Monte Cassino

by Sven Hassel

  Although as an NCO, Hauptfeldwebel Hoffman was not entitled to a batman, he had, in fact, two. One of them acted as his valet. Before an evil fate had delivered him into the hauptfeldwebel's clutches, he had been maitre d'hotel in one of the best hotels in Berlin. The other's functions were those of bottle-washer and cupbearer. He had to provide perfect service, when Hoffman took his meals, as he did, in solitary state.

  The only one who enjoyed the hauptfeldwebel's favours was Eagle, the former Stabsfeldwebel of the military gaol in Hamburg-Altona. He became the squadron's head clerk. We tried to get Eagle into the bad books of Mike and Leutnant Frick, but got nowhere. Eagle sat as snug as a bug and just laughed and jeered at us. One night some of the lads played a grim joke on him. They fell upon him, while he lay in bed sweetly dreaming, tied him to a tree, blind-folded him and draped a cloth round his neck. Finally, they set an Italian machine gun in front of him. When he was untied in the morning, he was a quivering wreck of terror.

  Hoffman thought it a good joke and called the perpetrators witty dogs, but when a hand grenade minus fuse happened to land on his table, the witty dogs became a bloody pack of communist saboteurs and he sent for the secret military police. They arrived in the guise of a lame Kriminalobersekretar, who spent three days drinking Hoffman's private hoard of liquor, then departed without unravelling anything, though not forgetting to take four cartons of Camel cigarettes and two smoked mutton hams with him. As he left, he assured Hoffman that he would be back again soon to go more thoroughly into the matter, whereupon Hoffman uttered some most peculiar noises. When our hauptfeldwebel poured out his woes to his pals at regimental HQ, they comforted him by reminding him that he had sent for the police himself; and he swore that henceforth he would take the advice of those with greater experience than he: never rouse the authorities, but let them sleep. They are difficult to lull to sleep again.

  We were standing outside the office waiting and freezing. The hauptfeldwebel always kept you waiting; it increased your nervous tension, he thought. We were wearing old, dark blue dungarees on top of our uniforms and felt sure of being selected for maintenance fatigue, the only job in which what you did was not always being watched and inspected. Porta had a brace and four screwdrivers in his hand. A sparking plug tin protruded from a pocket. Tiny had a petrol pump under his arm. He had been going about with it for the last week, but Hoffman had not yet tumbled to the trick.

  The newcomers were lined up on our left, their packs and great-coats piled in front of them. They were wearing jackets and had brand new gasmasks over their shoulders. Their steel helmets dangled from hooks on their belts.

  Hoffman came out from the office, followed closely by Eagle carrying the board with the day's allocation of duties and the six coloured pencils. He kept exactly three paces behind the hauptfeldwebel, halting and moving at exactly the same second. You could almost have thought they worked off the same differential. Hoffman took up position, legs straddled, in front of the squadron, opened his mouth till it was like a large red steaming hole, then, from the depths, came a savage roar of command: "Squadron: right dress. Eyes front!" He waited a couple of minutes to see if anyone would venture to move, then gave a grin of satisfaction and ordered: "Stand at ease. You pink zebra-stallions imagine you can pull off the maintenance trick with me, do you? Well, today's the last time, you stinking scrotums. Mechanics to the right."

  Two-thirds of the squadron moved to the right, while the rest stood gazing vacantly into the air.

  Hoffman strode up to them, followed by Eagle.

  "You there," he called, pointing to an obergefreiter. "Where did you get that pistol you've got on your broad bum?"

  The obergefreiter had to hand over his pistol.

  Hoffman grinned delightedly. He loved that sort of thing. He knew how much a pistol meant to an ordinary soldier. To deprive him of one was like stealing his soul.

  Three times Hoffman hounded them through the bog, on the pretext of bad carriage and undisciplined behavior.

  When the group had fallen in again in front of him, now covered with mud and duck pond, he gloated: "Well, you lice, you will perhaps have realised that you have joined a proper Prussian company, where there is discipline. You will see that you are less than the rump of a castrated hippo. Here I am the one who says what is what, and only I. If I feel I would like to knock your bloody heads off, I shall do it; if, contrary to all probability, I should discover among you swamp-fish a desert cow with a tiny bit of grey matter, I'll make him an NCO."

  When we had fallen out and Hoffman had disappeared Eagle came and hovered about for a while before he told us: "The major wants a word with you all and to have a look at the newcomers. He's crazy today. He's hounded the clerks through the office window five times already."

  "Do you know what I'm going to do," Porta said with a crafty grin. "I'm going to take you up to the front line one day and send you across to the Gurkhas or the Moroccans with a couple of severed ring fingers in your pocket. Come trista la vita!"

  Eagle disappeared hurriedly.

  Rudolph Kleber, our minstrel, who had been with the SS, sounded a tattoo on his bugle.

  "Mille diables! He won't become much older," said the Legionnaire with a laugh.

  We fell in as we were, dipping our hands into the waste oil first. We were supposed to be on maintenance and Hoffman might take it into his head to look at our hands.

  Major Michael Braun was there already, waiting for us. He was leaning up against a wall, playing with the large cigar in his mouth. We had heard the strangest rumours about Major Mike. Some people said that he wasn't a German at all, but an American. Julius Heide, who was always well-informed, said he had been a corporal in the American Marines. He had been born in Berlin, and been taken to America just after the first world war with his grandparents and seven brothers and sisters. There his mother had married an American business man, who thought of nothing but business and women. He dealt in textiles and didn't give a damn for race or politics. For him the U.S.A. was the entire world and its surrounding planets. Anybody who didn't subscribe to this was a damned nigger.

  When Michael Braun returned from a tour of duty in Hawaii with some rather peculiar notions, he was discharged and told that he was a blot on the escutcheon of the United States. He lived off his discharge gratuity until he became gigolo to an actress in Los Angeles. One day in a drug store in Lincoln Road he let his tongue run away with him and said a good deal too much about her. When he returned to her bower, he found her very het up by nine whiskies, two gins, three genevers and an account of what he had said relayed to her over the telephone. Between them they managed to smash most of the furniture before Michael was dismissed.

  Then he tried his luck as shoeblack at the end of the long Pier. Unfortunately he had not yet learned caution. He went to bed with a guardman's wife, a blackhaired Mexican nympho. The guardman, an Irishman, could not live up to her requirements and paid two Japs fromYoko-hama to keep her happy. One of these had a laundry in Little Street. The other worked in a bakery, where an immigrant from Vienna made Wienerbrod such as no Viennese would have recognized.

  Michael got involved in a sex orgy that ended in an almighty rumpus. There was a lot of talk of hidden cameras and it was quite a scandal. The guardman became a sergeant and the two Japs started their own laundry, which is still there in Little Street. They make a lot of money. They have a way with old shirts.

  Things did not go well for Michael. He was put in clink accused of responsibility for the photographs. Yet he was lucky in a way. He could have got ten years, but as the judge had lunched well that day and was in a good humour, he got let off. Also the judge liked the photographs which were attached to the evidence. A great many prints were made of these which were handed out to judges, counsel and the police.

  Having got out of prison, Michael Braun jumped a goods train to New York. When he reached rock bottom in Millwall Dock, he went to the army recruiting office in Washington Road. He swaggered in rather ar
rogantly; after all, he was an old marine and, what is more, one from Shuffield Barracks, but a lousy sergeant with three rainbows on his breast pocket--he had been on the Somme and still boasted of it--asked for his certificate of conduct. Braun tried to talk round his year in Los Angeles jail. Grinning, they invited him into a bedroom, where he was given the best thrashing he had ever had and made to understand that he was a criminal swine that the army wanted nothing to do with.

  He then went back to Millwall Dock, sneaked aboard the HAPAG line's ship, Bremen, and was discovered 375 miles east of Halifax. He then learned to his immense surprise exactly how many plates a man can wash in the course of a day. Every time he dropped one, the head waiter hit him on the head with a larding board. When the ship reached Hamburg he was handed over to the security officer. The beating-up he had had from the three recruiting sergeants in New York was nothing compared to that meted out to him in 8 Stadthausbrucke.

  He spent nine months in Fulsbuttel under Marabu, the most hated of all high-booted SS-Obersturmbannfuhrers. Intuitively, Braun realised that if he was to get out alive, he must kneel before the twisted Nazi cross and swear loyalty. His old soldier's flair told him who was the stool pigeon in the cell. Very carefully he began telling them about the US Marines and Shuffield Barracks, describing prisoners' work in the quarries, the inhuman marches under a blazing sun, and also let fall a phrase or two about the new semi-automatic MI carbine. He also let it be thought that he was familiar with Pedersen's Garand rifle.

  The Marabu became interested. For two hours Mike stood at attention, as only a marine could. The Marabu nodded approval and subjected him to various tests. In the first, he disarmed three tough SS men with just his hands.

  The Marabu was amazed. He had been standing behind a curtained window on the first floor, watching. Then Mike had to walk the two-mile long outdoor track after starving for six days. They put him in an ice cellar, and he was all but dead when they released him. Then they tied him to a radiator and chucked a bucket of water over him every quarter of an hour. He began longing for the garrison prison at Shuffield, where Scar-face, the worst of all evil staff sergeants, held sway.

  The Marabu spat on Mike, but at the back of Mike's brain he could hear the familiar trumpet call from Shuffield. Marabu had made the mistake of giving an old sweat treatment devised for political fanatics. Mike stood at attention and saw the Marabu through a veil of mist. The Marabu struck him in the face four times with his hippo-whip.

  Seventy-three days later Mike was transferred to a labour camp near Eisenach. By devious ways he managed to acquire connections in the Party. He became friends with a gauleiter and the two of them discovered a flair for deals, especially shady ones. So in record time, Mike became company commander in an Allgemeine SS Company. One day a good friend whispered in his ear that a police investigation was in the offing. Somewhere in the higher echelons someone had begun wondering why so many rationed goods were disappearing without trace in Eisenach. Mike realised that the time had come for a change of scene and he let fall a few pompous remarks to the effect that he felt it his duty to serve with the army, if the army would have him. His regional commander SS Gruppenfuhrer Nichols, swallowed the bait and so, one cold rainy day in April, he reported to the 121st Frontier Infantry at Tibor Camp. However, the Commander of No. 2 Company there, Hauptmann Tilger, could not stand this peculiar semi-German, so he was sent to Tapiau on the Polish frontier, just about as far away as they could get him. He spent six months there in the 31st Machine-gun Battalion, where he attracted a certain amount of attention by his skill in shooting. He got the army championship for his battalion. When his commander asked him what his rank had been in the US Marines the former corporal impudently replied:

  "First lieutenant, Herr Major."

  A report was sent to Berlin about Michael Braun and eight days later he was a feldwebel with a reserve officer cadet's braid on his shoulder straps. Three months later he was Fahnenjunker and at the end of a year Oberfahnrich. By chance he discovered that they were thinking of sending him to the Military Academy at Potsdam. There it would not have taken more than an hour or two to show him up for the gigantic liar he was, so he contacted his connections in the Party and went on his travels again.

  For a time he was with the 2nd Engineer Battalion at Stettin, where he learned with much swearing and sweating to make pontoon bridges. So, each time there was any talk of the Military Academy he managed to get himself transferred. There were few German garrisons that had not had the honour of his company by the time war broke out in 1939. He ended the Polish campaign at Lemberg as leutnant in command of a company. There he was a welcome guest on the other side of the demarcation line, where he drank many a good glass of vodka with the Russian officers.

  He fell out with his CO. who insisted that the time had come for Michael Braun to attend the Military Academy and as a result he left the 79th with this eloquent description in his soldier's book: "Undisciplined, insubordinate, quarrelsome. Unfitted for independent command."

  Obviously, such an entry did not make for an easy start in his new units. For six months he went about Germany commanding the transport company of a Service Unit, and one fine day he and his laden lorries drove into Eisenach, where half the loads disappeared into the roomy warehouses of his friend, the gauleiter.

  That was the end of Leutnant Michael Braun's service with the transport company. He became a hauptmann in record time and was promoted major five months later, all thanks to the gauleiter. The astounding thing was that Major Michael Braun had never been within a hundred miles of an officer training school. He was always given the dirty jobs and the insoluble tasks, and somehow or other, he managed to accomplish them, while others got the credit. His last commander added yet another uncomplimentary opinion to those already recorded in his soldier's book, and he was sent to a Special Duties regiment, all because when drunk, he had flung a mug of beer at Hitler's portrait and said 'Prosit!'

  But now, he no longer had a gauleiter friend to help him, for the latter was then breaking stones for a new autobahn and the mere fact of having known him was dangerous. Mike hastened to forget him.

  That was how Major Michael Braun found himself standing in front of our company introducing himself to the newcomers. He could swear for an hour and a half at a stretch and never repeat himself.

  "Well, you arse-holes," he bellowed, "I'm your commander. I will not stand for any form of funny stuff. If any of you should get the crazy idea that he would like to bump me off from behind, let him write his will and testament before he tries. I have eyes in the back of my head." He pointed to Tiny and said: "Creutzfeldt, who's the toughest company commander you have ever had?"

  "You, Mike."

  The major grinned broadly. Then he pointed to the Legionnaire. "On the right wing there you see NCO Kalb. Listen to him and you have a chance to save your lives. He has been with the Moroccans and knows every dirty trick there is. That long lout with the yellow necksquare on the left of No. 1 platoon has been one of the field-marshal's paratroopers, but he was too good with his knife and they kicked him out. You can learn close combat from him. From NCO Julius Heide there you can learn order and discipline; from Feldwebel Willie Beier, the Old Man, learn knowledge of people and humanity, though you won't have much use for the latter. Obergefreiter Porta can teach you to steal, and, if you are in need of spiritual comfort, go to our padre, Father Emanuel. Don't make a mistake with him. He can knock a bull unconscious with his left fist." He drew his heavy P. 38 from its yellow holster. "As you no doubt have noticed, I have a service pistol and not one of those arse-ticklers most pansy boys trick themselves out with, and the dirty swine who shows the least sign of cowardice when the skull-crackers appear will have a bullet from it sent through his dome by me. Don't think you have come here to get an Iron Cross. With the SS you have to be recommended twice before you get one, here it is six times. You are the scum of humanity, but you are going to be the world's best soldiers." He drew a deep breath and
restored his pistol to its yellow holster. "Take lessons from the men I've just recommended." Then he turned to Hauptfeldwebel Hoffman. "Two hours special drill in the river. Anyone who kills a comrade gets three weeks leave. Every tenth cartridge and every twentieth grenade will be live. I want to see at least one broken arm. Otherwise, four hours extra drill."

  Then began one of Mike's usual exercises. We hated him because of them, but they made us hard and inhuman. If you are to be a good soldier, you have to be able to hate. You have to be able to kill a man as you would a louse. We had had many CO's, but the German-American Major Michael Braun, who had never been to an officers' school, taught us all this in a way none of the others had been able to do. He would jeer and spit at you at eleven o'clock, hound you into death at twelve and drink whisky and dice with you at one.

  He made super soldiers out of gutter snipes. He introduced goose-stepping in a bog, where we were up to our eyes in squelch, headed by a band: ten trumpets, ten flutes and ten drums. He had even got permission for our minstrels to have bearskins round their helmets.

  Quite a number of cartridges had been filed, in readiness for the back of his head, but even so Porta and the Legionnaire had twice humped him back from No-man's land, and he never even said thank you. When there was anything particularly tough to be done: rolling-up the enemy line, blowing up a special objective, covering a withdrawal, mine-clearing, swimming a river under water with the engineers, capturing an enemy general, Mike nearly always took part, dressed as a private. Once he brought three wounded back, and the next morning he went back for a fourth who was lying out on the wire.