by Sven Hassel
After a while, someone sitting opposite, taking a sudden dislike either to the singer or the song, reached across and pushed him backwards on to the floor. Barcelona’s last words before he gave way to temporary oblivion were a fanatical, ‘Viva España!’
For a moment, Bernard the Boozer sat contemplating the inert figure of his art-loving friend. The sight seemed to move him very deeply. With the aid of Porta and the Legionnaire, he crawled walrus-like on to the table and prepared to make a speech, and there he stood, swaying in pendulum fashion from side to side, with the Legionnaire hanging on to both ankles and Porta waiting to catch him should he fall.
‘My friends!’ He held out both arms to embrace us. The electric light bulb went crashing to the floor. A paper chain came adrift and festooned itself round Bernard’s neck. ‘My friends, I trust you’ve all got enough to drink and there’s nobody going thirsty? Because I can tell you, here and now, that there’s enough liquor in my cellar—’ At this point he swayed backwards, into the waiting arms of Porta, and there was a pause while he was set back on an even keel. ‘There’s enough booze in my cellar to keep the whole German Navy afloat . . . and you’re welcome to it! You’re my friends and you’re welcome to it! Drink it all! Drink it until it’s coming out of your eyes and your ears and your arseholes . . . My friends!’ And now he swayed forward, and the Legionnaire held on to his ankles while Porta ran round to the front and caught him before he reached the table. He tilted him back again, towards the Legionnaire. ‘My friends, I hope you mink of this little place of mine as being a home from home . . . a real home from home, where you can piss and shit and fornicate just like you would by your own fireside . . . Being a publican, it’s not just a job, it’s a vocation . . . you know that? ’S a real vocation . . . Where do you lads go when you’re browned off and you want cheering up? Back to barracks? Back to the wife and kids? Like hell!’ With a joyous gesture, Bernard swooped round through an arc that brought turn dangerously close to scraping his nose on the table. By some miracle the force of his momentum was strong enough to carry him onwards, until he had again reached the perpendicular and the Legionnaire was able to reach up a hand and prevent his going off on another turn. ‘Like hell!’ roared Bernard, undaunted. ‘You don’t go anywhere near ’em . . . this is where you come! Round to good old Bernie’s place! Round to the boozer! Bernie the Boozer, that’s what you call me . . . and not for nothing, lads! I’m not called that for nothing! I been in the business a good long time and I know what it’s all about, and when you lads come here in search of a bit of comfort I make bloody sure you get it! Not one of my boys ever goes away from here without a gutful!’
‘That’s right,’ affirmed some wag from the far end of the table. ‘A full gut and an empty pocket!’
Bernard smiled benevolently, not catching the implications of this remark.
‘In my establishment,’ he declared, ‘the common soldier is king. Privates, corporals, sergeants . . . they’re all welcome! There’s only one class I won’t abide, and mat’s officers. Officers, my friends, are the most anti-social, arse-licking, yellow-bellied—’
The rest of his feelings on officers were lost in a general storm of cheers and catcalls. Bernard raised both arms above his head, clenching his fists and prancing about the table like a triumphant boxer. The Legionnaire and Porta hovered anxiously at his side.
‘Gentlemen!’ roared Bernard, his voice rising above the swelling hubbub, ‘we belong to Hamburg! Hamburg is our city! Hamburg is the last bastion of Europe!’
The cheers rang out again from all and sundry. Most of us had no affection whatsoever for Hamburg, but that did nothing to dampen our enthusiasm. We yelled and stamped and threw our arms round one another in a fervour of love and loyalty. Much encouraged, Bernard stamped energetically upon someone’s fingers and tramped down to the far end of the table, treading in plates and overturning glasses as he did so.
‘Sylvia!’ He lurched sideways, extended a hand and grabbed one of the passing serving girls. ‘Where are you going, wench? What do you think you’re doing? You’re on duty as long as the booze lasts . . . Bring on some more beer and let’s have a ball!’
Loud whistles filled the air. Feet stamped, hands clapped. Men opened their mouths and shouted wordlessly, for the pure delight of making a loud noise. Some of those who had temporarily withdrawn from the scene recovered their senses, vomited and returned to the fray. Bernard stumbled back down the table, waving his hands frantically towards the piano.
‘Let’s have a song! Ready for the song of Hamburg, lads! All together, now . . .’
The choir of voices filled the room. Harsh, unmelodious, out of time, out of tune, we bawled together Bernard’s song of Hamburg:
‘Das Herz von Sankt Pauli
das ist meine Heimat,
in Hamburg, da in ich zu Haus.’19
The song was brought to a full stop by Steiner, who staggered back from the washroom to announce that the first dead-drunk, out-like-a-light of the evening, was to be found on the floor. A roof-raising cheer went up and the entire party at once crushed its way into the washroom to inspect the victim. It was a Feldwebel. He was out cold and no amount of rough handling would bring him back again. With wild cries of jubilation the six fittest men transported him outside and flung him into the gutter. Porta laughed so long and so loud that he dislocated his jaw, but Tiny soon put it back in place for him with a well-timed upper cut.
During the next hour, another seven of the guests ended up in the gutter. Bernard the Boozer’s birthday party died slowly out in a stale sea of overturned beer and a hovering pall of smoke. The floor was covered in débris and drunken bodies. The boozer himself lay upended in a packing case.
The eight of us from the 27th, strung out arm in arm across the width of the pavement and half way across the road, supported each other through the night on our way back to barracks.
‘I’m thirsty!’ howled Porta; and the narrow, crowded buildings of the Herberstrasse flung the words back at him, echoing and re-echoing.
As we swayed past an underground station we saw an old man fighting with a brush and a bucket of paste to stick up a notice, and we naturally stopped to help him. For some reason he took fright and went hobbling off into the dim dawn light, leaving us to cope rather ineptly with the poster.
‘Whozzitsay?’ demanded Porta.
Steiner held it up and managed to read out the first word – NOTICE – before Barcelona pulled it away from him and dunked it in the paste pot.
‘Who the hell—’ Porta lost his balance, fell to the ground and foolishly attempted to pull himself up by my ankles. We collapsed together. ‘Who the hell sticks these damn things up at this time of night?’
It took us the best part of fifteen minutes to get that poster posted. We overturned the paste pot, we lost the brush, we tore the thing in half, we stuck it over ourselves and each other, and we finally got it back to front on to the wall and wondered why we couldn’t read it. It wasn’t until the Legionnaire, leaning against the rest of us for support, solemnly peeled the thing off and turned it round that the mystery was solved.
‘Whozzitsay?’ Porta fretfully demanded for the second time. He was on the ground again and couldn’t see.
Steiner and Barcelona stood with their heads together, taking each other’s weight and attempting to bring the lettering into focus. The poster was upside down, now. It looked like Russian to me. Steiner muttered the words aloud, and Barcelona politely corrected him as he stumbled over the more difficult syllables. Steiner kept saying ‘Thank you’ and ‘So sorry’, and Barcelona kept on saying, ‘Forgive me if I put you right, won’t you?’ and it was really quite a charming scene except that the rest of us found it almost impossible to stand still and wait, one or other of us constantly falling down and having to be picked up again.
‘Friends!’ shouted Barcelona, at last. He turned to us with a finger on his lips and his eyes open wide. ‘Don’t panic! Keep calm! It’s a message from the Ges
tapo!’
Steiner, left suddenly without support, pitched forward towards the poster, bumped into the wall and sunk slowly down it on his way to the ground.
‘I’m so thirsty,’ he moaned.
‘WhozzitSAY?’ demanded Porta, querulously, for the third time.
Barcelona put out a hand to steady himself.
‘It’s someone who’s to be hanged.’
He brought the words out with difficulty. His eyes were round and owlish. His mouth was slack.
Porta, apparently satisfied, turned and vomited down the steps of the underground. The Old Man sat down with his back against a lamp post. He made an attempt to speak, waited a moment, then tried again. The words came out one by one in a slow motion blur.
‘Who . . . is . . . to be . . . hanged?’
Barcelona put his head right up against the poster.
‘Traitor to the Führer . . . to the German people . . . and to her country . . . will be executed today at 17.15 . . . Emilie Dreyer . . .’
We picked up Steiner and Porta and continued on our way, arm in arm on a zig-zag course towards the Palace of Justice. Barcelona and the Legionnaire were roaring and hiccuping:
‘Dragoner sind halb Mensch, halb Vieh.
Auf Pferd gesetzte Infanterie.’
‘That woman – that woman they’re going to hang—’ I looked round for help in finishing the sentence, but no one was in a fit enough state. ‘That woman,’ I said, again. ‘Did we – have we –was she the one we—’
There was a silence.
‘Could be,’ said the Legionnaire.
‘So many people die,’ said the Old Man, wisely. ‘They go to war. They die. You can’t remember them all.’
‘We’re going to war soon,’ said Heide. ‘The battalion’s been alerted.’
‘Hurray!’ cried Tiny. ‘I’m a hero!’
We turned into the barracks. Porta suddenly sank down on all fours, on to the beautiful velvet lawn outside staff headquarters. With some difficulty he pulled himself up into a sitting position. The rest of us stood swaying in a row above him.
‘Let’s sing a song for all them lazy sleeping shits,’ he proposed. ‘Let’s have a little sing song . . . Colonel Hinka’s got a whore in his bed.’ He attempted a sly wink, but one eye refused to close without the other. ‘I know his whore, she’s a filthy clapridden slut that won’t even pass the time of day with an Obergefreiter . . . Let’s give ’em a sing song and wake ’em up . . .’
His voice rang out across the sleeping barracks; rude and powerful like the roaring of a bull in agony. The rest of us joined in.
‘Im schwarzen Keller zu Askalon,
da kneipt ein Mann drei Tag,
bis dass er wie ein Besenstiel
am Marmortische lag . . .’20
19 The heart of St Paul, that is my home . . . in Hamburg, there I am at home.
20In Askalon’s dark cellar a man drank for three days until he became as stiff as a marble broomstick
‘Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!’ swore the Legionnaire, tossing his equipment disdainfully into a corner. ‘What a sodding stupid job for a man of my age to be doing!’
He was an instructor in the art of single combat, and he had the task of training all the recruits that came regularly to us from prisons, barracks and camps.
Tiny shrugged his shoulders and tore off a mouthful of ham from the tin he had stolen from 8th Company stores.
‘Why do it if you don’t like it? he mumbled.
The little Legionnaire hunched his shoulders, lit one of his perpetual cigarettes and filtered the smoke slowly and reflectively through his nostrils. He leaned across the table and thoughtfully applied the glowing tip of the cigarette to the backside of a dying bee, watching its reactions. The bee promptly expired and the Legionnaire sighed.
‘Well, well,’ he said, straightening up. He looked at Tiny. ‘Why, might I ask, did you become a soldier?
‘Easy’ rejoined Tiny, spitting food in all directions. ‘Didn’t have no choice, did I? It was either the bleeding Army or starve on the bleeding streets . . . so I joined the Army.’ He gnawed off another lump of ham. ‘I had a bash at the cavalry first, only they said I was too big – too big for the horses, like – so they sent me off to the infantry . . . and that was sodding awful, that was,’ said Tiny, reminiscently. ‘Nothing but bloody marching day after bloody day . . . and those bloody officers!’ He spat, remembered too late that he was eating, and crawled about the floor in search of stray pieces of ham. ‘Thought they could treat you like dirt, just because you was a charity kid . . . lived on public assistance, like, before I joined up.’
The Legionnaire nodded.
‘Fair enough. In that case, I agree that you had no choice. It was a case of one evil as compared to another, and for my money that doesn’t constitute a choice.’
‘Bleeding right it doesn’t. Still—’ Tiny wiped the back of his hand across has mouth – that’s the way it goes, ain’t it? How about you?’
‘Me?’ The Legionnaire smiled, grimly. ‘I didn’t have any choice, either. I was never on public assistance and I was never in any real trouble with the police – never in a remand home, nothing like that. All I knew was being out of work and being hungry . . . my belly used to rumble for days on end. I used to chew paper when I could get hold of it. Even that wasn’t so easy to come by, but it did keep the pains at bay . . . So in 1932 I said goodbye to the shit of Germany and headed for the sun of France – only when I got to Paris it was just as grey and wet and sodding miserable as Berlin.’
‘So what d’you do? asked Tiny, chewing busily on his ham.
The Legionnaire gave him a mischievous wink.
‘Got myself picked up by a prostitute at a bus stop . . . I was very young in those days. Had a sort of wistful appeal for women – especially in bed’ He grinned, ‘She taught me a thing or two, that old cow . . . including French.’ That was quite helpful, as it turned out.’
‘What made you join the sodding Foreign Legion?’ said Tiny. ‘I never did understand that.’
‘I told you – no choice. The cops came round inquiring after my sugar mummy, and I decided it was time to piss off. It was either the cop shop and the likelihood of a spell in nick or burning my boats in the Legion. So I joined the Legion’ He shrugged. ‘It could have been worse. There always is something worse . . .’
He walked across to the window and stood looking out a moment.
‘Hey, you!’ He picked up a boot and hurled it at a passing recruit as the quickest way of gaining his attention. ‘I’ve got some equipment needs cleaning. Pronto. And make sure you do a good job on it if you want to keep your head on your shoulders!’
The recruit, a man in his early sixties, and broken and bent even beyond his years, turned and regarded the Legionnaire with rheumy eyes. The Legionnaire jerked his head and the old man shuffled obediently towards him. For the moment he was destined to polish someone else’s equipment until it shone like silver. For the future his fate was more glorious, though possibly just as futile: he was to die a so-called hero on the banks of the Dnieper, to the north of Kiev.
The Legionnaire closed the window and stubbed out his cigarette.
‘There’s always something worse . . .’ he murmured.
CHAPTER TEN
Departure for the Front
THE following day, a most regrettable incident occurred on the rifle range: Feldwebel Brandt was shot dead. Four times, straight through the forehead. The only comfort was, he could have known nothing about it. Death would have been instantaneous. Nevertheless, we were all very properly shocked. The officer in charge was at once arrested and questioned nonstop for several hours, but they released him in the end.
Tiny and Porta volunteered for the grisly task of removing the body. They went out together and loaded it on to the back of a truck.
‘How come it’s so bleeding heavy?’ grumbled Tiny. ‘You’d think he’d have lost a bit of weight, wouldn’t you, giving up his so
ul the way’s just gone and done?’
‘Didn’t have no soul,’grunted Porta.
They climbed into the truck and pulled out a pack of cards, sitting one on either side of the late Feldwebel Brandt and using his corpse as a table. Porta put his hand into his back pocket and yanked out a bottle of schnaps. He offered it to Tiny.
‘Ta.’ Tiny took it and swallowed deeply. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, snorted and spat. ‘We fired at the same moment, Julius and me. Exactly the same moment . . . I wouldn’t like to say which of us got the bastard first.’
Porta held out his hand for the schnaps and laughed as he recalled the scene.
‘Did you see how all the rest of the shits turned green? When it happened, they all looked sick to their bleeding stomachs . . . They knew we’d done it on purpose, all right, only they can’t prove nothing . . . What’s the betting we get stood free drinks all night as a result?’
‘Here’s hoping,’ said Tiny, and he spat again on to the card table. ‘You reckon the bugger’s in hell by this time?’
‘Where else? Him up there wouldn’t want the sod.’
‘No . . .’ Tiny snatched back the bottle and stared thoughtfully at it a while. ‘Wonder if He’ll want us when our time comes? . . . Eh? What d’you reckon?’
‘I don’t reckon nothing.’ Porta shuffled the cards and rapidly dealt out two hands. ‘Got more important things to think about. Pick your cards up and get on with it’
‘Yeah, all right.’ Tiny set down the bottle, obediently scraped his cards off the Feldwebel’s broad back and took a cursory glance at them. ‘His brains was splattered all over the place . . . Did you see ‘em there? When we picked him up? All over the place, they was.’
‘So?’
‘So nothing.’ Tiny hunched a shoulder. ‘I just wondered if you’d seen ‘em, that’s all . . .’ Another thought suddenly came to him and he closed up his hand and beamed across at Porta. ‘I reckon I’ll go and visit his missus, that’s what I’ll do. Cheer her up, like. Tell her he was just a lousy mean bastard anyway, so she hasn’t lost nothing by it . . . specially not if I get into bed with her. She won’t know what’s hit her. She won’t know her bleeding luck . . . After all,’ he said, reasonably, ‘it’s only what’s fair . . . I bump off her old man, it’s only right I go and screw her. You could almost say I owe it to her.’