Wheels of Terror Read Free Page B

bloody flesh. A man in a brown uniform staggered towards us. The red and black of the swastika on his armband was like a mocking challenge, and our grip tightened on our implements.
    Lieutenant Harder said hoarsely:
    'No! Cut that out ...'
    A trembling hand tried to restrain Porta, but the motion was half-hearted. With an oath, Porta swung his pickaxe and sank the point into the party member's chest as Bauer swung his spade and split the man's skull.
    'By Christ, well done!' Porta shouted, and laughed savagely.
    People were twisting in agony on the ground. The tram rails were red-hot and curled into grotesque patterns which thrust out of the hot asphalt. People who had been trapped in their houses jumped in madness from what had once been windows and hit the ground with soggy thuds. Some shuffled along on their hands dragging maimed legs behind them. Men thrust away wives and children who clung to them. People had become animals. Away, away, only away. The only thing that mattered was to save oneself.
    We met other soldiers from the barracks who were out like us to do whatever rescue work was possible. Many of these parties had senior officers with them, but leadership had often been taken by an old front-line sergeant or corporal. Only experience and nerves of steel mattered here, not rank. As we dug and heaved to free people from the collapsed cellars terrible scenes met us in the hot, stinking rooms which had been shelters.
    In one place five hundred people were crowded into a concrete shelter. They were side by side with their knees comfortably drawn up, or on the floor with their heads pillowed on their arms. Asphyxiated by carbon monoxide they had suffered no apparent injury.
    In another cellar were scores of people lying on top of each other, burnt to a solid mass.
    Screaming, sobbing, childish cries for help:
    'Mummy, Mummy, where are you? Oh, Mummy, my feet hurt!'
    Women's voices calling in anguish for their children - children who were crushed or burned or swept away by the gale of fire or who were tottering aimlessly down the streets stupefied with terror. Some found their loved ones, but hundreds never saw them again. God knows how many were sucked up in the hot breath of the giant vacuum-cleaner, or carried away in the river of refugees pouring from the stricken city into the dark fields, into the unknown.

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    Dead, dead, only the dead. Parents, children, enemies, friends, piled in one long row, shrunken and charred into fossils.
    Hour after hour, day after day shovelling, scraping, pushing and lifting corpse upon corpse. That was the job of the burial commandos.
    At the shout of 'Air-raid warning!' the children had run their last steps into the cellar. They had sat there, paralysed by fright until the hellish river of phosphorus reached them and ate the life out of their small twisting bodies. First quickly, then more slowly, until silence lay mercifully over them.
    Such is war.
    Those who have forgotten to weep, would have been taught anew had they stood beside the Ghouls' Squad, the panzer soldiers, and watched them at their work.

Furioso
    The men from the penal units always got the dirty jobs both at the depot and the front.
    We had newly come back from the Eastern Front to train with our new tanks and to make up our numbers. We were a penal regiment. All of us came from concentration camps, gaols, reform-camps or some of the other torture institutions flourishing during the German Millenium. Of our platoon, only Pluto and Bauer were convicted criminals.
    Pluto, the huge docker from Hamburg whose civilian name was Gustav Eicken, had landed in clink because he had stolen a lorry-load of flour. He always insisted it had been a frame-up, but we were convinced he had pinched the flour. Bauer had been condemned to six years' hard labour because he had sold a pig and a few eggs on the black market.
    The Old Un, our troop sergeant, was the oldest of us. He was married, with two children, and a carpenter. His