Court Martial

by Sven Hassel

  ‘They’re wicked, those dogs. Chew on your arse without a second thought,’ says Porta, disgustedly. ‘I wouldn’t own curs like that! Even if they spoke twelve languages and could write Sanscrit and knew the British and the Prussian drill-book for mounted troops forwards and backwards.’

  ‘Them dogs are devils,’ says Gregor, with hate in his voice. ‘All dogs are stupid. Just look at ’em. One of ’em starts to bark because some Jew-boy fly has pissed on his nose. Straight away some other four-legged dope answers him and then a third starts up. And they go on. All night if need be. And there’s nothing to bark at. Just keeping everybody awake. God how I hate dogs! Every one of ’em ought to be poisoned, stuffed an’ mounted on wheels so’s the bloody dog-lovers could pull ’em round after ’em without them shittin’ all over the streets.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Porta turns to Tiny, ‘did Sieg pay up?’

  ‘’E laughed in me face and give me the message that you were on your way to the glass ’ouse and would only come out again in a ’orizontal position with twelve bullet ’oles in you,’ answers Tiny, with a melancholy look on his face. ‘If there’d not been four crooks alongside ’im at the time I’d ’ave smeared ’im all over the wall.’

  ‘I’ll smash that bastard’s kneecaps,’ rages Porta, savagely, ‘and then his elbows just to make a job of it. I’ll stuff him back up into his mother’s German cunt before I’ve finished with him!’

  ‘Let’s knife the sod, an’ shoot ’im afterwards,’ suggests Tiny, wickedly. ‘I can’t stand untrustworthy people!’

  Porta lifts one leg and lets a huge fart, which makes all the gentlemen over by the hut look at us reproachfully.

  ‘Make sure you secure them properly,’ the Old Man warns us, conscientiously.

  ‘We had an execution in Grafenwöhr where the ropes hadn’t been secured properly and the condemned man ran round the execution ground like a chicken with his head cut off. What a scandal that was! Everybody panicked. The chaplain got the shock of his life when he saw the firing squad chasing the condemned man all over the execution square.’

  ‘Good God,’ cries Barcelona, aghast. ‘Did he escape?’

  ‘As I said, like a headless chicken flapping on the ground when you let go of it,’ says the Old Man, impassively.

  ‘Old man Attila would’ve rolled around in his saddle,’ grins Porta.

  ‘Ordinary people’d never ever understand it,’ admits Tiny, shaking his head. ‘It’s unbelievable what can go on in the bleedin’ Army. When I was post Gefreiter at Torgau, one Thursday mornin’ we got the job of blowin’ out some kind of a sailor. A queer sod ’e was who’d done a lot of very peculiar things in ’is lifetime. ’E’d started school at the age of seven an’ managed to spend three years in the first class an’ another three in the third. ’E went out in the fourth. ’E broke the German law as if ’e was workin’ to a plan, ’is crime sheet was that long it’d’ve took a person six months to get through it. The court martial said to ’ave ’im shot but bein’ a unusual sort of bloke they changed it to ’angin’. There was a staff Feldwebel from Torgau who was an expert at strangling people with a bit o’ rope an’ they give ’im the job. Then they found ’e’d got no neck to speak of. Shoulders and ’is neck was all one an’ ’ow can you ’ang a man with no neck? Why else’d God give people necks, I ask you? Well the executioner an’ the condemned man talked it over an’ agreed to get the Navy to make a special rope for the job. An’ the Feldwebel promised ’im ’e’d make a good quick job of it, without ’urtin” im.

  ‘But that’s where ’e made ’is mistake. The first try went wrong ’cause the rope wasn’t tightened properly. Least that’s what they said. The sailor slides out of the noose an’ straight down through the trap when it opened. Not a scratch did ’e get. Bang ’e goes down to the bottom of the pit an’ sits there cursin’ an’ swearin’.’

  ‘He didn’t hurt himself, I hope?’ says Porta, solicitously.

  No, no more’n ’e could climb up on to the scaffold again on ’is own. ‘E was the least disturbed of the lot of us. Bawled out the staff Feldwebel for a clumsy fool who’d no idea ’ow to ’ang people. Next time the noose is pulled real tight an’ even the condemned man ’imself says ’e’s satisfied. But it didn’t do no good. ’E slips out of it again like a fuckin’ eel.

  ‘“This lot’s enough to kill off the strongest nigger as ever lived,” shouts the sailor, as ’e climbs up on to the scaffold for the second time.

  ‘The staff Feldwebel is full of excuses, an’ the JAG man promises the sailor if it goes wrong a third time ’e gets a pardon. And believe it or not, ’e slips out again on the third go. The Feldwebel goes barmy an’ runs around on the scaffold as if ’e was tryin’ to bite ’imself in the arsehole. And before we could stop ’im ’e puts the noose round ’is own neck an’ jumps gracefully down the ’ole. ’E was dead as a nit when we got to ’im. A beautiful, a perfect ’angin’, carried out on ’imself.

  ‘The chaplain talked in Latin to Gawd Almighty an’ the JAG, the prosecutin’ officer an’ the defence officer went into a legal ’uddle, that nearly ended in fisticuffs. The sailor ’ad only been condemned to death once an’ they’d already executed ’im three times in a row. It was contrary to regulations, said the defending officer. They agreed to send it to the JAG’s office for decision. Carefully forgettin’ they’d promised the sailor a pardon if it didn’t work third time.

  ‘All the witnesses left. They couldn’t take it any more. ’Angin’ the same man three times in one day was too much for the strongest stomach.

  ‘When they’d gone all us guards went over to the ’ole to get ’im out, but ’e wouldn’t come up. ’E’d lost all patience.

  ‘The duty NCO told us to go down after ’im but nobody felt much like it.

  ‘So we got ’old of a Navy AB from out of one of the cells. ’E’d sold a cutter to the locals while on service in Norway, and was a nice, friendly sort of bloke, as understood ’ow to talk convincing-like to people. ’E got that sailor up out of the ’ole with no trouble at all.

  ‘Well, there was a dreadful lot of discussion went on in a dreadful lot of different kinds of courts, but in the end they made up their minds to let ’im go back to the Navy so they could shoot ’im, though there was some as thought the bullets’d just glance off of him ’e was that bony.

  ‘Some clever bleeder in Kiel found out the only certain way o’ gettin’ rid of ’im was to drown ’im, so they decided to give ’im a trip under a warship, the way they used to do in the good old days. As you know people condemned to death ain’t allowed to travel by train so off they takes ’im to Kiel in a Kübel. That saved ’is bleedin’ life for ’im. The Kübel never got to Kiel where they ’ad a old-fashioned keel-’aulin’ all ready for ’im.

  ‘A bit outside Celle a British fighter-bomber is stragglin’ along and sees this Kübel an’ ’as a go at it, so the three ’ead-’unters get sent upstairs. There was only their tin ’elmets and their badges left, but the sailor never gets a scratch. Death wouldn’t ’ave anythin’ to do with a bag o’ bones like ’im. ’E disappeared and ’as never been ’eard of since.’

  ‘Sacré nom de Dieu, ça commence à bouillir. How I wish I was on my way to France with everything I own on my back,’ sighs the little Legionnaire, lighting a Caporal. ‘France, a glass of good wine and a big bowl of bouillabaisse! Mon Dieu, home-sickness is tearing me to pieces!’

  ‘You wouldn’t be thinking of taking off, now, would you?’ asks Porta, worriedly. ‘The headhunters’d pick you up quick as a monkey picking a flea off his bollocks.’

  ‘If you do do it,’ says Tiny, ‘go that way,’ and he points to the west.

  The witnesses over by the hut walk about impatiently. The rain has turned to a slush which cakes on their clothes. The telephone inside the hut jangles irritably. Everyone looks towards it.

  ‘Departure has been put off for another two hours,’ shouts a JAG aide to us, as if he were announcing a change in a train time.
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  ‘Damn it all to hell,’ the Old Man curses, ‘artificial light.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve been pardoned,’ says the Westphalian, optimistically. ‘It’d be the first time I’d be really happy at having wasted so much time waiting around.’

  ‘Nobody gets pardoned any more,’ answers the Old Man gloomily. ‘They’re that far gone they can’t afford to.’

  ‘They cut the heads off two girls in Halle the other day just for buying butter coupons on the black,’ Gregor tells them, feeling his neck tenderly.

  ‘Rather eat mange, at that rate,’ says Tiny, shuddering.

  ‘What about fetching up dinner?’ shouts Porta from a bush, behind which he is squatting with his trousers round his ankles.

  ‘The Major didn’t say anything,’ says the Old Man, thoughtfully, ‘but to hell with it. Off you go!’

  Tiny and Gregor are off towards the truck like well-oiled streaks of lightning.

  ‘You touch any of that pork and beans before you get back and I’ll mow you down,’ shouts Porta from the bush, wiping away with a large chestnut leaf.

  The food container smells beautiful. The bean soup is thick as gruel. There is half a crate of beer too, and we get into quite a party humour.

  ‘The departing guests can’t be getting better than this,’ thinks Porta, joyously, shovelling food into his mouth.

  They have forgotten to give us a knife, so we have to pass the pork from hand to hand and bite it off in chunks. It doesn’t taste any the worse for that.

  ‘They ought to have rubbed a bit of garlic on it,’ continues Porta, taking a large bite.

  ‘I’ll be glad when this war’s over,’ says Heide, ‘so we can go out on proper manoeuvres again.’

  ‘You must have shit where your brains ought to be,’ shouts Porta, shaking his head. ‘Soon as one war’s over you bastards want to get out on manoeuvres and before we know where we are you’ve started a new war to see if what you’ve been manoeuvring about is right or not?’

  ‘There will be no more war,’ says Heide, decisively. ‘Our world war will be the last!’

  ‘What the devil will we need the Army and manoeuvres for, then?’ asks the Old Man in wonder.

  ‘Because the Army is as natural a necessity as prisons and policemen,’ says Heide, with an airy gesture.

  ‘There’s something in that,’ Gregor agrees, stroking his chin thoughtfully. ‘A country without an army’s like a man with no balls!’

  ‘Here, want some?’ the Old Man says to the JAG clerk who has sat down by us.

  ‘No thanks, I’ve no appetite,’ says the clerk, an elderly man.

  ‘Tu m’emmerdes,’ says the Legionnaire, with a short laugh. ‘The chap’s frightened at seeing people get shot!’

  ‘It isn’t a pleasant sight, either,’ the Old Man admits, quietly.

  ‘Everybody who shouts and screams about the death penalty ought to be made to see what it’s like knocking a man off,’ says Gregor, blowing on his cold-reddened hands.

  ‘In Madrid we did not make so much fuss about it,’ Barcelona explains. ‘We put them up in a row against a long wall and let them have it with an SMG. Always from left to right. It was like a mower going through a cornfield. Afterwards they hosed away the blood, so it was all clean for the next lot. Witnesses and all that, we didn’t bother with. Some of ’em we didn’t even try.’

  ‘Let’s have a cup of milk o’ madness, to drive away our uncontrollable fear,’ says Porta, with a little laugh, filling up our mugs.

  ‘Have you got schnapps?’ asks the clerk, in surprise.

  ‘I can hear this is your first outing,’ laughs Barcelona. ‘There’s always firewater at these parties!’

  Porta pushes forward his mess-tin for a new helping. His stomach seems to expand visibly. He takes a big bite of pork, chews, swallows and washes it down with beer and schnapps.

  ‘God, the way you can eat,’ says the Old Man, wonderingly. ‘Where d’you put it all?’

  Porta licks his spoon clean and pushes it down into his jack-boot, where he can get at it quickly if he becomes hungry again.

  He falls on to his back in the heather using his steel helmet as a pillow.

  ‘Pass the pork,’ he orders Tiny. ‘Soon as I see it I get hunger pains again,’ he sighs. ‘I’ve always been like that.’ He lifts up his backside and blows a thunderous fart which echoes over to the hut where the witnesses stand freezing.

  ‘Have you ever really eaten your fill?’ asks the Old Man, with an indulgent smile.

  ‘Never! No, never really,’ Porta admits, without having even to consider his answer. ‘There’s always been room for a little bit more. At old Mr Porta’s place in Bornholmerstrasse there were two huge padlocks on the pantry to keep his best son from taking it over completely. My appetite got me into trouble too, at the greengrocer’s where I worked. He found out I used to take a sample of all his delicacies.’ He pulls his piccolo from his jackboot, Tiny’s deep bass joins him:

  ‘Sie ging von Hamburg bis nach Bremen34

  bis dass der Zuz aus Flensburg kam.

  Holahi-holaho-holahi-holaho!

  Sie wollte sich das Leben nehmen

  und legt sich auf de Schienen dann.

  Holahi-holaho-holahi-holaho.

  Jedoch der Schaffner hat’s gesehen,

  er bremste mit gewaltiger Hand.

  Holahi-holaho-holahi-holaho.

  Allein der Zug, der blieb nicht stehen,

  ein junges haupt rollt in den Sand . . .

  The staff-chaplain came raging over towards us.

  ‘I forbid you to sing that filthy song,’ he screamed in a voice which cracked several times. ‘Can’t you keep order here, Feldwebel?’

  ‘Yes,’ says the Old Man, remaining seated on the heather.

  ‘Such horrible filth,’ splutters the padre. ‘You are carrying on like street-boys!’

  ‘Just what we are,’ grins Porta, shamelessly. ‘Bornholmerstrasse, Moabitt.’

  ‘Heyn Hoyer Strasse, Sankt Pauli,’ echoes Tiny, cheekily.

  ‘Request the padre to tell us please,’ smiles Porta, putting his heels together in the attention position whilst remaining seated. ‘Has the padre ever been in “The Crooked Dog” in Gendarmenmarkt? Best bunch of crumpet in the whole of Berlin, sir.’

  ‘Impertinent man,’ spits the staff-chaplain, disgustedly, with-drawing to the other witnesses over by the hut.

  ‘The new CO’s wife’s a nice bit of stuff,’ says Porta, pursing his lips.

  ‘Something queer about her,’ says Gregor, thoughtfully. ‘She’s got prick in both her eyes, and she’s always showing everythin’ she’s got!’

  ‘She’s a war widow,’ states Barcelona.

  ‘She’s married to the CO,’ the Old Man gapes at him un-comprehendingly, ‘and he was alive this morning when we left!’

  ‘Nevertheless she’s the widow of a Kapitänleutnant who’s at the bottom of the Atlantic with his VII B U-boat,’ Barcelona enlightens them.

  ‘Maybe she’s interested in science and is studying prickology,’ laughs Porta noisily. ‘First the Navy, then the Army and when our Oberst flies off to Valhalla she’ll move on to the Luftwaffe or the SS!’

  ‘She’s still an eyeful,’ says Gregor, his own shining. ‘Long-legged, round-arsed and high-titted! She wouldn’t need to ask me more’n once. Me and my old man’d be into that like a knife into a pound o’ butter!’

  ‘I’m afraid you’d be disappointed,’ Porta considers knowledgeably. ‘She smells a mile off of the Party and the BDM.35 Shouldn’t wonder if she’d got a swastika up her cunt rotating the wrong way, and no prick outside the Party’d fancy running into that!’

  ‘Swastika bints ain’t the worst to get down on their backs,’ Gregor corrects him. ‘They’re trained at the bridal schools, so they can fix up the happy warrior husband when he gets back from the wars with a tattered swastika banner and a deep-frozen prick!’

  ‘Bridal schools?’ asks the Old Man, rolling the words round h
is mouth. ‘Are there really such places? I thought it was only a joke.’

  ‘Jesus on the Cross, man,’ shouts Gregor, indignantly. ‘They teach these BDM bints all the tricks of the bloody trade, and they don’t get taken on if they aren’t well prepared in advance. For example they put a piece o’ chalk up their arses and get taught how to write with it while they’re swinging ’em in time to: Ein Reich! Ein Volk! Ein Führer! That exercise makes ’em that supple they can make a Party member ninety years old remember he’s still got a set o’ rattlers danglin’ between his creaky old legs.’

  ‘I once knew a countess who was so high-bred she could only come on if you bit her in the arse and filled her cunt up with champagne,’ says the Westphalian in a quiet, confidential tone of voice.

  ‘Them kind also get into Café Keese,’ says Tiny, importantly. ‘Met a real Duchess there once, ’Ohenzollem of the blood, she was. On the Reeperbahn she used to go incognito and called ’erself Ina von Weinberg. She’d got opera on the brain. Every time a John Thomas with a roll-collar got into ’er she used to start screamin’ out Wagner. Everybody in the ’ouse knew when she was gettin’ it in ’er old box-office.’

  ‘There are far more exotic ways than getting bit in the arse and singing Wagner,’ grins Porta lasciviously. ‘After we’d liberated Paris we ran into a couple of bits of stuff sitting, on the lookout for occupation prick, outside the Café de la Paix. One of ’em had to have a champagne cork with a violin string attached stuck up her arsehole. When she began to pant, you had to pull the cork out slowly. You can’t imagine the way that arse of hers could go on thrumming and twanging. It was nothing more nor less than the Marseillaise at full pressure.’