by Sven Hassel
‘Someone’s copped it,’ I said.
Tiny crossed the room and peered out through the broken window, with its one jagged pain of glass sticking up like a broken tooth. He turned with morbid satisfaction towards Linge.
‘Lieutenant Dorn,’ he said, simply. ‘He stopped it in the chest.’
The Lieutenant burst into the guardhouse as if a dozen T34s were snapping at his heels. He stared round, wildly.
‘Who threw that helmet? Answer my question! Who threw that helmet?’
Sergeant Linge performed a sideways shuffle round the perimeter of the guardhouse and gave a nervous guilty grin.
‘What the devil are you sniggering at?’ barked the Lieutenant. ‘Are you out of your senses? Are you a homicidal maniac? Do you realise you could face the firing squad for assaulting an officer?’
‘Sir, I didn’t throw it at you, sir,’ said Linge, with extreme and unctuous earnestness. ‘It slipped out of my fingers, sir. I happened to be standing near the window at the time, and it slipped out of my fingers. It was gone before I could stop it. I put out my hand to catch it, but it went before I had a chance.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sergeant, stop babbling like a bloody cretin!’ The Lieutenant took an impatient step forward, and it seemed suddenly to strike him that the guardroom was curiously overcrowded for that time of night. ‘What’s going on here? What are all these men doing in here?’ He looked suspiciously round the circle of anxious faces, and instantly put his finger on the weakest link in the chain: Private Ness, who was universally acknowledged as a certified moron. Dorn strode up to him, snapping his fingers at him as if he were a dog. ‘Come along, man! Out with it! Don’t stand there dribbling!’
Private Ness gave him a look of vacant despair. Across the far side of the room, behind the Lieutenant’s back, Sergeant Linge was busy informing him in hideous dumb show that his throat would be slit open if he dared say a word. Ness’s lower lip began slowly to fall apart from its moorings.
‘Well?’ snapped the Lieutenant. ‘Do you intend to answer my question or do you want to face the firing squad along with Sergeant Linge?’
Ness sprang quivering to attention. His eyes swivelled piteously from the Lieutenant to the Sergeant. His big baggy cheeks were shaking with fright.
‘They seen the Devil,’ he said. ‘They seen the Devil, sir.’
Well, that was it, of course. As soon as Ness had opened his great gaggy mouth, the rest of the bunch were only too anxious to pipe up and start filling in the details. Give Linge his due. He had sense enough to know that it was a matter best kept to ourselves. He and I and Tiny stood in tight-lipped disgust as the cretins poured out their own varied and garbled versions of the tale. Gregor had wisely disappeared, God knows where. Ness was by now babbling louder than any of them, and the Lieutenant was thrashing about with his hands and trying to shout over the hubbub.
‘For God’s sake, shut up! Shut up, I say! I want a proper military report, not a bloody horror story!’
He got his proper military report: at precisely 0105 hours the Devil had been seen to walk in the Colonel’s rooms. Every man present had witnessed it, and several were prepared to swear to the existence of horns, brimstone, forked tail, etc. One man in his zeal even added the embellishment of cloven hoofs, but this was angrily dismissed on the grounds that it could not have been possible to see them unless he was walking on his hands with his feet in the air.
Lieutenant Dorn perched himself gingerly on the edge of the table and sat for a while without speaking. I could understand his predicament. He himself could scarcely have been in ignorance of the rumours that ran round the camp; and even if he might not believe in horror stories, it was nevertheless pretty obvious that there was something untoward going on. No smoke without fire and so forth, and who was it who came a-visiting every night on the stroke of twelve in two big black Mercedes limousines? On the other hand, we could all picture the Colonel’s wrath when a report came in that the night guard had been discovered gathered together in the guardhouse babbling about the Devil. And we all knew who would be in command of the very next company to be despatched to the front: the officer who was responsible for making the report. Lieutenant Dorn . . .
I glanced sympathetically at him, and he raised a palsied, grey face in my direction. It was his duty to report the incident, no doubt about it. I was only glad that I was in my own shabby, ill-fitting boots and not his.
‘All right,’ he said, at last. He rose heavily to his feet. ‘Let’s get matters straight. Who was it who first claimed to have seen this mythical creature in the Colonel’s rooms?’
‘Corporal Creutzfeldt, sir, and Private Hassel,’ said Sergeant Linge, as quick as they come.
He would pay dearly for that accident with the helmet, and I daresay he was only too eager to drag someone else down into the mire while he was about it.
The Lieutenant walked across to Tiny and stood thoughtfully regarding him for a moment.
‘Corporal Creutzfeldt,’ he said. ‘Did you by any chance have anything to drink before going on duty tonight?’
‘Certainly, sir.’ Tiny assumed an expression of imbecilic wisdom and counted up on his fingers. ‘Four bocks and a couple of glasses of kummel.’
‘A couple, Corporal Creutzfeldt?’
‘Well – two or three. Four or five . . . Say a round half dozen,’ said Tiny, obligingly.
‘In other words, Corporal, you were drunk?’
‘No more than usual,’ said Tiny, stoutly.
‘Am I to infer from that remark that you are habitually drunk, when you go on duty, Corporal Creutzfeldt?’
Tiny paused gravely to consider the matter.
‘Well, yes,’ he said, at last. ‘But not so’s you’d notice it.’
‘Just as I thought,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘Delirium tremens. You’ve been having visions, Corporal. If it’s not pink elephants it’s devils with cloven hoofs . . . A mere figment of an overheated imagination. You saw the Colonel walk past his window – you saw him drinking a cup of steaming coffee – you saw him wearing his Uhlan helmet – you naturally mistook it for a pair of satanic horns. Is that not so, Corporal Creutzfeldt?’
‘Yeah, I reckon that would be it,’ said Tiny, cheerfully. ‘I reckon you’re probably right, sir. I reckon that was the way it must have happened.’
The Lieutenant turned, satisfied, to me.
‘And you, Hassel,’ he said, kindly. ‘I need scarcely ask if you also have imbibed alcoholic beverages during the course of the evening?’
‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
The Lieutenant smiled a tight little smile.
‘Who is in command of your Company? Lieutenant Löwe, is it not?’ An eager chorus assured him that it was. ‘Well, well,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘I think on this occasion we shall leave him to sleep in peace. But if any more of this drunken carousing comes to my notice, I shall, you understand, be forced to take a far more serious view of it. You realise what the outcome would be should I choose to file a report of the night’s proceedings? We should all of us, my friends, find ourselves in a very sorry situation . . . I advise you for the future to keep your eyes turned away from the Colonel’s windows. What the Colonel chooses to do at any time of the day or night is after all no concern of yours. He is at liberty to entertain whoever he wishes in the privacy of his own quarters, and he certainly won’t thank you for spying on him.’ He walked to the door, and then remembered. ‘As for you,’ he said to Sergeant Linge, ‘next time you happen to be standing by a closed window with a tin hat in your hand, just check to make sure there’s not an officer walking across the courtyard. I assure you you won’t get away so lightly a second time.’
That should by rights have been the end of the affair, but you can’t stop people talking and by the end of the following day the news was all over the camp. Creutzfeldt and Hassel had seen Colonel von Gernstein with the Devil. Creutzfeldt and Hassel and Sergeant Linge stood by and watched
as Colonel von Gernstein and the Devil had played at cards together. Private Ness was ready to swear that every night on the stroke of twelve Colonel von Gernstein turned into a vampire . . .
Twenty-four hours later, cloven hoofprints had been discovered beneath the Colonel’s window. There was a constant pilgrimage of men from every part of the camp, and some of the more scientifically minded took measurements and even attempted to make a plaster cast. Some fool suggested it might have been a wild boar from the forest, but this, of course, was patently ridiculous: no German boar with any sense of self-preservation would ever risk its life in the courtyards of Sennelager. For most men, this was proof incontrovertible that the Colonel’s nocturnal visitors were no better than they ought to be, and now a tale was told which had never been told before. It was said to have originated from the Quartermaster of the Second Company, but soon it could be heard all over the camp a dozen times a day. It appeared that the Adjutant before the present one, rolling back to camp at four o’clock one morning from the nearest brothel, doubtless three parts drunk and in no fit state to withstand any sort of shock to the nervous system, had chanced upon the Colonel and his loathsome companions as he passed through the main gate. The Adjutant had been discovered next morning, lying on the ground with four broken ribs and teethmarks all over his body. He was raving mad and never again regained full command of his senses. He was eventually transferred to the Army psychiatric hospital at Giessen, where it was said he used to walk the wards with a broom over his shoulders telling everyone he met that he was the figure of death with his scythe. He hung himself one day in the officers’ lavatory.
Meanwhile, back at Sennelager, the rumours ran through the camp like a horde of locusts, devouring everyone in their path. One of the best stories to emerge came from Lance-Corporal Glent, who went breezing into the Colonel’s apartments one morning, on some errand or other. Believing the Colonel to be elsewhere, he suddenly discovered him sitting at a table playing poker with his two dread companions. The visitors, according to Glent, instantly muffled themselves up in their cloaks and jammed their hats down over their eyes, but not before he had had a chance to catch sight of their faces. Ghastly, he said they were. Like something out of hell. Like skulls covered in parchment, with black holes where the nose and the mouth should have been, flaming red eyes and no ears. And the whole room reeked of sulphur and brimstone . . .
The next day, Glent put in for a transfer. It was curtly refused, but he was taken off the Colonel’s staff and sent to work in Armaments, where I suppose they reckoned he would have less chance of meeting death and the devil round every corner.
More than ever before, men went in terror of meeting the Colonel. The creaking and grinding of his artificial limbs in the distance was sufficient to clear an area for half a mile around. One day, he came unexpectedly upon Sergeant Hofmann. No one stopped long enough to witness the scene. We scurried off like rats from a sinking ship, so no one ever knew for certain what took place, but for over a week Hofmann was kept in the infirmary with a fever so high, you could have boiled an egg in his mouth. He came back like one returned from the grave, and I swear he didn’t say a word to a soul for the first twenty-four hours.
But if the Colonel did commune with the Devil, it was perhaps not so very remarkable in a place like Sennelager. You got all sorts there. From pimps and prostitutes to high-ranking generals. One general we had was von Hanneken, who in the days of his glory had been Commander-in-Chief of German Forces in Denmark. His downfall had been nothing more dramatic than petty greed. He’d overplayed his hand on the black market and someone had shopped him. Even a general was not immune. From living off the fat of the land in occupied Denmark, he had fallen to the very bottom of the dung heap in Sennelager. Porta had a most particular interest in the man. He was perfectly convinced that he had stashed away a small fortune in black market goods, and he was determined to force the secret out of him before he was sent into action and had his brains blown out.
‘Well?’ demanded Tiny, unfailingly each morning. ‘Has he talked yet?’
‘Not yet,’ said Porta. ‘I’m working on him.’
Working on him! He looked after him like a mother. He supplied him with cigarettes and extra rations, he kept him out of trouble, he dogged his every footstep. Until one day, hearing rumours that our stay in Sennelager was coming to an end, he flew into a panic and had a change of tactics. He enlisted the help of Wolf, Hofmann’s time-honoured enemy, and one of Porta’s particular mates, and together they spirited the General away for what they termed ‘a special exercise period’. We never knew what happened, but next day Wolf and Porta drank themselves ecstatic in the canteen and rolled off arm in arm to the nearest brothel. From that moment on, Porta had no more interest in the General, who was left on his own to sink or swim as he would.
As for the rest of us, we contented ourselves with gloating over the downfall of the former Gestapo man, Lutz. Lutz was Tiny’s pigeon. He had in the past caused Tiny a loss of his corporal’s stripes and three months’ hard labour in the penitentiary at Besançon, and Tiny was now joyously hell-bent on redressing the balance. As far as we were concerned, you could kick a Gestapo man all over the camp like a football, the harder the better. We waited avidly each day for a progress report. Tiny’s favourite sport was taking Lutz out to be exercised. Tiny would sit on top of the car park roof chanting out his commands, while big fat Lutz, weighed down with every conceivable sort of armament, would puff to and fro, and round about in circles, and would inevitably end up by falling into a ditch full of thick black mud which happened, conveniently, to be there. On the point of collapse, he would then be marched back to the barracks at the double, with Tiny triumphant behind him, prodding him with the point of a bayonet and proudly exhibiting him to all who stood watching. As a final touch, Lutz was forced to sing a little song, the words of which began: ‘A soldier’s life is a grand life . . .’
No one interfered. Lutz was in Tiny’s section and he was Tiny’s responsibility. It was up to Tiny to turn him into a good soldier. He tried on two occasions to kill himself, and the second time he was marched off to do four days’ solitary. Upon reflection, it must have seemed like a glimpse of paradise after Tiny’s rough handling.
When the training period was over, all those who had survived were now deemed worthy of going to the front line to be slaughtered by enemy guns, or blown to pieces by enemy mines. Sennelager had been but a rehearsal for the even bloodier real thing. Some of the poor fools must have wondered why they had ever volunteered.
‘A nation in which the average family has four children can afford to go to war once in every twenty years: this will allow for the deaths of two of the children, while still leaving the other two to perpetuate the race.’
Himmler. Speech to the officers of the School of
Politics at Braunschweig, 9th January 1937.
Obergruppenführer Berger snatched up the telephone the minute it started to ring. He grabbed the receiver towards him and bellowed into the mouthpiece.
‘Dirlewanger? Is that you?’
At the other end of the line, Dirlewanger pulled a face at his reflection in the window.
‘I was told,’ he said, ‘that you wanted a word with me.’
He spoke cautiously; carefully neutral, determinedly noncommittal, like a man reaching out a toe to test the temperature of the water. Had it indeed been a toe, it would have been instantly withdrawn: the temperature was well below zero.
‘Wanted a word with you!’ roared Berger. ‘I should think I did want a word with you! What the devil are you playing at out there? What’s going on?’
‘What the devil do you think is going on?’ Dirlewanger leaped instantly and aggressively to his own defence. ‘What do you expect to be going on? I can’t make an omelette without eggs, I’m not a bloody miracle worker! God damn it, Berger, this is no picnic out here! I need more men, and I need them fast.’
‘Who doesn’t?’ said Berger. ‘You think we’re hol
ding troops in cold storage just for the fun of hearing you bleat? Get your facts straight, man! We’ve cleared every prison and every detention centre in the whole of Germany. ‘What more can we do? You want us to open up the concentration camps and send those men out to you?’
‘I don’t give a damn what you send me,’ snapped Dirlewanger. ‘You can open up the loony bins and send the nuts out here for all I care. I don’t give a damn what they are, so long as I’m not lumbered with a bunch of screaming pansies. That’s the one thing I do draw the line at. Jews and queens get right on my tits. But for the rest, send me anything you damn well like – so long as you send me something!’
There was a slight pause.
‘Very well,’ said Berger stiffly. ‘You’ll get your men. They might not be pretty, but you’ll get them.’
The following morning, the camps, the prisons, the asylums were all combed in search of usable material. Anything did, so long as it was not a Jew or a known homosexual. Even a homicidal maniac could be turned to good use, provided he was trainable. And if anyone could train him, it would be Dirlewanger. Dirlewanger had served his apprenticeship under that master butcher of the SS, Standartenführer Theodor Eicke of the Death’s Head Brigade. He prided himself – and not without good reason – that there was no man he could not break . . .
Deserters
From Sennelager, we were sent to an area of stinking marshland, full of rising damp and mosquitoes, a few miles out of Matoryta. The battalion was up to strength, but only the First Company had been supplied with tanks. The other eleven were reduced to the level of infantry, and we had to wade ignominiously through the slopping waters of the marshes on foot. Tiny kept the faithful Lutz trudging at his heels carrying all his gear for him, while he strode in lordly fashion a few paces ahead, and the rest of us looked on with jealous hatred.