Comrades of War

by Sven Hassel

  With the dark fellow at the wheel they drove to Police Headquarters.

  ‘Aren’t we lucky, the two of us!’ Red grinned. ‘No front command for us!’

  ‘The man I could get to love hasn’t been born,’ Aunt Dora said.

  ‘Love for the individual is barbarism,’ the Legionnaire said.

  But they said this before they met each other.

  They had become children, dreaming about a paradise with seven bar stools and a conch curtain.

  Aunt Dora wanted the Legionnaire to desert, but he was too old and foxy to attempt such a naive act of madness.

  The train drove off. They separated, the same way as so many others.

  The war went on more savagely than ever.

  The war was running out of control.

  XI

  The Leave Train

  The depot officer, a captain, looked at our papers and said curtly: ‘The leave train Berlin-Warsaw-Lemberg on Platform 4.’

  ‘It’s all up,’ the Legionnaire sighed.

  The captain glanced at him and said with a jeer, ‘I see you can say what Caesar said when he crossed the Rubicon!’

  The Legionnaire grinned. ‘Alea iacta est!’

  The captain looked in surprise at the little scarred panzer soldier. ‘Are you a student, Corporal?’

  ‘No, a holy swine, 2nd Foreign Regiment,’ the Legionnaire grinned. He enjoyed seeing the captain’s amazement.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t know what it means?’ the captain asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the Legionnaire answered caustically. ‘In soldier’s language: Sophie has had it!’

  The captain flushed and waved us off.

  Further down the platform Tiny asked: ‘What sort of foreign stuff did you serve up to that silver pheasant?’

  ‘Just what you heard. Sophie has had it!’

  Tiny stopped and burst into a roar of laughter: ‘You’ll have to teach me that! I’ll use it on First Sergeant Edel when we’re back with the gang. Christ, that’ll make him gape, the stupid pig!’ He shoved back his cap, uttered another howl and stormed forward on the platform.

  He had caught sight of the Battleship, who surprised everybody by coming to say good-bye to him. They clashed like a pair of army elephants.

  A crowd of soldiers milled around beside the train, which was standing by the platform like an insatiable serpent.

  I glanced at the large depot clock. The second hand was rushing across the dial. Black and menacing. Round and round. Minute after minute. Soon it would be over.

  The East Prussian and Thomas Jensen slouched slowly through the platform control, dragging heavy infantry packs.

  Stein and Bauer hung out of a compartment window shouting they had five seats. They received our equipment through the window.

  A Red Cross sister asked if we’d like some coffee.

  Drinking from a common metal cup, we finished off the hot liquid which was supposed to be coffee, but which tasted more like soup boiled on a jute sack.

  ‘Everybody on board!’ the transport officer roared for the fourth time. But no one reacted.

  A couple of soldiers were brutally shoved into the train.

  Tiny hit out at an MP noncom. ‘Scram, head-hunter!’ he shouted.

  The NCO grumbled and uttered all sorts of threats, but beat it quickly. He didn’t want a row on a leave train. He knew from bitter experience that the most fantastic trouble might arise. At such train departures nerves were on edge.

  A woman’s voice called: ‘Alfred!’

  The Legionnaire whirled around and walked rapidly up to one of the kiosks, where Aunt Dora stood half hidden with her collar turned up around her ears.

  Putting her hand on the little Legionnaire’s shoulder, she said gently: ‘I have brought civvies with me. Hurry to a toilet and change. Get away from them!’

  The Legionnaire squinted at her.

  ‘Dora, old bitch, let’s not do anything foolish! You know the head-hunters as well as I do. Not one in a thousand gets away safely, and if they catch me with you, you’ll go straight to jail.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of their jails.’

  ‘Nah, but of their bullets.’ He pulled a newspaper clipping out of his pocket. The latest news from Völkischer Beobachter.

  She moved her lips while she read:

  WARNING AGAINST DESERTERS AND COWARDS

  I called upon the German people and German women in particular to be on the lookout for cowards trying to escape from east to west by hiding in refugee columns. Show no misplaced pity for these dirty dogs. Men who run away from their detachments in the Army, Air Force and Navy do not even deserve a piece of dry bread.

  On you more than anybody else, proud National-Socialist German women, rests the sacred duty of being on guard against these elements.

  Do your duty. Do not let yourselves be persuaded or affected by anti-social elements. Denounce ruthlessly, and on the slightest suspicion. Have no pity, whether they are stranger or your own husbands, brothers, or sons.

  Show them the contempt they deserve. Make them once more recognize their duty. If words fail to bring them around, have them picked up by the Military Police, which knows how to punish these miserable rats who do not know what honor is and for whom there is no room in our National-Socialist Greater Germany.

  Heinrich Himmler

  SS Reichsführer

  Chief of Police

  Minister of the Interior

  Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army

  Aunt Dora nodded.

  ‘A rotten bastard, but just wait. The balls of that black shit will boil some day, believe me!’

  ‘So will ours probably,’ the Legionnaire answered dryly. ‘If we lose our heads. Our only chance of surviving this madness is to fall into line. Quietly, without any fuss. Hold back wherever you can get away with it.’ He passed his hand under her chin and went on. ‘And take care to have valid papers in your pocket, or they won’t be proof against the meticulous scrutiny of the head-hunters!’ He pointed at an MP sergeant who looked like a hippopotamus. ‘Look at that fellow with his crescent-shaped badge! He’s dying to nab deserters and string ’em up with a piece of cardboard on their chests. Listen, old girl – but you’re crying! What’s this? Aunt Dora doesn’t cry!’ Clumsily he wiped away the tears from her heavily made-up cheeks.

  ‘You’re a stupid pig,’ she sobbed and hid her face on his shoulder. ‘I’m going to write to you, Alfred, every week.’ She stroked his cheek with its long knife scar.

  She looked at the train, which was hissing out steam in white clouds, thinking; It’s like an insatiable grinding machine asking to be fed with flesh, blood and bones.

  She looked up at him: ‘Where are you heading for, you think?’

  He looked toward the bridge at a couple of rattling trolleys before he answered.

  ‘The Old Man wrote in his last letters that the Regiment is now standing in the vicinity of Orsha in the central sector. Orsha is a junction of the highway Minsk-Tula-Moscow. Well, actually it leads all the way to Siberia,’ he added, ‘ending in Kolyma, where our comrades from Stalingrad are now slaving in the mines.’

  Orsha, she thought. A name. An unknown name. A dot on the large maps. A filthy and infinitely sad spot in the immensity of Russia. A place through which thousands of soldiers are marching. Men dressed in green and brown, most of whom never return. She stroked his hand, destined by evil fate to press the trigger of a machine gun and cause death and destruction to other soldiers. She could teach those hands to shake a mixer.

  ‘Alfred,’ she whispered, looking into his ugly, scarred face. Her unfeeling eyes were blinded by tears. ‘But don’t you understand, you stupid pig, that I love you, you stinking desert jackal. I swear to God, I love you! Why, I don’t know myself. I was raped by some man when I was twelve. When I was fifteen I liked it. Now it doesn’t interest me any more. We’ll love each other as two people who know enough to see our fellow men as swine till the opposite is proven. We know that life is
one long rotten carnival night and the only requirement is that you have on a good mask. Alfred, I’ll wait for you even if it takes thirty years! One of these days we’ll wake up from this bad dream. Then we’ll sell the saloon and slip off where we can run a decent place with girls, schnapps and beer!’

  The Legionnaire laughed. ‘And where would that be? In Tibet, perhaps?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, in Brazil. I have a sister there who runs a regular brothel. There’s the right soil for us two. No head-hunters. No Stapo. You have the right to breathe as you like.’

  Sister Lotte, a little nurse who’d been to the Führer school of the League of German Maidens, came dancing along the platform and fastened a spruce branch to the door of one of the cars. She had seen this done in a war movie. She wiped her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief. She had also seen this in a war movie. Then she kissed the nearest soldier on the cheek. Flinging her head back like a Valkyrie, she cried in near ecstasy: ‘My hero, my unknown hero! I thank you for fighting for us German women and for making us feel safe from those Soviet monsters.’

  The soldier, an infantryman with a foxy face, glanced at her, farted loudly and yelled: ‘Go to hell, you officer’s bedwarmer!’

  Lotte’s cheeks flushed. ‘You swine!’ she hissed. ‘I’ll see you get a trip east.’

  The retort was a loud roar of laughter from the soldiers nearby. The infantryman smacked her behind.

  ‘Hurry home and make yourself ready for the victors. They’re on the way!’

  Gnashing her teeth Lotte retreated. She tore the spruce branch from the car door and placed it three cars further down where she thought they were more worthy of receiving her branch. She said something to an MP sergeant, who just shrugged his shoulders and pushed her aside.

  A whole family had showed up to take leave of a seventeen-year-old boy who’d been drafted and was going to a training battalion in Poland.

  ‘Be proud and brave,’ cried his father, who turned out to be a Regierungsrat. ‘You have to be a credit to your family!’

  ‘We’ll be looking forward to a letter from you soon, nephew,’ whinnied an old white-haired man wearing the phantom uniform of a colonel from the time before World War I, ‘in which you’ll inform us that the Führer has awarded you the Iron Cross.’

  ‘Send us a picture of yourself in uniform as soon as possible,’ his mother squeaked, whisking away a traitorous tear.

  The father looked reprovingly at her through his monocle, ‘German women don’t cry, Louise! We Germans are proud.’

  A minister with a stiff white collar and a ridiculous derby hat on his head put his arms around the mother’s shoulders and said unctuously: ‘How wonderful it must be to be able to send a son to the battlefield to fight our barbarous enemies who threaten to overrun our Fatherland!’

  A member of the family in a brown uniform looked at him. ‘What do you mean by saying that our enemies are about to overrun our Fatherland? Hasn’t the Führer explained that the strongly winding front lines have to be straightened out?’

  Making sure the Party man didn’t overhear, an NCO in the compartment window beside them muttered: ‘We’ll be straightening out the front lines till we stand with our backs against the Chancellery of the Reich in Berlin.’

  The minister nervously blinked his eyes. He passed a finger along his starched collar. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He looked ingratiatingly at the Party man.

  ‘The District Leader probably misunderstood me. I mean that our enemies are overrunning the Ukraine, which according to the Führer’s words also is our Fatherland.’

  ‘Where and when did the Führer say that?’

  The minister looked at him. ‘The Führer has said many times and also the Minister of Propaganda has often written in Völkischer Beobachter that the Greater German Reich is going to extend to the mountains of the Caucasus, and that’s where our enemies are at the moment.’

  The District Leader glanced passingly at the minister, who had put his head to one side and folded his hands on his stomach.

  ‘In that case it might be a good idea if you, Herr Vicar, were to take a trip east. Then you could help our heroes chase our enemies clear out of the Greater German Reich.’ The Party man beamed with joy as he saw the minister collapse in fear.

  A gray figure moved along the train in an almost stealthy manner.

  Bauer neighed with enthusiasm when he saw who it was. Ewald, Aunt Dora’s pimp, in fatigues. Two days ago, as so many times before, he had again stepped through the little gray door leading up to Gestapo Headquarters on Karl Muck Platz. After a long wait, he was taken to Bielert’s office by an SS man in black uniform.

  Bielert received him sitting on the edge of a table and accepted the closely written pages Ewald, as usual, delivered to him.

  Bielert tapped the papers. ‘How much of all this is lies and fabrications?’

  ‘Nothing, Herr Brigadenführer, everything is true!’

  ‘Herr, you may skip. Here with us it’s only Brigadenführer. Remember that, you rat,’ Bielert snarled.

  Bielert scolded, threatened, roared, and still Ewald didn’t understand a word.

  Finally Bielert pulled out a piece of white paper. A red line had been drawn straight across it. He thrust the paper under Ewald’s nose.

  ‘Here I have your induction papers to a penal field regiment. You were once a soldier for six whole weeks, weren’t you?’

  ‘Certainly, Brigadenführer,’ Ewald trumpeted and clicked his heels as he’d once been taught to on the drill-ground at Grafenwöhr. Just the thought sent shivers up and down his spine. Better jail than the infantry barracks, he’d said then. How happy he’d been when it came out that he’d served jail sentences for ‘gainful crimes.’ During the Ragnarok of mobilization he’d been inducted through clerical error, an error ‘which the Wehrmacht deeply deplored.’ He was speedily dispatched from the Army and lived in a whirl of pleasures in Hamburg’s underworld. But now they weren’t so fastidious any longer.

  Now, anything could be used at the front, even guys like Ewald. There was a whole army of penal regiments to receive paltry bandits like him.

  Bending toward him, Bielert whispered: ‘But, my little friend, there is another possibility!’

  Ewald’s face lit up with hope. He already felt safe from the most terrible thing that could happen to him. He had bought exemption from jail by becoming a stool pigeon. A respectable number of people had found themselves squirming in Gestapo’s net thanks to Ewald’s reports. Actually, Paul Bielert could thank Ewald that he’d become Brigadenführer, because quite unawares Ewald had gotten on the track of something really big.

  ‘I’ll do anything you request, Brigadenführer,’ Ewald stammered, giving Bielert a fawning look.

  Bielert put up a gloating grin. ‘I’m not requesting anything from you. You’ve the choice between two alternatives: induction in a penal battalion or being hauled before a court-martial as an anti-social element!’

  Ewald caught his breath. ‘Court-martial!’ he groaned. ‘But how can I be brought up before a court-martial? I haven’t done anything. I never got mixed up with politics.’

  ‘Really?’ Bielert answered, pointing at the papers lying on his writing desk. ‘Maybe all that has only to do with butter and coffee coupons? Nah, my fine friend, you’re stuck to your neck in political filth.’ He turned to the door and roared: ‘Geige, Potz!’

  Two big men in the black uniform of the SS edged into the room.

  ‘Get that thing court-martialed,’ Bielert hissed and pointed at Ewald, who stood chattering his teeth in the middle of the floor, swaying as if about to fall.

  The two big SS men went over to Ewald, caught his arm and said with chilly joviality: ‘Come along then, little one.’

  ‘No, no,’ Ewald cried, ‘you can’t do that to me, Brigadenführer. I’ve always been good and done exactly what you asked. I’ll do anything you want!’

  Bielert laughed.

  ‘I don’t want
you to do anything at all, you skunk. I just never again want to have the pleasure of seeing your bastard face.’

  Ewald screamed like one possessed. He who had never had pity for others now had dropped into the fire himself. He had been foolish enough to mention Aunt Dora’s name in the previous report, and Bielert was Aunt Dora’s bodyguard.

  ‘Well, get a uniform for him, and off he goes with the next transport.’

  That’s why Ewald was now sneaking alongside the train in a uniform without shoulder straps and collar insignia. Bielert hadn’t been content only with sending him to a penal regiment; he had sent him to Penal Field Training Battalion No. 919, Brest-Litovsk.

  If Ewald had suspected what he was in for he would probably have slipped away right there and gone under cover in Hamburg as a deserter. He would have better chances of escaping unhurt as a deserter than as a member of the most notorious unit in the German Armed Forces. In this battalion the new arrivals were always welcomed by Staff Sergeant Neuring, who would say:

  ‘You probably think you have a chance of saving your skin here in No. 919, but you’re mistaken. At 11:55 you are all going to be shot in the nape of the neck according to regulations.’

  ‘The MPs were running alongside the train with their tin badges flashing on their breasts. They were shouting at and threatening the many soldiers who just couldn’t be driven into the train.

  The little Legionnaire put his arms around Aunt Dora and pressed her to him. ‘Bon, I have to board the train now, Dora. This war will never end happily unless Corporal Alfred Kalb of the 2nd Foreign Regiment is there. What if Hitler should win! That would be no good for the two of us.’

  Aunt Dora pressed up against him. Her big bosom covered his narrow chest. Her lips found his. She held him caught in her grip as if she would never let him go.

  ‘Alfred,’ she whispered. ‘You will come back!’ It wasn’t a question. It was a prayer. A cry, almost a command to God. The Legionnaire mustn’t die, fall for a foolish cause.