Berlin or Bust

^{CHAPTER TWO} ORDERS

“Achtung,” Leutnant Klaus Reiser shouted. Attention! “The captain is about to call assembly. Schnell, schnell, you idiots.”

The men groaned from their sleep sacks in the empty warehouse where the Army had billeted them. Most had slept in their uniforms, too drunk to undress.

Otto Steiner rolled onto his side and smacked his lips. “Ja, schnell.” Hurrying up sounded good. He’d do it as soon as he finished his dream.

Greta smiled and reached out to him—

Reiser kicked him in the ribs. “Get up, pig-dog.”

The gefreiter jumped to his feet and made a show of straightening his uniform. “Jawohl, Herr Leutnant. Einsatzbereit.” Yes, indeed, Lieutenant. Ready for action.

Standing behind the lieutenant, Oberjäger Schulte eyed him with a slight smile, his handsome face glowing from his night of wild sex. Jäger Beck, the rifleman the squad had forgotten in the dance hall bathroom, had also managed to rise early.

“Schnell, schnell, Steiner,” Schulte said as if saying, tsk, tsk.

“Ja, Steiner,” Beck chimed in. “Schnell.”

“I should have let you drown in shit in that bidet, Wolfgang.”

“Schnell,” the lieutenant roared at them all.

Reeling with hangover, the platoon flinched and hurried as the lieutenant commanded. Steiner took a swig from his water bottle and spat. Poured more into a tin and lathered his face for shaving.

The last lieutenant had led the platoon in a counterattack among the rocks surrounding the monastery at Cassino. A tank shell punched his head clean off. Hunched over his MG42 machine-gun, Steiner had seen it all. One moment, the dashing young officer exhorted his men to glory. The next, the air vibrated around the space where his head had been.

Steiner would never be able to erase that image from his mind. The headless body wobbling and still holding the upraised Luger, which fired once in final defiance before dropping. He remembered thinking: That’d look great on a propaganda poster. Fight to the death, comrades, and beyond!

Reiser joined the platoon in Genoa and had been itching to get into combat ever since. He struck Steiner as a halsschmerzen, an itchy-necked commander out for glory so he could win the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross medal, the coveted tin necktie. A typical Prussian bastard who felt that anything worth doing was worth overdoing, and that not overdoing was the same as failing.

Commanders like that took big risks in the field. As fanatic as the SS but for personal rather than national glory.

Steiner turned from his mirror. “Any word on why the company is having an assembly, Herr Leutnant?”

“Ja,” sneered Reiser. “We are going to England.”

The paratroopers glanced at each other and smirked at the second-lieutenant’s attempt at humor.

“Did you hear that, kid?” Steiner asked Muller as he finished his shave. “We’ll be drinking Schnapps in London!”

The rifleman looked up from his kit. “What?”

“Maybe the SS arschloch was right. Germany’s enemies all capitulated thanks to a magical weapon the Führer cooked up. Maybe we really are going home.”

Muller nodded glumly, the poor romantic fool.

Out in the courtyard, the band started playing the Horst Wessel Song. The company was mustering. Assembly had started.

“Schnell, schnell,” Steiner said with a grin, wiping his face clean. “Hurry up and wait.” He opened his prized tin of Scho-Ka-Kola and ate a piece of the bittersweet dark chocolate as a make-do breakfast. Then he buttoned his tunic, pulled on his steel helmet, and followed his comrades outside.

Eagle Company, 3rd FJR, mustered by platoon in a neat U-shaped formation as the band played its stirring march. A paratrooper regiment consisted of 2,600 men, comprised of three combat battalions of 850 men each plus battalion headquarters, communications platoon, and battalion supply train. Each combat platoon boasted a strength of forty men organized into three nine-man squads. Sixteen rifles, nine machine pistols, and six machine-guns.

Of course, these numbers only existed on paper now. Combat, illness, and accident had reduced the regiment to just 800 men and Hauptmann Werner’s Eagle Company similarly to sixty combat effectives. These paratroopers stood at parade rest in the cold in their blue-gray Luftwaffe (Air Force) uniforms. Highly disciplined and well trained, they were the best and they knew it.

Steiner thought it comical that he counted among them. He’d volunteered for the paratroopers to impress a girl back in his hometown. Greta Fischer, a big-breasted Aryan beauty who idolized the Führer. Her great bosom heaved and her cheeks blushed as she talked about German boys giving their lives in droves at the front. Steiner didn’t know if it was the mass death or the garish pageantry of it all that aroused Greta’s passion, he didn’t care. He just wanted in on it.

Next thing he knew, he was living with men and getting shot at by gum-chewing Amis who’d come 5,000 miles just to kill him. Lice, dysentery, iron rations, cruel officers, and retreat. A year of savage fighting, and he barely remembered what Greta looked like, while he heard she’d married a Party official and was enthusiastically doing her part to make blue-eyed babies for the Reich.

Steiner no longer fought to impress her. He didn’t fight for the Fatherland and its superior ideology and wounded pride. He didn’t fight for all the pageantry designed to exalt the ridiculous into something deadly serious. He fought just to survive, ripping bullets from his MG42 to make the goddamn Amis stop trying to kill him. Just twenty years old. He’d barely lived.

For two years, his main concerns were staying dry, getting rid of body lice, thinking about women, bitching about officers, keeping his machine-gun working, sleep, scrounging food, writing letters, reading the same worn-out books, playing cards, and getting drunk whenever possible. He wanted to go home.

As the band played on, Steiner stared at the helmeted figures facing him across the courtyard and wondered how many of them had joined to impress a girl. Most, probably. Only a maniac liked killing and was willing to die for it. The biggest fools were like Muller standing next to him, wishing he could make love to the war. No, the average paratrooper wanted to be a hero, and nobody wanted to do what it took to be a hero unless he thought it would get him the pick of girls. And here they were, all dressed up and without a girl in sight.

Seeing the comedy of it all kept him sane, though the joke was also on him.

“Brave Fallschirmjäger!” Hauptmann Werner shouted after the band stopped playing. Wearing his Iron Cross on his throat and a black patch over his scarred left eye, the grizzled captain addressed them from the head of the formation. “Heroes and defenders of the Reich! I stand before you at the threshold of victory. The Führer’s super weapon has defeated the Allies in France. Daily, State Radio declares our triumph. Hostilities with the Allies have ceased.”

Werner glared at them all with his good eye, which gleamed a bright blue. “Generalmajor Schulz has issued orders.” Schulz commanded the 1^st Fallschirm Division in the Adriatic Sector. “The 3^rd Parachute Regiment is assembling. Transport has been organized to deliver us to the airfield. There, we will board planes and fly to England.”

The stoic paratroopers stirred before resuming their rigid attention. Steiner couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The lieutenant hadn’t been joking, he’d been serious. That or the captain was joking.

“Our orders are to form a joint task force with our American and British counterparts,” Werner said. “We will train together. We will fight a common foe. The English and the Amis were once our enemies, but no longer. In fact, they are now our allies in the struggle to contain the Red menace in the East.”

Werner nodded to Hauptfeldwebel Vogel, who barked, “Company dismissed!”

Muller smiled. “The Russian Front!”

“So much for going home,” Steiner said.