Rage of Battle

otherwise died from hypothermia had they been allowed to stop for any length of time.

Even so, the cockney’s earlier comment to David Brentwood and Waite that they were all “for the high jump “—execution-made the prisoners reluctant to keep up the punishing pace. “Hope the bastard that’s got my uniform is warm,” complained a U.S. engineer. “I’m sure as hell not.”

“Least you’ve got your boots, mate,” said Fred Waite, the British private who had teamed up with David Brentwood. “Least your twinkies won’t fell off.”

“Speak for yourself. Anyway—”

“Schweig dock!” yelled a guard.

“Shut up your fucking self,” said Waite, turning to Brentwood, his breath steaming the air. “That Kraut’s getting on my tit.”

Brentwood said nothing, glancing anxiously about as another stream of POWs, thirty or so Americans, up ahead were being melded into the main column heading for Gobfeld. For a moment David thought he recognized Thelman, but the main POW stream quickly swallowed up the new additions before Brentwood could know for sure. Dizzy, like so many of the other prisoners, from lack of food and sleep, and the effects of the cold, David found it necessary to muster all his strength merely to keep going in the column. Nevertheless, he tried to increase his pace.

“Easy, Davey, old son,” cautioned Waite, his breath no longer visible in the air, his body losing the battle. “Not the World Cup, you know.”

“Thought I saw a buddy of mine,” answered David.

“Yes, well relax. Husband your energy, old son. That’s the—” Waite wanted to say “ticket” but couldn’t go on, gasping for air like an exhausted swimmer. Brentwood took the Englishman’s left arm and draped it about his shoulder, taking his weight. “You okay, Fred?”

“No.”

“Schnell! Schnell!” one of the guards yelled, soon joined by several others shouting at the stragglers on the flanks. Brentwood heard the shouts of an altercation several yards behind them. The snow muffled the tramp of the column, and the voices seemed unusually loud, bouncing off the pine trees. “Schnell!” the guard kept shouting. Brentwood saw it was the Englishman with the badly injured eye. The bandage had slipped down from his eye, the blood now a dark plum color against the snow. The man was sitting on a stump, winding up the bandage and telling the guard to “stuff it!”

Several prisoners stopped, including David, and within seconds it was looking ugly; a feldwebel was running down the side of the column, with two other guards trying to keep up with him, other guards yelling for prisoners to stay in column, prisoners retorting, some of them derisively clapping the Stasi guards. “Run, girls! Run, you sausage guts!”

The feldwebel stopped by the Englishman, drew his pistol, and ordered the man to get up. The Englishman refused and the feldwebel shot him. There was silence, then a bulge of prisoners forming around the dead Englishman, his bandage fallen, like a streamer in the snow. Guards either side of the feldwebel held cocked Sudayev submachine guns. Suddenly David saw Thelman fifty yards ahead of him, also looking back at what was going on. The tension hung in the air like icicles. The feldwebel shouted and a few prisoners shuffled forward, the outrage still thick in the air, but the submachine guns were staring the prisoners down at point-blank range. “Any soldiers stopping,” shouted the feldwebel, “will be shot. You understand!”

“Christ—” said Waite, the bottom seeming to drop out from what David had thought was the Englishman’s reservoir of high morale. “I’m — I’m for the knackers,” confessed Waite. “Like bloody running downhill — once you slow down, you’re buggered.”

David had tried to get Thelman’s attention, but he had disappeared into the column in front of a tall flyer, one of the glider pilots who’d overshot Munster, coming down too close to the Teutoburger Wald.

As the POW column emerged from the wood a few miles south of Gobfeld, the prisoners were surprised to see a convoy with ten olive-green army trucks with Russian markings on the rear bumper.

“Bloody ‘ell,” said Waite, his teeth chattering, as they were ordered aboard the trucks. “This is more like it.”

“Yeah?” came a doubting voice from behind. “Where are they taking us?”

“If they wanted to do us in, mate,” said another Englishman, “they could have done it in the woods.”

The doubting voice was silenced, but Waite himself gave David a very cool, practical reason why the woods wouldn’t have been a place of execution. “Not enough open space to bury three hundred of us, unless they used ‘dozers.” As if to underscore his point, Waite now remarked on the fact that they were loading the dead Englishman onto one of the trucks. “No evidence,” said Waite.

“Take cover!” shouted one of the prisoners. Three Thunderbolts, terrifyingly close to the ground, swept out of the cloud above the trees, a short burst from the lead Gau cannon, its rotary barrel spewing a narrow cone of thirty-millimeter tracer, exploding three trucks in less than two seconds. The men aboard the trucks, half of them on fire, dropped from the tailgates, rolling in the snow at the roadside.

The other two Thunderbolts, pilots so near, they were plainly visible as they whooshed by, withheld their fire the moment they recognized Allied POWs waving them off-NATO’s Thunderbolts’ supply of thirty-millimeter tank- killing ammunition dangerously low due to the heavy convoy losses.

The Stasi guards, short of trucks now, were already quickly selecting the fittest of those who had survived, loading them onto the other vehicles. David Brentwood and Waite, already on one of the other trucks in the middle of the column, found themselves squashed hard against the vehicle’s cabin by the press of newcomers.

“Stumble-Ass!” It was Thelman, face lighting up the moment he spotted Brentwood.

“Schweig dock!” shouted one of the four guards assigned to the truck, but in the confusion, no one took any notice.

“Buddy of mine,” explained David, grinning for the first time in the last seventy-six hours. “We were at Parris Island together. Same DI. Called me ‘Stumble-Ass’—Thelman ‘Thelma.’ He was a son of a bitch.”

“Charming,” said a cultured English voice.

When they reached Gobfeld, the convoy roared on through the town.

“Thought someone said we were stopping here.”

“You’ve been misinformed, old boy,” came the English voice. “We’re going to a holiday camp in Stadthagen.”

“Where’s that?”

“Seven miles farther on, I believe.”

As the truck bumped its way north over the artillery-scored road, snow started falling again, but this time more densely than before.

“What’s in Stadthagen, Fritz?” asked one of the Americans. The guard said nothing. “Anyone speak Kraut?” asked someone else. The cultured English voice, which Brentwood could now see belonged to a junior lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, owned up to knowing “a few words” of German. In fact, he was fluent, and the rest of the men fell silent so that he could talk to the guard, but it was still difficult to hear above the high whine and rattle of the convoy.

“He says,” the Englishman reported to his eager audience, “that there are no girls in Stadthagen and that it will be hard work.”

“What will be?”

The Englishman asked the guard to be more specific. “He says there is a ‘store’ there. A very big store.”

“Macy’s?” suggested Thelman.

“Harrods?” said another.

David was pleased to see the morale picking up now that they were off their feet, at least for a while, and in the relative warmth of the truck, even if they were destined to work hard at whatever it was in Stadthagen.

“I think,” proffered the English engineer, “that he rather means stores. I should think he’s alluding to a prepo site of some kind. Did we have one at Stadthagen?” He looked about the truck.

“Yes,” answered a British lance corporal, wearing the insignia of RAF ground crew. “Ruddy great petrol dump.”

“Ah!” said the engineer. “Then, chaps, we’ll ‘roll out the barrel’!”