text: Two figures made a frantic dash from the doorway of a bombed-out tenement and, hunkering down, ran for their lives for a gap in the low cemetery wall across the street. ‘Halt! Halt you filthy swine! I said H-A-L-T!!’, the angry shouts of their pursuers, hot on their heels, rang out behind them. They kept running. In the murk of smoke and masonry dust suspended in the air, the blazing row of buildings behind them illuminated this night of shear Hell on earth in an eerie glow. The men following them upped the ante. ‘One more step and we’ll shoot. You’ve been warned!’ The running men reached their goal and heaved themselves through the hole as the angry whine of machine-gun rounds whizzed by, centimetres above their heads. The first man through, the older of the two, scrambled for cover behind the wall, dragging the younger one down with him. ‘Scheisse that was close! You alright my boy?’ ‘J-j-ja, I t-t-think s-s-so.’ He strained to stop his teeth from chattering. ‘You’re not hit?’ ‘N-n-n-no, I'm, I’m alright.’ ‘OK, lets move... Now!’, the older man growled in a hoarse whisper and pulled his companion into the murky graveyard with him as a salvo of howitzer rounds peppered the street. Their pursuers, a couple of military policemen colloquially called “chain-dogs”, were half-way across the street when the murderous rain of shells started falling. Now more concerned for their safety than catching their quarry, they too made a frantic dash for the gap in the cemetery wall amidst the screaming hail of red-hot shrapnel. The first man started to dive through the gap just as a shell detonated behind him. The force of the blast propelled him all the way through and he landed on his back, gasping for breath and splattered with pieces of smoking flesh, jagged uniform tatters and thick sticky gobs of his partner’s blood. The poor bastard was a split-second too late to save himself. Looking in wide-eyed horror at the scraps of flesh sticking to him and scraping a length of still warm intestine from his face, he vomited seeing his partner’s steel helmet land at his feet. The head, secured to it by the strap, trailed a delicate wisp of smoke. Scurrying for cover, he shit himself as three more rounds struck on the other side of the thick wall in rapid succession, smearing the remnants of his partner across the shrapnel-pitted brickwork. He’d never seen front-line action before now, before the bomb-ravaged nightmare moonscape of Berlin became the front itself. Front-line action was not what he’d had in mind when he volunteered to serve the Führer and Fatherland five and a half years previously. He’d expressly joined the military police in order to avoid the chaos and horrors of the front. He had spent the war years working hard to preserve order amidst the mounting bedlam in the capital city, brought about by the escalating frequency and severity of the aerial bombing and the ever-increasing inability of the city administration to deal with the aftermath of the raids. Until now, now that the Russians had arrived, there had always been days or at least hours in between the raids during which he was able to assert his authority. He revelled in the power he wielded in these chaotic times, doggedly arresting the many deserters, stragglers and looters that abounded, often shooting them on the spot. He gruffly marshalled shocked civilians to maintain order and form bucket-brigades to quench the raging fires that had become a daily fact of life. Though the bombed-out residents needed no prodding from the likes of him to try and save what little remained of their world. There was no respite, no escaping the front now, as there had been for him when he opted to join the military police in lieu of joining the millions of his countrymen being ground into the mud of the sempiternal Russian steppes. The artillery barrage stopped as suddenly as it had started, replaced now by a ringing in his ears, the muffled crash of large chunks of masonry hurtling into the street and the roar of the fire burning insanely out of control in the bombed-out hulks of the tenements across from the cemetery. Then he heard another faint sound beneath the ringing in his ears. The ringing began to subside and the other sound got louder and louder, until he realized it came from his chattering teeth. He clenched his jaws together in an effort to put an end to their machine-gun movement, but the spasm of his jaw muscles proved stronger than his will. Jamming the sleeve of his tunic in his mouth he bit down hard, filling his mouth with a thick section of slippery intestine that had so recently been part of his partner and vomited uncontrollably again. The retching at least put an end to his teeth chattering. When he was finally able to stop gagging he remembered his training and began breathing deeply while counting slowly to a hundred to give his body and mind something on which to focus, other than the nerve-shattering shock of the shelling. It took him until eighty-seven to calm down enough to be able to examine his own body for wounds amidst the gore from his dead partner that covered it. Other than a few superficial shrapnel cuts to his skin beneath the rends in his tunic, he appeared to be unharmed. As his heartbeat slowed his thoughts returned to the two deserters they were chasing when the artillery-salvo struck. He raised himself up on his elbow and peered cautiously around the edge of the gap in the wall to check whether a troop of Ivans was creeping up the street. Seeing nothing moving, he removed his helmet to listen for the sounds of foot-falls or tank-treads. He heard neither but knew it was only a matter of time before the shock-troops appeared on the scene. Putting his helmet back on he leaned against the wall to consider his next move. ‘Well my boy, you're sure in the shit now,’ he said to himself. The two fugitives they'd been pursuing had gotten up and run further into the cemetery in a crouch when the shelling had started, desperately seeking a place to hide. They had come upon a row of thirty or forty corpses neatly laid-out on the ground where they had been deposited and were waiting for a work-squad of POW’s to dig a communal grave in which to bury them. There were several shovels scattered among the bodies where the work-squad must've had dropped them in a panic and run of to find shelter as a carpet of bombs began creeping along the street next to the cemetery. Seeing the bodies and glancing back over his shoulder as the first Feldgendarm threw himself through the same hole in the wall by which they had entered, the older man dove for the ground, grabbing the younger man’s arm and pulling him down beside him among the dead. ‘Lay still. Don’t make a sound’, he whispered harshly to his companion who was shaking like a leaf. ‘Don’t move a muscle, no matter what happens next’. But the younger man couldn’t stop his shaking. ‘Calm down my boy, you’ve got to calm down. Our lives depend on it’. The young man rammed his knuckles into his mouth and bit down hard, burying his face in the soft fragrant earth. Pain supplanted the fear somewhat and he managed to gradually stop shaking. Looking around, the older man saw the body of an SS officer lying next to the younger man and smiled, thinking, ‘death will find you bastards wherever you are’. He put his mouth close to his companion’s ear and whispered, ‘stay here, I’ll be right over there to the left, next to that woman and those two little kids. And remember, not a movement or a sound. We’ve made it this far, and we’ll make it all the way.’ The young man, his hand still jammed in his mouth and eyes tightly closed, nodded his head. The older man crawled over the bodies next to him and stretched himself out beside the woman, the bodies of the two small children between them. His hand crept up past his head and felt around until it touched the smooth wooden handle of a shovel. He wrapped his fingers around it, pulling it closer and waited for what would come next. The surviving Feldgendarm roused himself and stood up cautiously, keeping his back pressed to the wall. He peered into the cemetery through the haze of smoke and dust for a sign of movement, but could make out nothing. Looking out through the hole in the wall to his left again, and seeing no movement in the street beyond, he started to creep among the gravestones with his MG at the ready. ‘Show yourselves you cowards, I know you're in here. You won’t get away from me. I spend my days catching traitors to Volk und Vaterland like you two. May as well make it easy on yourselves and come out with your hands up.’ The only sound greeting him in reply was the crash of a building wall weakened by the raging fire in the street behind him. He continued walking slowly, cautiously, peering into the acrid haze that hung in the air like a stinking fog until he came upon the row of corpses laid out for burial. ‘Maybe you are the lucky ones,’ he thought, ‘for you its over and you will not have to try and survive the horror that is sure to come now that Ivan is here.’ He knew the tricks of deserters only too well, knew how they hid among the huddled groups of refugees that had been streaming into the city for months, knew they slipped in among the masses of dead that seemed to be laying about everywhere since the random shelling had started a week ago, on The Führer’s birthday. Straightening-up, he walked down the neatly laid-out row, studying each body closely to see if he could recognize the two deserters among them. Passing the frozen form of the younger man, he continued on for another few paces and then a smile slowly spread across his face. On the ground in front of him was one of the bastards, he recognized him by his finely-tailored Luftwaffe officer’s uniform. He let out a low snicker seeing the man stretched-out beside a woman’s body, two small children looking as if they were sleeping between them. ‘So, there you are at last, you filthy pig. May as well get up, or would you prefer I shoot you were you lay like the dog you are?’ His face buried in the dirt, the man held his breath and lay motionless. ‘Get up you traitor, get up or I will shoot you where you are. Come on, get up. The Ivans will be here soon enough and then they’ll shoot you anyways. Unless they ship you off to Siberia along with the rest of the traitors who wouldn’t defend the Vaterlandt to the death. Don't you at least want the honour of dying from a German bullet instead of a Russian one?’ As the Feldgendarm stood over the man, the younger one cautiously and ever so slowly reached over next to him, to the body of the SS officer and felt around for the dead man’s holster. His hand struck pay-dirt and he carefully and ever so slowly lifted the flap and withdrew the Walther P38 it held, hoping to dear God it was loaded. ‘Alright you swine, have it your way,’ the Feldgendarm sneered, ‘if you prefer to die like a dog in the dirt, who am I to deny your last request?’ The man came up at him suddenly, swinging the shovel he held. The Feldgendarm took two quick steps back saying, ‘you think I am such an easy mark you fool?’, and squeezed the trigger of his MG. But the MG jammed and the two men stood looking into each other’s eyes, the hatred hanging suspended in the air between them. The Feldgendarm let the MG fall. As he pulled a pistol from the holster on his belt and his hand came up to point it at the man’s head, a shot rang out behind him. His eyes suddenly bulged out and his mouth fell open. ‘What..... was....?’, he uttered in confusion and then coughed, gagging on the blood that filled his throat and spewed from his lips. He looked into the man’s eyes one final time and then his eyes rolled upwards and he collapsed to the ground. The man standing couldn’t believe he was still alive. As the shock subsided, he saw his companion standing three metres away with a smoking pistol in his hand and, even though he was sure there was no God, mumbled thanks to Him, just in case. ‘I've never killed anyone before,’ the young man muttered, ‘never.’ His voice choked with emotion, the older man said, ‘A second ago I thanked God, but that was a mistake. It’s you I need to thank, you saved my life.’ ‘I had to shoot him Horst, I had to.’ ‘I didn’t think you had it in you my boy. But don't let it bother you, this one had it coming. Lets get out of here now, I think I hear tanks coming up the street.’ The two men started toward the gates at the far end of the cemetery, but Horst stopped suddenly and said, ‘wait here a moment, there's something I have to do first.’ He walked over to the body of the Feldgendarm, stopped and urinated on him. When he was finished, he walked back to where his companion stood waiting. ‘Let’s find some civilian clothes and change out of these uniforms Herbert. This shit will all be over soon and there's no way I'm going to die in some lead-mine in Siberia. And neither are you my boy, not after all we’ve been through.’ **\~\~\~** Footnote: Horst was my father. He made it through the Hell of war, including the Russian Front and was saved by British captivity in the aftermath of D-Day, eventually returning to his hometown of Berlin in 1946 where he met and married my mother. Herbert was my mother’s first husband. For most of the war, he received deferments from military service as he was one of the few auto mechanics still alive that were experienced in repairing and maintaining the big Mercedes and Maybach limousines, the favoured means of personal transport of the Nazi big-wigs. He was eventually drafted into front-line service in the final months of the war, serving for a short time on the rapidly approaching east front. There he was felled by a piece of shrapnel, but survived and evacuated back to Berlin. The shrapnel was lodged against his heart and surgery was deemed too risky in his weakened condition. The surgeons kept the wound to his back open, banking on it working itself out on its’ own. He died in the Charité Hospital of septicemia early in 1946. He and my father met only in this story that I wrote in honour of them, never in real life. They were good men and I bow to them.