Blitzfreeze Read Online Free PDF Page B

and -2s. The PAK will be next to Party HQ and the Komsomol 5 . Party HQ is the last thing they abandon.
    Gods, how it rains! Rain is coming in through the gasventilators. If rain can get through them gas can too! Involuntarily I look towards my gas-mask hanging over by the periscope. It has two filters. One of them has been used for distilling spirits and smells sweetly of alcohol. It ought to be a great help in a gas attack. You’d be half cut before you’d even noticed you were choking on chlorine.
    At the roadside, half in the ditch, a lorry lies on its side. One of the big three-axled heavy artillery jobs. Its howitzers have been blown over into the orchard. One wheel has disappeared completely. The strike has torn up a whole row of fruit-trees. Ripe apples are lying everywhere. 1941 was a good year for fruit. The apple-pickers had been hard at work when the air-borne mine arrived. A ladder has been cut across as neatly as if with a circular saw. An apple-girl has been blasted inextricably into it. She has been blown almost completely out of her clothes. One shoe hangs from her leftfoot and a piece of amber on a chain is still round her neck. A piece of a rung has gone through her stomach and sticks out of her back. Dead artillerymen lie around the lorry. One of them still clutches a bottle of wine in his hand. He met death in the middle of a swig.
    By the gate lies the body of a German infantryman. He cannot be more than seventeen years of age. Both fists are buried in his entrails as if he were trying to retain them. His ribs are bared. They look like polished ivory. In the black crater, blasted by the mine, water chuckles pleasantly, washing away blood and torn remnants of humanity.
    ‘Odd how wars always start in the autumn, and how they slow down in the spring,’ Porta philosophies. ‘Wonder why?’
    When summer begins to wane war begins in all seriousness. Then the infantry skirmishing is over. It usually starts with the sound of engines starting up night after night over on the other side.
    Suddenly, just before some dawn, things start to move. The first twenty-four hours are always the worst. There are so many casualties. After a couple of days things begin to ease off. Not because the war itself gets any easier. Just the opposite. What happens is that we get used to living with death.
    During the last three weeks fresh troops have been pouring in. Night and day boots have marched past our white castle. Companies, battalions, regiments, divisions. In the beginning we watched them curiously. They smelt of France. We all longed to be back in France. Then we were wealthy. Porta and Tiny did big business. In partnership with a Marineobermaat they once sold a fully-armed torpedo-boat. Tiny reckoned on receiving an English decoration when the war was over. The two shady gentlemen who had bought the torpedo-boat had promised him one.
    We thunder through the village without meeting resistance. The heat from the exhaust makes us sleepy. Porta has the greatest of difficulty in keeping the heavy tank moving straight between the lines of troops marching on both sidesof the road. A moment’s inattention and he could flatten an entire company.
    Our own infantry are lying on the back of the tank half-unconscious from the carbon-monoxide. It is dangerous to lie on top of the engine between the two big exhaust-pipes, but they still do it. It’s so lovely and warm.
    Tiny sprawls on his ammunition and curses in his sleep. His snores are almost enough to drown the noise of the motor. Four fat lice race across his face. They are the rare kind with cross-markings on their backs. They are said to be particularly dangerous.
    They give us a Deutschmark for every good specimen we turn in to the medical orderly. He puts them in a test-tube and sends them to Germany. We’ve never found out what they do with them back there. Porta has a theory that they wind up in a concentration camp for lice in which scientists are attempting to