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

Butcher exclaimed in sudden excitement. ‘Over there!’
    He pointed a gloved hand that shook slightly at the trees. A faint black trail of smoke was rising above them, caught immediately by the wind as soon as it cleared the protection of the trees and dispersed at once.
    ‘ Smoke,’ Schulze said.
    ‘ Food!’ the Butcher croaked, suddenly hoarse with excitement.
    ‘ Food? How do you know that, you greedy chowhound?’ Schulze rasped angrily.
    The Butcher grasped him by the lapels and as big as Schulze was the other man nearly swung him off his feet, he was so excited. ‘I know, Schulze, because I can smell it! I can smell, it, do you hear! There’s grub over there ....’
    It was a small convoy, a couple of halftracks, three tractors and a truck, black against the melted snow, which dripped in sad monotony. The thin smoke still drifted into the sky, although it must have been hours since the vehicles were surprised by the bombers which had destroyed them.
    ‘ Ours?’ the Golden Pheasant queried in a small voice, for he like the rest of the men standing on the ridge-line looking down at the wrecked trucks and the dead bodies scattered all around them, was awed and somehow depressed by the sight, as if he had never seen a dead soldier in his life before.
    ‘ Yes,’ Schulze answered tonelessly, taking his eyes off the ghastly tableau to his immediate right: charred bodies heaped together indiscriminately, a clawlike hand held upright by the frost, a pair of unblinking resentful eyes, a bloody stump of what had once been a leg. ‘The poor shits must have been making it west when they got hit. Probably Popov Stormovik dive-bombers.’
    There was a heavy silence, broken a few moments later by the Butcher saying, hardly able to control his voice, ‘But there’s grub down there, Schulze.’
    The big sergeant repressed a curse of anger. Of course, the big greedy swine was right. Food was the most important thing now; it would give them the energy the men desperately needed to keep going across this terrible freezing waste. ‘Matz, post a couple of sentries up here. The rest of you, follow me. We’re going down.’
    Led by the Butcher, who sniffed the air like a dog scenting a juicy piece of meat, they slithered down the slope eagerly, half up to their waists in deep snow at times and commenced the ghastly business of searching the wrecked halftracks and other vehicles, even turning out the pockets of the stiff, hard-as-wood corpses in their burning desire for food.
    But it was Butcher who found what had caused the smell which had first attracted his attention. Thrusting aside the dead driver of one of the tractors, his body ripped open from chin to abdomen, the frozen viscera, a dull red-grey, swollen out of the tremendous hole in the corpse’s stomach like a gigantic sea-anemone, sniffing eagerly all the time, he discovered what he sought. A huge pile of blutwurst , that had swelled up and burst in the tremendous heat generated by the bombs which had destroyed the little convoy, and which was still bubbling with the last of the warmth, spreading its delightful odour throughout the shattered wagon the tractor had been towing.
    Greedily, all discipline forgotten now, the starving men dipped their dirty frozen paws into the gooey red-black mess and swallowed it with cries of delight, their eyes gleaming with sudden animation, as if they were in that state of mind when one might as well laugh as cry.
    Schulze ’s mood was too sombre to be attracted by the thought of food, although he was as famished as the rest. It was thus buried in his gloomy thoughts, his gaze fixed on a group of young soldiers, faces set waxeningly in looks of eternal fear, that Matz approached him with his suggestion. ‘Schulzi, I’ve been thinking.’
      ‘ Don’t,’ Schulze answered, without turning, still wondering why teenage German lads like the ones opposite had to die out here in this goddam nameless piece of Russia. For what? ‘Yer