Sven Hassel by Legion Of The Damned

Author:Legion Of The Damned
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-11-19T00:34:20+00:00

I had been walking for twenty-four hours without a break and when I eventually let myself tumble into a ditch I was so exhausted that I fell asleep at once. There is no landscape so tedious as the Russian. The country roads are long and twisty, made of just earth and gravel. On all sides is steppe and more steppe as far as the eye can see. Now and again you may see a bird. The villages lie fifty or sixty miles apart. After two and a half days' marching I reached a railway line which, judging by the map, must have been that between Gorki and Saratov. Feeling tired and done, I lay down on the slope of the embankment and waited. There was no shade so I was almost roasted by the blazing sun. I began to be troubled by thirst. Specks danced before my eyes. I could not sleep and yet I felt dead and empty inside. Time stood still and no longer concerned me. I just lay writhing in my gloom. Feeling both apathetic and savage, I hungered for a woman. Ursula, you have gone, I shall never see you again. I don't know if I wept with the hurt of it; I may have kicked the ground and cursed God and generally behaved like a spoiled child, but those were dreadful, interminable and bittersweet hours that I spent lying waiting for a train somewhere between Gorki and Saratov.

When one came it was a freight train traveling fairly fast. You're jumping that if it costs you your neck, I told myself; and as soon as the engine was past I began running alongside the cars, terrified in case I should stumble on the loose stones of the embankment and fall beneath the wheels. I caught hold of a handrail on a gondola. Three, four times I tried to swing myself up but did not manage it, and I was on the point of losing my head and either letting go or else stopping running and just letting my feet trail; but then I clenched my teeth and jumped again. A moment later I heaved myself in over the back of the car and dropped onto a cart that had been hidden by the tarpaulin covering the gondola.

Then I nearly had a stroke, for suddenly a ghastly face appeared over the edge of the cart on which I lay panting. Paralyzed with fright, we stared at each other. Then I pulled the pistol out of my pocket. The other groaned and shut his eyes.

"Jetzt ist alles aus!"

"What the hell--are you German?" I lowered my pistol in amazement, and the next moment another man emerged.

They had escaped from a pow camp a hundred miles north of Alatyr. There had been four of them at the start but one of them had fallen off the train and been run over and another had jumped down right into the arms of three Russians. Luckily they had not searched the car.

We

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