Court Martial

by Sven Hassel

  The lid flies open with a crash.

  Now I’ve seen it all,’ shouts Gregor, hoarsely, tossing a bundle of papers with a Finnish lion decorating them, into the air.

  The sergeant who resembles a fieldmouse throws himself across the table, racked with sobs. For lack of anything better the big corporal smashes three chairs to kindling.

  ‘What a super bunch of crooks,’ says Porta, with a grating laugh. ‘Pinching War Bonds that haven’t even been issued yet! And the paper that stiff you couldn’t even use it to wipe your arse on!’

  The following day all three of them are shot as a warning to all and sundry. The execution takes place on the parade ground of the Artillery Barracks. They line them up against the wall of the bath-house. A squad from the Sissi Jägers takes care of the execution. They arrive on bicycles which they lean against the fence outside the old car repair shop.

  Since Tiny has always wanted a bicycle he steals two of them whilst their owners are shooting the bank-robbers.

  We enjoyed the use of those bicycles for a long time.

  40 SD (Sicherheitsdienst) = Security Service.

  41 Ich habe etc. (German) = I have betrayed the Führer.

  † Halt! etc. (German) = Halt! Hands up!

  42 Ich etc. (German) = I have been looting!

  † Der etc. (German) = The Golden Bear.

  43 golden pheasant = High-ranking Nazi party member.

  44 NS-camp = Nazi Children’s Camp.

  45 Schupo (Schutzpolizist) = Civilian police.

  46 Stabsarzt Staff M.O.

  THE SPURIOUS GERMAN

  The silence of utter boredom envelops No. 5 Company office in Titowka.

  Heide has been detailed for temporary service as Company Chief Clerk. I have been put on indoor duty sorting out personnel records. In between, Hauptfeldwebel Hofman uses me as a runner. It hurts when I put weight on my leg but that doesn’t worry him.

  ‘Exercise,’ he states, ‘gives a man a healthy soul in a healthy body. You should be thanking God, and some Russian’s bad marksmanship, for having any leg left at all!’ He grins, and blows a cloud of cigar smoke in my face.

  The shell splinter went straight through the calf of my leg. A year earlier I’d have been sent straight into hospital, and might, with luck, even have got sick leave. But those wonderful times are a thing of the past. Two or three weeks indoor duty and you’re declared ‘fit for service’ again.

  Hauptfeldwebel Hofmann has acquired an American chair which can both swivel and rock. He sits in it as if it were a throne. His big feet are up on the desk. A huge cigar rotates between his teeth. He throws a superior glance at us and pours himself a big shot of vodka.

  ‘If you sad sacks should ever get to be Hauptfeldwebel, then you too will be able to allow yourselves a little eye-opener in the mornings!’

  The telephone interrupts him, loud and jangling as only an army telephone can sound. Nobody takes it. We look at it in silence.

  ‘Unteroffizier Heide! Why the hell don’t you answer that phone?’ roars Hofmann. ‘What the devil do you think you’re here for?’

  ‘Five Company, Unteroffizier Heide speaking!’

  He listens for a moment, then hands the instrument to Hofmann.

  ‘Paderborn, Werhkreiskommando,’ he whispers secretively.

  Hauptfeldwebel Hofmann, Five Company,’ roars Hofmann, self-confidently. ‘Jawohl, Herr Oberstleutnant,’ he whines in a servile tone, jumping up from the American chair and going white and red by turns. ‘There must be some mistake,’ he says weakly ‘Unteroffizier Bierfreund died long ago. Fallen for Führer and Fatherland. Half-Jewish? Impossible, Herr Oberstleutnant. There can have been no mistake. That bastard was dead as a Jew after a trip in the gas-chamber! I beg your pardon, sir! Yes sir! I’ll watch my tongue Herr Oberstleutnant!’ Hofmann would be wagging his tail if he had one. ‘No sir, no! Unteroffizier Müller is alive and well. Serving here with the company. In charge of accounts, sir! Very good man, recently recommended for promotion to Feldwebel. Yes of course Herr Oberstleutnant. A photograph, sir? I’ll send one immediately. I’ll have him photographed from every possible angle, sir. I will look after it personally, Herr Oberstleutnant.’ He listens, for several moments, in dismay, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He concludes with a weak: Jawohl, Herr Oberstleutnant, the possibility of any such monstrous crime having occurred will be closely investigated.’

  He replaces the telephone on its hook as carefully as if it were made of glass. He glares at it uncomprehendingly as if he cannot believe his own ears. With a resigned movement he falls into the American chair which rocks back under impact and deposits him on the floor.

  ‘Bloody foreign Jewboy shit!’ He swears at it viciously, rubbing his rear. He sorts feverishly through the papers on his desk. ‘Get hold of Porta and Wolf,’ he roars at me. ‘Fast! Get your fucking legs moving, man! There’s hell to pay! If we ain’t quick about it, quick as all hell, we’ll be on our way to Torgau before the week’s over!’

  I go off at a trot to carry out his orders. I find Wolf in a storeroom, banging away at an adding machine.

  ‘Beat it!’ he roars, as I open the door. The wolfdogs get up from the floor and show their teeth.

  ‘It’s important,’ I shout, backing nervously towards the door, followed by the hungry eyes of the two great dogs.

  ‘Important? For who?’ asks Wolf, without looking up from the adding machine. Not for me, I’ll be bound!’

  ‘They’ve rung from Paderborn! They’ve found out something or other to do with Bierfreund and Müller!’

  ‘None o’ my affair,’ decides Wolf, brusquely. ‘Give Hofmann my love and tell him if he wants anything from me to come over here! A Chief Mechanic doesn’t jump for a shit of a Hauptfeldwebel.’

  Porta is in the sauna with three girl soldiers.

  ‘Paderborn,’ he grins carelessly. ‘Wehrkreiskommando! Up them! Never heard of anybody called Bierfreund! All the Jews I know are either on their travels or in a concentration camp queuin’ up for the gas chamber. Müller I’ve known for years. A good solid German if ever there was one. Got a pedigree that goes back to the times when caving skulls in with a club was the regular pastime on Sundays!’

  ‘Are they coming?’ asks Hofmann, shortly, when I get back.

  ‘Herr Hauptfeldwebel, sir, they say they are not coming!’

  He stares at me uncomprehendingly, and his face takes on the look of a man who has just been shot.

  ‘D’you mean to tell me those two bastards refused point-blank to get over here? On your way, man!’ he roars in a voice like the baying of a giant hound. ‘I’ll tear the guts out of you if you don’t come back with those two sons of whores!’

  Porta comes to meet me, with long, well-considered strides.

  Where’s he hiding, this chap who wants to see me?’ he asks superciliously, straightening his yellow topper.

  I point silently to the closed door of the company office. Without taking any notice of the sign: KNOCK AND WAIT, he thunders on the door and enters the office as noiselessly as a T-34 crashing its way through a tinware factory. He cracks his heels together and roars at the top of his voice:

  ‘Herr Hauptfeldwebel, Obergefreiter Porta, Five Company, Number Two Section, Number One Group, reporting for service as ordered!’

  ‘Stop playing the bloody fool,’ hisses Hofmann. ‘And don’t shout like that! Anybody shouts here it’s me!’ He leans back in his American chair. Through the window he sees Chief Mechanic Wolf on his way across the muddy parade ground, jumping from dry spot to dry spot to avoid dirtying his hand-sewn, 550 mark, officers’ boots. ‘Oh God,’ he prays, silently, let him fall on his arse in the middle of all that mud!’

  But God is not on Hofmann’s side. Up on his toes Wolf jumps, picking his way safely to dry ground, where he stops, standing on a large stone.

  Wang, the Chinese, comes running with a cloth to polish the 550 mark boots carefully. Chief Mechanic Wolf considers his boots to be an impo
rtant part of his image. Highly polished, hand-sewn boots are the outward sign of a big boss. Only untermensch and suckers go around in issue boots. He straightens his tailor-made, non-issue, slate-grey uniform, unnecessarily.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ he says, ironically, as he enters the company office. He helps himself to one of Hofmann’s cigars without being invited.

  Hofmann does not try to hide his feelings. There is nothing he would rather do than knock the cigar down his throat.

  ‘I don’t remember your turning up with interest and repayment for the last quarter on that loan of yours,’ begins Wolf, holding out a greedy hand.

  We have more important things to discuss today,’ Hofmann cuts him off superciliously.

  ‘Can’t think what they could be,’ answers Wolf, perching himself on the edge of the desk. ‘But perhaps you’d like a visit from my collector?’

  ‘How much?’ asks Hofmann, sourly, scratching himself behind the ear.

  ‘You know very well how much,’ smiles Wolf, slyly, ‘and you’ve also heard all about what happened to Staff-Wachtmeister Brinck, who was two weeks behind with interest and payments!’

  ‘Usurer,’ snarls Hofmann, the muscles of his face twitching nervously. He knows the story of how Staff-Wachtmeister Brinck lost his ear under mysterious circumstances and got it back in a parcel sent through the FPO. The story went it was the partisans who had done it but it was in reality the 80 per cent men. And not for the first time.

  Hoffmann opens a drawer and hands Wolf a large grey envelope.

  The notes are counted carefully, and every one of them is held up to the light.

  ‘D’you think I’ve made ’em myself?’ asks Hofmann, bitingly.

  ‘No you’re too stupid!’ answers Wolf, cheekily. ‘You’re the kind that gets it passed on ’em!’

  ’They’ve called me from Paderborn,’ says Hofmann, sadly. ‘The shithouse is on fire!’

  ‘Send for the fire engines then,’ suggests Wolf, unworriedly. ‘Ought to be their job!’

  Porta doubles up with laughter, and bangs both fists on the desk.

  ‘Funny men, ain’t you? In a minute you’ll be down to earth again, though,’ predicts Hofmann, threateningly. ‘It was “Arse and Pockets”47 himself on the blower. Falsifying personal documents is a serious business. It can cost a man his head! The least you can get is a long, long spell in the cage.’

  ‘We’ll send you a Christmas parcel every year long as you’re in Torgau,’ promises Wolf, ‘and we’ll give you a letter to take with you to Iron Gustav, so he won’t be too hard on you.’

  ‘If I go to Torgau,’ bawls Hofmann in a stentorian voice, looking for all the world like an overheated boiler which needs a valve opening, ‘then you go too. The lot of you! I’ll tell ’em everything I know and what I don’t know I’ll guess at and tell ’em that too! Did you know, by the way, that the penalty for selling on the black is death?’

  ‘You don’t say!’ smiles Wolf, merrily.

  ‘Herr Hauptfeldwebel knows somebody, perhaps, who sells things on the black market?’ asks Porta, with a hypocritical smile.

  Wolf gives out a neigh of enthusiasm,

  ‘Don’t you get me worked up, Porta!’ threatens Hofmann, letting himself fall back into his American-made chair. ‘I’ll blow you off the face of the earth like the shit you are!’ He takes an oily revolver from a drawer in the desk and waves it back and forth from Wolf to Porta.

  Why not start by shootin’ yourself? Wolf baits him. ‘Be one problem less for the company!’

  ‘A Hauptfeldwebel doesn’t have to take that kind of shit,’ shouts Hofmann, beside himself. ‘Insult me one more time in the presence of subordinates and you’re on the hook! You’re Chief Mechanic in Five Company, but I am Five Company!’

  ‘May I touch you?’ asks Wolf with assumed awe, putting out his hand. ‘You’re a big man, but things can happen to big men, too, you know!’

  ‘He could, for example, get blown up,’ breathes Porta, exposing his single tooth.

  ‘Are you threatening to take the life of your Hauptfeldwebel?’ roars Hofmann, hammering the desk with his pistol. ‘I could throw you lot to a court martial easy as winkin’! Take a look at your crime sheets. They’d make any lawyer fall arse over bollocks backwards.’ He flicks through Porta’s. ‘After three months’ service at the Army Ammunition Depot at Bamberg you were sent to the military prison at Heuberg because they’d come to the decision that you ought to be chained up. Larceny and arson! Several times. All the way through: deceitful, untrustworthy, mendacious and so on.’ He throws Porta’s record back into the drawer with an expression of disgust. ‘Here, you can read your own,’ he says, pushing Wolf’s record towards him.

  ‘I’ve seen worse,’ grins Wolf, proudly. ‘Here, see! Here they say I am an excellent organiser.’

  ‘The devil take this company of thieves, swindlers and habitual criminals,’ cries Hofmann, furiously, rustling through the pages of a pile of personnel records. ‘Here’s that bastard of a Yid’s sheet,’ he shouts, throwing it across the desk. ‘I’ll wrap his circumcised Jew cock round his neck for him, an’ make him understand a German ain’t made just by changin’ a Yid name to Müller! I’ve always been against this fucking falsification business. I warned you! Now the shit’s hit the fuckin’ fan!’

  ‘So, that’s what it’s all about,’ Wolf grins noisily. ‘Don’t forget that though it was us that changed the papers, it also was you that put your silly great sprawling signature under the whole bloody swindle.’ He waves the record sheet above his head jeeringly.

  ‘Says here: Above corrections confirmed. Hofmann, Haupt und Stabsfeldwebel. Couldn’t mistake that signature. Lovely, clear handwriting.’

  Hofmann seems to take up less space in his American-made chair. He looks as if he is being rendered down slowly.

  ‘It’s falsification of documents,’ he says in a voice which is hardly audible. ‘We’ve turned that Jew, Bierfreund, into Müller, a pure German! My God this is serious. You could just as easy turn SS-Hein48 into a Yid. If this ever gets out ... ’

  ‘Who says it will get out?’ asks Wolf, ‘You weren’t thinkin’ of puttin’ it in the papers were you?’

  ‘No falsification of records has occurred before somebody’s proved it. For example by a plain confession,’ declares Porta, airily. ‘But who’d be nutty enough to confess to a thing like that? Bierfreund, the Yiddischer German, alias Müller, he’ll keep his trap shut all right. Let’s think this through!’

  ‘Yes, let’s think, for Christ’s sake think,’ shouts Hofmann, hope awakening in him. ‘What d’you say, Wolf? You can make black look white when you want to!’

  ‘Don’t know a thing about it,’ says Wolf icily, ‘Never even heard of it!’

  ‘Me neither,’ says Porta, smiling cheerfully.

  What do you mean by that?’ asks Hofmann, doubtfully, feeling like a man who is walking on thin ice and has to move extremely carefully.

  ‘It’s not so difficult,’ says Wolf, with a sly look in his fishy green eyes. ‘You’re the one who’s turned a Jew into a German with a stroke of the pen. And you’ve put him in for promotion to Feldwebel. A Jew Feldwebel in the Greater German Army! That’s something! The boys in Prinz Albrecht Strasse’ll be movin’ that fast when they hear about it you’d think somebody’d put gunpowder up their arseholes!’

  Who’s gonna tell ’em, then?’ asks Hofmann, with fear in his voice.

  ‘The boys who rang you up from Paderborn,’ smiles Wolf, sarcastically.

  ‘“Arse and Pockets” can’t stand the Gestapo! He hates ’em,’ says Hofmann, with certainty.

  ‘Anybody say he likes the Yids?’ grins Wolf, maliciously. ‘Particularly one of ’em who’s goin’ to become Feldwebel on forged papers?’

  ‘I don’t like Jews either,’ admits Hofmann. ‘So why the hell should I have helped one of ’em to become a German?’

  ‘He’s good with figures,’ answers Wolf, jeeringly. ‘If you hadn’t got him he
re you’d’ve been court martialled a long time ago for embezzlement. It’s no secret you can’t count to twenty without takin’ your boots off! A figure-wise Yid’s like manna from heaven to you!’

  ‘Those papers in Paderborn are going to have to disappear,’ states Porta, tearing a copy of Army Regulations in two.

  ‘How?’ says Hofmann, seeing a straw to clutch at.

  ‘This way,’ says Porta, rubbing thumb and forefinger together, the international sign for money changing hands.

  ‘Shit, Porta. You can’t buy Oberstleutnant von Weisshagen!’

  ‘Don’t need him,’ Porta waves the objection away. ‘He’s only an Oberstleutnant. We’ve got a pseudo-German here and I know there’s more’n one of that particular race in Paderborn. If those boys get their scimitar-shaped noses together then they’ll move over that poor German Oberstleutnant like a steamroller!’

  Hofmann looks at Porta admiringly.

  ‘You’d make a good Unteroffizier, Obergefreiter Porta. What do you say to signing on for a twenty-four?’

  ‘Herr Hauptfeldwebel, I only wish I had the time. But they’re expecting me in Berlin!’

  ‘Let’s get hold of this pseudo-German bastard,’ roars Hofmann. ‘he ought to be able to sort this out. It’s him it’s all about, anyway. On your way,’ he chases me, pushing me out of the door.

  The Moses dragoon is sitting with one of the cooks, Unteroffizier Balt, gnawing on a shank of reindeer which he dips repeatedly into a bowl of garlic sauce.

  ‘Hofmann is sighing with longing to see you,’ I say, accepting a piping-hot chunk of reindeer.

  ‘What’s he want?’ he asks, casually, biting off a large mouthful of meat.

  ‘They’ve been on the blower from Paderborn asking how it comes about you’re a German? Hofmann’s fallen out of that American chair of his several times already.’

  ‘My papers are gilt-edged,’ says Milner, knocking back a large glass of beer. ‘Permit me,’ he says to Unteroffizier Balt, dipping a piece of bread in the garlic sauce. He champs like a hungry pig. Fat runs down from the corners of his mouth and down over his chin.