SS General by Sven Hassel Read Free Book Online Page A

MG pointing skyward, ready for any attack that might be launched by Russian infantrymen in the area.
    It was no joyride, being in a motorized sled driven by Porta. The thing weighed three tons and he flung it up and down, from side to side, with the same recklessness as if he were in a car at an amusement park. We shot up hills like fireballs from the cannon's mouth and fell straight down the other side, landing with a spine-jarring crash on the ground. Porta laughed so much that he several times lost all control and we tore through the snow at seventy or eighty miles an hour, the wind cutting across our faces as we clutched the sides of the sled and prayed, our faces green with suppressed vomit.
    "Wheeee!" shouted Porta, as the sled launched itself into space from the summit of a fairly steep hill.
    We held our breath and closed our eyes as we waited for the crash. Tiny and Porta roared with exhilaration and the sled hit the hard-packed snow and bounced up again.
    "This is the last time I ever travel with you, you brainless bastard!" sobbed Heide, almost choking with rage and panic.
    Porta merely flung back his head and laughed. Even as I watched, he took both hands off the wheel and gave his attention to a bottle of vodka he had with him. I turned in despair to Gregor.
    "He's drunk," I said. "We shall all be killed."
    Gregor was hanging onto the MG for dear life. "I'd rather be killed than suffer this much longer," he muttered through clenched teeth.
    Porta laughed again, rather wildly, and had another swig from his bottle. We had all been given supplementary rations of vodka, a liter each, before we left, but Porta, in his usual manner, had ended up with three times more than anyone else.
    "Where exactly are we going?" inquired a young and rather superior NCO, who had recently joined us and was fresh out of training.
    "To the war, my young friend, to the war!" The Legionnaire, who was the only one apart from Tiny and Porta who seemed unmoved by the crazy cavortings of the sled, patted the boy condescendingly on the back. "You shall see action at last," he promised him. "You shall see men risk their lives and their sanity for little bits of tin to hang on their chest; except that most of them will end up with little bits of wood to stick in their graves instead."
    "Yes, yes, I know all that!" said the boy, frowning with impatience. "But where are we going?"
    "You'll see soon enough. Don't be so eager. Wait till you get there, you'll probably wish you'd never come."
    "What do you mean by that?" The boy turned on the Legionnaire, his blue eyes narrowed. He was a model of National Socialist soldiery; eager as hell to come to grips with the wicked Communist bogeymen and quite unable to picture the degrading butchery that it entailed. "I'm not scared of a load of lousy Communists!"
    The Legionnaire looked at him and slowly shook his head. "You may not be scared now, kid, but you'd damn well better be later on--because that's the only way you're likely to survive. Don't underestimate the enemy, they're not quite the little paper dolls they made them out to be at home."
    Contemptuously the boy turned his back on the Legionnaire. I sat watching him and wondering how long he was likely to last.
    It took us four hours of Porta's switchback driving to reach the rear positions. The temperature was way below freezing point, and although we were packed with newspaper, we still shivered in our thin capes.
    There was no fresh snow on the track here, it was a river of ice and the sled zipped along the surface, which was exhilarating on level ground and heart-stopping on slopes or sharp corners. We tore down the side of a steep hill, narrowly missing a boulder which would have chopped us to bits, and found ourselves approaching a hairpin bend at almost a hundred miles an hour. Below us lay the charred remains of the stricken village of Dobrinka. The slightest error of judgment by Porta and we should be thrown hurtling into space toward the