The Western Lands Read Free Page B

You can tell how long a soldier has been at the front by how much he shivers. The new ones are shaking like they had malaria. The old hands move slow, like lizards.
    Wilhelm was lucky. His colonel in the Waffen SS was an addict. As soon as a town was captured he was into the drugstores and the doctors' offices. Wilhelm had a superb Männlicher with telescopic sights. It's a wunderbar feeling, to tag someone at five hundred yards, like the hand of God, the tiny figure falling in the snow . . . way out there near the skyline. And he practiced with his P38, worked over by a gunsmith and with a butt custom-molded to his hand. He could hit snowballs in the air.
    Back to some requisitioned farmhouse, no need to ask permission from the owners. They have been removed by a work crew . . . had to . . . dead, you know . . . the ampules and syringes and alcohol laid out. The Colonel is a thin, aristocratic man of fifty with a fine thin nose and thin lips and little blue veins hard to hit. But Wilhelm could find a vein in a mummy.
    "Allow me, my Colonel."
    The blood blooms in the syringe and he pushes the plunger home.
    "Sieg Heil!" breathes the Colonel.
    Wilhelm is tying up . . . ahh the blessed warmth.
    "Heil Hitler!"
    "Heil Hitler!" the Colonel echoes.
    Wilhelm knows the whole thing is insane, like Napoléon. He remembers the Victor Hugo poem, "It snowed it snowed it snowed."
    He knows the Colonel is thinking the same thing. How can we get out from under this madman and save our assholes? But such thoughts are better left unspoken. As the Russian offensive gathers momentum and the Allies are close to Berlin, watch what you say and even what you think. The Black Dogs are sniffing for defeatism and disloyalty. One wrong word and you can hang with the Russian partisans with a placard around your neck: "Here is a pig who deserted his comrades. Now he is dead forever." And this is a lieutenant. Officers are not exempt from such summary execution . . . on the contrary. So play it kalt , and watch and wait.
    Shots outside . . . Wilhelm packs the drugs and the syringes. They will have to fall back, though they have been ordered to hold the position bis in der Tod. "Let Goebbels and Goering and Hitler come up here and hold it," growls the Colonel. "I am pulling back."

    The long retreat, the frostbitten soldiers hobbling along on toeless feet. And those with their eyelids frozen off who can never again close their eyes. And the genitals that drop off when you try to take a piss and the concentrated yellow urine seeps out with sluggish black blood . . . back back back . . . to the outskirts of Berlin.
    Berlin is a ruin, without water or food or police or medical facilities. Clearly it is every man for himself. The Russians are in the eastern outskirts of Berlin, the Allies in the west. Wilhelm is following his instincts. He knows that the name of the life game is Survival . The War is lost but the SS is out with ropes, grimly and methodically hanging all deserters and defeatists from trees and lampposts and the projecting beams of bombed-out buildings.
    Ah, a dead major. Wilhelm goes quickly through his clothes. A .25 automatic, which he pockets, and four boxes of ampules and a syringe with extra needles in a little metal box . . . Eukodol . . . what is this? Wilhelm draws up two ampules of .02 grams. He hits and presses the plunger home.
    "Sieg Heil." It's almost a speedball of morphine and cocaine. A real updraft, like he used to feel when he was flying gliders. But he never made the air force. His sight was short.
    Keep moving, get to the Americans! They will believe anything if you tell them what they want to hear.

    The fall of Berlin . . . music from Götterdämmerung . . . thunder and lightning. Dazed citizens dipping water out of bomb craters. Lightning freezes into the lightning insignia of the Waffen SS . . . face of the dancer blazes with alertness . . . WHOOSH! He throws himself to the ground as a shell explodes in front of him. He