SS General by Sven Hassel

anyone else, it might have been a stone; only a cunning old fox like Porta was able to spot it in time and know it for the death trap it was.
    "Jump!" he now screamed again, and without taking his eyes off the track, he reached out with one hand and gave a tremendous push at the nearest recruit, who fell overboard with a shrill yell of fear. Heide dived headfirst into a snowdrift. Tiny turned around, picked up two terrified boys by the scruff of their necks and hurled them bodily into space, then threw himself after them. The rest of the recruits clung anxiously to the handrail, not fully understanding the danger that was now only seconds away from them, but understanding only too well the kind of accident that could befall anyone fool enough to jump off a vehicle moving along at sixty miles an hour.
    "Enemy aircraft!" shouted the Old Man, as he hurtled over the side.
    By some miracle, it worked. It seemed that they could understand enemy aircraft. Probably it had been part of their training. At any rate, they jumped!
    Gregor and I abandoned our precious MG and disappeared together into the snow. I landed like a bullet only inches away from a telegraph pole. I sat up, feeling nauseous. Another fraction to the right and my head would have been crushed like an eggshell. A helmet would have saved me, but we had largely given up wearing them, finding that the advantage of having a protective layer of steel on top of one's head was more than outweighed by the disadvantage of impaired sight and hearing.
    Porta made one final attempt to brake by using the clutch, but it had no perceptible effect. The sled was now almost on top of the mine. At the very last second Porta gave a despairing wrench at the wheel and the sled slewed away in the opposite direction, but we had no time to sit back and applaud, nor to mop our brows with relief, nor to check our casualties, for the second sled was approaching fast. We rushed into the road, waving our arms and screaming at Barcelona, who was driving.
    "Mine! There's a mine!"
    Too late. They were too close on our tail and hadn't a chance of pulling up. Barcelona applied the brakes with all his force, but the sled merely upended and burst into flames as the mine exploded beneath it.
    The third sled, the one carrying the ammunition, was taking desperate evasive action, but it was out of control and the wreckage of the second sled was scattered in its path. It went plowing through it, through the flames and across the writhing, screaming bodies, turned two clumsy somersaults and then itself exploded. Lieutenant Wenck was propelled up into the air like a human torch. We ran to the spot, but the body that fell back into the snow was a twisted, grinning parody of a human being, and it died before we could reach it.
    Slowly the noise of the explosions died away; slowly the whirling debris came to rest. Pieces of broken machinery and torn chunks of human flesh sank down into the melting snow. We found Barcelona lying some way off, where he had been thrown by the first explosion. He was alive but unconscious, with his uniform in ribbons and a huge hole in the side of his chest. We patched him up as best we could and carried him carefully back to the road, where a medical orderly had already set up a first aid post. As we laid Barcelona gently in the snow, our eyes were drawn to a sight that was almost too horrible to contemplate. And yet it compelled you to look; you looked until you felt sick with disgust and torn apart with horror, and still your eyes refused to turn away from the mangled mess that lay trapped beneath an overturned sled. A young soldier, half crushed, half destroyed, yet incredibly and horribly still breathing.
    "Oh, my God," muttered the Old Man, putting a hand over his eyes. "Oh, God, let him die."
    Appalled as I had never been before, I stood with the rest staring down at the infinitely pathetic, infinitely repulsive thing that only seconds before had been a human being. It lay with