Comrades of War

by Sven Hassel

  The Old Man was tapping an anthill with a twig. He answered indifferently:

  ‘Three sub-machine guns – one Russian. Seventeen hand grenades. A flame-thrower, and a stovepipe without ammunition.’

  ‘Holy Mary of Sankt Pauli!’ Porta rejoiced. He doubled up with laughter. ‘I’ll be damned if it isn’t enough to hold one’s own against a whole army. Let’s just hope it won’t get through to our colleagues what a dangerous bunch we are, because then they might run again!’

  ‘Shut your damn mouth!’ flashed Lieutenant Ohlsen. ‘Your endless twaddle doesn’t help us a bit. Why don’t you instead give us some hint how we can steer through the partisan territory and get back to the German lines. There must be a new front line somewhere.’

  ‘Pardon me for interfering,’ Tiny cut in, ‘but I believe the new front line is being set up in the vicinity of Berlin.’

  ‘This is disloyal talk!’ Trepka cried. ‘I request court-martial in accordance with the Führer’s Order Number 8!’

  ‘Trepka, you can’t be quite sane. Do you imagine we’ve time to lose over that kind of nonsense here behind the Russian lines?’

  Trepka clicked his heels and looked at Lieutenant Ohlsen with a fanatic gleam in his eye. He crowed like a bantam cock.

  ‘Herr Lieutenant, every German soldier regardless of rank may request court-martial proceedings against defeatists and traitors!’ He handed Lieutenant Ohlsen his written denunciation of Tiny.

  Lieutenant Ohlsen read it through in silence and then tore it up. He looked sharply at Trepka, who stood before him straight as a ramrod, completely sure of himself.

  ‘In your place I would forget about that denunciation. The idea of court-martial seems to have gotten stuck in your throat.’

  Tiny, who sat on a tree stump between Porta and the Legionnaire, let out a shout which rang through the forest. ‘Let’s see how eager our budding colonel will be to court-martial poor Tiny after Ivan has picked us up. Julius Jewhater has told me all about that dirty report.’

  ‘Cut out the clamor, will you!’ Lieutenant Ohlsen admonished him, ‘or we’ll be on our way to Kolyma before we know it.’

  ‘Saperlotte!’ the Legionnaire grumbled. ‘I definitely prefer the Sahara to Siberia.’

  ‘I say, to hell both with your Sahara and Siberia if only Joseph Porta can get to Bornholmerstrasse, Moabitt, Berlin.’

  ‘And how does Joseph Porta propose to get there?’ Lieutenant Ohlsen jeered.

  ‘We lift a truck from Ivan. It’s better than to walk,’ Porta answered nonchalantly.

  Lieutenant Ohlsen looked at the Old Man and shook his head. The Old Man shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘A crazy idea,’ he muttered.

  Porta got up, slung his machine gun over his shoulder and trudged off into the forest.

  Like a faithful dog Tiny followed in his tracks, lugging along the the ammunition boxes.

  Lieutenant Ohlsen shook his head once again. He commanded: ‘In single file after me!’

  For hours we pushed our way through the jungle-like evergreen forest. We cried. We cursed. We fought. But the drive for self-preservation and the fear of what we had to expect from the Russians if we fell into their hands compelled us to keep moving.

  With the unerring instinct of wolves of the wild, Porta and Tiny led us through brush and swamp until, after four days of intolerable exertions, we saw the glare from some fires.

  In our fright we hid among the pine trees. Except for Porta and Tiny we were all agreed that we must get away from those fires, but in the end Lieutenant Ohlsen surrendered unconditionally to Porta and Tiny, though deep down he looked upon both as insane.

  ‘If there are fires, there are Ivans, too,’ Porta said with conviction, ‘and where there are Ivans there are trucks, and we are going to use a truck. Tiny, come, let’s look into it.’

  They vanished in the darkness. The Old Man and Lieutenant Ohlsen cursed savagely.

  Returning two hours later they squatted down beside us as we lay in the tall grass.

  Tiny pushed back his bowler. He was gurgling with laughter.

  ‘We ought to have met a long time ago, Joseph Porta. Think of all the things we could have fixed on Reeperbahn. You’d have conned the dudes and Tiny would have socked ’em.’

  ‘A gem of a truck,’ Porta mumbled.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lieutenant Ohlsen asked impatiently.

  ‘A cross-country armored vehicle for tank gunners, crammed with gasoline cans, enough to take us to Bornholmerstrasse!’

  ‘And the crew?’ Lieutenant Ohlsen asked, staring at the dark crowns of the trees.

  ‘Nothing to speak of,’ Tiny answered, jabbing at some mosquitoes. ‘Just eight yellow monkeys sitting around a coal-basin getting soaked. Ponimayu?’

  ‘They have at least three quarts of vodka,’ Porta said, ‘which they have pinched from one of their QMC officers, with guarantee.’

  Tiny laughed softly. ‘And now those two Tartar baboons are sitting there lapping it up as if the war would soon be over. I can bet they sit there thinking: The Germans, that Nazi riff-raff, have almost been chased back to Poland.’

  Porta laughed loudly. ‘And suddenly there we are pinching their armored truck. They’ll have a fit!’

  We lay for a little while in silence. You could feel everyone pondering that truck.

  Porta rolled a papirosu for himself.

  After a moment Lieutenant Ohlsen stood up. ‘Very well, let’s pick it up.’

  And now one of those countless dramas never reported in communiqués took place behind enemy lines. The only consequence of such incidents is that a few names are struck from the muster roll.

  Corporal Vasily Rostov and tank gunner Ivan Skolyenski of the 34th Panzer Brigade had just walked over to their wonderful new troop transport truck to pick up a couple of pieces of smoked mutton, when they felt a pair of steel fingers around their throats.

  Slowly everything went black before their eyes. The new truck seemed to float in the air. Vasily just managed to put his hand to his throat and touch the strangling fingers. Then he died.

  Ivan saw his two children before him. He got only a brief glimpse of them. He wanted to call them, but not a sound passed his lips. His legs twitched a bit. The Legionnaire slightly tightened his grip. Then he died too.

  Porta and Tiny quickly pulled the dead men’s blouses over their black panzer coats and put on the Russian helmets. They had a brief whispered exchange with the rest of the squad. Then all of us sneaked up to the fires, where a few Russians, the rest of the truck’s crew, could be made out.

  ‘Yob tvoyemat’,’ Porta cursed loudly.

  The Russians by the fire laughed. One of them called: ‘Hurry up now. We’re waiting.’

  ‘Right away, my boy, right away,’ the Legionnaire whispered. ‘You’ll soon be home in the garden of Allah!’

  We approached from the smoking side of the coal-basin, noiselessly, like snakes. Julius Heide readied his steel sling. The Legionnaire massaged his wrist and tightened his grip on his Moorish dagger. The Old Man tested his short entrenching spade, turning it in his fist. Each and every one tried out the feel of his special weapon.

  Spades and knives flashed in the glare from the small fire. A sickening gurgle came from a couple of the surprised tank gunners as knives and spades cut into quivering flesh.

  Julius Heide lunged at a sergeant. He pressed his face into the glowing embers of the fire, which went out with a fizz. He released his victim only when he didn’t move any more.

  Lieutenant Ohlsen vomited.

  The whole incident happened so incredibly fast – without noise, without heroism – that we looked in astonishment at the corpses of the Russian tank gunners. One of them had a piece of bread in his hand. Another held an overturned messtin. The kapusta had poured over his breast.

  ‘Not one eye will be dry when the message of the heroes’ deaths gets to the village,’ Stein grinned. He poked the corpse of the sergeant with the toe of his boot. />
  The Old Man sat rocking, head in hands. He was deathly pale. He had thrown the bloodstained spade some distance away from him. Lieutenant Ohlsen went on vomiting bile.

  Those two could never get used to it.

  Tiny and Porta had forgotten the dead. They had jumped into the brand-new armored truck. Porta behind the wheel. Tiny behind the machine gun.

  When they discovered how many weapons it contained, Julius and Stein stood up in the back of the truck and uttered one joyous exclamation after another. It was crammed with ammunition: two machine guns and one of those peerless Russian trench mortars.

  Porta screamed with joy. He revved up the engine and let it roar till the air quivered.

  ‘This is quite a coach, isn’t it?’ he gushed. ‘You won’t find it’s match in the whole German army!’

  Lieutenant Ohlsen and the Old Man jumped in when the engine started roaring.

  ‘Have you gone completely out of your mind?’ Lieutenant Ohlsen rapped. ‘That roar can be heard as far as the roller conveyor. Make it run more quietly.’

  ‘Can’t be done, Herr Lieutenant,’ Porta yelled back. ‘Ivan doesn’t know how to build noiseless engines. They have to creak and bang.’ He took a turn with the heavy truck. The chains clattered over the burnt-down fire and the corpses. ‘Ivan Stinkonovich, this is Joseph Porta, Corporal by the Grace of God in Hitler’s defeated army!’

  He put on the brakes. The chains made a squelching noise and clouds of earth flew about our ears. He put on the headlights, which again made the Lieutenant shout.

  ‘Turn out those lights, man, and I order you to shut your mouth!’

  ‘Herr Lieutenant, if I do as you say we won’t get very far. We’re no longer scared Germans but bold Ivans. We’ve won the war, thrashed the Nazis, chased them deep into Poland. We’ll soon be in Berlin which has real china toilets. So why drive in the dark and in silence, Gospodin Leytenant? Lots of light, oceans of light! Mother Russia is rejoicing! The victory is ours! The proletariat is mighty! Long live Daddy Stalin! Yob tvoyemat’!’

  Lieutenant Ohlsen pointed a finger at his forehead and looked at the Old Man. He thought Porta must be insane.

  Like one possessed he guided the heavy truck through the night. He and Tiny sat on the driver’s seat, dressed in Russian uniform coats and steel helmets.

  Often we would pass by camps where the narrow road didn’t permit him to turn aside. He just speeded up the truck and raised his fist for the Red Front greeting, while bearded, wild-looking, half-uniformed men waved and yelled to us, swinging their weapons above their heads.

  ‘Uraaa Stalin! Long live the Red Army!’ partisans flushed with victory roared after what they took to be a Russian armored car.

  ‘To Warsaw and Brest-Litovsk!’ Porta yelled back. ‘Down with the Germanski! We’ll wash and crap in cans made of china in Berlin!’

  ‘Put away a can for us too, brother Gospodin,’ the partisans bellowed for good-bye.

  Hour after hour the sound of clattering chains was heard as the truck rumbled through the big forest. When we halted during the day, the truck was camouflaged. It couldn’t be seen from a yard’s distance. Half of us stood guard behind machine guns and trench mortars, while the second half slept.

  Somewhere deep within the forest a partisan unit under the command of a lieutenant from the Red Army were busy with some sort of court-martial. A young Russian woman, hailing from the Volga district, had fallen into their hands. To get board and lodging the girl had served as a kind of office help for a German regimental staff. Then the offensive started rolling. Chaos. Panic. She was forgotten more or less deliberately. There were plenty of girls wherever they went. The red braiding of the artillery officer has always appealed to girls. The last thing she saw in the village was a cloud of dust after the departing regimental staff.

  Quickly she packed her few things in a couple of bags, slung them across her shoulder and set out on the roller conveyor. Around her, German soldiers were being bawled out and cursed by brutal MPs as they poured back from the front. She fell. She got up. She staggered. She wept. For a few miles she was allowed to hold on to a cavalryman’s stirrups. He was her countryman, a Cossack.

  Finally the Cossack increased his speed. She couldn’t keep up with him any more. She stumbled and fell. The horse pranced. The Cossack swiped at her with his long nagayka, gave out a short ‘Nichego!’ and spat after her. He spurred his horse and galloped down the roller conveyor with the sunlight reflected in the red crown of his cap.

  For a short stretch she rode with an infantry kitchen truck. Then she was chased off by a lieutenant.

  Before she knew, the soldiers of her own country had popped up on the roller conveyor.

  She ran into the forest to hide, though she had more enemies, and more dangerous ones, in the forest than among the army soldiers on the road.

  For hours she sat in a thick brake, paralyzed with fear.

  Early one morning she ran into the arms of two shaggybearded partisans. They dragged her before Lieutenant of the Guards Turyetza, chief of the partisan unit. He was a tall slim man, and had been the best in his class at the military academy in Omsk. At the age of fourteen he had denounced his mother for counter-revolutionary ideas. She was killed by a piece of falling rock in Sib-Chicago near Novosibirsk.

  When Pyotr Turyetza was notified of his mother’s death by the head of his Komsomol unit, he just shrugged his shoulders and remarked: ‘She got what she deserved.’

  He was intelligent, fanatical and quick to make a judgment.

  When he saw Maria enter the camp between two of his men, he immediately noticed the Wehrmacht socks, the gray pullover with the green border, and the characteristic green scarf.

  He smiled icily. ‘Traitor!’ he hissed. He spat at her face and struck her with his fur cap. ‘What’s your name? What are you doing here? Where do you come from?’

  His slap gave her courage. From deep down, the characteristic obstinacy of her race surged up. Her pretty eyes became narrow slits as she lapped up the blood streaming down her face. She screamed at the Lieutenant of the Guards.

  ‘I come from my mother’s womb, you oaf! And I’m running away from the Germanski. You who hide in the woods and kill from ambush don’t know maybe what’s happening on the highways and in the villages today!’

  ‘So this is how you want to play it, you slut.’ He called his second in command, Staff Sergeant Igor Poltonek, a little Kalmuck. A Cossack who didn’t give a rap what was his or what was coming to him, but always gave himself most. He clicked his heels before the Lieutenant and growled tersely:

  ‘At your service, Gospodin Leytenant!’

  ‘Take care of that bitch,’ the Lieutenant snarled at the bowlegged Cossack NCO, who grinned with satisfaction and secret understanding as he dragged the girl away.

  They beat her. They broke two of her fingers. They petted her.

  ‘Marisha,’ Lieutenant Turyetza whispered. The pet name for Maria. ‘So you were going to spy on us for your German friends?’

  ‘Nyet,’ the girl moaned.

  ‘You were going to inform against us?’ the Lieutenant whispered, nearly twisting her neck out of joint. He grabbed hold of her breasts and squeezed till she screamed. ‘You’re a traitor, you’ve whored with Germanski.’ He gave her a kick.

  They tore off all her clothes. They swung her over a branch, where she hung like a bow, while they cut little narrow gashes in her flesh and rubbed the wounds with salt.

  They took her down again.

  She said she had sold Russia. She had stabbed the Red Army in the back. She had derided Papa Stalin. She was a Vlassov traitor.

  They forced her to drink vodka. They poured it over her face directly from the bottle. The Lieutenant shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Do what you want with her.’ Then he left.

  Igor Poltonek, the Kalmuck, flung himself on top of her. He whispered: ‘Marisha!’

  When he was satisfied, he drew a swastika on her forehead with a re
d-hot nail.

  They cut off all her hair and burned it on the fire. Then they spat at her and walked off.

  When they set out at dawn they just left her lying there. When Turyetza asked Igor if she was dead, he lied and said ‘yes.’ He hoped she would die slowly in the damp forest, but she didn’t die. She was from the Volga, and people from the Volga region die hard.

  When she woke up, there was only one thought in her throbbing burning head: She had to kill the Kalmuck before she died.

  Sobbing, she staggered on her way. Instinctively she walked west.

  Three days and nights later she was sitting on a windfall, wishing herself dead. The worst pains had gone. The burn on her forehead didn’t smart any more, but she was oppressed by an overwhelming, murderous fatigue.

  She chewed sappy twigs to still her thirst, but chewing hurt. Her teeth had been knocked loose and the mouth was heavily swollen.

  Suddenly she heard a snarl, and in the same moment a pair of fingers closed around her throat and pulled her back. Almost paralyzed with fright she stared into Tiny’s grimy bandit face beneath the Russian steel helmet.

  ‘A broad!’ he roared. ‘A broad with a mark on her skull!’

  ‘Ass!’ the Old Man hissed as he came crawling from the brush like a lizard, followed by the Legionnaire. ‘Why don’t you let go of the poor girl, you’re choking her!’

  Tiny got up and helped Maria on her legs, but didn’t miss the chance of passing his large fist over her well-formed body, only half covered by the torn rags she had for clothes.

  ‘Holy Mother of Kazan,’ Tiny exclaimed. ‘What a sweetie!’ He winked at the Old Man and the Legionnaire. ‘Let’s cast dice who’ll be first to hop on her.’

  ‘Swine,’ the Old Man scolded. ‘She’ll be brought to Lieutenant Ohlsen.’

  ‘You can take her first,’ Tiny offered magnanimously. ‘I bet she’ll only be too glad if we do it to her.’

  ‘Shut up,’ the Old Man answered. ‘If you touch her I’ll shoot.’ He tipped his sub-machine gun.

  Tiny pawed the girl like a chicken before its head is chopped off.