JOSEF'S FORGE - 1
Copyright 2006 by Carl Mason with Ed Collins
All rights reserved. Other than downloading one copy for strictly personal enjoyment, no part of this story may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, except for reviews, without the written permission of the authors. However based on real events and places, "Josef's Forge" is strictly fictional. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. As in real life, however, the sexual themes unfold gradually.
If you would like to read other Mason-Collins stories, please turn to the listing at the end of this chapter. Comments on all stories are appreciated and may be addressed to the authors at carl_mason@comcast.net.
This story contains descriptions of sexual contact between males, both adults and teenagers. As such, it is homoerotic fiction designed for the personal enjoyment of legal, hopefully mature, adults. If you are not of legal age to read such material, if those in power and/or those whom you trust treat it as illegal, or if it would create unresolvable moral dilemmas in your life, please leave. Finally, remember that maturity generally demands that anything other than safe sex is sheer insanity!
CHAPTER 1
(Silence Descends upon the City)
Suddenly, it was eerily quiet as silence descended on the rubble of a once proud city on the River Volga. The ground stopped shaking. The battle for Stalingrad was over.
The six young men in the ruined basement looked at each other in surprise. The noise and the quaking of the ground, the constant flow of adrenalin - and death - had become part of their lives. The city center had fallen quiet two days ago. Field Marshall von Paulus must have surrendered even though their pocket in a factory district had held out. How was it possible that the proud Sixth Army had been vanquished by an undisciplined rabble of subhumans? It was the second of February 1943.
Sergeant Walter Uppmann moaned as he attempted to turn over. "You ok, Unterfeldwebel?" asked Josef, a 17 year old Volksdeutscher [ethnic German] from Riga. (His Latvian family had been caught in Berlin at the outbreak of war.) The other 17 and 18 year-old Obergrenadiers [privates in the Wehrmacht infantry], Gerd, Heinz, Thomas, and Wolf, looked on with concern. Their sergeant had seen them through a good part of the battle since they had joined the Sixth Army as replacements. "Yeah. A little piece of steel may have screwed me up a bit, but it's not going to kill me. The leg doesn't feel so good, but I'll be ok. How about you, men?" responded Uppmann.
The members of the squad - at least the five men left out of ten - looked at each other dubiously. No one was about to put into words how hungry he was - and had been for some time. It had been a week since the rotting remains of a dead horse had been found - and even the rats, under determined attack, had wisely fled the cellars. All were showing both a lack of adequate rations and the effects of a lengthy and vicious battle. The simple truth is that they were exhausted, desperately hungry and thirsty, filthy, lice- ridden, and shivering uncontrollably in their summer Wehrmacht uniforms.
Nothing happened for several hours. Finally, hearing approaching steps, Gerd stuck his head out of the basement, quickly raised his hands, and called to the others. Slowly, the boys exited the cellar and faced the Red Army patrol. God, it was cold! (No less chilling was their memory of how Soviet prisoners taken during the battle had been quickly killed on the spot.) After being frisked, they were immediately hurried down the rubble-strewn street by the Soviet soldiers to threatening gestures with their weapons and cries (in Russian) of "Hurry up! Move along!" The boys needed no translation. Noticing that Sergeant Uppmann was beginning to fall behind, Josef motioned to one of the guards, inquiring by signs if he could go back and help him to catch up. The guard simply turned and machine-gunned the sergeant. Leaving his body in the street, he grunted sourly and motioned for the others to MOVE!
The shaken and increasingly dispirited boys, already pretty well out of it, could barely force themselves to stumble along. Finally, in a voice of command the young Obergrenadier didn't know he possessed, Josef firmly reminded them that they were German soldiers, members of the Fuehrer's Sixth Army. Responding instantly, they straightened up and continued to march towards the river.
(On the River Bank)
The high, treeless bank overlooking the Volga was increasing full of disarmed German troops waiting for...something. The men had been stripped, their clothing examined, and their few possessions tossed into barrels before being allowed to climb back into their thin uniforms. There was neither food nor water - and the wind off the river cut through them like a razor. During the evening, a German Lt. Colonel accompanied by a Soviet officer walked through the crowd. As they approached, Josef rose, saluted sharply, and asked about the food and water situation. The Oberstleutnant told the boys that the Soviets were presently tending to their own troops, but had promised relief by breakfast. In fact, the Soviet focus had been strictly on winning the battle. Virtually no plans had been made either to feed their own troops or to feed and house the 91,000 German (and other Axis) survivors who surrendered.
That night was nothing that the young soldiers wanted to remember...ever. The bank was increasingly more crowded as prisoners arrived from throughout the area; the temperature was dropping precipitously; some of the lads, Heinz in particular, were having serious problems keeping it together. In addition to their condition, that which had happened on the street to their sergeant had finally gotten to them. Josef, his arm around the young soldier's heaving shoulders, tried to help him maintain some semblance of balance. The enormity of the challenge they faced - merely to stay alive, let alone to return home - began to dawn upon each of them.
As a faint February sun dawned, the scene along the Volga was surreal. Even though they had slept with arms around the other, their bodies pressed tightly together, many of the men were covered in frost. A relatively large number had died during the night. Starvation...exhaustion... disease...wounds...and (before long) despair were already fast thinning the 91,000 (out of 300,000) troops who had survived the battle. German work crews collected their bodies and tossed them into several trucks like cords of wood.
About 2:00 pm, a large number of trucks arrived and backed up to the edge of the sloping bank. Two large barrels of water were unloaded from each truck; two Soviet soldiers were busy inside with that which had to be food. A wave of cries and moans grew and swept across the now crowded bank, a wave that threatened to fling itself against the trucks at any moment. At its zenith, the wave hesitated and subsided. Maintaining their discipline, the troops lined up under their NCOs [non-commissioned officers] - or whoever took command - and approached the trucks in long lines. Soviet guards nervously relaxed their fingers on hundreds of triggers.
On reaching the truck to which their column was directed, each man was given seconds to drink. There were no ladles or cups; the water was brackish and tasted slightly of oil. Forced to use their hands, only a few drank before the surface of the water was coated with filth and even vermin...but they drank. Occasionally, a single shot rang out as a soldier failed to move quickly enough to satisfy the guards who stood with drawn weapons. Having drunk, each man received a small chunk of ancient bread, the only meal that he would receive that day.
The remainder of the day and that night were no different from the day and night that had preceded them. On the second morning, they found that many more of their comrades had escaped their pain and suffering. When breakfast - such as it was - was finished, the Germans were told that they would be moved across the Volga to a holding or transit camp. Soon long lines of German POWs were snaking across the hard-frozen river towards the eastern bank. The lines were dark against the ice - and, observed from either bank, appeared strangely blurred. Many tens of thousands strong, the breath of the men was actually creating a light fog. Once the columns had passed, the river ice could be seen littered with the bodies of hundreds who hadn't been able to make it.
(East of Krasnoslobodsk - The Holding Camp)
Once on the eastern bank, Josef and his boys - for he was now the recognized leader of their little band - found themselves in a particularly bleak area. Stretching towards the Volga as the river made a great bend towards the Caspian Sea, it was fast frozen that day, though Josef guessed it was normally quite marshy. As they came off the ice near the flattened village of Krasnoslobodsk, the various columns of prisoners had been directed in a number of directions. After several hours hiking, their column of perhaps 5000 men reached an area that had been partially cleared. Heavy lines of barbed wire enclosed it, but all that could be seen within was a partially destroyed rural school. The center of the structure was in ruins - probably hit by a bomb or a heavy shell - though two short, fire-damaged wings of the building remained. There was nothing else.
Our young Germans would remain in that place for the rest of February, all of March, and into earliest April as winter gradually turned into a cold and wet early spring. The Soviets were heavily occupied militarily. Little transport was available to take them to permanent camps that, in any case, were not yet prepared. The Soviets still had to develop their systems for receiving and holding large numbers of POWs. (It was not a problem that they had faced in the war to date, but it was a problem that had to be faced as the Wehrmacht gradually weakened and the Red Army pressed irresistibly westwards.) Tens of thousands of the Stalingrad prisoners would die in the holding camps - some estimates stretching as high as half those captured. Only when word came down directly from Moscow that slave labor was vitally needed to rebuild Mother Russia was there the slightest effort to save life. Even then, camp staffs had to be fired and replaced with those less inclined to take immediate vengeance on the invaders who had so barbarically wreaked death and destruction across the Rodina [the Motherland]. Even the newest soldiers who had been brought from the easternmost reaches of the Soviet Union to stop the Germans on the Volga and in the Caucasus, had seen the plight of over 100,000 civilians who had died in and near Stalingrad.
For Josef, Gerd, Heinz, Thomas, and Wolfie, it was simply a matter of staying alive. Josef, a natural leader, took full advantage of the fact that the German Landser (infantryman) was fully conditioned to obeying orders without question. Long before their minimal basic training, they had learned those lessons in the Hitler Youth. As others, especially the young and the old, simply slumped down onto the inhospitable surface - and often died where they collapsed - he pushed them to remain alert...to remain alive. As so many others looked on apathetically, he had his boys strip the bodies of dead comrades, using their light uniforms to layer their own clothing in the bitter cold. As more of their fellows died, their clothing even gave them some semblance of shelter against the wind and snow. He made sure that they were in line when the thin soup made from polluted water and the tops of vegetables was passed out. He pushed them to aggressively collect their small pieces of khleb (a dark, moist bread usually undercooked to the point of being runny) when it occasionally appeared on the menu. And he marched them to the lectures by NKVD "Antifascist" officers who preached on the glories of Communism and the evils of western democracy. At night, he made sure that each heard a few words of encouragement and solace and, other than Thomas who was the homophobe of all homophobes, he made sure that they felt his arm around their shoulders and, occasionally, his hand stroking their shaven heads.
Let no one think it was easy. For instance, there were several other groups of younger prisoners in their holding camp. In late February, it was announced that special trains would begin taking 2500 POWs per day to their permanent camps. Several of their friends were in the first 500-man detachment that limped joyfully out of the camp. There was only one problem: Almost all the rolling stock had been assigned to the Red Army's advance on Rostov. Though they were jammed and locked into cattle cars that stood on a siding, the steam locomotive never appeared. When the cars were opened about a week later, over twenty-six hundred POWs were dead. No one had been assigned to feed them or give them water.
Nor was there much that any German, however dedicated, could do about the medical situation. The problems simply overwhelmed them; the soldiers had brought many diseases to camp with them; and Soviet authorities had no system in place to distribute medicines. Dystrophy, typhus, frostbite, complications from old wounds, exposure, their totally inadequate diet, diarrhea, and the polluted water supply all took a frightful toll. Josef did all that he could, though his bones and those of his buddies gradually became increasingly prominent. After breakfast, for instance, there was a gentle exercise session. He also led a determined attack on the vermin that drained their strength and spread disease. Each morning saw a "bedbug patrol," even though the stench of turpentine that accompanied the crushing of the hated bloodsuckers turned their stomachs. On rainy days - and March was sodden - he had the boys strip, thoroughly wash in the first urine of the morning, and then attempt to minimize the smell by rubbing their bodies with a small piece of brown soap that he always managed to beg, borrow, or steal. The squad agreed that it did control the lice - and the bedbugs surely didn't like it. "An old German remedy," he always smirked when questioned about an approach that was widely adopted throughout the camp.
To be sure, there were some problems that Josef couldn't handle. He remembered one night as he trudged back from the "shit pit." The moon suddenly came out from behind heavy clouds and disclosed a prisoner using a heavy nail to gouge what little flesh remained on the body of a naked comrade who lay dead. He didn't...he couldn't...say a word. There was also the problem of punishment by the guards that was usually arbitrary and designed to terrorize rather than to correct a specific problem. (The slightest disobedience - or even the appearance of disobedience - was, of course, severely punished, but we are speaking of something else at this point.) Gerd and he were walking back from a visit to a squad in the far corner of the camp where they had been studying Russian when a guard suddenly appeared, knocked Gerd to the ground, and manhandled him over towards one of the windowless "punishment boxes" near the barbed wire fence. Using what vocabulary he possessed, he ascertained that Gerd would be in the box for 24 hours. Once in the closed box, Gerd would not be able do anything other than stand upright and would receive neither food nor water. When the boys returned the next morning to help their comrade, no guard was in sight. After waiting for two hours, Josef went over to the guard station (that occupied one wing of the old school) and knocked. A guard opened the door and motioned for him to enter. After nearly half an hour, the guard emerged with a white-faced, staggering young German. The right side of Josef's face was swollen; there were tears in his eyes; as they passed, the boys could see blood on the back of his thin uniform trousers. The two of them trudged over to the punishment box whereupon the guard unlocked it and threw the stiff and weakened Gerd onto the ground. Whistling, he walked off. No one said a word until they were well on the way back to their encampment. Thomas seemed about to say something when Wolf moved over to their leader and muttered, "Just know, Sarge, that every guy in the squad would follow you to Hell and back!"
On a sunny day that Heinz (their resident expert on such matters) swore was in early April, the boys sat around after their exercise session, swatting at the mosquitoes that were just beginning to be noticeable. God, they were big enough to pick up a Volkswagen...maybe even the Field Marshall's Mercedes...and fly off with it and could they ever bite! Loudspeakers suddenly blared, announcing that in 15 minutes they would leave for their permanent camp. As they stood in lines before the camp gate - probably an hour later - Josef noticed that barely 2000 of the 5000 men who had marched into the camp in early February were departing. He shook his head in sorrow. Several hours later, their ranks swollen by another column, they again stood in line at a temporary dock on the Volga. It appeared that they would board several barges pushed by a heavy tug that were similar to those Josef had seen carrying grain on the Spree River in Berlin. Suddenly, he felt an arm around his shoulders. A low voice growled in his ear, "You did it, Sarge. You did it! We're all alive! Every man in the squad owes you his life." It was the great homophobe, Thomas.
(To Be Continued)
DATES OF LAST POSTING IN NIFTY
Archived in Gay/Historical Unless Otherwise Noted
OUT OF THE RUBBLE (32 Chapters): 10-22-04. CASTLE MARGARETHEN (9 Cs): 12-24-04. THE PRIEST & THE PAUPER (12 Cs): 3-10-05. HIGH PLAINS DOCTOR (12 Cs): 4-25-05. FOR GOD AND COUNTRY (9 Cs): 6-13-05. HOBO TEEN (12 Cs): 8-23-06. YOUNG JEREMY TAYLOR (9 Cs): 9-25-06 (posted in Sci-Fi/Fantasy). STREETS OF NEW YORK (10 Cs): 12-06-06. JOSEF'S FORGE (10 Cs): Posting.