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all!'
    Schwarz, his black eyes gleaming fanatically, flung his arm up, as the rest snapped to attention.
    `That will never happen, sir,' he barked eagerly. ` Sieg Heil! '
    ` Sieg Heil! ' the cry rose and reverberated around the mountain top, harsh, brutal and arrogant, flung out like a challenge to fate itself.
    One hour later, the Wotan men began to transform Peak 555 into a fort. The ground was iron-hard, but a grenade buried in its surface soon softened it up so that the digging could commence. By the end of the first day, when the pale yellow ball of the winter snow started to slide behind the snow-covered peak, they had created a series of shallow holes all along the perimeter of the plateau below it. These were covered with sacking and rags which they had waterproofed with a mixture of rifle oil, paint, petrol and candle-wax. When the Americans still did not counter-attack on the following day, the hard work of digging commenced once more, the men burying into the Italian earth like moles. That evening their narrow one-man foxholes, each shaped like a coffin, were deep enough and they set about making them, comfortable. As a sweating Schulze joked to von Dodenburg:
    `They laughed when I started digging this.' He pointed to the hole, with its straw filled mattress at the base and the stove made from a twenty-litre French oil drum, already glowing invitingly. 'But now the joke's on them. You see there's nothing like a nice warm bed to come home to at night. Just stretch out your hands, sir and feel the warmth given out by that thing!'
    No thank you, Schulze, and I'm not going to ask where you stole the fuel from for it either, you rogue. Come on, out of there, I'm going to plant a spandau here. You'll cover my CP with it.'
    Schulze wiped the sweat off his big red face with the back of his hand.
    `All right, sir, I'm coming. But that's always the trouble with this shitty war - it breaks up a feller's home life!'
    By the end of the third day, Battle Group Wotan was dug in and waiting for the enemy to appear. The Americans, hidden by the permanent smoke-screen below still did not come, and life on the Peak began to settle in to the routine of a military encampment.
    Schulze, together with one of the ex-inmates of Torgau military prison, who had been conscripted into the Battle Group just after it had moved to the Italian front, made a crystal radio set from an empty cardboard GI ration container, copper wire taken from a shell and a couple of razor blades. And in the evening after stand-down, a group of the troopers would crowd round it, listening to American jazz from the Allied military station and frying potatoes in the howitzer recoil mechanism oil which Schulze had 'organized' somehow or other.
    `They taste pretty good, sir,' Schulze told an amused von Dodenburg during the course of one of his evening rounds, 'but that oil gives yer a nice old case of the Cassino trots next morning - nearly takes the ring out of yer ass, it does!'
    ‘I remember in Russia one time,' the ex-Torgau man said after von Dodenburg had gone, 'I was caught off-guard by a salvo from an Ivan Stalin Organ (1) and I jumped in this hole without thinking. I should have. The hole was full of crap!'
    The Tyrolean boys laughed softly in the growing darkness, warming their frozen hands on the hot metal sides of their canteen cups full of bitter 'nigger sweat'.
    `And I'd put my shitty paws into it before I realized what the hell it was,' the ex-Torgau man said bitterly.
    `Must have been one of those rear-echelon stallions,' Schulze commented sympathetically. 'They crap all over the place.'
    ‘ Ner,' the ex-Torgau man answered. 'They never get that near the front - their hide's too precious.' He took a sip of his nigger's sweat. 'All I'm saying is that there ought to be the death penalty for that sort of thing! Who else but a first class crap hound with ingrowing toenails and flat feet would do that kind of thing - shitting indiscriminately for other