Highway to Hell [antikvár]

Suddenly he felt something hit him in the back. He felt something cold pressing into him and knew instinctively that it was a knife. Groaning he fell on his knees and quickly reached out both hands behind him. They fastened around a body and he bent over, flinging it over himself onto the path. The knife streaked up towards Strakuweit and he felt the stab in the breast as it struck but managed to hold the Russian down, squeezing iron fingers round his throat. Gasping, he lay on him, the knife still in his chest, and battered the Russian's yellow face with his head, spitting blood at the same time into the man's rolling eyeballs. But the wound in his back and chest burned as if someone had pierced him with a red-hot iron. He felt his strength ebbing, his fingers turning to ice as the neck in his grip swelled, but he had no power to sustain the hold 1 The summer sky hung broodily over Dubrassna, a little village on the Dnieper east of Orsha. It was scarcely to be found on any good maps and even the ordnance survey maps of the General Staffs marked it out as a disconsolate, scattered cluster of nine huts, two wells and a tractor station which served the needs of the other desolate villages within a radius of 50 kilometres. Regimental Sergeant-major Kunze gazed moodily at the prospect of Dubrassna. "It surpasses my wildest dreams!" he said aloud, voicing the unspoken thoughts of the whole of No. 5 Company who had marched all the way from Orsha and were now fagged out, covered in dust and at the end of their tether. They, too, gazed, eyes popping, muttering under their breaths, as they stood dumbfounded at the wells, looking helplessly around them as the barked order came: "To your quarters—dismiss!" Two days later the company was ordered to the front lines—leaving behind in Dubrassna a squad, the company baggage and the field kitchen. And, naturally, the Orderly Room, the very soul of a company. Without the Orderly Room there would be no war, a colonel had once replied when he had facetiously been asked: "What's the most important thing in the army?" In the Company Orderly Room hung the fate of 200 men the leave passes, the mail, promotions, summaries of evidence, the punishments, the casualties—and the letters, signed by the Company Commander, Lieutenant Faber: "Died for Greater Germany!" 1