SS General by Sven Hassel Read Free Book Online

that's the worst. Everyone is talking about Stalingrad, I hope you're not there, it sounds like hell. Hohne, the boy on the fourth floor, that is, came home on leave but after two days he had a telegram say ing to go back to his regiment. He'd only just left and the police came for him, his wife is half mad not knowing what's happened. She spent a whole day at the Kommandantur trying to find out but nobody will tell her This war is cruel, it's so hard on everybody, men fight ing and the women not knowing and even the children getting killed. They've just cut down the rations again Last week I heard they were selling horsemeat under the counter in Tauenzienstrasse, but I got there too late, it was all gone. Tomorrow I'm going to try at Moritz Platz see if I can get some without using coupons. The children need meat, it's not for myself, I wouldn't care for it Willi please look after yourself, because what would we do without you if you never came back? The sirens have just gone again, it'll be the English, they always come between five and eight. We've had three days without them but I knew they'd be back. Can't leave us alone, it seems. Please write to me soon, we all send our love,
    Liselotte.
    P.S. Don't worry about us here, we're quite all right, only we wonder where you are.
    We read Willi's letter lingeringly and lovingly. Mail was scarce in our part of the world and we shared it in much the same way as we shared cigarettes. A letter to one of us was a letter to all. And besides, the burden of a letter from home was almost too much for one man to bear by himself. We were all greedy for news, yet whenever it came it unsettled us.
    We prepared the sleds and moved out as darkness fell. An icy wind was cutting across our faces and whipping the frozen snow into great peaks. We heard the guns boom out at Yersovka, where they were bombarding Stalingrad. Rumor had it that an entire Russian division was pinned down in Rynok, and that a factory on the Isle of Barricady had been destroyed. Rumor also had it that the 100th Infantry Division and the Rumanian 1st Tank Division had been destroyed. For the most part, we stolidly disbelieved everything we heard, good or bad. It was, however, a fact that the 2nd Rumanian Infantry Division had bumped into the Russians a few days back and in their panic-stricken retreat down the banks of the Volga the majority of them had been shot by advancing German troops and their bodies left where they fell, to discourage any more such displays. Their commanding officer had been hanged by his feet outside the Spartakos factory and was still rotting there on public view.
    Tired and irritable, and so cold that we felt our very blood had frozen, we moved ahead with the sleds. We had to be at the front with the reinforcements by eleven o'clock, before the Russian artillery started up. The bastards were so regular, you could set your watch by them. We knew eleven o'clock was the deadline, but it was hard going across Selvanov and Serafimovitch and you had to be constantly on the alert that you weren't heading into the Russian lines at sixty miles an hour and not able to stop until you were well and truly in their midst.
    We traveled thirty-five men to a sled. The one carrying the ammunition was third in the column, that being the least vulnerable position for the most vulnerable of the sleds. Lieutenant Wenck was traveling with the ammunition. Officer though he was, we regarded him with more respect and less scorn than most of his kind. In fact, we almost paid him the compliment of treating him as one of ourselves, he had been at the front so long.
    Porta was, as usual, in the lead. He was as good as a mine detector any day, he seemed almost to sense the presence of those little surprise packages the partisans were in the habit of leaving for us everywhere they went. Tiny sat by his side on the front seat, manning the machine gun, a pile of grenades near at hand. Gregor and I were crouched behind Porta, the