The Two-Headed Eagle

“Good thing that you shouted in German,” he said, “otherwise I’d have smashed your head in for you. Did you chuck that grenade back out again? ”

“No, he did.” I pointed to Toth, crouched near by. The Stosstruppen leader smiled.

“Not bad, not bad at all. Can I interest you in joining my storm- company perhaps? We could use people with reflexes as quick as yours.” He turned back to me. I noticed that although he had the Edelweiss col­lar badges of the elite Tyrolean Alpine troops, the Landeschutzen, he spoke with a marked Sudetenland accent. “Anyway, let me introduce myself,” he said. “Oskar Friml, Oberleutnant in the 2nd Landeschutzen Regiment; currently leading the 28th Storm-Troop Company attached to infantry regiment No. 4, Hoch-und-Deutschmeister. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

I thought this display of courtesy rather forced, coming from some­one who not a minute before had nearly killed us both. However I said nothing, but merely shook hands and introduced Toth and myself, then thanked him and his men for coming out to rescue us. He smiled: a rather nervous, evasive smile I thought.

“Not a bit of it. We didn’t know you were here. Our look-outs saw your plane come down and we thought you were either dead or taken prisoner by the Wellischers. We came out after that raid to see if we could cut some of them off as they tried to get back. Our people killed quite a lot of them and cleared the rest out of the trenches.”

“Were there many of them? ”

“About a hundred I reckon.”

“Is it usual then for the Stosstruppen to take on the enemy at odds of three against a hundred? ”

“Oh, not unusual at all. Moral force and quickness on your feet is what counts in this sort of warfare. In the trenches a dozen real soldiers can see off a thousand conscripts—or perhaps two thousand if they’re Italians. Cowardly rabble: no stomach for fighting at all—except for a few of their own storm-troops that is, the ‘Arditi.’ Some of them are quite good I understand, but they wear body armour, which isn’t much use and weighs a man down too much. We believe in fighting light, as you see.”

He was quite right about that: he and his men had no rifles or equip­ment, only a haversack full of stick-grenades slung over one shoulder, a gas-mask canister over the other and a short, vicious-looking spiked cosh. Friml smiled as he showed me his own version of this weapon. It consisted of a wooden handle with a short length of tight-coiled steel spring and, on the end of that, a steel ball studded with hobnails. I noticed that the handle bore rows of filed notches.

“There, how do you like it?” he enquired. “I had it made specially. Much better than the standard issue. Here, look . . .” He bent down and picked up a battered, rusty Italian steel helmet which I supposed had once belonged to the dead soldier: the French “poilu” type, with a raised comb along the crown. He placed it on a stone, then dealt it a sudden blow with his cosh. The helmet-top caved in like an eggshell. “Not bad, eh? And it’s pretty well silent too. Most of them never know what hit them. I’ve killed at least fifty men with it, but I haven’t kept a close account lately. I did for twenty of them at least that afternoon at San Martino. We had about two hundred trapped in a bombshelter. They tried to surrender, but we just squirted flame-throwers in through the air vents. You should have heard them howl in there. I had a wonderful time of it: stood by the entrance knocking them off one by one as they tried to get out with their hair on fire. Half-trained conscript refuse the lot of them: there wasn’t one of them over twenty.” He smiled as if at some idyllic memory.

“How old are you, Herr Leutnant?” I enquired. To me he looked about thirty-five.

“Twenty-three last birthday.”

“And do you expect to see twenty-four at this rate?” To my surprise he seemed not to be at all put out at this question.

“That all depends,” he replied, smiling. “It’s my belief that bullets find out the cowards and weaklings, so I may come through. I’ve been wounded nine times, but nothing serious so far. Anyway, whether I live or not scarcely matters. The thing that the Front has taught me above all else is that in this century the ‘we’ will be everything and the ‘I’ noth­ing. So what if I do die? The blood and the nation will live on after me as they lived before me. We are the aristocracy of mankind, we trench- fighters: the steel panthers, the very finest specimens that the human race has ever produced, without fear and without pity. The devil take the rest of them, the conscript herd corrupted by town-living and Jew- culture. They’re good for nothing but following up an attack and occu­pying ground already taken. It’s the front-fighters who bear mankind forward with them in the attack.”

I ventured the view—diffidently, eyeing the spring-loaded cosh as I did so—that at the present rate of losses, if the Stosstruppen were indeed the vanguard of the human species then by about 1924 we would have regressed to the early Stone Age.

“A typical peacetime soldier’s view,” he replied. “The reason why people like you can’t cope with this war—and most regular officers can’t in my opinion—is that you regard this sort of war, total war, as an aberra­tion. Well, it isn’t, the Front is the future: permanent war; the Darwinian battle for survival in which only the strongest and those of the purest blood will survive.”

So this was the modern age, I thought to myself: less than two decades into the Century of Scientific Progress and Rationality and here are men fighting in this dreadful wilderness with weapons and ideas more appro­priate to the Dark Ages.

“Anyway,” I said at last, “do you want us to come back with you now or shall we wait until dark? Sunbathing out here with a corpse for company is not really my idea of a pleasant afternoon.”

Friml looked puzzled for a moment, then regarded the remains of the dead Italian as if he had just noticed them.

“What, this one here?” He laughed. “You’ll pretty soon get used to sights like that once you’ve been here at the Front for a while: that and much worse. It’s nothing really: just a quantity of decaying tissue re­turning to the soil from which it grew . . .” At that moment there was a tremendous crash near by which knocked the breath from our lungs and sent stone fragments shrieking over our heads. As we picked ourselves up I put my fingers into my ears in an attempt to stop the ringing in my dislodged eardrums. Friml was much amused by this.

“War music, Herr Leutnant, the orchestra of battle. That was a 20cm by the sound of it. You’ll get used to it after a while, so that you hardly notice it any longer . . .” He paused, alert. “Quiet,” he whispered, “what’s that? . . .”

As my ears began to function once more I realised that what I had taken to be the ringing left by the blast was in fact voices nearby: voices talking quite loudly in Italian. We all listened intently. There seemed to be two of them, in a crater near the aeroplane wreck: two soldiers left behind by the raiders to guard it until nightfall and the arrival of the sal­vage party. By the sound of their voices they seemed to be an older man and a youth. Whoever they were, they were certainly very unwise to be conversing so loudly in broad daylight when predators like Friml and his men were roaming the battlefield. Friml crouched, intent as a cat stalk­ing a bird. Slowly, he drew a stick-grenade out of his haversack, tugged the toggle at the base of the handle, waited poised for what seemed like hours, but could only have been a couple of seconds—then threw it in a graceful arc to land somewhere out of sight. There was a muffled explo­sion and a puff of white smoke, then silence for a while. Then the wailing began. It was frightful to listen to. The older man seemed to have been killed outright, but the younger was still alive—just. If you see people in films spi