Court Martial

by Sven Hassel

  ‘Par Allah, he took the whole burst in his guts,’ says the Legionnaire.

  ‘To hell with him,’ reckons the Westphalian.

  ‘He’s only got himself to thank for it!’

  ‘Put him under cover down by the stables,’ says the Old Man. ‘We can’t do any more for him. Let’s move!’

  Somebody is waving energetically, with a red curtain, from one of the windows in a long house.

  ‘That’s “The Red Angel”,’ the prisoners tell us. ‘That’s where the commissar has gone into hiding!’

  ‘They’re certainly in a hurry to surrender,’ grins Gregor. ‘We must really have a bad reputation!’

  Above the door a wooden sign swings. On it is painted a red angel astride a green elk.

  We knock the windows in and send a few shots through them to shake the nerves of the people inside.

  ‘Vigi ores60,’ shouts Heide, in a piercing voice.

  They come out one at a time, all of them, both men and women, looking anxious and confused. Last is a big, fat woman with half a shotgun in her hand.

  Porta nips the cheeks of her behind in a friendly manner, and runs his hand up under her skirt.

  ‘Where have you been all my life?’ he says, lecherously. ‘If I’d only known you were here I’d’ve come sooner!’

  ‘Any of these shits still inside?’ shouts Heide, importantly, expanding his chest for the benefit of the prisoners.

  ‘Shut it, you sod,’ says Porta, looking down his nose at him. ‘Which of you is the commissar?’ asks Gregor, with a pleasant smile.

  ‘He’s been shot,’ says the fat woman, ‘right through the forehead.’ She puts her finger on her own forehead so that there can be no doubt of where the commissar was shot.

  ‘Jesus, but she’s ugly!’ says Tiny, pulling a face.

  ‘She’s lovely,’ says Porta, trying to get his arm around her. ‘Just let me get the feel of you,’ he smirks, and purses his lips for a kiss.

  ‘You’re pretty,’ she says, pressing him to her huge breasts so closely that his head disappears completely.

  ‘Well, let’s you an’ me go somewhere and forget the war,’ he suggests with a lecherous grin.

  ‘We can go up to my room,’ she says, closing her eyes. ‘I’m a civil servant and I’ve got good bed-clothes!’

  ‘Are you a commissar?’ asks Porta, and shouts ‘Red Front!’ quickly three times.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I run “The Red Angel”. She throws out her arms like an emperor who has won a great victory.

  ‘Holy Raphael, protector of travellers, what can a busy man ask for better than a lady innkeeper for a girl friend?’ grins Porta.

  Tiny is getting on well with a tall thin girl with thick pigtails, the colour of new ale, hanging down her back. His entire arm is out of sight under her skirt.

  ‘What do you Soviet people do in this ‘ole, when you’re not killin’ Germans that is?’ he asks, pushing his hand out through the neck of her dress and waving at himself.

  ‘We discuss the new five year plan,’ she says, giving out a little whine and biting his fingers.

  ‘You must be bored to bleedin’ death then,’ decides Tiny. ‘We’ve only discussed one five year plan, an’ that took a ’ell of a time. Let’s go to your place,’ he suggests, ‘so I can show you how we roll a girl out on a sheet!’

  Suddenly a man rushes out of a doorway, swinging a Kalashnikov above his head. He slides down into a potato pit, in a cloud of snow, and begins to shoot to all sides.

  ‘Our commissar,’ says Mischa, rolling his eyes towards the heavens.

  ‘I thought he was dead,’ says Porta, pinching the fat woman’s wobbly cheeks.

  ‘He must’ve come to life again, then,’ she answers, carelessly.

  ‘Looks like it,’ shouts Gregor, sliding head first into cover. ‘If he ain’t he’s the first corpse I’ve seen shoot like that!’

  ‘See if you can get him,’ says the Old Man to the Legionnaire, who is keeping an eye on things from a window.

  ‘German swine,’ shouts the commissar, from the potato trench, ‘you’ll never get me alive. I’ll kill the lot of you!’ Another burst showers down dust from the ceiling and walls of the bar-room.

  Cautiously the Old Man peers from the window, makes a trumpet of his hands, and shouts: ‘Drop your shooter, tovaritsch, and come over to us. We won’t hurt you!’

  A new salvo is the only reply. It rattles against the wall.

  ‘The devil take you, you treacherous schweinhunde. You’re not fooling me!’ The Kalashnikov roars again.

  ‘Gregorij, Gregorij,’ Dimitri tries to entice him. ‘Stop all that nonsense and come down and meet the Germans. They’re nice people!’

  ‘Shut up you izmeejik61. You don’t fool me! Germanski, I am an important man and not easily taken prisoner,’ Gregorij shouts, from the potato pit.

  ‘Tavaritsch,’ begs Mikhail. ‘Be sensible! Come over and let us celebrate our liberation together. The Germans know you’re a big man, and will treat you accordingly!’

  ‘You’ll soon realise I’m not a man who can be taken lightly,’ comes from the potato pit. Another burst sprays the wall.

  ‘You’re nothing but a madman, Gregorij Antenyjew,’ cries Fjedor, angrily. ‘We’ve concluded a peace with these Germans, and if you don’t come out quickly they’ll come and get you, and shoot you on the spot like a mad dog!’

  ‘If we could get you over there you could knock his brains out with one blow of your tits!’ says Porta to the fat woman.

  ‘I’ll strangle the bastard if I ever get my hands on him,’ she swears viciously.

  ‘He’s a dangerous man,’ warns Yorgi. ‘He has been to the sniper’s school at Moscow and almost always hits what he aims at.’

  ‘Must be out of form today,’ says Porta. ‘Up to now he’s been wasting his powder.’

  ‘He usually has some hand-grenades in his pockets,’ says Mikhail, darkly.

  ‘You couldn’t throw a hand-grenade in here from over there,’ says Barcelona, measuring the distance to the potato trench with a knowledgeable eye.

  ‘He could crawl forward and get into range,’ says the Old Man, worriedly.

  ‘Il est con,’ says the Legionnaire. ‘If he leaves the trench we’ve got him! He can’t be that crazy – yet!’

  ‘What about annoying him so as to make him shoot off all his ammo?’ suggests Gregor. ‘He can’t have a lot with him.’

  ‘Then I’ll pick ’im up easy as the devil pickin’ up a parson sittin’ on the pot on a Easter Sunday,’ Tiny laughs, noisily.

  ‘Maybe that’s not a bad idea,’ says the Old Man, thoughtfully.

  A grenade explodes with a sharp bang, some way in front of our position, and throws snow through the windows.

  One by one we run from the door and move from one wall of snow to the other to make him waste his ammunition. As soon as one of us is under cover the next man starts running, but the commissar continues firing like mad.

  ‘Let’s stop this nonsense,’ says Medical Unteroffizier Leth, when we have been moving around between the snow walls for a while. ‘I’ve been a nurse in an asylum and I know how to treat madmen. Got a broom?’ he asks, when we are all safely inside the bar-room.

  Sofija comes running eagerly with a besom.

  ‘Just the thing,’ smiles Leth, with satisfaction. ‘We used ’em in the asylum to knock some sense into ’em. I’ve never met a loony yet who wasn’t scared of one of these. Give me one of those Russian hats, and I’ll show you how to fix a bloke who’s gone off his head.’

  Yorgi hands him a green fur cap with a tall, pointed crown.

  ‘Hey, you there,’ shouts Leth, when he is outside. ‘Drop that gun and come over here! If you don’t I’ll come up and give you a real beatin’ with this broom here! Na doma.62’

  For a moment there is a heavy silence, and it seems as if the mad commissar does not really know what to believe.

  Leth walks slowly across the village square and
threatens him with the broom.

  ‘Come on down here, you crazy devil,’ he yells, his voice echoing back from the snowy walls. ‘Or I’ll be over and warm your back with this broom!’

  ‘Lies and propaganda, you wicked German,’ answers Gregorij from the potato pit. ‘You are a devil, and neither heaven nor hell will have anything to do with you!’

  ‘Come back,’ shouts Gregor, nervously. ‘He’s mad as a hatter!’

  ‘Don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs,’ shouts Leth over his shoulder. ‘I’ve been specially trained to deal with German loonies, and I know what I’m doing!’

  He approaches the potato trench, step by step, swinging the broom round his head.

  Suddenly the machine-pistol rattles out a long snarling burst.

  Leth spins round like a top. It looks at first as if he is turning to come back to us, but then he goes down like a sack of potatoes. The snow rises in a cloud around his body.

  ‘Now do you understand who it is you’re up against? shouts the commissar, triumphantly. He emits a long peal of crazy laughter, and now none of us can doubt that the man really is insane. ‘Men like me are impervious to both fire and water! I’m that tough I could smash a rock to dust just by sitting on it!’

  ‘I’m not standing for this any longer,’ roars Barcelona, angrily, emptying his magazine in one long rattling burst.

  The mad Gregorij returns his fire immediately. Two hand-grenades fall, not far from the door.

  ‘He must be superhuman,’ I cry, in amazement. ‘No normal man can throw that far.’

  ‘In the name of all the devils, and by the holy name of Christ’s body, I’m coming down there to flay your hides off!’

  Again the Mpi chatters. One of the bullets goes through Porta’s hat.

  ‘This can’t go on,’ says the Old Man, with decision. ‘Who’ll volunteer to take him?’

  ‘Think we’ve got shit in our heads?’ asks Gregor, in angry indignation.

  ‘One bloody madman with a machine-pistol, and he’s holdin’ up an entire section!’ shouts Barcelona, bringing his first down on the table in impotent rage.

  The mirror with the angel on it smashes to pieces, and falls from the wall, as another burst crashes through the broken windows.

  ‘That’s the limit,’ screams Shenja, furiously. ‘That mad shies gonna get to know Shenja from Odessa better! Gimme one o’ them Hitler saws!’

  Porta hands her a Schmeisser and a bag of magazines. She is so angry that froth rings her mouth and nose. She goes out of the door like a rocket.

  ‘So long, love! Thanks for dropping in!’ Porta shouts after her. ‘I’ll plant three lilies on your grave!’

  She zigzags up the hill. The Legionnaire gives her covering fire with the LMG. Tracer makes an umbrella over the potato trench. Suddenly the madman comes into view on the left of the long pit, and sends a burst at Shenja. Her own Mpi goes off like a runaway rattle.

  We send a concentrated fire from windows and doors.

  The rain of bullets throws him up into the air. He falls backwards, then staggers to his feet again, but before he can fire Shenja is beside him. Now it seems as if she has gone mad. She stands over him, like a statue, with straddled legs, and fires down into his body.

  ‘If she goes round the bend now,’ cites Gregor, worriedly, ‘then I’m leaving!’

  She stops firing, swings the Mpi on to her shoulder as if she were carrying a spade, and descends the hill with long measured strides.

  ‘That’s what the Amazons must have looked like in the old days when they marched back in triumph after a great victory,’ laughs the Old Man.

  ‘Anybody say anything about the weaker sex?’ asks Porta.

  ‘Call Mum here any time!’ says Shenja, proudly, handing Porta back the Schmeisser and thanking him for the loan of it.

  Slowly the inn fills up with villagers come to have a look at the Germans. As Shenja’s stocks are depleted feelings of friendship grow warmer.

  To mark the occasion, the stuffed bear in the chimney corner is wearing a German steel helmet.

  Porta takes a balalaika from the wall.

  ‘That was with my father in Siberia,’ Shenja tells him.

  ‘Well now,’ says Porta, trying the strings.

  ‘Can you play it?’ she asks.

  ‘Too true I can,’ he answers, pressing it to his side.

  The first notes are soft and mellow. Then they become wild as the drumming of Cossack horses crossing the steppe. He wipes his hands on his trousers, and begins to play the clown with the instrument, in Kalmuk style.

  Tiny knocks out his mouthorgan. Porta sings in a high voice:

  ‘Einmal aber warden Gläser klingen,

  denn zu Ende geht ja jeder Krieg.’63

  Soon the inn is shaking to the dancing of the Russians. Mischa springs so high into the air that he splits open his head on a beam. Gregor breaks a finger learning to turn a somersault. Porta gets a crick in the neck when Fjedor persuades him to try jumping over a table with his feet together.

  ‘As soon as this war’s over,’ Tiny tells Sofija, stroking the insides of her thigh, ‘this honourable German uniform of mine goes straight on the muck-pile, and I step proudly into the ranks of the scoundrelly civvies again.’

  ‘Mind you’re not disappointed,’ laughs Gregor. ‘Civilian life’s a lot more complicated’n you think it is. You can’t go about there with your brain shut off an’ a set of regulations stuck on your forehead. Life in the Army gets simpler and more straightforward the more stars and braid you’ve picked up!’

  ‘What does Germany look like?’ asks Yorgi, inquisitively.

  ‘Ruins! No matter where you look,’ answers Porta, ‘and everybody goes round in the same standard clothes, that’ve been turned God knows how often. A couple of times a year Adolf tells us that he now has victory in his pocket!’

  ‘There’s a lot as loses their nuts, too,’ explains Tiny, from the far end of the table. ‘Them’s the ones as don’t take the law too seriously, and go on the pinch durin’ the blackout!’

  ‘How will it all end?’ sighs Dimitri. ‘Poltava lies also in ruins.’

  ‘It’ll end with one of us losing the war and the winners taking all the loot,’ decides Porta, largely.

  ‘If you Germans lose the war you will not be allowed to have an Army any more,’ predicts Fjedor, darkly, patting a Schmeisser.

  That’d be bad,’ Porta admits, with a false smile. ‘The German. Army is for us something holy. Like the Church! Prayers on Sunday and drill on Monday. We always close out the week with a parade and start it again with prayers and weapon drill!’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ yells Heide, raising his arm. He is too drunk to understand Porta’s irony.

  ‘The Army is a gift from God to the German people,’ hiccoughs Gregor, saluting the stuffed bear.

  ‘We Prusians are born to the practice of war,’ shouts Heide, proudly, raising his arm again. ‘God created the uniform and the rifle especially for our use.’

  ‘In the same way as he created the spade and the muck-rake for the Russians,’ grins Porta, jovially. ‘That German God certainly does know what he’s doing!’

  ‘Don’t worry about losing the war,’ shouts Andrej, lifting his glass to Barcelona. ‘If you do, then we Russians will join you and fix our present allies. Together we could beat the rest of the world in no time!’

  ‘Yes, we do have a lot in common,’ says Porta, thoughtfully, ‘particularly holiness and cruelty.’

  ‘Should we get into difficulties,’ shouts Gregor, with the voice of a General, ‘we will not hesitate to take cruel and unusual methods of warfare into use. We shall mobilize all German and Russian lice, infect them with spotted typhus and throw them at the heads of the Americans. That will make them lose the desire to force our peace-loving peoples into making more wars.’

  ‘We could also collect rats from the ruins and from the graveyards of former wars,’ suggests Porta, ‘and, when he had infected them with
all kinds of shit and corruption, send them as gift parcels to our hateful enemies, who are consciencelessly killing our women and children.’

  ‘Yes, we Germans and Russians know how to make other nationalities keep in line all right,’ shouts Barcelona, above the noise.

  ‘Helmets off for prayers!’ hiccoughs Porta, crawling up on a table. ‘We must pray to God to help us finish this World War as soon as possible, so we can get a new one started!’

  The village patriach, who is nothing but skin and bones, says he can remember the Crimean War, where some fool of an English general slaughtered his own cavalry, and if he thinks really hard he can remember Napoleon’s entry into Moscow.

  ‘It was a brave sight,’ he says, quietly. ‘What a lot of horses they had with them. Napoleon was riding on a white one!’

  ‘Snow camouflage, I suppose!’ says Tiny.

  ‘Do you shoot with cannons in this war?’ the ancient asks Porta.

  ‘We do set one off now and then,’ admits Porta.

  ‘Do you think, perhaps, one day, a man could see how one of those things works?’ asks the old fellow in his thin, reedy voice.

  ‘You can come with us when we leave,’ suggests Porta.

  ‘We’ve got a cannon here,’ reveals the aged man, with shining eyes. He smacks his toothless gums together gleefully. ‘Somebody forgot it here, shortly after the Revolution, and we’ve kept it hidden ever since.’

  ‘Why don’t you try to fire it then?’ asks Tiny. ‘No powder, maybe?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ boasts the village patriach. ‘A lot of it, of all kinds.’

  ‘Where is this shootin’ iron you’re talkin’ about?’ asks Tiny, interestedly. He gives Sofija a smack on the backside which sends her flying into the arms of Fjedor.

  ‘In the reindeer stables, hidden in the straw,’ chuckles the old peasant.

  ‘Let’s go and look it over,’ suggests Tiny.

  ‘Yes, let us do that,’ the ancient man nods, obviously pleased. ‘I have taken part in two or three wars, but I have never seen a cannon fired, and now that I am over a hundred years old I would like to see it before I die.’

  ‘When were you born?’ asks Porta.

  ‘More than one hundred years ago,’ answers the aged peasant, with a happy smile.