The Furred Reich Read online

  The Furred Reich

  Len Gilbert

  Copyright © 2016 Len Gilbert

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Belgorod, 1943

  Adventurers

  Troika

  Troika, pt. 2

  Asril

  Oasis

  Miao

  Ausbruch

  Green Tide

  Head Hunters

  Meerkats

  To Safety

  Hans Solo

  Allies

  Hex

  Crucible

  Gully

  The Pass

  Kharkov, 1943

  320

  Blowtorch

  Potato Masher

  Master Sepp

  Changing Lands

  Antwerpen

  Out of the Woods

  Undefeated

  Gott Mit Uns

  Pearls and Swine

  The Breadhouse

  Cyan

  Dachau

  Different But Good

  At Your Service

  Wanderlust

  Statecraft

  Wolfie Problems

  Hakenkreuz

  Qok

  Vaterland

  Counsel

  Weltanschauung

  Kasha

  Destiny

  Nacht Und Nibel

  Christening

  Squiggles

  Lifeboat

  Giraz

  Lightning Rune Tribe

  Heim Ins Reich

  Rotten Edifice

  The Grossdeutschland

  Die Leibstandarte

  Oxbane

  End of the Line

  Tex

  Convergence

  Doomsday

  Der Standartenfuehrer

  Immer Vorwarts

  Ambassador

  Blunt

  Blunt pt. 2

  The Relic

  R75

  Delay Doctrine

  Rivalry

  The Good Humans

  Schoener Tanz

  Pure Again

  Belgorod, 1943

  Hans coughed out loud. Dust penetrated everything, especially his parched throat. He was exhausted, but as usual, his feelings were irrelevant in the vast emptiness and heavy gray horizon of the Russian steppes. The mass of vehicles ahead of him churned up clouds of soil that covered both man and machine in gray dust. Even still, the growl of Panzers ahead reassured him.

  The first light of dawn fell over them, and through a veil of fog Hans saw a town whose name he did not notice. Numerous vehicles moved slowly forward, with motorized troops of the Division Grossdeutschland walking on either side, ready for anything.

  They reached the edge of town. Hovels on fire illuminated their exhausted faces. Like innumerable Russian towns, this one looked like an over-sized barnyard, with no sidewalk and no alignment of buildings. Some of the men ran up to a rusted trough filled with water and drenched themselves despite the cool autumn weather, beating their clothes against trees or the sides of buildings.

  Guns blasted off somewhere northwest. It was time to go again. Hans’ company loaded themselves back into the truck as it sped toward the sound of the guns. They climbed off the truck when the officer’s whistle blew. Ahead was a village built around a tall, steely factory looming in the distance.

  Guns slung, the company made its way toward the village, and immediately the Russian trenches showered them with a rain of shells. The two companies broke for cover in an orderly outburst. Without a word they spread out and surrounded the point.

  “Reach those points ahead!” Lieutenant Lensen shouted as he came running back. “Surround the brickworks!”

  Hans and company scanned for every nook and cranny which might offer some shelter. Bent double, they proceeded toward the village. Occasionally he heard someone laughing, and he wondered if it was innocence or bravado.

  Still the Russians were invisible. Hans watched as some thirty of the men leaped silently through the ruins. Five or six Panzer grenadiers ran along beside a building. One threw a grenade through a busted window, and the air shook from the explosion. A blood curdling scream followed in its wake, but it was unlike what they had often heard before. A human figure dressed in white fell from the window and rolled down to the feet of one of the men. It was a Russian civilian. She ran towards the soldiers, screaming. The men stood silent, aghast, as she ran through the ranks of petrified German soldiers. Three others came out: Two men and a child. Lensen, who just realized that the civilians hadn’t been evacuated, stuck a loud speaker to a half track and fastened the speaker a on a pole with a white rag.

  The loudspeaker crackled out some nasally Russian words and the four men on the half track looked desperately at their comrades still in the shelter. The half-track had gone less than a hundred yards when the irreparable occurred. The whole vehicle seemed to fly upward as a series of deafening explosions rang out. Five or six huts disintegrated on the spot. The truck had driven over a land mine.

  Hans saw two black silhouettes gesticulating in the flaming half-track. He heard them screaming, too.

  “Look out for mines!” someone shouted.

  But his voice was drowned out by the German response of mortars and anti-tank shells. The ground in front of Hans burst into geysers of flame and earth. More thatched roofs flew off now-exposed houses, like bald men who’d lost their wigs.

  The Russians replied with much heavier howitzer guns. And every shell landing within sight of Hans and his comrades made the ground shake under their feet and sucked the air from their lungs. Still the assault whistles blew. Everyone left the shelter and ran for the nearest embankment. German mortars pounded the ground some thirty yards ahead to disrupt the arrangement of mines. The Russians, with multi-barreled machine guns mounted upon trucks, poured a devastating fire onto everything they could see.

  Suddenly, no one felt confident. Hiding in the brickworks building, Hans and four others pressed their faces into the ground. His face knocked against the dirt with every explosion. Behind another heap of shattered bricks, a noncom was shouting at the top of his lungs to fire at will. One at a time, the five of them risked looking out from behind the pile. But the whine of shells made even the boldest duck right back down.

  German mortars and rocket launchers kept on firing at an enemy who seemed to have the upper hand. The metallic factory tower of the tractor works just bounced off all those shells. They had to get closer.

  Hans heard some men shouting to give themselves courage. As for himself, he grit his teeth and clenched his sweaty hands onto his Mauser, not from emotion but rather from a reflex akin to a drowning man hanging onto a rope.

  Earth flew up all around them, sometimes coming down on human figures dressed as soldiers. Shrill and deep sounds were everywhere, as was brilliant and fading light. Suddenly, to Hans’ left, a raging fire broke out in a cluster of sheds. Smoke and heat climbed into the sky and a huge sheet of flames quivered and roared to life. Even where he was the intense heat invaded the air.

  Their men surged back rapidly, as if the whole thing were some kind of ballet. The metal roofs buckled in the heat. A horde of Russians, some with uniforms and some without, came running from the burning buildings. The Germans shot them all down like rabbits.

  An explosive blast erupted in the air. One of the shells must have hit a gasoline dump. In confusion the Russians scrambled around with their hands in the air, occasionally remembering the way to other Russian entrenchments.

  The artillerymen now concentrated anti-tank fire on the area just around the factory. The job of ‘cleaning up’ the Russians, who were scurrying around desperately, was left to Hans and the infantry. A light pressure on the trigger, a puff of smoke, and Hans’ Mauser
went looking for another victim. Was this a crime? A young, bewildered Popov, already wounded several times, stayed in Hans’ sights a moment too long. And then turned ashen and clutched his breast with both hands. He did a little half turn and fell face-first into the ground. Would Hans ever deserve a pardon for that?

  For Hans and company, as it had been for Ivan just a moment before, everything that moved through the smoke became hateful. Nothing could stop their desire for destruction, not even the rending cries of Obergefreiter Woortenbeck, who clenched his trembling hands on an iron grille and stiffened up for death. Death that flooded from the bloody pulp which once held his entrails.

  Hans’ group joined the rest of the men, who were snatching a few moments of rest in a cement settling tank. Everyone was gray with dust. A telephone operator settled down beside them and spoke with Captain Wollers. The fighting had died down some, and the Germans were regrouping for the final assault. One section had a mortar and two anti-tank guns. Hans’ section had grenadiers with machine guns and rifles.

  The sergeant specified the points Hans’ company must reach. And the men agreed to do so before the uncontrollable terror set in. A group of Russians suddenly appeared through some dismantled scaffolding, waving a white cloth. There were well over fifty of them and none of them had uniforms or even weapons.

  One of the Landsers, who was fluent in Russian, talked to them. Protected by the white cloth, four of the men took the prisoners to the rear. A few friendly words between the adversaries would probably produce a settlement which would have allowed all of them to just sit down and have a drink. An exception to all the insensibility.

  But it wasn’t enough to peel the young men’s eyes away from the metallic wreckage of the factory, which Hans and his Kamerads would soon be obliged to attack and enter. Fear knotted his throat, and he once again felt like a sheep moving to the slaughter.

  He wasn’t the only one scared. The fellow beside Hans stared at him from his blackened face and murmured: “If only those bastards would give up!”

  Their feelings, of course, were unimportant.

  The trench telephone rang and crackled out an order.

  “One-third of the men forward. Count off by threes.”

  One, two, three… One, two, three… Hans drew a “one.” Which meant he could stay in that splendid cement hole, but he cut off his smile in case the sergeant should notice and send him right onto the field. Inwardly, Hans thanked whatever spirit he could think of.

  The fellow beside Hans had number three, and was looking at Hans with a long, desperate face. Hans kept his eyes turned front, so the fellow wouldn’t notice Hans’ own joy and relief. Then the sergeant made his fatal gesture, and the brave German soldier beside Hans sprang from his shelter with a hundred others.

  Immediately, Russian automatic weapons rang out. Before vanishing to the bottom of his hole, Hans saw the impact of the bullets raising little fountains of dust all along the route of his recent companion. The fellow would never again contemplate the implications of number three. The noise of guns and grenades was deafening, and almost drowned out the cries of those who’d been hit.

  “Achtung! Nummer zwei, voraus!”

  Next, it was going to be Hans. Along with everybody else who’d drawn “one.” Everything outside was flashing and exploding. Usually, people begin counting with “one.” So why had they started with “three” this time?

  “Nummer eins, nachgehen, los!”

  Hans’ turn had come. After a moment of hesitation, Hans sprang from his shelter and into the madness. Everything looked gray through the thick fog of choking, whirling dust. Except for the glimmering flashes of light. In a few jumps Hans reached the foundation of a shattered hut. Inside, a German soldier was dead and staring at the open breech of his machine gun.

  With watering eyes, Hans stared through the smoke, trying to see the enemy. And do his duty. About twenty-five yards ahead some trucks exploded into little fragments, one after the other. Hans couldn’t tell if the four or five running soldiers were German or Russian. Hans was with two companions in an open shelter made of logs packed with dirt; a shelter which the Russians had built to take machine gun fire. The three of them were sitting on the mangled bodies of the four Popovs who’d been killed by grenades.

  “I did that bunch in, with one shot,” shouted a strong young soldier from the Grossdeutschland. But a burst of mortar fire forced them all down into the heap of enemy corpses. A shell hit the edge of the bunker, and earth and logs blew apart, falling back onto their heads. The fellow huddled between Hans and a dead Russian was hit. As his body jerked up and down from the impact, Hans tensed himself to run. Then another shell struck the shelter, disintegrating it. Debris poured down onto Hans’ legs and sent him reeling back. He howled for help, sure that his legs were broken. His trousers were ripped down the leg, but the bruised skin underneath was untouched.

  Hans plunged back into the heap of Russian corpses and fell onto the fellow who had been hit. He let out a howl as an avalanche of rubble poured down around them.

  “I’m wounded,” the fellow next to Hans groaned, “something is burning in my back. Call for a stretcher.”

  Hans looked at him in a daze, then shouted, “Saenftentraeger!”

  But his ludicrous cries were lost in the whine of yet another shell whistling down onto the now fully-exposed shelter. Instantly Hans buried himself back into the corpses, and then saw nothing but a white light. Then everything went silent.

  Cough Cough

  ……… Screech!

  The stillness was broken by the shriek of some bird of prey flying as low as an Ilyushin. He covered his helmet with both hands, forcing himself into the ground, expecting that shell to explode and rip into his spine at any second, but the only thing that hit his back were the rays of a suddenly intense sun. Was he dead? Once the feeling returned, he felt the grit of orange sand against his eyelids and in his mouth.

  Hands trembling, he allowed himself to pick his head up a few inches, gradually open his eyes, and lift his head onto the horizon. What his eyes fed back his brain was hardly able to compute; a blue, cloudless vantage with a sea of sand all around him.

  His mind must be playing a trick on him. It must have been unable to cope with the overload of trauma, and split off a second personality in response. Any minute now a soldier of the Grossdeutschland, maybe even that damned Prussian whom Hans called his best friend, would pull him out of this dream he was having, and he would be right back outside of the Tractor Works. Maybe the battle would be over, too. The idea of ‘sleeping’ through all of it was not an unattractive one.

  The circling bird of prey reminded him of two German sergeants who once examined Hans’ glass-torn body after he flew through the windshield during a truck accident some months ago. Just as the bird was doing now, one officer quipped that Hans must have been dying, and in response Hans violently awoke and shouted, “I’m not!”

  Jolting up onto his backside, Hans shouted at that bird that was mocking him.

  “I’m not dead!”

  For another moment he looked around. The distant smell of water and mud greeted his nostrils and returned his attention to his own choking thirst. Getting back onto his feet, Hans picked up his fallen Mauser, strapped it to his back and followed his nose, the sound of the battle-luggage strapped to his uniform making a strange clanging sound in the desert. It was a sound he’d noticed for the first time.

  The desert waterhole was very close; only some three quarters of an hour by foot. Not too far for a specialized infantryman. When he got to the oasis, which looked more like a big water hole, Hans didn’t know whether to be relieved to finally get all the water he needed for once, or to be alarmed that his kamerads had not yet pulled him back into reality. His eyes took in that pool of dark water, lined with date trees, and a single, stone-lain road which looked as if the Romans had laid it themselves. Was he no longer on the steppes of Russia?

  Seeing nobody else around, Hans began stripp
ing naked, and as soon as he was done, ran right into the water. It felt like a warm bath. The water soothed his wounds: Deep frostbite from last winter, and especially the dislocated shoulder he suffered from that auto accident. He greedily gulped down the fresh water and rinsed off his filthy, blonde hair. Any minute now he’d be pulled back to Belgorod.

  Hans sat in the waterhole for at least half an hour before his temples started to throb. A sharp pain returned to his shoulder from where it was once dislocated, and he felt a bout of nausea coming on. All his illness and injury was coming back to plague him now that his body sensed a shred of normalcy.

  Staggering back to the shore, Hans wiped himself dry with his torn trousers and put them back on as quickly as he could before vomiting into the sand. His head was swimming. Deliriously, he picked up his tunic and buttoned it back on, lifted up his Mauser and prepared to keep walking until… Something.

  Part of joining the Grosssdeutschland meant going through an unforgiving regimen of endurance training, so Hans was sure that he could walk to some settlement, no matter what his condition. But before he could take another step, Hans’ body rebelled once again and he collapsed back into the silty sand.

  “Help.”

  Adventurers

  Kairah gave a long, dramatic sigh – probably because the lioness knew it would bug her friend, the deercat, who gripped tighter onto the reigns in reaction. The two women had been traveling southward, through the Sea of Sand, for a couple days now. This time they had a horse to save them from an endless walk, like last time they went on an adventure. Kairah was mounted upon the horse as her friend, and servant, Amalija, walked alongside the tall beast.

  “Are we there yet?” The lioness teased, with a fat grin upon her features. The deercat turned her head to look up, and pouted a little in frustration at the 5'4" lioness straddled atop the horse.

  Kairah was clad in a pair of pants, which did look a bit masculine, but that didn’t bother the adventurous feline. On her upper body was a business type shirt that men usually wore, but most of that was hidden by a thin, brown cloak that allowed a hood to protect her neck and features from the blistering desert sun.