Order of Battle Read Online Free PDF

be glad to get out of the place. He stepped up into the driver’s seat and took the wheel, as Kratzer joined him in the cab.
    The truck swayed ponderously as it bounced down the dirt road. The load lay heavy on the floorboards in the back. Willi drove carefully. This wasn’t the time to break a spring, or an axle.
    He whistled softly to himself: “ Du Heine Fliege—”
    He remembered it now. Mutti used to sing it to him—so long, long ago.
Du kleine Fliege,
Wenn ich dich kriege,
Dann reiss ich dir dein kleines Beinchen aus.
Dann musst du hinken
Auf deinen Schinken —
Dann kommst du nie mehr wieder nach deinem Haus
    Funny he should think of it now. And of his mother . . .
    Willi was a war child. His father, Walter, was killed on the western front in 1916, the very day he returned from home leave. Willi was born nine months later. He was brought up by his mother. He remembered her well from his early childhood. Mutti would sing to him the old German nursery songs and she would read stories from Der Struwwelpeter : about Konrad, who sucked his thumbs, and had them cut off by the tailor; about the crybaby, whose eyeballs dropped from their sockets; about Cruel Paul and Slovenly Peter, and little Fritz, who was eaten alive by a wolf; about Hans, who was sliced in two sliding down a banister; and the little girl who burned herself to a pile of ashes. . . .
    He still remembered the book cover vividly: Konrad, with his bleeding thumb stumps. It said: “Merry Stories and Funny Pictures for Children 3 to 6 Years of Age.” He hadn’t liked the picture of Konrad at first; it made him afraid to suck his own thumb. Then he stopped that, and he was proud of it. He always secretly felt that it served Konrad right, having his thumbs cut off—because he didn’t stop. And he got used to the pictures.
    Later he was less and less close to Mutti, especially during the four years up to his nineteenth birthday, when he was in the Hitler Youth. And then, of course, he joined the Waffen SS. . . .
    Kratzer brought Willi out of his reveries.
    “Up there,” he ordered. “Turn left. Into the forest.”
    In a small clearing just inside the woods, hidden from view from the road, another truck was waiting. It was not a Wehrmacht vehicle, but a run-down civilian truck which had been converted from gasoline- to wood-burning in the wartime effort to conserve vital resources. The big cylindrical furnace tank and the wood storage bin were mounted clumsily behind the cab. A man in civilian clothes, leather jacket and cap stood puffing on a pipe nearby. He carefully extinguished it with a work-hardened thumb and put it in his pocket as Willi brought his truck to a halt next to the other vehicle.
    The men jumped from the truck.
    “ Los!” Kratzer commanded. “ Die Kisten umladen! All the boxes into the other truck! Get going!” He made an impatient gesture with his submachine gun.
    The two SS guards put away their weapons. At once they and the civilian began the transfer of the heavy boxes from the Wehrmacht truck to the wood burner. Willi looked curiously at the battered vehicle. Kratzer joined him. He grinned.
    “We don’t want to attract too much attention,” he said. “The enemy has air patrols in the area we have to go through. But they won’t waste ammunition on a decrepit old wood-burning truck like that!”
    “Will we make it?” Willi asked dubiously. “Into the mountains?”
    “Of course. It’s four hundred and twenty kilometers to Rattendorf from here. We’ll be there tomorrow. Early.”
    Willi hoped the major was right. It wouldn’t be easy to negotiate the Alpine roads in a shitty, worn-out wood burner.
    The men had almost finished reloading the boxes. The three of them were swinging the last heavy box to heave it up onto the pile on the truck. Suddenly one of them lost his grip. The two others, unable to hold the box, let go. The box crashed to the ground, splintering open.
    The three men stared at the shattered box. Mingled