Liquidate Paris by Sven Hassel Page A

of the engines crashed and boomed through the stillness of the night, and more than one house had its windows blasted out as we passed by. Some buildings were even more unfortunate: they stood directly in our path and we simply demolished and left behind as heaps of rubble.
    'Come, sweet death,' intoned the Legionnaire, cheerfully, behind his periscope.
    Little John shuddered and turned to Porta.
    'Gives me the perishing willies,' he complained. 'Got any booze on you?'
    Porta obligingly handed over a bottle of the best Schnapps, which he had nicked from a supplies depot a short while back. The Schnapps had been originally requisitioned for a divisional commander, but unluckily for him Porta had arrived there first. According to Porta, he had smelt alcohol several miles off and had followed his nose along the trail.
    Little John, attacking the Schnapps as he did everything else, with full verve and gusto, poured half the bottle down his throat. He then belched, spat through the observation slit against the wind and received the whole lot back in his face, whereupon he swore hideously, and wiped himself on a piece of oily rag. By such little excitements were our journeys habitually enlivened.
    We went on, hour after hour, towards the enemy lines. The road was more congested, now, with the debris of war. Burnt-out-cars, the wreckage of other tanks, English and German, the charred remains of human beings sprawled over, under and beneath them. An entire column of infantry lay scattered at the side of the road in the grotesque attitudes of death.
    'Jabos,' said Porta, unemotionally.
    You couldn't get too worked up about the slaughter: we'd seen it all before, so many times.
    'Remember the old tank song they used to put out on the radio?' said Barcelona, suddenly and for no very apparent reason.
    He turned to the rest of us and began softly chanting the song that we'd all heard so often, back in 1940. The words no longer seemed very appropriate :
'Way beyond the Maas, the Scheide and the Rhein,
Advancing upon Frankfurt, a hundred tanks in line!
A hundred German tanks and the Fuhrer's Black Hussars
Gone to conquer France, cheered on by loud huzzahs!
With a hundred throbbing motors, a hundred grinding chains,
A hundred German tanks are rolling o'er the plains!'

    A banal song at the best of times, it now seemed utterly absurd. There was a burst of scornful laughter, both from our own tank and from others in the column: we had left the radio switched on and the whole company had enjoyed Barcelona's moment of nostalgia.
    'Belt up!' came Heide's raucous voice, over the radio. 'What's wrong with you stupid buggers back there? It's not the time for that sort of thing! '
    Poor Heide! He was taking it very hard, the way the war was going. The rest of us merely laughed until we felt sick. The hundred German tanks and the Fuhrer's Black Hussars were no longer rolling triumphant o'er any plains but desperately fighting a rearguard battle against the advancing enemy.
    Our laughter was cut short by the sight of a strange, straggling group along the roadside. I couldn't at first make them out. Prisoners, perhaps? No, prisoners would not be guarded by nuns, and I suddenly saw that the weird, batlike figures running hither and thither were members of a nursing order trying in vain to restore order to their group of--what? I screwed my eyes up behind my dark glasses.
    'Nuts!' hissed Little John, in my ear. 'Bleeding nuts out of the nut house, that's what they are!'
    He was quite right: an asylum near Caen had been evacuated and the arrival of our long column of tanks had created panic in their already confused midst. They darted about in all directions, some clapping their hands and grinning, others raving and howling like wild beasts. Some just stood vacant in the middle of the road, heads rolling limply and arms hanging. One poor idiot hurled himself under a tank and was crushed. The nuns called out despairingly and threw their arms into the air,