The Bloody Road to Death by Sven Hassel Read Free Book Online Page B

Dimitrovgrad!’
    ‘We don’t give a fuck if it’s the ‘igh priest o’Jerusalem’s own piss!’roars Tiny. ‘Give it ’ere you Easter bleedin’maniac’
    ‘He’s bringing us
bad lucky
shouts Barcelona furiously. ‘When I was with the Mountain Brigade, we had to drag a bastard like him about with us. Mahogany trees fell on us. The troop-transporter broke down. We walked straight into a minefield that cut us to ribbons. At Drutus the mountain rolled down on us. A month of it, we had! A Russki deserter – a commissar – convinced us finally it was all that pissin’parson’s fault. But you know the Mountain boys – missionaries to a blasted man. Singin’psalms over the poor dead ’uns and
nobody’d
do this parson in. The Russki did it for us. He was educated up to have no moral scruples about doin’a parson. He crept up behind ’im while he was gettin’round some Georgian clotted cream. Bang! And the parson’s brains’re mixed up with the cream. The very same evening, lads, our luck was back with us.
    ‘Everythin’went like a dream till we got to Elbruz where there was a new parson waiting for us. Off pisses our luck again. Eight days after he arrived the whole bloody Brigade’s sittin’up in Valhalla.’
    Fast as a cat the Old Man is up by the side of the padre, tears the goatskin from his hands and throws it to Porta.
    ‘You’re responsible to me for the contents!’
    ‘Well,
well
!’ Porta bows deeply. ‘You trust me
that
much?Even my old dad wouldn’t have. Least not since he caught me drinking from his private bottle of
Slivovitz?
    We march steeply upwards and meet cactus again. Tiny’s body towers like the side of a house in front of me. His language is almost turning the air blue about him. When he stops I bang into him. He has the SMG, with tripod and all, strapped to his back. He seems tireless. He takes one step to my three. His size is abnormal. Huge muscles swell the tight-fitting uniform. His strength is abnormal. He can shoulder-charge a wall and down it goes. Breaking bricks with a single chop of the edge of his hand is child’s-play to him.
    Porta is confident that Tiny’s great-grandfather was a gorilla which had got loose from Hagenbeck and raped his great-grandmother. She was digging peat, says Porta, just outside the Zoological Gardens at the time. Tiny is quite proud of this anecdote.
    I get myself tangled in a patch of thorn. I bend to free myself and a branch whips across my face, ripping it open. Blood pours down. I stumble, and the long thorns go through my uniform and bore into the flesh like bayonets.
    Porta helps me out. The unit takes a break while the medical orderly extracts the poisonous thorns and treats the wounds. By afternoon I am swelling up and have a high fever. Luckily the orderly has a supply of serum. He bangs the needle into me straight through the uniform and camouflage jacket. It feels as if it goes straight into a lung. Raging I hit out at him with my Mpi. The needle snaps off as he jumps to safety.
    ‘You wicked monkey,’ he yells, pulling out his P-38. ‘I’ll teach you to lay your filthy hands on the Medical Corps!’
    His pistol cracks twice before the others reach him and wrest it from him. It takes him a long time to simmer down and even then he won’t touch me any more.
    A
500
who has had medical training removes the broken needle from my back.
    ‘Death by thirst is the worst death of all,’ says the Legionnaire, staring out over the stony desert. The air shimmers in the heat.
    We reach an impenetrable wall of scrub. The machetes cannot touch it.
    ‘Back!’orders the Old Man, setting his teeth.
    Despair and fear slowly take hold of us. It all seems hopeless.
    We hear violent firing – which seems to come from the other side of the hills. A Maxim stammers furiously and an MG-42 replies. The path leads us back into the bush.
    Porta recognizes a spot we have passed earlier. We halt, overcome by fatigue, and let ourselves drop to the