Court Martial

by Sven Hassel

  ‘“I know you, Alexandro Alexejewitsch,” he shouted to our foreman, between gulps of water.

  ‘See, even at the gateway to death a German notices everything, so that he can tell the Evil one down in hell who it was who sent him there. Now every Soviet citizen knows that one thing’s what he tells God and the Evil one, and another thing’s what he tells the NKVD. Well, his recognising Alex meant he’d left us no choice. Now we’d got to do him in. But these Germans are tough. We jumped up an’ down on him till every bone in his body must’ve been broken. Under the water he went on sendin’ up bubbles and spitting like a forest cat in springtime, but death took him in the end even though he’d fought a good fight.’

  ‘They’re a pestilence, those devils,’ shouts Pjotr, gripping the bolt of his Home Guard rifle. ‘If they come here, we’ll soon finish them off. Bang, this’ll go, and there’ll be one German less left in the world.

  ‘I want a couple of ’em alive,’ shouts Cholinda, the milkman’s wife. ‘I’d hang ’em from the beams, I would, and castrate ’em. Then we could sit an’ enjoy their screamin’, just like the Tartars used to do when they surprised a feller between their wives’ legs.’

  We caught a couple of Finnish fascists in December ’39,’ says Sofija, happily. ‘We hung ’em up by the feet and beat ’em between the legs until we dropped with exhaustion. It was a couple of officers with green stripes down their trousers and swastikas in their wicked eyes. When we was finished with ’em their grey trousers’d turned red. Before they died they were sorry a hundred times over that they ever attacked the Soviet Union an’ put out the eyes of small children!’

  ‘That’s what I like to hear,’ roars her husband, Vassia, fanatically. ‘When I was serving in the Levtenow punishment camp we had that many ways of killing off the enemies of the people we sentries got mixed up ourselves. But when it came to the fascists, we just used to flay ’em like we skin reindeer. Our OC, a hellhound from Chita, collected gloves. His house was just like a museum. One day he discovered that he was short of one particular kind. He whistled up the whole camp, went round the ranks and selected a man and a woman of each nationality. The chosen ones were taken to the kitchen and made to put their arms into boiling water. Then our Mongolian OC skinned their hands and arms neat as you please, and had some gloves for his museum that nobody else had. Some shit must have talked in Moscow, though. What a row there was! I was lucky, I’d been on other duties that day and hadn’t been in the kitchen. On a hell of a cold morning up turns a little commissar, who’d forgot how to smile before he was born, even. He was so little he could’ve walked upright under the belly of a horse! The heel-less Cossack riding-boots he wore had legs no bigger’n thimbles but still came up to his knees. If his ears hadn’t stuck out like bat-wings his tall pointed fur cap would have rested on his shoulders. It was so tall he could use it for a stool. It took him twenty minutes to sentence the glove collectors to death. Decapitation by sabre on the parade ground before sundown. He chose the executioner personally. A kalorshnik55 from Leningrad, a giant of a fellow, who could have hidden the Commissar from Tomsk in his open mouth. He was in for life for having murdered four women, chopped their bodies to pieces with a woodsman’s axe, and thrown the remains in the Luma.

  ‘All of us, both prisoners and permanent staff, were paraded to see it, so we’d all get an idea of what’d happen to any of us who might get the idea of collecting gloves for ourselves. It was a nasty execution. The woman-murderer from Leningrad was as nervous as a virgin with her backside pushed up against a red-hot stove. Every time he looked at the little Commissar from Tomsk, he shook like an aspen. He started by cutting an arm off the first one. The poor fellow bellowed like a bull, but not for long. In two shakes his head was rolling on the parade ground. The next one he did, he took half the man’s chest off along with the head. That’s how it went with all ten of ’em. That murderer from Leningrad was strong as a bear. When he swung the sabre it fair whistled through the air.

  ‘The OC from Chita was the last of ’em to be done. Three strokes and he was gone. Then the Commissar from Tomsk pulled his Nagan and put a bullet straight between the eyes of the quadruple murderer from Leningrad. He swayed like a tree in a storm and down he went amongst the ten he’d cut the heads off. That’s what we’ll do when the Germans come. We’ll pull their hides off an’ hang ’em to dry outside Party Headquarters. No commissar’d bother just now what we did to Germans.’

  His stream of words is interrupted by the opening of the door. A thick cloud of snow blows into the drinking-shop.

  ‘Shut the bloody door,’ everybody shouts at once, as the icy breath of the Arctic sweeps through the room.

  A young woman, holding a three-year-old boy by the hand, leans back against the door. With a tired movement she pushes back her hood and wipes the snow from her face. She blows on her cold hands and stamps her feet on the floor to get some warmth back into them. Then she looks searchingly around the packed room, where the air is thick with machorka smoke.

  ‘Looking for me, woman?’ asks a skinny fellow with a white face full of pimples. His forehead is as low as that of a mental defective. His eyes gleam with animal ferocity.

  ‘Come home now, Gregorij,’ she begs him, in a low, quivering voice.

  ‘Not a chance,’ snarls Gregorij, emptying his beer glass with a long slobbering sound. ‘Get off my back, woman! I can’t stand the sight of you or that little whore’s son of yours!’ He takes a long swig of spirits and gives out a rumbling belch.

  ‘You promised me this morning you would not get drunk today,’ she says, complainingly, pushing a lock of dark hair back from her forehead.

  ‘Would you believe that? Now this bitch of a woman says I’m drunk!’ He hiccoughs, and grins foolishly. ‘If that ain’t an insult, I don’t know what is! You’re forgettin’ perhaps, who’s commissar in this town! Just you wait, you bitch! It’s easy for me to fix you an’ that whore’s brat!’ He refills his mug and drinks again. The beer runs down over his chin and chest as he drinks. Truhhh!’ he puffs, blowing the beer out over his face. Don’t come here tellin’ us what to do, you Kiev mare! There’s plenty of room in Kolyma for Trotskyists like you! I know what you’re thinkin’, you wicked counter-revolutionary bitch, you!’ he slobbers drunkenly, and wobbles uncertainly towards her with his full tankard in his hand. With a cackle of laughter he empties the beer over her head and slaps her face. ‘Fuck with the pretty officers all right can’t you, you wicked devil! Don’t think there’s any of us here believes you were married to that shit of a captain! Fell in battle ‘gainst the Finnish fascists, you say! Jew lies! The shit shot himself ‘cause he was scared of goin’ to the front! I know what’s what, I do! Ain’t I the polittruk56?’

  ‘You’re dead drunk,’ she says, quietly, wiping the beer from her face with her sleeve. ‘Won’t you ever grow up? Tomorrow you’ll be sorry!’

  He looks at her with a foolish, drunken look on his face, pushes her to the floor dragging her by the ankle, like a sled, across the floor to the grinning crowd at the bar. ‘Here,’ he shouts, ripping her clothing apart, ‘help yourselves, anybody! I Commissar Gregorij Antenyew, give you my permission! Whore’s are state property!’ With a harsh laugh he forces her legs apart.

  ‘Here, give her a candle fuck,’ shouts Shenja, delightedly, forcing a thick wax candle up into the woman’s exposed sexual parts. ‘Conceited upper-class mare!’ She forces her down, brutally, across the table.

  ‘Come on boys,’ grins Gilda. ‘The gate’s open! Give it to her! A bitch like her, that looks down on us, ’cause we don’t understand books!’

  ‘Mother, mother,’ screams the little boy, striking weakly at the drunken mob.

  ‘Let me get at it,’ grins Yorgi, slobbering as he opens his trousers. ‘Here, you bitch, there ain’t one this big in the whole of Kiev! Stop screamin’l It’s good for you!’

  ‘I’m gonna have her from the back,’ titters one-legged Mischa with his trousers down round his one ankle
.

  ‘Shut up you little whore’ son,’ shouts Kosnow, the muscular fur hunter, sending the little boy flying across the floor.

  ‘Pull her down a bit farther,’ gurgles Mischa, lasciviously. ‘I can’t get it all the way up. There, that’s it! Take this in your rotten, Ukrainian cunt!’

  Each time one of the drunken, slobbering men has finished, Shenja throws a bucket of water over the raped woman.

  ‘We believe in cleanliness here,’ she says, laughing harshly, ‘but Kiev whores like you wouldn’t understand that!’

  ‘You don’t fuck a whore for nothin’,’ Shenja roars with laughter. ‘Costs a kopeck a go, boys!’

  ‘Cheapest whore I’ve ever had,’ howls Fjedor, happily, pushing three kopecks up between the woman’s legs.

  When they are bored with it, they roll her under the table. She cries desperately for her boy, who is lying unconscious under a bench.

  ‘Listen to that mare howling,’ shouts Yorgi, irritably. ‘Throw her out!’

  They kick her out, brutally, into the snow.

  ‘My boy,’ she screams, desperately, hammering madly on the heavy door.

  Gregorij picks up the boy and throws him out of the door as if he were a ball. He lands a good distance away in a snow drift.

  ‘These traitors to the people’ve got to be wiped out,’ roars Mischa, banging the table. ‘I read in Pravda the other day that they are showing their horrible faces everywhere. Think, they fished out a Jew who had sneaked into the position of sampolit57. They shot him,’ he adds, after a short pause.

  ‘If you stop and stand still you damn well die,’ says Yorgi, for no reason, handing Mischa a full mug of beer.

  On a sudden impulse Shenja announces a round on the house. All talking stops. Silence falls over ‘The Red Angel’. The amazement is universal. Nobody can remember the fat hostess ever having been that generous.

  ‘I’ll push that whore kid of hers back up her cunt,’ screams Gregorij, falling to the floor with a crash.

  ‘Get your rotten fingers off my legs,’ snarls Shenja. ‘You’re the last man’ll ever get inside my drawers!’

  ‘If you’d tried it once you’d never fuck with nobody else!’ grins Nikolaij, foolishly.

  ‘You little turd,’ jeers Shenja. ‘Me, as has sailed the Seven Seas and served diplomats and generals? Think I’d sink to a snow monkey like you? I once got fucked by a real lord in the middle o’ the Atlantic Ocean!’ She smiles, happily at the remembrance. ‘He was a real Englishman with a proper castle where a Duchess used to walk every night when it was full moon! When he shot his load it was blue. Blue as the lamp outside the commissariat!’

  ‘And since then you ain’t never washed your cunt,’ jeers Tanja, who has been sent to the village, temporarily. Not even the polittruk knows what she has done. It is whispered that an order will come, one day, for her to be liquidated. It has happened before. Others say she is an informer.

  ‘I was a lorry driver on the Omsk, Moscow, Leningrad trip,’ boasts Dimitrij.

  ‘Now you only do the run from “The Red Angle” to the reindeer pen,’ grins Cholinda, the milkman’s wife.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, woman,’ Dimitrij spits contemptuously. ‘Omsk, Moscow, Leningrad’s the toughest route in the whole Soviet Union. By the time you roll down Newski Prospect you’re half batty!’

  ‘Suit you then,’ Cholinda screams with laughter. ‘You’ve never been anythin’ else!’

  ‘When I cracked up at last,’ continues Dimitrij, refusing to be interrupted, ‘I went on the tramp and’ve travelled by train free o’ charge, over the whole of the Soviet Union. The good thing about trains is there’s always a set of tracks leading away from where a fellow is. And if you get to some place in the winter where it’s too cold to sleep outdoors, then you can count on it there’s a gaol around where you can get a warm an’ some grub.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a good thing about the Soviet Union,’ shouts Yorgi, patriotically, ‘we ain’t got no shortage of gaols. Long live Stalin!’

  ‘The day came when I had to give up that wonderful, free life,’ smiles Dimitrij, sorrowfully. ‘It was in Odessa. I was lying dreaming on a bench in the Park of the Proletariat, when I felt a knockin’ on my think-box. There stood some dope of a garadovoj,58 grinning at me, and whirling his long truncheon like a wheel. He’d hit me across the soles of my feet with it and I felt it all the way through my body. Right out to the ends of my hair it’d gone.

  ‘“I am leaving,” I said, bowing politely. “I am lying here quite by mistake!”

  ‘“You’re not so dumb as you look,” grinned this garadovoj, giving me one in the middle of the forehead with his truncheon so that I wouldn’t forget too soon that people are not allowed to sleep in the Park of the Proletariat. I moved off at top speed, but hadn’t more than put my nose outside the park before I was arrested. It was, unluckily, just in the false dawn, when the milk-carts come rumblin’, an’ it’s the best part of the day for the coppers. I’d been looking forward to a cuppa coffee and a bite, too!

  ‘Well, they drove me to spjaetsyalniyi stamtsyja.† There they gave me a goin’ over which made me admit that work was a great blessing for all Soviet citizens.’ He throws his arms wide and looks over the ice-covered windows. ‘And now here I am in company with a bottle of vodka!’

  Above the bar Captain Wasilij Sinsow lies in bed watching Tamara, who moves up and down the room, like an angry cat, with a cigarette between her sensuous lips.

  ‘What the hell is there to do in this dirty hole?’ she hisses. Tuck and get drunk! I’m tired of it! Why don’t you ever go out with me?’

  ‘Where the hell’d we go?’ he asks, irritably. ‘We went to the pictures last week!’

  ‘Pictures,’ she snarls, angrily ’Wynn call that a cinema? Political shit! We’ve got to do something! We’ll go mad else! We’ll die and we won’t even know it!’

  ‘Let’s go skiing, when the storm has dropped,’ he suggests, weakly.

  ‘Ski? Now I do believe you’ve gone mad! I’m cured of skiing for the rest of my life!’

  He supports himself in the bed on one elbow and shows his beautifully white teeth in a big smile.

  ‘As soon as we’ve won the war, we’ll take a holiday in the Crimea,’ he comforts her. ‘We’ll go sailing and make love on the deck with only the gulls to see us!’

  And in the evening we’ll have dinner at a restaurant!’ She laughs, and her face lightens at the thought.

  ‘And we’ll stay all night. As long as we want to. And we’ll fill ourselves up with caviare and Crimean wine,’ he promises.

  ‘When we’ve won the war,’ she sighs, sadly, emptying the vodka glass. ‘You’ve heard of the Thirty Years War, I suppose? Why shouldn’t this one last just as long? Well, there’d only be twenty-eight years of it left.’

  ‘Twenty-seven,’ he corrects her, beginning to whistle.

  ‘What’s a year more or less?’ she groans, resignedly. ‘Oh, hell, Wasilij, I feel as if I were locked in a stinking prison! You lie there on your back all day, drinking. What the hell are you doing here anyway?’

  ‘I’m training Home Guards, you know that,’ he answers her, angrily. ‘I’m also keeping an eye on enemy movements, and sending wireless information if they get here. It’s a very important job and you know it!’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ she laughs, wildly. ‘They do say the Germans are stupid, but I’ll never believe they’d be stupid enough to come here! Nobody’d be that stupid! Only Soviet citizens are dumb enough to live in a hole like this.’ She passes her hand over his coal-black hair, kisses him on the lips, and passes her tongue over his. ‘I’m bored! Four months alone with you! Everywhere snow, nothing but snow! It’s driving me mad! We can’t even be bothered to make love any more! We can do all the hundred and ten positions in our sleep! Find something new to do, you fool!’

  ‘Maybe we could arrange a dog race,’ he suggests, without believing it himself. ‘There’s a lot of sledge-d
ogs here!’

  ‘Those village curs are too stupid to learn to race,’ she considers. ‘Do you remember when we used to go to the races in Moscow and then to the Bolshoi in the evening? Give me a drink!’ She holds out her glass towards him. ‘Get up for Christ’s sake! What do you think you’re for?’

  ‘Not so impertinent, woman,’ he says, threateningly. ‘I can soon have you back in gaol!’