Guns At Cassino Read Free Page A

sing-song. 'You toss a coin and takes yer choice - heads the bastards take a lump out of yer arse, tails, they kick it.'
    He tugged at the obstinate little animal again, whose hooves were muffled in sacking to cut down the noise.
    `All right,' von Dodenburg whispered, grinning. 'You've registered your protest, but keep the noise down. They tell me those Africans up there have sharp ears.'
    `Yeah, and sharp knives too,' Schulze said dourly. 'Those Goums cut the tails off a couple of paras last week and when a patrol found them, they had their tails stuck in their traps.'
    `Can't worry you, Schulze,' the handsome young SS Major commented, waving his hand for the column to continue up the steep, treacherous track. 'The way you've been abusing yours, it must have fallen off years ago.'
    Behind them in the darkness, the tough, rangy South Tyrolean farm boys who made up most of the First Company laughed softly and urged on their commandeered Italian mules, which carried the ammunition and rations they would need once they had captured the Peak and had dug in.
    They plodded on carefully, bodies held tense and expectant, waiting for the sudden dramatic hush of a flare which would indicate that they had been discovered by the French. But none came. As a thick cold mist began to roll down from the peak, they started to work their way through the abandoned trenches. Once von Dodenburg stopped and glanced down at a dead paratrooper, sprawled on his back, his legs spread apart, his jump-suit ripped open down the middle. Where his genitals had once been, there was now nothing but a bloody mess. Schulze's story had not been another of his macabre inventions. Von Dodenburg swallowed hard and straightening up hastily, urged the grenadiers on before they could get a proper look at the para's mutilated body.
    They passed between two miserable white-painted Italian cottages, their pathetic little gardens, littered with French and German equipment, both roofs gone. Kuno von Dodenburg, followed by Schulze carrying his Schmeisser machine pistol, gave them a quick examination. But they backed out hastily. They stank rankly of poverty, animals and human excreta - and in the second one, an old Italian woman lay huddled in a corner, one shoe gone, her black skirt thrown up over her head to reveal the obscenely naked flesh beneath.
    `The Frogs don't think much of putting out sentries, do they sir?' Schulze said after a while, as they left the huts behind them.
    `No, obviously not,' von Dodenburg answered softly, still trying to absorb the discovery of the mutilated para and the raped Italian crone. 'They're too confident they have beaten us for good, it seems.'
    He glanced up at the stark black outline of the peak far above, towering up through the grey cold mist.
    `Wotan will teach them to be more careful next time, won't it, Schulze?'
    `If you say so, sir,' Schulze answered non-committally.
    They plodded on.
     
    Four hours later the sentries did not have to wake them in the miserable holes they had scraped in the iron-hard 'earth, ready for the dawn stand-to. The mist that covered the mountain side was freezing cold and most of them lay in their camouflaged capes, awake and shivering.
    Stiff-legged and shuddering, Major von Dodenburg crossed over to the battalion HQ, a hole covered by four camouflaged capes, clipped together to hide the light of the lantern. Here and there a trooper was attempting to wash himself from the water in his canteen; but most of them were standing around in a daze, munching mechanically on slices of hard Army bread or urinating on the naked rock. As he passed the mule lines, Schulze got up sleepily from where he had been bedding down between two of the animals and gave him a parody of a salute.
    `Well, I must admit the bastards keep you warm,' he said thickly. ‘But both of them snored worse than a couple of drunken whores!'
    Von Dodenburg grinned and pushing open the flap of the cape, dropped inside. The radio operator,