Liquidate Paris

Book 0: Sven Hassel War Classics

by Sven Hassel

Genres: War & Military; Suspense

Synopsis

Tiny lands on the tailgate of the tank. It is suicide. He empties the machine gun into the tank. Quickly, he jumps down and powerfully throws a hand grenade through the open hatch. The heavy tank rotates wildly, crushes some Brits under its crawler tracks before it crashes over the hillside. There, it explodes into an inferno of fire. The German panzer soldiers attack with flame-throwers and phosphorus grenades. They take no prisoners. The survivors are mercilessly liquidated. "EXCEEDS ITS PREDECESSORS 'ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT' AND 'A FAREWELL TO ARMS" VIGIE MAROCAINE, MOROCCO

Release date: December 23, 2010

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

‘I wonder,’ said Little John, shading his eyes with his hand as he stared out to the horizon, ‘if you could reach England by swimming there?’

‘Probably,’ said the Legionnaire, sounding bored.

‘If you were a fish,’ added the Old Man.

‘And had a supply of food to keep you going—’

‘Mind you, it would take some hell of a time.’

‘Hm.’

Little John stared out across the sea again, frowning and scratching the top of his head.

‘It has been done?’ he said at last.

‘Sure, but not from here. They don’t set out from here.’

‘Where would you arrive if you set out from here?’ insisted Little John, who was nothing if not downright dogged when once he had embarked upon a subject.

The Legionnaire hunched a shoulder.

‘Buggered if I know … Dover, perhaps.’

‘Crap,’ said Heide. ‘This is in a straight line with Brighton. Nowhere near Dover.’

‘How far do you reckon it is, then?’

Little John again.

‘Mm … thirty kilometres. Eighty kilometres. A hell of a way, at all events.’

‘Why don’t we try it?’

The Old Man smiled.

‘Because you’d drown before you were even half-way there.’

‘You want to take a bet?’

‘Why not? It’s practically a certainty!’

‘Of course,’ murmured Barcelona, ‘there is always another point. If you missed your way, which you very likely would, because one bit of sea looks exactly the same as any other bit of sea, there’s no knowing where you might end up. You could be lucky enough to bump into the coast of Ireland, but if you floated past that you’d have to carry on all the way to Greenland.’

‘I’d take a chance,’ said Little John. ‘I’d sooner swim about the perishing ocean for the rest of my life than carry on fighting in this bleeding war.’

Absurdly enough, we actually began training for it. Each day we swam a bit further than the previous day, always pushing ourselves to the limits of our endurance, the rule being that the weakest must keep up with the strongest. I personally gave up the idea of swimming to Greenland on the day I nearly drowned with cramp. If it hadn’t been for Gregor, the war would have been over as far as I was concerned. But one or two of the others pressed on with the training programme. They came back at midnight after their last excursion, all of them completely knackered but exultantly declaring that they had seen the coast of England on the horizon.

‘Another couple of weeks,’ declared Little John, ‘and I reckon we’ll be able to make it.’

They never had the chance. For some reason unknown to us the look-outs were doubled all along the coast, and before Little John and his team of aspiring Channel swimmers had found the means to evade them, history had put a stop to their ambitions in the shape of the Normandy landings. War had once again intervened.

They were hurling grenades into our midst. The blockhouse had already received a direct hit and was leaning drunkenly at an angle, one side dug deep into the sand, the other rearing skywards. The roof sagged in the middle.

For my money, grenades are even more fiendish than bombs. They play more cruelly on the nerves. The noise they make is infernal, and they tend to fall where least expected. At least with a bomb you stand a chance of calculating its probable landing point.

Another explosion. The blockhouse had received its second direct hit. This time the roof finally collapsed. A shower of earth and sand rained about our ears, slabs of concrete crashed about us, all the lights were abruptly extinguished. Those of us that could, got out. Major Hinka was thrown out, bodily, head-first, and landed with a thump on a pile of debris. Cautiously he picked himself up. There was blood on his face, his uniform was in shreds, the stump of his right arm poked grotesquely through a rip in his sleeve. It was two years ago he had lost that arm. The stump had never yet healed properly.

A squealing horde of rats came bounding out from the ruins of the shattered blockhouse. One, in a panic, made a dart at the Major. It clung to his chest, rolling back its ugly mouth and revealing a row of sharp yellow teeth. With the back of his hand Little John sent the brute flying, and the minute it hit the earth it was seized upon by its companions and torn to ribbons.

From afar, the Marines artillery were firing non-stop upon us, slowly demolishing the stout concrete walls upon which we had relied for our protection. The newly-embarked infantry troops were advancing upon us, and we repulsed them as best we could with volleys of hand-grenades. Little John carelessly dangled a grenade as he helped pull a survivor from the wreckage of the blockhouse. I watched him in a state of suspended horror: the pin was half pulled out and he gave no signs of having noticed. But Little John knew what he was doing where hand-grenades were concerned. He and I were, so to speak, the champions of the section. Little John threw them from a distance of 118 metres; I from 110. So far, no one had been able to better our performances.

Meanwhile, the fun continued. It had already lasted for several hours and we were growing quite bored by it. It was rather like sitting inside an enormous drum beaten by a million maniacs. After a time your senses became blunted and you accepted it as mere background noise.

Porta suggested a game of pontoon, but who could concentrate on cards? Our nerves were stretched taut, our ears cocked for the least change in the quality of sound of the inferno that raged all about us. It was child’s play at the moment, compared with what was surely to come. Sooner or later, they would launch a full-scale attack; move in for the kill. God grant they wouldn’t use flame-throwers! We should be lost if they did, and we knew they neither gave nor expected any quarter. They themselves had taken care to inform us that surrender was our only possible course, as they otherwise intended to fight until our last man had been wiped out. Propaganda, of course. We put out the same sort of rubbish ourselves. When it came to the point, flame-throwers or no, we should fight until we dropped, with our backs to the wall, with no thoughts of surrender in our well-drilled mind.

The Old Man was standing alone and forlorn in a corner, gently swaying from side to side and staring with glazed expression at his tin helmet, which he was holding before him in both hands. He didn’t know that I was watching him, and I saw that his cheeks had two clear rivulets of tears running through the layer of smoke and dirt. There, I guessed, was a man who could not much longer endure the disgusting sights and sounds and smells of war.

The bombardment continued. Quite suddenly, and with no warning, the roof of our new shelter caved in upon us. For a moment there was panic and confusion. The thought ran through my head like a ticker-tape gone mad: so this is how it feels, to be buried alive. So this is how it feels, to be buried alive. So this is— And then, suddenly, I was standing upright next to Little John, both of us straining to support the weight of a heavy beam and prevent yet another landslide. Little John said nothing; just stood and sweated and clenched his teeth. It seemed to me that every bone in my body was breaking beneath the strain. I half wished that Little John would give up the unequal struggle, and then I, too, with no loss of face, could let fall my share of the burden and sink down peaceably to die beneath the resulting debris. But Little John stood stolidly on, and before I could disgrace myself Gregor appeared with a heavy hammer and some props. We weren’t yet buried alive, but it had been a near thing.

One end of the shelter was clearly still unsafe, and we crowded silently together and passed round cigarettes and a bottle of calvados without a word. The only sound, other than the howling of the battle outside, were the pitiful moans of those who had been injured. A young kid of seventeen or eighteen was screaming his head off in agony, lying in a corner with both his legs crushed almost to pulp under the weight of a heavy cannon. They hauled him out and pumped him full of morphine, but I gave little for his chances. And certain it was he would never walk again.

Porta crawled about between people’s legs, in search of his pack of cards, which had been scattered by the blast. The Legionnaire calmly unrolled a little green mat and began playing dice, left hand against right. The rest of us stood, or sat, or huddled together in an atmosphere as taut as a bowstring. We had reached that extreme of fear and tension that carried madness in its wake, when any chance remark or trivial incident could drive men over the borderline and turn them into wild beasts scratching and clawing at each other. It was a relief when a second horde of rats appeared: it gave us a legitimate excuse for violent action, and probably averted a small-scale disaster.

The hours passed; slowly, wearily, one after another in orderly procession, dragging onwards towards a new day, or a new night, we were no longer sure what time it was or how long we had been there. We just sat and waited. There was nothing else we could do. Some of us smoked, some of us talked, some of us slept. Most of us just sat and stared. The Legionnaire had long ago rolled up his little green mat, but Little John brought out his harmonica and gave us the same half dozen tunes over and over. A few of us swore at him, but the majority suffered in silence. The Army teaches you patience if nothing else.

Outside, there was no indication whether it was day or night. A dense cloud of smoke hung like a pall between heaven and earth. It seemed unlikely that anyone – or, indeed, anything – could have survived the onslaught.

At one point, Porta pulled out the forty-nine playing cards he had managed to salvage from his pack and began dealing them out to his nearest neighbours, but even his enthusiasm waned in the face of our total lethargy. For one thing, it was almost impossible to see the cards without constantly lighting matches, and for another, who the hell cared anyway whether he won or lost?

‘Not even bloody worth cheating any more,’ grumbled Porta, sweeping up the pack and angrily shuffling the cards.

No one bothered to deny it. We just went on with our wearisome task of waiting.

‘Might as well bleeding eat as sit on your bleeding arses and do nothing!’

Porta glared round at us in the gloom. No one so much as twitched a muscle. With an indifferent shrug of the shoulders he pulled out his iron rations and set about consuming them. We stared with vacant eyes. Not even Major Hinka passed any comment, though the opening of iron rations, never mind the actual eating of them, was expressly forbidden until or unless the order was given by a commanding officer. Porta munched stolidly on, using the point of his bayonet as a fork. When he’d finished his rations he drank the water used for cooling the machine-guns. No one protested. No one cared. Who wanted to cool machine-guns when any moment he was in danger of being blown to pieces by the enemy? Porta, apparently unmoved, concluded his meal by scrubbing his one remaining tooth with the piece of oily rag used for cleaning rifles. He then settled back with his hands behind his head and a beam of contentment on his lips, as one who has come to the end of a three-course meal and a bottle of wine.

At last the bombardment showed signs of abating. Cautiously we roused ourselves, picked up our rifles, pushed the armour plating away from the wall slits, set the machine-gun in position. That anyone should still be living in the hell of the outside world would be nothing short of a miracle. The scene had changed beyond all recognition since last we had looked upon it. Wreckage lay scattered for miles about. The barbed-wire installations so lovingly supervised by Rommel had completely disappeared. Major Hinka made several despairing attempts to contact base by the field telephone, but with no success. There was no telephone: was no base. All the positions we had held had presumably been crushed out of existence by the bombardment.

And now the enemy were pouring off the landing-craft and swarming up the beaches in their thousands. Wave upon wave of khaki-clad figures with never a thought in their heads that they might still have to encounter opposition. Who, after all, could possibly have survived the onslaught and be alive to offer any resistance?

And then, suddenly, the mortars were sending an uninterrupted cascade of grenades into the midst of the khaki hordes. For a moment the infantry hesitated, dropped back, evidently shocked by this unexpected reception. Their officers gave them no respite. They shouted orders back and forth and urged the men on with impatient arm movements and jerks of the head. The machine-guns sliced through their approaching ranks, mowing them down dozens at a time. Porta’s flame-thrower sent its evil tongues leaping in among them, catching a man here, a man there. We rose up from our hell-hole and watched them die. It was our turn, now, to deal out wholesale destruction. The khaki figures fell over each other, trampled on their fallen comrades, stumbled and staggered but still came on. I saw one soldier trip on a pile of debris and become impaled on some hidden barbed wire. His screams were horrid even to my exultant ears. It was a relief when he was caught in the machine-gun fire and sliced almost in half. At least it put an end to the screams.

Major Hinka suddenly rose to his feet and dashed out into the open, yelling at us to follow him. We surged along in his wake, Little John and the Legionnaire at the head of us. I was dragging the gun with me, hanging round my neck by the strap. With my free hand I yanked grenades from my belt and hurled them into the mass of the enemy. All around us men were screaming, shouting, shooting, entangled in barbed wire, dying silently in the oil-sodden sand. Directly before me, a soldier in khaki. He had lost his helmet. I crashed my knee into his stomach, knocked him cold with the butt of the gun, left him lying there and ran on. I suddenly became aware that Barcelona was at my side. We ploughed on together, our heavy boots squelching in a sea of blood and bodies.

And now the enemy were retreating. Slowly at first, then speeding up by degrees until at length it was a mad dash to the sea, jettisoning arms, gas masks, helmets as they ran. Our turn had come, and we had triumphed. But how and why, for whom and for what reason? For the Fatherland? For the Führer? For honour, for glory, for medals and promotion? Not at all. Not a bit of it. We fought through instinct. To preserve our precious lives at all costs. And every minute a nightmare. One moment fighting side by side with a friend; the next moment, chancing to turn your head to see that what was once a human being is now no more than a bloodied mass of pulped flesh and crushed bone. And for a few minutes it breaks you up, you feel the tears choking you, you bang your head with the butt of your rifle, you feel that you’re going mad, you can’t stand it any longer. And then, seconds later, you’re back in the thick of the battle, fighting again in deadly earnest, hating everyone and everything; fighting to kill and killing for pleasure.

As soon as the lull came, Porta’s thoughts turned once more to food. I never knew anyone eat as much and as often as that man. And while he was sitting stuffing himself, Little John set about his usual macabre task of inspecting the mouths of corpses for gold teeth, which he carefully extracted and dropped into a little bag which never left his side. The Old Man used to create hell and mutter about hauling him up before a court-martial, but no threat yet devised had ever had the least effect on Little John.

Most of us stretched out on the ground behind the concrete shelter and watched Porta opening the booty of tins which he had purloined from somewhere or other. The first tin turned out to be full of gun grease. So did the second. And the third, and the fourth. The idiot had evidently pillaged an arms depot. He was the only one who seemed not to find it amusing, and, indeed, began threatening to knock people’s heads off until the Legionnaire caught his interest by suggesting we should attach the tins to a hand-grenade, tie the whole lot to a stick of phosphorus and hurl it into the enemy ranks. Had it not been for the Old Man putting his foot down, Porta would doubtless have tried out the new weapon there and then.

The attack started up again. The machine-guns grew white-hot. Barcelona operated the large mortar, his steel gloves hanging in shreds. There was no respite, no breathing space, no pause for thought. It was kill or be killed, and both we and the enemy were splashing about ankle-deep in blood. The stretch of sand that separated us, once so smooth and silvery, was now churned up into a sticky, rusty-brown mess.

In the distance, the sea had grown a veritable forest of masts. Between the sea and the beach, a multitude of landing-craft were disgorging more khaki-clad figures. Many of them fell before they could reach dry land. Many more staggered only a few yards up the beach before collapsing. But still the assault continued. An entire army was being thrown into the attack on the Normandy coast. If the attempt failed, it must surely be a question of years before they could gather their forces to try again.

We were all of us, by now, half crazed with thirst, and were not so particular as we had previously been in following Porta’s example and gorging ourselves on the water used for cooling the machine-guns. It was warm and oily and it stank to high heaven, but champagne itself could not have been more welcome. And we ourselves smelt none too sweet, if it came to that.

Indifferently, a group of us stood watching as an unknown soldier burnt to a cinder in a sheet of flame that was clear blue. It was a new type of grenade being used by the enemy. It contained phosphorus and it burnt fiercely on contact with the air.

Imperative blasts on a whistle sent us once more into action. We surged forward, impatiently brushing aside the dying and the wounded, many of whom clutched at our feet, came crawling towards us over the sodden sand. This was the counter-offensive; there was neither time nor room for pity. We rushed on, with grenades whizzing past our ears, exploding to right and to left. We ran unthinkingly, blindly like robots. A man who paused for reflection was a man who was lost.

More ships, more boats, more landing-craft. There seemed no end to the khaki figures that emerged from the water and launched themselves up the beach. But most of them were no more than kids. All that they knew had been learnt at home, on the barrack square, on manoeuvres, in the lecture room. This was their baptism of fire and they ran like crazed innocents into the mouths of our guns.

Slowly, we fell back. The English pursued us. We led them on, until at last they were there, where we wanted them, directly beneath us and in range of our flamethrowers. They threw themselves flat to the ground, seeking cover behind the chalky slopes that rose from the beaches. For our part, we took shelter amongst the concrete ruins of the blockhouse, wriggling our bodies into craters and shell holes. We were filthy, we were exhausted, and we stank. No doubt about it. I found myself irrelevantly wishing that we might be compared, in our present state, with the brave warriors of Nuremberg, loyal Party men all, who marched and countermarched like clockwork toys on their everlasting parades, with all their glittering pomp and their oppressively scrubbed faces, banging on their drums and blowing on their trumpets and waving their pretty little flags in the air. We lay grimed and bleeding and louse-ridden in our dug-outs, but somehow I felt we could manage to make those puppets of Nuremberg look pretty stupid.

I glanced casually at my companion on the left. He bared his teeth at me in what passed for a smile, and it struck me that he was no longer a human being, he was a wild beast. We were all wild beasts, all of us who were fighting in this lousy war. A sob of rage and fear rose up and choked me, set my whole body shaking and my teeth rattling. I bit hard on to the butt of my rifle, I yelled and I screamed, I shouted out for my mother as men always do when their nerve suddenly deserts them. It was a common affliction of the front line. Sooner or later it happened to us all. And when it did, there was but one thought uppermost in your mind: get the hell out of it! Get up and run! The devil with their courts-martial, the devil with their prisons, their Torgaus, the devil with the whole shit-ridden lot of ’em …

I was jerked to a bone-jarring halt by a knee thrust into the small of my back. A large hand caught hold of my hair. A second large hand jammed my helmet back on my head. I looked up and saw Little John.

‘Just take a good deep breath and pull yourself together,’ he said, quite sensibly for him. ‘It’ll pass, me old fruit, it’ll pass … No need to panic, so long as your head’s still on your shoulders.’

He grinned encouragingly at me, but it was no use: my nerve had gone, and all self-control with it. I had seen it happen to others in the past; I should see it happen to many more in the future. Porta, perhaps; Little John himself. The Old Man had been near to it, the Legionnaire had been through it several times, and he was a veteran of fourteen years’ experience. But for the moment it was my turn to suffer, and I stood shivering in Little John’s bearlike grasp. He wiped the sweat off my face with a piece of dirty rag, pushed me further back into the remains of the blockhouse, stuck a cigarette between my lips. Vaguely, I was aware of the Old Man crawling towards us.

‘What’s up? Not feeling too good? Take a deep breath and try to relax. Just hole up here for a while until it passes. No need for panic, things aren’t going to start up again for a bit.’

Calmly, he pulled out a roll of sticking plaster, hacked off a length and covered up a long gash in my forehead. How or when I’d received it, I couldn’t recall. My sobs continued, but the cigarette had a soothing effect. And, over and above all else, I was no longer alone. I was in the company of friends; friends who cared, friends who understood. I knew for a certainty that they would risk their lives for me and would share their last crust of bread with me. It is, perhaps, the one solace of war, this extraordinary and selfless friendship that exists among men who are forced to live and fight together day after day, week after week, for an indefinite period of time.

Gradually, I became calmer. The crisis passed, and I knew that for the moment, at least, I could carry on. There would be other attacks, that was almost certain. And they would come upon me suddenly, with no warning. But it was useless to dwell upon it, for that way lay madness.

The Old Man suggested a game of cards and we settled back in our concrete fissure and they let me win, and I knew that they let me, and they knew that I knew, but what the hell, we were friends. And quite suddenly, for no reason, we began to laugh, and while life was not exactly rosy it was not quite such hell as it had been.

D-Day plus 1. The day after … Contact with the enemy had been broken. Losses on both sides were hideous. Hardly one surrounding village that had remained intact. Most were razed to the ground. Porta just went on eating. I do believe he could have consumed a whole cow and suffered no visible after-effects. Long, thin and bony, with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, he ate, belched, farted, ate again, belched again, always seemed to be in a state of near starvation. And yet remained the picture of rude health. The war machine had evidently played havoc with his metabolism.

On this occasion, he had a bean-feast. No more tins of gun grease, he had uncovered a cache of real Argentinian corned beef. We made it into a hash and heated it up in our helmets over spirit stoves. Porta stirred it gently with the point of a bayonet, Little John added a tot of rum that he had picked up from somewhere. Even Major Hinka consented to join in the meal. It was the best we had had for many a day.

I was on guard near the machine-gun. An unpleasant task, because a thick fog seemed to rise from every crater and smothered the earth like a shroud. Occasionally a rocket or a stream of tracer pierced a way through the mist. My companions were asleep, lying curled up on the ground, nose to tail like dogs. A light rain was falling, the wind was whipping itself up somewhere above the fog. I was alone, and it was bloody freezing. I huddled deeper into my great coat, pulled down my helmet over my ears, and still the rain found a way in and trickled in cold rivers down my back.

Check the machine-gun. Check the firing mechanism, check the shell-ejector, check the belt-feed. It was tedious, but our lives could depend upon it.

From somewhere beyond the point I judged the enemy to be there came a slight clicking noise. Ominous and steely. What were they preparing now? Listen hard for several minutes, but nothing happens.

Away to my right is a dandelion, bright yellow and all alone in the wilderness. The only flower that grows for miles around. What was this country like before the war came and destroyed it? Trees and fields and cows. Buttercups and daisies. Juicy green grass, rich earth, neat hedges and winding lanes. What is it now? Disfigured and bloody. I wonder where the people have gone, whether they still live, whether they will ever return.

Away to the north, the rumble of heavy artillery. The sky suddenly glows deep crimson. That must be Omaha, where the Americans are landing. I turn to the south and follow the pattern of the flaming rockets that are cutting through the night, extinguishing all forms of life wherever they come to earth.

Porta talks to himself in his sleep. You listen at first, in case he says something interesting, but after a while you get sick of it. His nocturnal soliloquies are always, predictably, on the same subject: food. Quietly, the Legionnaire curls out of his sleeping position and wanders away to a dark corner. Makes a noise like a waterfall. Hard to understand how anyone could sleep through such a racket, but surprisingly they do. The Legionnaire stumbles back and collapses with a grunt between Little John and Gregor. Little John kicks out in his sleep. Gregor gets on to his back and starts snoring.

The night drags on. After a bit I find I’m dreaming, and the dream is so vivid it seems it’s actually happening. I. . .