Comrades of War

by Sven Hassel

  He pointed up at the tall fellow, who was again bawling out one of the SS riflemen.

  The SS company disappeared slowly behind some spruces. In about a quarter of an hour they would emerge on the other side, and then they would soon be upon us.

  They emerged like a bombshell. Stege started chewing and cocking his tommy gun.

  The Old Man raised his eyebrow and signaled a warning to us. Tiny stood shifting his feet.

  The weapons of the SS company clanked harshly, like the instruments of a sailor’s dentist just before he extracts the tooth of a stoker in filthy donkeyman’s trousers and torn tropical undershirt.

  Krause, the SS man who was with us because of cowardice, gave a hollow cough. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  ‘Afraid of your brothers?’ Porta inquired sweetly.

  The SS man winced nervously and didn’t answer. The Legionnaire whistled. ‘Mon Dieu, now we’re going to see something.’

  The SS Obersturmführer at the head stepped along briskly. His sleeves were rolled up, making the thick black hair on his arms visible.

  We had a foreboding of death. Our nostrils dilated as on game flushed by far away beaters.

  Gerhard walked into the house. Tiny and Bauer went along.

  They were sweating when they reached us, with the SS Obersturmführer in front. They were all very young. Fine fellows in good condition.

  ‘Company, halt! Order arms! Left turn! Stand at ease!’

  The command was cold and slick, like the rest of the morning.

  The Old Man blinked at the SS officer with the death’s head cap and the long black hair on his arms. Their eyes met. The Old Man walked slowly across the fabulously green grass. The grass the old Jew loved so much.

  The little Legionnaire slouched behind. As if accidentally, he swung his sub-machine gun into firing position and slipped for cover behind the stack of firewood.

  Porta sneaked into the house. In the little barred window behind the rafters one suspected the presence of a blackish blue muzzle. The Old Man was covered by the two best killers on the front.

  The SS officer hitched up his wide belt, weighed down by his Mauser.

  Plates and bottles clattered in the house. The SS men craned their necks. The bottles made such a pleasant, familiar sound.

  The report which the Old Man delivered was short and non-cooperative. He gave patrol and unit. Thirteen men, not counting the zebra man. He understood the false communication by declaring in an exceptionally loud voice: ‘Nothing particular to report!’

  Glasses and plates clattered again as if protesting against the Old Man’s report. They seemed to be calling: ‘Come inside, SS Obersturmführer, and you’ll have a surprise!’

  The slim SS officer gazed with raised eyebrows at the open door. He walked towards the house with slow steps, uncannily slow. His new high boots and leather things creaked loudly. He stopped for a while at the chopping-block, picked up the axe and cut a heavy stick in two with one stroke. That axe had been ground by an expert. He kicked at the split stick and laughed gently. His face became hard. He turned to the Old Man.

  ‘Sergeant, assemble your men and get out of here quick!’

  As he raised his arm to the perfunctory salute of the SS, a heavy gold watch gleamed on his wrist.

  The Old Man made us fall in.

  Porta emerged. The Legionnaire got up, surprising the SS officer a bit. He pushed back his crumpled cap and whistled between clenched teeth.

  The sergeant in the Old Man came out. He called very loudly: ‘On the double, you bastards!’

  Sullenly and reluctantly we fell in. We jostled each other and squabbled. Tiny, Heide and Bauer came strolling out of the house. Tiny with his long Siberian knife in his hand.

  ‘Shoulder arms! Rout step, forward march!’ the Old Man commanded with a voice so loud it cracked.

  We walked right past the SS men, who grinned and spat out their contempt at us. ‘Shits,’ one of them crowed exultantly.

  Tiny was about to yell something but the Legionnaire and the Old Man were at his side, keeping him quiet.

  There were amazingly many horseflies out that morning. They bit us viciously, always at the very edge of the collar.

  We walked between the spruces without looking back. We came to a halt only when we’d gotten as far down as the old bridge across the dried-up river. Without a word we flopped down in the brush and glanced up toward the mountain cabin, which was steeped in the sharp morning sun.

  The SS Obersturmführer stepped into the house, followed by two SS men. One of them was the tall Oberscharführer, who was carrying his sub-machine gun like a riding whip.

  They were inside for a long time, but we didn’t hear anything. Some of the SS men had thrown themselves on the green grass, where they were playing craps and cards. They seemed to be waiting for a late train.

  ‘Our friend, Lieutenant Stief from the 76th, has hidden himself well,’ Porta nodded.

  ‘Let’s hope well enough,’ the Old Man said nervously. He was chewing on his lidded pipe.

  ‘We’ll soon see,’ the little Legionnaire said. ‘Allah knows. Allah knows everything.’

  Tiny passed around his canteen. He had had enough foresight to fill it up with schnapps. We drank in big gulps. Porta and the Legionnaire had also filled their bottles. We finished them all off. We became braver. We wanted to see blood. Tiny spat on a leaf.

  ‘Dogs, stinking shits!’ he cursed. ‘Let’s plug ’em.’ He tapped the magazine of his tommy gun. Stege started chewing.

  ‘Let’s do it, Old Man,’ he said hoarsely.

  The Old Man was sucking at his pipe.

  A long wailing scream cut through the dewy morning. Instinctively we wormed our way to safer cover. Tiny was licking the empty canteen.

  ‘The old Jew didn’t hide well enough,’ Stege sighed.

  There was another scream. Each of us knew that scream from prison and camps.

  ‘I wonder what they’re doing,’ Brandt whispered.

  ‘Killing him slowly,’ came brutally from the Legionnaire, who pulled the flame-thrower into position and started adjusting the sprayer. ‘In the Rif Mountains we always took revenge when the blacks cut up our joes.’ His eyes probed the Old Man, who was lying behind a bush staring at the cabin.

  The Legionnaire wanted to say something more, but he just reached the first syllable.

  They came out with Gerhard Stief. He crawled on all fours in his zebra togs. He was moaning all the time. They kicked him. On such a cold morning all sounds are amplified. They borrow volume from the fresh vigor of the morning and are heard pure and without intruding sounds. We heard the thuds quite clearly when they kicked him, and we could hear them breaking his arm, once, twice. And then a third time. And every time we heard only a sound like branches cracking on a winter night and a tortured soul’s subdued but piercing moan.

  Every detail etched itself into our hearts. With every new torture grip, we moved a little closer to insanity.

  They did something to his face. Then he collapsed.

  The tall Oberscharführer bent down over the silent Gerhard Stief. In his hand flashed a knife.

  We knew what was coming. We had seen it before, and yet it always overwhelmed us – the shriek. This prolonged, indescribable shriek as the body shot upward in an arc. The nearly dead body hopped squealing along the path.

  They put his head on the chopping-block. The SS Obersturmführer struck only twice. Blood poured out in a long spurt.

  The still morning was now defiled only with their laughter and their jokes.

  Then they dug a hole in the dunghill and threw the corpse and the chopped-off head into it.

  They fell in. A command – and they vanished among the spruces, singing, ‘Jewish blood shall flow.’

  Stege sobbed loudly, Tiny growled, while the Old Man almost begged: ‘Be reasonable!’

  But the Legionnaire hissed: ‘Ca c’est la légion! We’ll be mad like the men in the Rif.’

  His
outburst of fury kindled like a forest fire. The following took only seconds to happen. The wolves would be confronted by even bigger wolves, led by a Moroccan dog-wolf.

  To kill a man may have a cleansing effect.

  We didn’t believe it, but we tried it and became convinced.

  He who was to die fell over. He scraped the earth with hands and feet. Blood mingled with earth and filth flowed down his face. He blubbered. His eyes were closed.

  The Legionnaire kicked him in the mouth because he groaned out a ‘Heil.’

  Doubling up, he came to rest with his face in the dust, which slowly got caked from blood and sweat.

  The sunlight crawled up the mountain slope to be a spectator at the long drawn-out murder of revenge.

  Brandt tore off his ear before we strapped him to the birch tree.

  The prisoners in Auschwitz would have been delighted if they’d learned how this man died.

  His dead body rolled further down the slope. For a moment it settled on a ledge. We hurled stones and branches after it to work it loose.

  It rolled on. It seemed to be turning somersaults. Heaps of turf and pebbles were having a race with it. It chanced to stop in a position that would give the ravens a hard time getting at its eyes.

  VI

  Revenge

  We had dug in and were waiting for Gerhard’s murderers. It sounds like a paradox, but we looked forward to killing them. It was like Christmas Eve just before the door’s thrown open for the big tree. Only, we were ferocious like wolves.

  Stege was weeping. He was the only pure soul among us. Porta cursed savagely. Tiny described graphically and with sweeping gestures all he would do to the SS men when he caught them. In the meantime he was cracking thin twigs and tearing apart plants.

  The little Legionnaire was muttering Mohammedan curses.

  The place where we had dug in was a natural fortress, a sure death trap for the SS men when they got there. All we had to do was to pull the trigger and set up target practice.

  ‘It’ll be a riot,’ remarked Brandt, the cross-country truck driver who was always sucking on his hollow tooth.

  ‘I want to scalp that big SS super-shit,’ Julius Heide said from his tree. He was to warn us as soon as the SS company emerged from among the spruces.

  ‘Nah, brother Julius, that’s my job,’ Porta resolved, kissing his long battle knife.

  ‘You’re stark raving mad,’ the Old Man cried. ‘Can’t you grasp the consequences of what you intend doing?’

  ‘You’re a pale shit,’ Porta remarked. He spat down onto the path far below. ‘Not one of those guys will get home to mother and talk. Before nightfall the ravens will be lying gasping on their backs, bellies bursting from overfeeding.’

  ‘We’ll take our good time in killing them, won’t we, boys?’ Tiny called cynically, putting on the visor of the heavy MG.

  ‘Ass,’ the Old Man exclaimed, annoyed. ‘Don’t you see, damn it, that what we’re planning to do is murder?’

  We gaped.

  ‘Did you say murder?’ Porta yelled, forgetting sound carried far here in the mountains. ‘What then do you call what we’ve been doing for the last four years? Maybe you can explain that to us, honorable Herr Sergeant?’ He scoffed and spat derisively.

  ‘Imbecile!’ the Old Man snorted. ‘Till now we’ve only murdered enemies, not fellow countrymen.’

  ‘Enemies, did you say?’ Porta roared. ‘Your enemies, maybe. I’ve no enemies except SS bastards.’

  ‘Oh, no, you don’t, do you, you stupid ass!’ the Old Man shouted indignantly, getting up from the hole he’d dug with Stege and me. He swung his sub-machine gun toward Porta, who was lying on the ledge above us looking down.

  ‘You’re very forgetful, my boy. If I could only put on blinders in the same way. Let me help your memory a bit. Don’t you remember the NKVD men we butchered at Brobusk? Do you remember the time you, Tiny and the Legionnaire slashed the throats of the suicide crews in Kiev with your own hands? Did you forget the Bosnians or the women in the flame-thrower unit? Maybe you’ll even tell me you’ve forgot the partisan Boris and his band? But maybe they were your friends? In that case you have a very odd way of showing your friendship! Not to mention the infantrymen at Height 754 we all sent to hell with flame-throwers and explosives. And what about the civilians in the sewer at Kharkov? The prison personnel in Poltava? All of them were your friends, I suppose? Do you want me to continue?’ The Old Man’s face was flaming red.

  ‘God, how you can run on!’ Porta sneered. ‘He should’ve been undertaker in the storm troops of the Salvation Army.’ Turning to Heide, he pointed his thumb at the Old Man.

  ‘Shut your filthy Berliner mouth or I’ll shoot you right this moment,’ the Old Man yelled, exasperated.

  He was holding the sub-machine gun pressed to his hip, aiming it at Porta.

  Silence. In the three years Porta, Stege and I had been associated with the Old Man, this was the first time we’d heard him threaten shooting.

  Surprised, we looked at the Old Man, our Old Man, our Willie Beier. He was breathing heavily, as if choking. Then he began speaking in a stutter. The words came falteringly, as if they had to clamber over an obstacle topped with barbed wire.

  ‘Those SS fellows are murderers, devilish brutes. They deserve every one of those things you say you’ll do to them. If anyone understands you, I do!’

  He clutched his neck, sat down on the edge of the hole and looked up toward the mountains where we could hear the SS men sing:

  For as far as the brown heath runs on,

  It’s all in my possession . . .

  ‘But you don’t fight murder with murder, don’t forget that,’ came almost inaudibly from the Old Man.

  Porta was about to say something, but the Old Man motioned him to be quiet.

  ‘Do you recall the time the head-hunter lieutenant was shot in Lvov?’

  The Old Man looked at each one of us with his penetrating blue eyes and went on. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  He repeated the question four or five times before receiving an answer. But we remembered as plainly as yesterday. A lieutenant from the Military Police had been shot in the head and killed. It occurred in Pahlevi Street in Lvov. During the ensuing razzia sixty people were assembled and shot outside the house where the lieutenant’s fate had been sealed. Among the sixty were nineteen children under twelve. All the furniture in the adjacent property was chopped to bits. A woman with a baby was knocked down by the rifle butts of the SS.

  ‘I wonder if the person who plugged the dirty head-hunter officer regretted it? Indirectly he was responsible for all those people’s deaths,’ the Old Man went on in an undertone.

  He pulled off his helmet. It rolled down the crag on to the path and continued further down the valley like a merry ball. Heaps of little rocks rolled behind the helmet as if playing tag with it. Indifferently we followed the ugly helmet with our glances.

  ‘Do you remember the two SS men you stabbed to death in Stalino?’ the Old Man persisted stubbornly. ‘In reprisal the whole town of Brigadenhof was massacred. Or when they found the Blitzmädel, that telephone operator on the highway and believed she’d been raped by civilian Ivans? Within five minutes, thirty women were dragged from their homes and children to drudge in the slave camps of the Reich.’

  Oh yes, we remembered. Later, the Air Force girl admitted she’d not been raped. It had been mere play-acting. They shrugged their shoulders, put her in the clink for ten days for having made a laughingstock of the secret Military Police; meanwhile children were starving to death in the village and their mothers worked themselves to death in Germany.

  With closed eyes the Old Man went on giving one instance after another while far away we heard the SS soldiers bawling:

  Red hussars are riding, riding rapidly away.

  Loveliest maiden, you cannot go their way.

  Porta blinked with his pig’s eyes. Stege sighed. Heide spat. The Legionnaire hummed: ‘Come now, death, come!�
�� Only Tiny seemed to be untouched by it all.

  ‘If you massacre those SS up there,’ the Old Man warned, ‘you should keep one thing straight: retaliatory action will be taken on the people in this area. And in the prisons,’ he continued after a pause. ‘And you’ll be guilty of every single one of those murders. Every shot that’s fired is yours. After all’s done, you’ll be murderers if anyone is. Mass murderers!’

  The Old Man again looked at each one of us in turn. He held our eyes firmly with his own. Then he said sharply, like a burst of machine-gun fire, ‘Fire away, if you dare. But don’t forget that every time an SS man dies from your dumdum bullets, you kill twenty civilians at the same time, with probably a good many women and children among them. Schoolchildren. Little starving toddlers who’re right now innocently occupied with their play. Fire away, boys, to hell with it, fire away! Release your safety catches! Blaze away and avenge Gerhard, the Jew, who refused to lie on a bed because he would foul it with vermin. If he could see what you plan to do he’d spit straight at your dirty faces. If you want to avenge him, pick up your junk and let’s get out of here. Let’s tell everybody what we’ve seen. Cry it out! Never forget it! Sing it out again and again! You have to survive this war in order to blare it out everywhere. Draw it, write it, say it again in twenty years when the world will be spinning comfortably! No one should forget what happened to other races, to those who thought differently, and to women and children. That will be your revenge for the thousands of Gerhards they’ve tortured.’

  The little Legionnaire got up, seemingly dead tired.

  ‘As always, you’re right, Old Man. You’re right.’

  Suddenly, in a fit of frenzy, he flung aside the heavy tank of the flame-thrower, kicked it, thumped it fiercely with both fists and cried in despair: ‘To hell with it all! Our freedom’s gone and our courage is useless. Any use of arms, even by us stupid, rotten swine, is dead sure to play into the hands of the big bastards!’

  He flopped down, kicked off his boots, pulled out his prayer rug, bowed toward the east and mumbled a long prayer to his Oriental prophet.