by Sven Hassel
‘1 see,’ said Obergefreiter Braun, puckering up his forehead. I’ll try one of them next time.’
‘Yes, you do that,’ said Stever, cramming his cap on his head and stepping smartly out of the barracks.
No one seeing Stever outside the prison, with a pleasant smile on his lips and a helping hand for little old ladies who couldn’t cross the road, would ever have taken him for the same man who casually battered prisoners half to death before throwing them into their cells to rot. And if anyone had asked Stever himself about it, he would have been quite puzzled.
‘Look, I’m only an Obergefreiter’ he would have said. ‘I’m only carrying out my orders . . .’
And besides, he had never actually killed a man. He prided himself on that. He had been through the entire war without firing a shot at anyone. And that was a record to boast of. Stever had no man’s blood on HIS conscience . . .
CHAPTER SEVEN
Prison Discipline
MAJOR ROTENHAUSEN turned up once every month to introduce himself to the latest batch of prisoners and to take his leave of those who were departing. He never said farewell to those who had been condemned to death, since as far as he was concerned they no longer existed; only to those who were leaving to serve their sentences in one of the military prisons, Torgau or Glatz or Germersheim.
His favourite visiting hour was eleven o’clock at night, when all the prisoners had settled down and were asleep. He enjoyed the inevitable panic and confusion as guards raced round the cells shaking unwilling men into wakefulness in order that they might be presented to the. prison Governor. It gave him a pleasurable sense of his own position and importance.
He made one of his surprise visits four days after the affair of the forged pass. It was a few minutes before midnight and he went to the prison straight from an evening’s play at the casino. He was in particularly good humour. He had dined well, he had drunk a little too much and he had passed an entertaining evening. He was the picture of sartorial elegance, and he knew it. His grey cape, lined with white silk, billowed gently in the breeze. His leather boots creaked energetically as he walked across the courtyard. His long legs looked superb in their sleek grey trousers, and his epaulettes gleamed golden in the darkness. Major Rotenhausen was one of the garrison’s best-dressed men: three years earlier he had made a marriage of money, and he was now president of the casino. Men looked at him and envied him, and Rotenhausen held his head high and felt himself to be the pride of the German Army.
Most people who came to the garrison accepted Rotenhausen at his own value, assuming automatically that he was a man of influence and a power to be reckoned with. There had been only one occasion, that the garrison could recall, when some stranger, some upstart officer from God knows where, had walked into the place and upset all the accepted rules of etiquette, had ignored Rotenhausen and set all the other officers by the heels.
He was a young colonel, no older than thirty at the very most. He had lost an arm at Minsk and was stationed temporarily in Hamburg, a half-way halt between hospital and a return to the front line. He had received virtually every decoration that was available, and his chest was a blaze of medals. His uniform itself caused several disdainfully raised eyebrows. Apart from the tunic, which was tailor made, the rest had all very obviously come straight from the stores. Men looked at his boots, his trousers, his kepi, even his leather belt and holster, and silently sneered. His pistol was a P.38. All the other officers carried the Walther, a neat little job which they felt to be more becoming to their status, but the unknown colonel was apparently indifferent to such niceties.
He belonged to an Alpine Regiment, the edelweis flash stood out boldly on his left sleeve, and although at first the garrison had no idea who he was or why he was there, this fact in itself was enough to put them on their guard.
Only half an hour after his arrival, the Colonel called a meeting and informed the startled company that he had provisionally taken over the command of the garrison.
‘I am Colonel Greif of the 9th Alpine Regiment,’ he announced, into the horrified silence. ‘I am here for, a temporary period.’
He shook hands with no one; merely fixed them all with his bright unblinking gaze and continued with his introductory lecture.
‘I’ve always got on well with the men under my command, and I expect to do the same with you. Just pull your weight as I pull mine and we shall all do fine together. Only one thing I cannot stand and will not tolerate, and that’s a shirker.’ The steady brown eyes flickered back and forth across the ranks of the assembled officers. ‘I suppose you must be aware, gentlemen, that the units at the front are crying out for replacements? I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, but if for some reason you haven’t been out there for a while you might not be quite aware how desperate the situation has become: there are men in my regiment, for instance, who have had no leave for the last three years . . .’
He asked every officer present how long he had been in the garrison, and his eyebrows rose ever higher and his lips turned down at the corners as he heard the replies. The number who had ever been anywhere near the front was but a minute percentage of the total.
‘I can see, gentlemen,’ said Greif, ‘that things are going to have to change round here . . .’
And change they did; and abruptly. Within three days of the Colonel’s arrival all the fantasy uniforms, the capes and the cloaks and the stylish kepis, the highly polished boots and the neat little pistols, had been reluctantly packed away and exchanged for more regulation attire. The garrison became a place of hard work, filled with sweating hurrying men and drab uniforms, instead of presenting its more usual aspect of a fancy dress ball in full swing.
‘We’re at war, for God’s sake!’ was Greif’s constant cry. ‘This is a military establishment not a toy-soldier fort!’
Even the officer commanding the 76th Infantry Regiment, old Colonel Brandt, had to bend before the storm and abandon his lorgnette.
‘If your sight is defective, then go and get yourself some spectacles,’ said Greif, curtly. ‘But don’t ever let me see any more of this affectation.’
And Brandt had to stand there and take it. Had to stand to attention and suffer insults from this strip of piss, this one-armed ribbon-bedecked jumped-up colonel from nowhere who was young enough to be his son . . .
The garrison suffered not in silence but in a continuous state of low dissatisfied muttering. Men gathered together in small secretive groups and spoke in veiled tones of various accidents that might possibly befall the Colonel. One lieutenant even had the brilliant idea of denouncing him – anonymously, of course – to the Gestapo. While they were still trying to work out what to denounce him for, the garrison as a whole received a shock from which it never quite recovered: Colonel Greif had a social call from no less a person than Heydrich.
Heydrich of all people! The devil’s adjutant! The idea of denouncing Greif to the Gestapo was tacitly abandoned and men began to grow suddenly restless and to seek after change. Requests for transfer began to pour in. No man in his right senses would wish to stay on in Hamburg under someone who was a friend of Heydrich. Even the front line was preferable to the Gestapo . . .
Rotenhausen was not amongst those who joined in the first mad scramble to get out. He stayed his hand a while – not through any low cunning but simply because his reactions were slow. And God protected him, thus confirming his own exalted view of himself. Only a few days after Heydrich’s visit to the Colonel, Greif was advised by telegram of a new posting. He packed his bags and set off within hours for the Russian front. He was never to see Germany again. He died in a snowdrift just outside Stalingrad, and when the Russians discovered him, on 3rd February, 1943, he was stiff and cold and had been dead for some time.
The garrison celebrated his departure for four days and nights non-stop. The champagne flowed and the old carnival uniforms were pulled out of their hiding places. Men strutted and peacocked to their hearts’ content and Colonel B
randt bought himself a new lorgnette.
Greif’s replacement was a Brigadier General of doubtful intelligence and possibly suffering from a premature onset of senility. The garrison were charmed by him. A most delightful old fool, even if he would insist on slobbering over their wives’ hands and whinnying like a horse whenever he presented himself to them.
‘General von der Oost, Madame . . . of the Infantry, of course!’ And then he would straighten himself up, creaking and grunting, tug at his jacket, heave at his collar, clear his throat and trot out one of his standard jokes. ‘I’ll venture to guess you don’t know why I’m in the Infantry, eh?’
Obviously no one ever did, and no one ever cared, but the answer came just the same.
‘Well, I’ll tell you . . . I’m in the Infantry for the simple reason that I’m not in the Artillery, d’you see . . . never could stand the Artillery, matter of fact . . . dreadful business, all that noise all the time, gives me a shocking bad head . . .’
One day he staggered into the casino and stopped the whole proceedings with a great roar of delighted laughter.
‘Gentlemen, I’m happy tonight! Do you know why I’m happy?’
By this time his officers had grown accustomed to his simple turn of wit. They did know why, but he was a brigadier general and he suited them very well, so they shook their heads and humoured him.
‘I’ll tell you why!’ The General held out his arms, delighted. ‘I’m happy because I’m not sad!’
Even when they had all politely fallen about in deferential amusement, von der Oost was not satisfied. Beaming, he advanced upon them and cracked another witticism.
‘Yesterday I was damnably sad . . . simply because I wasn’t happy, d’you see . . .’
Better an old fool like van der Oost than an objectionable young hothead like Greif. The garrison and their new commander were on excellent terms. Von der Oost asked no more than that he be allowed to keep them in a state of constant amusement. Men quickly found that if they laughed at his jokes he would blindly sign any piece of paper that was set before him, whether it be an illegal requisition for a crate of margarine or an execution order. There was even a rumour in the garrison that the Brigadier General was unable to read.
‘Well, well,’ he always remarked, after scrawling his signature across a document. ‘Well, well, well, there you are, d’you see. Always up to date, eh?’ And he would lean back in his chair and wave a hand at his empty trays. ‘In tray, out tray, pending . . . nothing in any of ’em, d’you see . . . That’s the way to do it, gentlemen. Keep up with the work and it never gets on top of you.’
‘They executed three infantry soldiers at Fuhlsbüttel yesterday,’ said his Adjutant one morning, by way of making conversation.
‘Ah, yes,’ said van der Oost. ‘They have to, don’t you see . . . each war demands its sacrifices. Without sacrifices there wouldn’t be any war, you know. Wouldn’t be any war . . .’
He always slept during the Kriegspiel15. He would drop off at the beginning and wake up half-way through with loud cries of encouragement and advice.
‘The foreign armoured divisions must be destroyed, gentlemen! Must be destroyed before they manage to reach Germany and cause a congestion . . . The essential in a battle of this kind, d’you see, is to make sure the enemy run out of munitions . . . What’s a tank without shells? Eh? Like a railway without a train . . .’
And the officers would nod their agreement and conscientiously begin moving the pieces as he directed. But somehow, no matter how hard they tried, they never were able to devise any scheme for cutting the enemy’s supply line. In the end they hit on a solution, and at the start of each game they would solemnly announce to the General that the enemy lacked munitions, whereupon, quite contented, he would rub his hands together and beam his approval.
‘Well done, gentlemen. That means we have won. All we need do now is bomb the enemy’s factories and then we shall have them at our mercy.’
And off he would fall to sleep, convinced of his own brilliance as a military strategist.
One day the garrison cat upset the whole field of battle by depositing a litter of kittens in the middle of Hill 25. All the little tanks, all the little field guns and all the little armoured cars, were scattered pell mell about the table, some upside down, some on their side, some even on the floor. It looked as if a miniature bomb had scored a direct hit. And the cat, as is the way of cats, had chosen a particularly inapposite moment to give birth, as the garrison had invited then neighbours in to partake in a game.
Van der Oost lost his temper for the first time since he had been there. He demanded that the cat should be hauled up before a court martial. There was nothing for it but to humour him and join in the fantasy. Two Feldwebels cornered the cat and held her throughout the trial. It was the nearest they had come to danger during the whole of their military careers. The cat was sentenced to death on the grounds of having sabotaged the officers’ instructions course in the art of warfare. However, the next day found the General in a better temper. He reprieved her on condition that his batman attached her to a collar and lead and looked after her. Some time later the cat disappeared: the General’s batman had sold it to a butcher and the General fretted his heart out until another cat was found to take her place.
Two years had passed swiftly and pleasantly since the terrible advent of Colonel Greif and his brief reign of terror. The garrison was a happy and hedonistic place, and Major Rotenhausen increased his sphere of influence from day to day. He had discovered that the Brigadier General had a passion for cognac, and he had also discovered where he could lay hands on a continuous supply of it. Major Rotenhausen and General von der Oost understood each other very well.
Humming briskly to himself, Rotenhausen marched across the dark courtyard to the prison – to his prison, the prison he commanded and where he kept his prisoners. He smiled and flicked his riding crop against the side of his leg. He never went riding, he was terrified of horses, but the crop looked good and was useful for bringing recalcitrant prisoners to heel.
Stabsfeldwebel Stahlschmidt had been warned by telephone of the visit, and he came to meet him. Rotenhausen rather distantly returned his salute. Stever was also there. They had had to search half the town for him and had eventually run him to earth in a private club, where he had been watching an obscene film in which naked people of various shapes and various sexes committed atrocities upon one another. Stever had still not completely returned to the mundane world of the prison.
‘Very well, Stabsfeldwebel. I suggest we get down to business straight away,’ said Rotenhausen, vigorously switching at himself with his crop. ‘I’m a busy man, as you know, so let’s waste no time.’
Stahlschmidt led the way to his office. It was not only clean, it was not only tidy, it was impeccable in every detail: every single object in it was placed according to the rule book. Rotenhausen walked about it a few times, peering into hidden corners for patches of dust, examining the wire baskets for papers that had no right to be there, taking out a metal rule and measuring the distance between the edge of the desk and the edge of the in-tray, the edge of the desk and the ink well, the ink well and the out-tray, the out-tray and the blotting pad. Stever stood stolidly at the door watching him. Stahlschmidt walked about behind him and every now and again closed an eye in Stever’s direction. What fools these officers were! He knew that Rotenhausen had long cherished a desire to fault him on some small point of order. Had he himself been an officer, thought Stahlschmidt, he would not have taken so long about it. But then, he was smarter than Rotenhausen and that was why Rotenhausen would never catch him out.
Having measured everything on the desk that was even remotely measurable, Rotenhausen sighed with weary boredom and demanded to see the list of the prisoners. Smiling, Stahlschmidt handed it over to him. He read it through with the aid of a monocle, which he had great difficulty in keeping in his eye.
‘Stabsfeldwebel, this list is deficient. I see no mention
of the number of new prisoners . . . I see no figure for the number of men who are to be transferred . . .’
‘There we are, sir.’ Stahlschmidt jabbed a fat red finger at the foot of the page. ‘I think you’ll find these refer . . . seven new prisoners, sir. One lieutenant colonel, one cavalry captain, two lieutenants, one Feldwebel, two privates. Fourteen to be transferred, sir. All of them to Torgau. There’s one brigadier general, one colonel, two majors, one captain, one Hauptmann, two lieutenants, one Feldwebel, three corporals, one marine, one private. There are also four men condemned to death. Their appeals have been rejected and all necessary arrangements have been made for their execution.’
‘Well done, Stabsfeldwebel’ With a twist of the lips, Rotenhausen dropped his monocle and laid the paper on the desk. ‘It gives me great pleasure to find everything so well organized. You obviously know your work and take care over it. You’re a man in whom one can have all confidence. Hm.’ He beat himself hard with his riding crop. ‘No slovenly ways here like there are at Lübeck, eh? Everything goes like clockwork with you, doesn’t it, Stabsfeldwebel?’
‘I do my best, sir.’
‘Let me just give you one word of warning, however: watch out for accidents . . . You know the sort of thing I mean? If a prisoner happens to break an arm or a leg, that’s perfectly all right by me, but do try to avoid breaking their necks!’
‘Me, sir?’ Stahlschmidt frowned. ‘Me break their necks, sir?’
‘You know what I mean!’ said Rotenhausen, irritably. ‘Just take great care, that’s all I’m asking . . . If not, we shall both find ourselves in trouble. There’s a man called Bielert at Stadthausbrücke. You may have heard of him. A most disagreeable type. He’s started taking rather too much interest in our affairs these past few weeks. Nosing about the garrison, asking questions about the prison, the way it’s run, how many people in it, you know the sort of thing . . . He even had the infernal nerve to come bursting into the casino at two a.m. the other day. Such behaviour would never have been tolerated in the days of the Emperor. A man like that would have been thrown out on his ear . . . A lieutenant who didn’t know him took him at first for a priest. I ask you! Strange type of priest . . . He was one of Heydrich’s disciples, you know. Not a man we should be wise to cross, Stabsfeldwebel. We know better than that, don’t we?’