whole of the million-strong SS. But for the time being he wanted to do what pathetic little he could to help his beloved Fatherland in its hour of defeat. What had that big ox Sergeant Schulze said to him more than once before they had finally walked into the trap: "Sir, we've always had it drummed into us for these last years that we must learn to die for Germany." And he had inevitably stroked his pugnacious, unshaven jaw at that moment before adding, "Now we've got to learn how to live for our country!"
As that long column of stinking human misery trailed ever eastwards, leaving their dead and dying behind them, soon to be swallowed up by the raging snowstorm, von Dodenburg knew that that rogue Schulze, for all his undoubted faults, had been right. The days of dying on the 'field of honour' for Folk, Fatherland and Führer were over. Now one had to live. The question was – How?