Comrades of War

by Sven Hassel

  The Legionnaire hummed, ‘Come now, Death, come.’ I stopped my ears, I didn’t want to listen to the damned song; but thousands joined in: ‘Come now, Death, come!’ Again gurgling laughter from over in the corner.

  The gray man passed his finger probingly along the edge of the scythe, the bright glittering scythe. He nodded with satisfaction. It was sharp. Sharp like the large guillotines in Plötzensee and Lengries. Like the knife that sliced Ursula’s head from her slender neck I wonder, are there guillotines in Kolyma? What’s wrong with you, you stupid pig? I thought you’d said good-bye to that love you had once in Berlin, the Jewish girl who slept with the SS because she had a sense of humor! A lovely girl. A gorgeous piece. Don’t blubber, you sissy! Once you wanted to be an officer. You wanted to be a soldier, you blockhead. And what are you now? A little shit in the reserves scared of the Man with the Scythe. What do you have to worry about? Close up your bellows and stand down. Whom do you have to worry about but yourself, you dimwit? Isn’t it strange! Not a single soul will think of you when you’ve pulled over to the side. Come on, then, you ox, take me with you across the Styx. D’you imagine I’m afraid of you?

  The gray man got up and wrapped the cape about him. With measured steps he came toward my bed. I let out a loud piercing scream.

  The nurse came once more. She wiped my forehead with something which felt deliciously cool. It was raining. A monotonous soothing patter. The Man with the Scythe had gone. He’d taken along two from the ward.

  Seven days later I was transferred to the ward where Tiny and the Legionnaire were lying. Tiny had saved up two weeks in the can for himself, which he’d serve as soon as he’d recovered. As the head nurse and three other nurses trooped in the door, he’d shouted: ‘Hurrah, here come the broads! To the bunks, boys!’

  A terrific uproar followed. It ended an hour later with the medical officer giving him two weeks. Tiny just couldn’t understand why. He couldn’t be made to see that the army hospital wasn’t a brothel. Wherever he saw women, Tiny saw brothels.

  ‘All sorts of things are happening here,’ the Legionnaire grinned. ‘Some of the nurses are dying for someone to sleep with who has brass on his chest. Staff Corporal Hansen over there has been here for seventeen months and has the dope on everything. He says sister Lise had taken it into her head to have a boy as long as there’s still time. She’s tried a whole pack of men, but so far no boy. But she hasn’t given up hope yet. She’s going as strong as ever. She sees it as a national duty.’

  One day the Legionnaire and I were bundled up in some blankets and carried off to a spot from which we had a view of the glittering waters of the Elbe and could observe the tugboats working their way upstream. Sportly we were joined by Tiny, who was also placed in a chair. For a whole hour we sat there, listening to the boom of the riveting hammers at Stülckenwerft.

  A nurse taught me to walk. My legs were paralyzed. The last grenade splinter had struck the spinal column as we clambered up the cliff. Gradually I learned how to walk. It cost me torrents of sweat. That nurse was exceedingly patient. Though old and ugly, she was devoted.

  I’ve forgotten her name. Those who help us are very often forgotten, enemies never.

  Tiny thrust his big fist under the nose of each of our ten fellow-patients in the ward. ‘This is no lady’s hand. You’d do well to realize that from the very beginning.’

  ‘It reminds me of a funeral chapel,’ Stein mumbled with a scowl.

  ‘That’s the way I like it,’ Tiny said. ‘Your words show you’ve been to school. I don’t mind if you sit around on the beds – but listen to this! When I say, “Fetch beer!” you’ll put your pennies together and run like blazes to pick up beer for Tiny. And God help you should you try to dilute it! If I only get enough beer I’ll be silky as a kitten, make a note of that. But if I’m out of beer’ – he made a long pause and looked about him ominously – ‘may God Almighty have mercy on you!’

  III

  Dictator Tiny

  Russia had been forgotten. What we knew of Russia, that is: the Eastern Front. A name, my dear, which comprehends a worse hell than any described by the priest, even that of a sect founded solely on man’s fear of the unknown. The most inventive missionary of such a sect wouldn’t be able to conjure up a hell that could even faintly compete with the hell we learned to know on the Eastern Front – a hell peopled with devils in khaki and green, experts in sadism.

  At present we were remote from this hell. We were wounded, ill, lecherous, drunk. We didn’t give a damn about anything. Just live and forget. Tomorrow you’ll die.

  We had ended up in a good army hospital in Hamburg, with a sympathetic head doctor, good and bad nurses. The operations were past. They’d cut us up a little in Cracow, a little more in Berlin, and now in Hamburg they cut us up still a little more. We weren’t confined to bed and could take walks outside the hospital grounds. Though liquor was banned, we drank anyway. We spent our time whoring, getting into fights, frequenting saloons, and fornicating with the girls and wives of other soldiers.

  The little Legionnaire couldn’t fornicate any more, thanks to an SS-Unterscharführer in Fagen concentration camp who amused himself with amateur surgery. Since he couldn’t cheer himself up by breaking the Sixth Commandment, he had to find other means. Alfred Kalb, former corporal in the 2nd Regiment of the French Foreign Legion, drank slowly, single-mindedly and uninterruptedly. When someone said, ‘The Desert Rambler is slightly drunk,’ he was very drunk, so drunk it would make anybody else conk out.

  Tiny provoked fights wherever he went. He let on to everybody he’d come to Hamburg to kill someone, preferably a soldier from the sticks. He trounced one of the bouncers on Sankt Pauli because he suspected him of mixing water in his beer. When the manager asked him to pay his bill, Tiny tossed him into the arms of the chorus girls. A horse was walking around between the tables and was given beer by the guests. Tiny took it along with him and left it in the hall of the nurses’ residence, where it created a wild uproar. When the head doctor, Dr Mahler, heard about Tiny and the horse, he chuckled:

  ‘What’s the harm, let them have their fun.’

  Dr Mahler, Head Medical Officer, was the most unmilitary army surgeon imaginable. For many years he had practiced in the British colonies. His specialty was tropical medicine. After the attempted assassination of July 20, the Nazi authorities had him arrested. It was rumored he barely escaped hanging. He was somehow mixed up with Admiral Canaris, the leader of the German resistance. How he got off alive was never explained. When questioned about it, Dr Mahler would shrug his shoulders and say: ‘Rubbish.’ He still walks the rounds in his fever-ravaged army hospital, accompanied by the head nurse, sister Emma. Thousands of people are alive today because of the devotion of this physician.

  But there were bad physicians in the hospital also, useless Nazis whose greatest amusement was to detect ‘truants’ and malingerers. Dr Frankendorf, for one. He was constantly persecuting flak private George Freytag, who was afflicted with a strange fever no one could make head or tail of. They were continually making blood tests, but every test came out negative. Just when they believed he’d been cured, the fever would set in again. Under the leadership of that bandit Dr Frankendorf, blitz raids were carried out to check whether George possessed benzine-soaked sugar or similar feverinducing agents. They found nothing. Frankendorf held interrogations, cajoled, threatened, cursed, but every time he walked away defeated and deeply disappointed.

  Whether it was convenient for Dr Frankendorf or not, the fever of flak private George Freytag persisted.

  With Dr Frankendorf, all the other patients in our ward were convinced that George was shamming. For a whole afternoon and evening straight till midnight, Tiny was making the most fabulous offers to George in return for his secret. Tiny’s motive was somewhat different from Frankendorfs. To him it seemed that George had found the perfect disease. George shook his head:

  ‘Believe me, pal, my fever is real.’

  Tiny m
ade no bones about his disappointment. He yelled and threatened to punch him in the face. In his fury he kicked a water basin out the window, but to no avail. George kept the divine secret to himself.

  All in all, George was a strange boy. He neither drank nor gambled, and he showed no interest in women. All he did was to take a stroll when the fever would permit it. George was a pretty boy, a good boy. He used to do things for the nurses, from all of whom he received the affection of a child – which he actually was.

  We sat in Number 72 with a view of Reeperbahn and the Palace of Justice, which loomed menacing at the end of Glacis Chaussée. From the Sankt Pauli Brewery came a whiff of beer.

  The Legionnaire pulled a bottle from under his mattress, a big bottle of Kümmel. It passed from man to man. Tiny belched blissfully and had two swigs. He glanced about him to see if anyone objected. Heinz Bauer was already a bit fuddled. This annoyed Tiny, who happened to be in his ‘sensitive’ mood.

  ‘Some real swell girls have been cooled off lately,’ Paul Stein said. He was thinking of the three women who’d been murdered in Hamburg in the course of a couple of weeks.

  ‘That murderer must be nuts,’ Tiny said, and belched once more after a long pull at the bottle. ‘The last one he strangled with a stocking and then cut her up.’

  Paul said that first the girls had been strangled with a stocking or a piece of underwear; afterwards they’d been raped and mauled with a knife. The murderer’s gratification seemed to depend on the girls being strangled with an intimate article of clothing. At this stage the police were nearly throwing fits from frustration.

  ‘Maybe Dr Frankendorf is the sex killer,’ Tiny suggested, his face lighting up. ‘Damn it, boys, what if Dr Frankendorf would get his nob lopped off!’.

  ‘Bon Dieu, that would be great,’ the Legionnaire exclaimed. In his mind’s eye he saw the bovine head of Frankendorf drop into the basket.

  ‘Have you seen the photographs posted in the glass case at the Davidstrasse police station?’ asked Mouritz Klokyty, a volunteer from the Sudeten. We couldn’t stand Mouritz. ‘There ought to be a law against posting things like that,’ he continued. ‘God’s wrath will soon be upon them, upon us all.’

  ‘What d’you mean by that?’ Tiny asked and sent a gob of sauerkraut after him. He’d stuffed his mouth from an emergency pot he kept in a cardboard box under his bed.

  Mouritz grew solemn: ‘But don’t you realize that scandal will lead to a bad end? Thunder and lightning will strike you.’

  ‘I can quite see that God might get worked up a bit over some females getting ripped up from top to bottom,’ Tiny answered good-naturedly between mouthfuls of sauerkraut, ‘but that’s no reason why he should punish me, the Desert Rambler, Sven, or the Schupo’s1 in Davidstrasse. It wouldn’t occur to any of us to chop up broads. We’d prefer to give them the old-fashioned treatment.’

  ‘Almighty God,’ Mouritz cried in indignation.

  ‘You shouldn’t curse,’ Tiny admonished, threatening with his finger.

  Mouritz couldn’t be interrupted. He turned to the rest of us:

  ‘You’re blasphemers, devil’s brood. God’s arrow will strike you, since you refuse to see the coarse morals around you.’

  Like a priest excommunicating his congregation, he pointed at Tiny, intoning: ‘You are the tempter, the vessel of evil, but the good will crush you.’

  Tiny had been struggling with a piece of pork he had a tough time biting in two. He stopped chewing. He pulled the whole chunk out of his mouth and glowered at Mouritz:

  ‘What am I, did you say?’

  ‘The vessel of evil,’ Mouritz intoned. ‘Life is a thorny path, bestrewn with vices, and you are one of these prickly vices.’ This made Tiny, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the pork in his hand, gape in astonishment. Mouritz made a threatening gesture in his direction: ‘But you won’t tempt me, you devil. Tempter and seducer, I say “No Admission” to you!’

  Mouritz was interrupted in his excommunication by the Legionnaire, who shouted laughingly: ‘Voilà, that’s enough somber talk.’

  Tiny had gone back to chewing on his pork. Slowly, he got up. From his throat came a growl. ‘You ought to be a bit careful about abusing Tiny, you prune. Apparently you’re not aware I’m saved, that I’m now a pious person who’s bought absolution. Would you like to hear the price, you who have sold your piety to Adolf, you Czech Judas? Five quarts of vodka, a quart of cognac, and two hundred makhorka cigarettes I risked my life stealing from the QM sergeant of 27th Panzer – and then a squirt like you says I’m ungodly!’

  He pulled the pork out of his mouth again and slapped Mouritz in the face with it. Mouritz was reclining on the edge of his bed. His face had gone green with fright.

  ‘Louse of Sodom,’ Tiny remarked. He spat at Mouritz, lying now as if stone dead and staring with glazed eyes at Tiny, who had renewed his battle with the pork. Mouritz’s mouth opened and shut like the mouth of a codfish in a fishmonger’s box just before its head is cut off – to prevent the customer from discovering the cod is half dead. Tiny belched himself through the pork, which stubbornly remained in one piece.

  ‘Get out of here, you Nazi fink, and try to walk across the Alster on a nice little prayer, just like Moses when he crossed the Suez Canal.’ Tiny’s concepts of Biblical history were somewhat confused. He smacked Mouritz straight in the face with the tough piece of pork. With a shriek Mouritz fell under the bed. Without removing his boots, Tiny flung himself on his own bed and continued his efforts to best the pork.

  A nurse’s aide poked her head into the ward, to see only one thing: Tiny on the bed with his boots on. Delighted, she galloped off to announce the unheard-of infraction of regulations to the universally feared matron, sister Emma, who was nicknamed ‘the Battleship.’

  Without a word, the Legionnaire pitched the bottle of Kümmel across to Tiny, who caught it without getting up. He gargled down the drink conscientiously as he lay on his back with the pork in one hand. This is how the matron found him. For half a minute she was speechless. With glazed eyes she fixed the human gorilla who was preening himself on the bed, displaying a pair of infantry boots on the blue-and-white checkered cover.

  ‘Have you gone out of your mind?’ she asked, pointing a pudgy finger at the black, polished boots. Tiny removed the bottle from his mouth, spat over the foot of the bed and hit a bowl a couple of yards away. The nurse’s aide barely escaped being spattered. Tiny cleaned his nose by snuffling inward loud and forcibly.

  ‘What do you want, you fat sow?’ he asked.

  We caught our breath. We hadn’t noticed it, but Tiny was drunk, and in that condition he could take it into his head to do anything. Some time ago he had quarreled with a girl in an apartment on the third floor. The girl had wanted Tiny to go and bathe first. By way of protest he threw the bathtub out of the window. The racket was such that the people who were around thought a bomb had fallen in the yard and started walking to the cellar.

  The eyes of ‘the Battleship’ vanished in her fat face.

  ‘How dare you?’ she hissed, bending down over Tiny who was resting quietly on the bed as before. ‘You call me a sow?’

  Tiny answered nothing and continued chewing the pork.

  ‘Get up, you pig, or you’ll find out whom you’re dealing with,’ the giant woman growled ominously. As she bent even lower over chomping Tiny, her dress pulled up and revealed the huge hollows of her knees.

  ‘Save your powder, Fatty, I know you. You’re head nurse in this institution, and I’ve been told you’re called “the Battleship” because you’re so fat and ugly. I call you “Tub of Lard” myself. Bah, that’s that, now scram!’

  A flush spread over the woman’s round cheeks like a thundercloud over a sunny village. ‘Get up, you crud,’ she hissed, caught Tiny by the shoulder and, to our astonishment, lifted him off the bed. In the next moment she flung him to the floor, where he landed with a crash. He stared at her with deep admiration. Up to then he’d never
been thrown out of bed by anyone.

  The Battleship straightened out the bed, threw the bottle of Kummel and the big hunk of pork into the trash can and sailed out of the room without another word.

  ‘Holy Mother of God, that’s a woman for you,’ Tiny mumbled, rubbing his shoulder. ‘Damn me if I won’t get hooked up with her. Just imagine the close action.’

  ‘She’ll choke you like a duckling,’ Heinz Bauer remarked.

  Tiny grabbed a drinking glass, crashed it against the wall and roared: ‘I’m going to rape that pig, you bet I am!’

  The door opened once again. As she stood there sucking a piece of candy, the Battleship filled up the doorway. She glowered at Tiny, but her stares shattered against him.

  ‘Quit showing off, you ox,’ she spat out in her deep, masculine voice. ‘Your bawling disturbs the other patients. You’re in a hospital now and not in your barracks. If you make any more trouble, you’ll have to answer to me.’

  She slammed the door with a crash, showing no concern for the peace of those other patients that just now she had been so worried about.

  ‘What a little rascal,’ Tiny cried jubilantly. He fished the bottle out of the trash can, finished it off, and flung it out of the window into the garden of the Meteorological Institute. Then he went hunting for the pork in the trash can – it had gotten mislaid among other delicacies – picked it up, brushed it off a little, and again settled down to chew it.

  ‘A gorgeous piece,’ he belched and threw himself on the bed, but oddly enough he removed his boots first. He began bawling a martial song that unknown soldiers had improved.

  Wirsind die Panzerjäger,

  die Hungerkünstler der Nation,

  Für Dörrgemüse und für Käse.

  Swinging the pork in one hand, he swelled his voice to a fantastic volume.

  Vorwärts, dumme Schweine,

  im Kampfe sind wir stets alleine,