Cauldron of Blood by Leo Kessler Read Free Book Online Page A

seemed like the blade of a sharp knife stabbing at their lungs. But while their upper bodies froze, their legs burnt with the sheer agony of every fresh step, lifting the snow-heavy boot from the white mire, placing it down, and forcing it to move yet another miserable half-metre. Indeed, it was only the iron discipline of the Wotan which kept them going and the efforts of Corporal Matz and Sergeant Schulze.
    Matz at the head of the column, supporting a semi-conscious Golden Pheasant for half the time, and Schulze bringing up the rear, seemed inexhaustible. Bullying, striking, cajoling, joking, pleading, the two of them kept the rest moving, ordering them not to swallow the hard snow to satisfy their raging thirst, dragging those who slumped down into the snow to their feet and kicking them on their way, carrying the weapon of some sobbing youth who moaned he could go on no longer, watching the tears freeze like pearls on the boy’s sunken face.
    Thus they struggled west, finding their way across this cruel endless landscape the best they could: green moss on the trunks of a group of birches indicating north, a sudden glimpse of the sun, a cold pale yellow ball sliding momentarily from behind the leaden clouds, and a quick estimate of where south lay by means of Schulze’s watch, acting as an emergency compass; a line of regularly bent trees on a ridge-line, an indication where north lay, for from there came the prevailing wind. On and on. Ever westwards.
    The Butcher, the most powerful man, apart from Schulze, in the whole force, husbanded his strength. Head tucked into his collar against the biting wind, his eyes narrowed to slits so that he did not have to see the wildly swaying young men all around him, he did what old heads always did in situations like this: he formed mental pictures of other and better times in order to forget the miserable present.
    At first it was women. Blondes with enormous breasts, clad in black stockings, who reclined lasciviously on silken sheets, exposing their well-rounded charms and secret places to him in complete, seductive abandon. Red-heads, wild with passion, their bodies covered with sweat as he pumped them full of his salami, whimpering and giving little screams of pleasure, ripping their nails along the length of his back in their ecstasy. Brunettes, dark eyes full of strange promises, who refused to let him touch them, but who indulged him in all kinds of wild-slow unknown perversions....
    But then the Butcher’s stomach started to rumble, and he forgot the women. Now he kept himself going by thinking of food: great steaming mounds of sauerkraut and huge red pig’s knuckles, heavy with yellow fat; heaped plates of boiled potatoes, surrounded by metres of succulent juicy wurst , cauldrons full of thick green pea-soup, in which swam whole sides of salt bacon....
    His eyes virtually closed against the icy wind, his stomach rolling enormously, he sniffed, the delightful visions forgotten now. He could smell something: something that had that sweet-sour odour of charred food. There was no mistaking it. It was the smell of the bottom of the great cauldrons they had used in his days as an apprentice butcher, to boil down the poorer quality pork after they slaughtered the pigs on Monday. Invariably the stuff got burnt.
    He opened his eyes, big nose twitching like that of a blood-hound attempting to scent a fugitive. He surveyed the blind-white plain, stopping in his tracks to do so, so excited at the thought that there might be food close at hand that he forgot the rest.
    ‘ What’s up with you?’ Schulze grunted, coming level with him. ‘You look as if yer gonna shoot yer wad in a mo.’
    The Butcher did not answer, his eyes sweeping the horizon, following the hills to his right around to the group of stark-black skeletal trees to his immediate front.
    ‘ Well, come on,’ Schulze snarled angrily, digging him in the ribs. ‘Piss or get off the pot! What’s up?’
    ‘ Look,’ the