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out. Before that we gave him a black eye and knocked out one of his teeth, a gold one that, strangely enough, neither Porta nor Tiny would have. We also banged his shin with a belt buckle so that it swelled up enormously. He was half-Jewish. Looking like that, he told us when he asked us to do it, he would be sent home to the States and never see the front again. Only an idiot stayed at the front voluntarily, but of course there were some of those on either side. I won't say we despised them. Most of us had volunteered originally, so in our heart of hearts we had a sort of admiration for the tough guys who shrank from nothing and accepted all the consequences of their volunteering.
    We laid the wounded out in rows along the side of the road and sent a wireless call for amphibians and SPWes,* which we filled with bloody, whimpering bodies.
    * Troop-carrying tanks.
    Porta and I lifted up a man and found that a bit of lung was bulging out from a gaping wound in his back; Tiny came up carrying a corporal, half of whose cranium had been shot away, baring the brain. Behind a midden, we found an officer, whose face had been shaved off by a shell splinter. We piled the dead in two great heaps. Many were little more than charred mummies. Thousands of flies buzzed round them. We dug a common grave. Not a deep one, just enough to make sure they were covered with earth. The sweet smell of corpse was nauseating.
    One of the prisoners, a staff sergeant, who was sitting on the front of Major Mike's tank chatting, had been given schnaps and was half-drunk. He gave everything away, telling us that they had sent back the green signal that reported the area clear of the enemy. Some of his companions looked at him contemptuously. Then he saw the same contempt in our eyes and realised the ghastly thing he had done. He snatched Barcelona's pistol, shoved the muzzle into his mouth and pulled the trigger. We could have stopped him, but none of us moved.
    Major Mike gave the body a contemptuous poke with the toe of his boot.
    "War's a bloody thing," the Old Man muttered.
    The Major scribbled down a message for the radio NCO to send back:
    "Rhinoceros to Sow. Chief. 36 tanks liquidated, 10 trucks, 17 cars. Unknown number of killed. Own losses: killed--one private; wounded--one Feldwebel and one NCO. Awaiting contact with enemy. Continuing on own responsibility. Breaking off link. End."
    We grinned understandingly, knowing that Major Mike wanted to deal with the enemy regiment on his own. Having risen from NCO to major, he was determined to shine and to do that the red tabs had to be shown that they were not the only ones who could do things. It was pretty ingenious, breaking off radio communication. For the next three or four hours nobody would be able to get hold of us. It was playing for high stakes, but if Major Mike could bring it off, he would be a big man. If things went wrong and he returned alive, he would land in Torgau. That was the hard law of the Army.
    "Mount," ordered Mike. "Tanks--fo-r-ward."
    We leaned out of our opened hatches as we drove through a belt of young trees and then down to a river bed with stinking water and mud, where some swollen bodies of dead cattle made the air putrid.
    Leutnant Herbert's tank stuck. It just shoved the mud in front of it, till it got itself well and truly stuck.
    Major Mike swore furiously, leaping from his tank and wading across up to his knees in mud. When he had kicked at a dead rat and glared evilly at Leutnant Herbert in his turret, he asked "What the hell do you think you're doing, man?"
    Leutnant Herbert muttered something about it being an accident that might have happened to anybody.
    "There's no such thing in my squadron," bellowed Major Mike. "You aren't pissing about the Kurfurstedamn now. You're in a war and in charge of a tank costing a million Reichmark. I don't care about the million, but I need your bloody tank. What bloody fool promoted you Leutnant. Pull him out, Beier!"
    Tiny and