Comrades of War

by Sven Hassel

  denn die Scheisshaushingste

  fahren mit den Autos hintendrein,

  dann verleihen Euch was die Nazis.

  ‘Beer,’ he said, turning to no one in particular.

  ‘Do you imagine you’re in a saloon?’ Paul Stein asked.

  In one bound Tiny was on his feet; he grabbed Stein and swung him over his head. ‘You miserable lump of snot,’ he cooed endearingly, gradually tightening his grip on his victim. ‘So you imagine you can annoy Tiny? You dare to forbid me quenching my thirst! You may go to get beer now. For every darn penny you’ve got. And right now, you flat-worm!’

  He tossed the terror-stricken Stein to the wall like a discarded bottle cap, spat after him and yelled, ‘Make it snappy. I’m in a hurry, I’m thirsty.’

  Getting up, Stein mumbled something under his breath and scowled at Tiny, once again settled on the bed indifferently chewing his everlasting piece of pork.

  ‘You’re going to break your neck with your boorishness some day,’ said the Legionnaire in a gentle, almost gingerly voice. He occupied the bed by the window, the best bed in the room. With his strategic eye he had confiscated this bed as soon as he entered the ward. By rights it belonged to Mouritz, the Sudeten Czech. Naturally, Mouritz had made a stink about it.

  ‘That’s my bed, buddy. You must’ve made a mistake.’

  By way of answer the Legionnaire had merely given him a lofty look. Mouritz repeated his protest. The Legionnaire put away his paper and slowly raised himself on the bed.

  ‘Merde, c’est, mon camarade.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Mouritz looked dumbly at the Legionnaire, who’d returned to his paper. A cigarette hung at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Nothing, nothing at all, mon camarade.’ He made a gesture of dismissal, as if pushing away something bothersome. All at once he shot up like a tightened steel spring and bellowed: ‘Allez!’ Mouritz didn’t understand French. He merely stood there glowering. He just couldn’t believe it was all real. The rest of us said nothing. We knew what was coming. A fight, a glorious nerve-drugging fight!

  Tiny got to his feet. He moved toward Mouritz like a bear smelling honey. Mouritz, whose back was turned, didn’t see the signs of the hurricane that was brewing to crush him. The Legionnaire turned down his thumb and whispered smiling: ‘C’est bien ça!’ – the signal for Tiny. It had cost the Legionnaire hours of patient labor to hammer this signal into Tiny’s thick skull.

  Suddenly Mouritz was in the grip of an iron claw. He was swung aloft and carried across the ward to the bed by the door, the poorest bed of all. Its occupant had to turn the lights on and off and was constantly disturbed. Tiny put Mouritz down very softly, as if he were made of fragile glass. Then he took a step back and observed him closely.

  ‘You’re a swine,’ he confided to Mouritz, ‘a common stupid swine who brown-noses the Nazi shit-piles. Now, tell me what you are!’

  Tiny slapped him with the back of his hand. Quite lovingly, he thought. To us it looked like a volcanic eruption.

  ‘Now tell us what you are, you chicken coop.’

  ‘I’m a swine,’ Mouritz stammered.

  Another slap.

  ‘Didn’t you go to school, you fathead? Can’t you learn something by heart? What are you?’

  ‘A stupid swine,’ Mouritz whimpered, ‘who brown-noses the Nazi shit-piles.’

  ‘A pretty good answer,’ Tiny acknowledged. He pointed at the bed where Mouritz was lying. ‘You requested this bed, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did,’ Mouritz answered, surrendering.

  Tiny raised his eyebrow. ‘Hell, what did I hear?’

  Mouritz hastened to add, ‘Herr Corporal!’

  The gorilla nodded his head with satisfaction.

  Everybody had witnessed this scene. It established Tiny as absolute dictator of the ward, a dictator who brutally and without scruples exploited his subjects. An Adolf in miniature.

  This was the reason Paul Stein now obeyed Tiny’s command and was quick about bringing some beer from the Sankt Pauli brewery. Without a word, he placed all ten bottles in the cardboard box under Tiny’s bed.

  Tiny ordered Mouritz to sing for him. It came to a hymn, a sad hymn about the salvation of the world. Tiny meanwhile interrupted his beer drinking and listened politely straight through the nine stanzas. His only comment was to dispatch a gob of spit after Mouritz. He ordered him to go to bed and rest, but not till he’d said a prayer for Tiny’s soul.

  When all orders had been duly carried out, Tiny drank a bit in silence. Eventually he had passed the stage of being simply ‘very drunk.’ He started bellowing a song. The tune hadn’t yet been okayed by the historians of music, and the text was such that it could have brought a charge of high treason on his neck.

  Auf der Strasse nach Moskau

  marschiert eine Kompagnie,

  das sind die Reste

  von Adolfs ganzem Heer,

  Sie konnten schon Josef sehen,

  und mussten wieder stiften gehen,

  wie einst Napoleon.

  For a moment he was silent. Then, with renewed vigor, he roared to the same tune:

  Hurra, wir haben den Krieg verloren

  ‘Anyone here itching for a fight?’ he queried into the darkness. A moment or two passed; then he added: ‘If so, I’d be glad to give your hides a tanning.’

  No answer.

  He flung the bottle out of the open window. It crashed against the street. A rasping voice rebounded from the walls by the Zirkusweg intersection. We could observe rapture in his face as he listened. Staggering to the window he neighed in anticipated triumph: ‘Look your jaws, you jackasses! Can’t you see you’re sailing past an army hospital? We must have quiet here. We’re sick people. Heroes! Don’t disturb the sick! If you do, I’ll come down and thrash you!’

  A male voice huffily took up the challenge and egged him on. It reverberated profoundly in the watchful silence of the night.

  ‘Holly blazes,’ Tiny yelled, making ready to jump through the window.

  In the next instant three or four of us were on top of him. We held him down firmly.

  ‘But he talks back, don’t you hear?’ Tiny was outraged. He shouted out of the window, ‘Just wait, you beggar, till I’m free. We’re fighters here. Defenders of our country. We’re heroes. What ideas can such a, such a . . .’

  The Legionnaire had to knock him out with a stool.

  Night came on and the ward was still.

  1 Schutzpolizei – the Civilian Police.

  Aunt Dora thought of everything in terms of money. She stood behind her bar counter with the stuffed sword fish and supped akvavit with angostura bitters. Her eyes measured up all who entered by the revolving door.

  The Legionnaire sat on a tall bar stool across from her drinking pernod. This beverage, which looks innocent enough, tastes like licorice, is poisonously green and turns white when mixed with water.

  ‘Pernod is invented by the devil,’ he said, ‘but you don’t know till the eighth glass.’ Laughing, he handed the ninth to the girl.

  She undressed in one of the tiny niches. Her underthings were pitch black, quite sheer. Only her panties, which she refused to take off, were red, coral red. When she removed them upstairs, only Stein and Ewald, Aunt Dora’s assistant pimp, were watching.

  IV

  Aunt Dora

  We often went to ‘Wind Force 11’ behind the Central Station. More correctly, we always went to ‘Wind Force 11’ behind the Central Station.

  Aunt Dora, the hostess of this ritzy saloon, was an unfeeling ugly woman. She measured everything in money. Some people, perhaps most, thought it was disgusting. To us, Death’s grooms, it seemed wise. Money can get you anything. ‘For money you can buy eternal life at the seat of Allah in the blue valleys,’ the Legionnaire said and piously bowed his head to the southeast.

  ‘Money can buy any amount of female meat,’ Bauer said.

  ‘Money can buy a whorehouse,’ Tiny said. With his glance he undresse
d a girl preening herself on a tall bar stool.

  ‘Money will admit you to Aunt Dora’s.’ I laughed and blew her a kiss.

  ‘And allow you to get cuckoo on stuff you can get nowhere else in the Third Reich,’ Stein grinned. He flushed down a large glass of gin and ordered a refill.

  ‘You’re a herd of dirty pigs,’ Aunt Dora insisted, ‘but as long as you can pay you’re welcome in Wind Force 11.’

  We had plenty of money. We had been away at the front for very long. Most of us had a knack for business and knew how to procure merchandise. The black market in Hamburg was the best in the world, the little Legionnaire declared. Anything could be bought and sold there, even a corpse.

  The light in Aunt Dora’s saloon was red, very soft. There was a law against dancing, in force now for almost three years. But at Aunt Dora’s they danced anyway. The police and their stooges came around frequently, but Aunt Dora, a demon in petticoats, said: ‘The best way to keep your friends is to know something about them.’ And she always managed to find out something about them, enough to make them close their eyes to anything unlawful in Wind Force 11. In the reports on public sentiment filed at the Secret Police, Wind Force 11 figured as a nice place with a regular clientele and without political significance.

  In Wind Force 11 more rules and regulations were broken than anywhere else. Ladies would come there to experience the forbidden, though at the last minute they might chicken out. Other people would come there to get drunk and then shoot themselves – or they’d get their throats cut and be thrown into the Elbe. By and by they would be hauled in with a boathook by a revenue vessel at Landungsbrücke.

  A girl in a knee-length dress asked the Legionnaire for a dance. He didn’t even bother to look at her. He sipped his vodka and took a long drag at his cigarette, then slowly let out the smoke through his nose.

  ‘Would you like to dance, little one?’ the girl asked a second time. With greedy glances she surveyed the stringy figure with the brutal face, its long knife-wound gleaming fiery red.

  ‘Go to hell,’ the Legionnaire snarled through the corner of his mouth.

  The girl exploded. She was terribly offended. A lanky young fellow came sliding up to the Legionnaire’s stool. He reached out for the throat of the little soldier, but in the next instant he found himself on the floor. A kick in the face and a murderous blow at the larynx. Then quiet once more. The Legionnaire sat down again and ordered another vodka. Aunt Dora gave a sign to the doorman, a big Belgian. He grabbed the lifeless figure like a big bag of flour and chucked him through a doorway. From there others continued the transport to some place sufficiently distant from Wind Force 11.

  The girl was soundly whipped in a little room behind the kitchen. She didn’t cry. A soiled quilt covered up her head, as with so many other women who’d been brutally punished in that room behind the kitchen. The quilt choked her cry. The person in charge of this business was Aunt Dora’s right-hand man, a former pimp. He had placed the girl on a table specially made for the purpose. He beat her with a short Cossack whip he’d bought a long time ago from an SS man who had two of them to sell. Ewald, Aunt Dora’s executioner, bought one, a police detective the second. The detective thought it might help get confessions.

  In all other respects this criminal detective had been very correct in his work. But he didn’t produce enough confessions. Among themselves his superiors had a kind of saying, that he would profit greatly from a trip to Russia. That was the reason he bought the Cossack whip. He immediately became a police sergeant; some said he even did better. For now he was no longer correct, and he got plenty of confessions. A dictatorship can’t use correct people. What it wants is results.

  Ewald flogged the girl twice. Then he slept with her. Those who knew said he always did that.

  Next evening the girl went back to work at Aunt Dora’s. She took home thirty-five per cent of her earnings. Never again did she ask the Legionnaire to dance.

  Two ladies sat down by the Legionnaire. They were well-dressed, arrogant ladies, no common barflies. One of them gave the Legionnaire a quick glance. She crossed her legs and her skirt came up above her knee. There was a hint of a flaring white petticoat. The two ladies drank champagne. The best, they’d ordered. The Legionnaire lit a fresh cigarette with the butt of his old one and squinted at the champagne. Pointing at the filled glasses, he asked:

  ‘Chateauneuf, est-il le meilleur?’

  The ladies pretended they hadn’t heard.

  His face distorted with haughtiness and expectant victory, the Legionnaire bent over to the dark lady, called Lisa by her friend. The other’s name was Gisela. ‘How about a throw for a hundred marks?’

  The lady answered nothing, but her cheeks flushed. It could have been the champagne. The Legionnaire laughed. Aunt Dora stood with her back to the counter, but she could see the whole thing in a tiny mirror among the glasses. She laughed. I laughed. Bauer laughed. Tiny was drinking, cursing, and babbling wildly about girls.

  ‘Do you want to come upstairs and play a little? I’ll give you two hundred marks and a new pair of panties,’ said the Legionnaire in an undertone.

  Aunt Dora laughed over her bitters. With Danish schnapps she used only angostura. It cleansed the soul, she used to say. A pastor had once told her that her soul would be hard to wash clean. That’s why she drank the hot stuff.

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ Lisa said, turning the Legionnaire down. She had almost emptied her glass in one swallow. She must have done it by mistake; her friend Gisela had only sipped at hers. Laughing softly, the Legionnaire ordered a refill for her from Trude, a waitress from Berlin helping out Aunt Dora at the bar. He winked at her. Trude understood.

  Madame Lisa’s glass received a couple of dashes from a special bottle. Aunt Dora alone knew the contents of this bottle. Whatever it was, a few drops mixed in a girl’s drink always produced results. Lisa was completely unsuspecting and picked up her glass. Turning around from her glasses, Aunt Dora poured out a drink for the Legionnaire and told him, stressing every word: ‘You are a filthy swine. But good luck. Filth makes money, my boy.’

  The Legionnaire laughed.

  ‘Madame, four hundred down and new undies from France,’ he wheedled, then went back to blowing smoke rings.

  Trude moistened a perfectly clean glass with her breath and polished away as if trying to wear it out. A smile hovered about her lips. Like all of us she was excited, because she knew the Legionnaire couldn’t have anything to do with women and didn’t want to, either.

  ‘You’re repulsive,’ said Lisa, demonstratively turning her back on the cruelly grinning Legionnaire in his black panzer uniform with small silver death’s heads on the lapels.

  ‘Sacre nom de Dieu!’ the Legionnaire exclaimed, feigning surprise.

  Aunt Dora stuck a long cheroot in her mouth and turned to the Legionnaire. ‘Give me a light, you African bastard.’

  The Legionnaire obliged and rubbed his nose. ‘What d’you think, should I hire that lady for a turn in bed?’

  ‘Now shut up, you swine, and leave the lady alone. She wants none of you, and you of her. You know that well enough.’

  She sat down on a tall chair across from the Legionnaire, who turned again to Lisa. ‘You have beautiful legs, madame. Mon Dieu, you’ve got damn beautiful legs. I wouldn’t mind undressing you. Six hundred in cash if you’ll let me undress you! How about a dance, madame?’

  ‘No, and do leave me alone. I’m not what you think I am.’

  The Legionnaire raised his eyebrow. ‘You don’t say so! What a shame.’

  Aunt Dora blew smoke in the Legionnaire’s face. Her brutal mouth smiled.

  ‘What did you take the lady for?’ Bauer asked.

  The Legionnaire smiled, pulled his nose and took a swallow from his glass.

  ‘A distinguished lady looking for adventure, not a cheap slut going out in her mistress’ clothes.’

  Lisa sprang up. In the next second the Legionnaire’s cheek resoun
ded with a slap. With lightning speed he caught her by the wrists. He twisted his lips to a snarl, showing a row of pearly white teeth.

  ‘Merde, so the little thing is showing her claws? Tiny, c’est bien ça. Madame would like to dance.’

  Tiny slid heavily down from his bar stool and slouched up to them like a gorilla.

  ‘Brassy fellow, I don’t want to dance,’ Lisa snorted.

  ‘Of course you do,’ the Legionnaire decided. He nodded to Tiny.

  She tried to free herself, but the sinewy fingers of the Legionnaire locked her wrists like a steel trap. A heavy gleaming gold bracelet jingled faintly like little bells. Without a word Tiny caught her round the waist and swung her onto the floor. He yelled to the pianist:

  ‘Alois, thrash away, you pianos-puncher. Tiny’s going to crank up a whore.’

  At the little tables in the niches the guests were snickering. The girls whinnied, gloating over the elegant lady who got herself into a scrape. They looked upon Wind Force 11 as their beat, exclusively theirs. All strange women to them were like rags to a bull.

  A savage tune was struck up on the grand piano. The other guests stepped down from the little dance floor behind the curtain. Tiny geared up and rolled out on the floor. He braked with a jolt, slid sideways in small crow steps, stopped and howled, swung Lisa above his head and spun her around. Then he declutched and glided through the room in waltz time, with no regard whatever to the music. All at once he felt like an apache, flung his lady into a corner and spat on the floor. But he had her in his grip again directly – even before it had dawned on her that she’d just torn right through the room. He let out a loud roar and danced a solo round his partner, who had gradually gone half mad. Fists on hips, he circled about her in rocking motion like a rooster doing a mating dance, humming:

  This will soon be over,

  There’s an end to everything.

  Alois, the pianist, forgot to play. Grabbing Lisa, Tiny flew past the grand piano at top speed, but he managed in passing to butt Alois in the face.

  ‘Get a move on, you shrimp, what do you imagine you’re here for?’