Comrades of War (2 page)

‘Listen to me, Desert Rambler,’ Tiny whispered loudly to the Legionnaire. ‘Now, when we come steaming into this stinking hospital, I’m first going to get roaring drunk. Yes, once more I’ll get properly stoned, and afterwards I’ll take care of three little carbolic pussies all at once.’ He looked dreamily at the ceiling and snorted blissfully, licking his frostbitten lips. ‘You bet, I’ll give it to them for all I’m worth.’ His eyes shone with expectant rapture. It would be the first time in his life he’d ever been in hospital, and he imagined it as a sort of brothel with a quite extensive service for the clients.

The Legionnaire laughed. ‘You’ll learn, my boy. First, you’ll be cut up so drastically that you’ll have something else to worry about during the first couple of weeks. You’ll be sweating steel splinters from every pore. They’ll shoot syringes into you all over so you won’t conk out on them, because they can still use you for cannon fodder.’

‘Stop it! I don’t want to listen,’ Tiny shouted, white with terror.

After a few minutes silence, he asked guardedly: ‘Does it hurt very badly, you think, when those field surgeons cut into you?’

The Legionnaire slowly turned his head and looked closely at the big rascal. Every feature of Tiny’s oafish face showed fear of the unknown ahead of him.

‘
Bon
, Tiny, it hurts, it hurts like hell. They tear and pull the flesh into shreds and tatters so you gasp and groan. But cheer up; it hurts so much you won’t be able to utter a sound, not a squeak. That’s the way it is,’ nodded the Legionnaire.

‘Oh, Jesus Mary,’ Tiny gasped. ‘Holy Mother of God.’

‘Once they have me patched up in the hospital,’ I thought aloud, ‘I want to find a mistress, an expensive, attractive mistress in a long mink coat – a real trophy with plenty of experience.’

The Legionnaire nodded.

‘I know what you mean, a prize piece.’ He clicked his tongue.

‘What’s a mistress?’ Tiny bungled in.

We conscientiously explained to him what a mistress was. His face lit up.

‘Oh, a whore to keep at home. One of those free-lancers. Oh, Christ, if you only could hunt up one of those!’ He closed his eyes, dreaming up whole battalions of gorgeous girls. He could see them walking in a straight line down a long street, wiggling their well-shaped posteriors.

‘How much does one of those cost?’ Not to let the dream girls entirely out of his sight, he contented himself with just opening one eye.

‘A whole year’s pay,’ I whispered, forgetting the pain in my back at the thought of the mistress in a mink coat I was going to have.

‘I had a mistress in Casablanca once,’ the little Legionnaire mused. ‘It was just after I’d become a sergeant in Number 3 Company of 2nd. A good company, a nice boss, no stinking pile of shit.’

‘To hell with your boss. We want to hear about your broad, not your damned bosses.’

The Legionnaire laughed.

‘She was married to a dissolute shipowner, a real old goat. The only thing she saw in him was his dough. His fortune ran to a nice string of O’s. Her favorite pastime was buying lovers and then discarding them when she had worn them out.’

‘Were you thrown out, too?’ asked Tiny, who’d become attentive.

The Legionnaire didn’t answer, but went on with the story of the shipowner’s wife in Casablanca who bought good love.

Tiny obstinately persisted in butting in. Finally he let out such a roar that the other wounded passengers in the car started bawling him out.

‘Did you also get the boot, Desert Rambler? I’d like to know if you were kicked down the kitchen stairs.’

‘No, I wasn’t,’ the little Legionnaire yelled, annoyed by the interruptions. ‘When I found something better I cleared out.’

We knew it was a lie, and the Legionnaire realized we knew.

‘Her complexion was olive yellow,’ the Legionnaire went on. ‘Black hair, always up to some trick. Her underthings,
mon dieu
, were a treat like a bottle of Roederer Brut 1926. You should’ve seen them and touched them,
mon garçon
!’

The NCO with the head wound gave a low laugh. ‘You must be quite an epicure. I wouldn’t mind going out with you some evening and taking a look at your girls.’

The Legionnaire didn’t even bother to look at him. He was lying with his eyes closed, a gas mask container under his head.

‘Women don’t interest me any more. I only speak from old experience.’

‘Tell me a little more about your Casablanca girls, Desert Rambler. Where actually is that whorehouse, Casablanca?’

The Legionnaire gave a hollow cough.

‘Evidently you believe there are only two things of importance in this world, whorehouses and barracks. Casablanca is no whorehouse, but a lovely city on the west coast of Africa. A place where Legionnaires of the second class learn to eat sand and drink sweat and where you can order a complete Turkish band. In Casablanca, too, those asses who imagine they’re going to have a glorious time with the Legion find out they’re swine, because they’re born of swine . . .’

‘ . . . and made by swine,’ added a voice from the darkness that had gradually fallen on the car.

‘Quite true,’ the little Legionnaire nodded, ‘they are made by swine like you and me and all other joes in this world.’

‘Long live the swine!’ someone yelled.

‘Long live the swine!’ we roared hoarsely in chorus. ‘Long live the stupid swine for the Nazi piles of shit to push around!’

‘You scum, you nasty rabble!’ It was Hitler’s sergeant who’d cried out; he was quite indignant. ‘God help you, you rats, when the attack will roll forward again! Field Marshal von Mannstein will soon cross the Lowart and storm toward Moscow.’

‘In that case, it’ll be in a transport train bound for Siberia with prisoners,’ someone jeered.

‘Onward, grenadiers, saviors of Greater Germany!’ the sergeant bellowed frantically.

‘Haw-haw, you self-made Adolf, were you in action at Velikie Luki?’ Tiny inquired. ‘Since you speak so warmly of Lowart!’

‘Were you?’ asked a Pfc with only one arm, which was festering with gangrene.

‘You bet I was. The three of us sat in the stronghold with the 27th. Any objections, you dirty bastard?’ All at once Tiny confided to the whole car: ‘As soon as I’m out of the hospital I’m going to beat up a QMC officer. I’ll thrash that common thief till he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow. I’ll slash him across the jaw so he’ll have a grin stuck on his face for the rest of his life.’

‘Why’re you so mad about QMC officers?’ asked the onearmed private.

‘Did you leave your brains in your lost arm?’ Tiny exclaimed. ‘You ass, have you never gotten dripping wet under one of our rain capes? You see, those QMC fellows get their cut on everything we use. Every rain cape is made in such a way that the rain sloshes through. Don’t you see the trick? Since the QMC makes a fat profit from every rain cape, and big fools like us throw away the first two in the hope of getting something better, you can plainly see what the gimmick is.’

‘A prize stunt,’ the Legionnaire remarked. ‘If only I could get into the Quartermaster Corps and sell raincoats to those officer thieves! Should this befall me, Allah would indeed be wise and good.’

‘What about that broad you were telling us about?’ Tiny cried. He’d forgotten about the QMC officers.

‘Mind your own business,’ the little Legionnaire snarled. A little later he spoke to himself: ‘Mohammed and all true prophets, how I loved her! Twice after she dismissed me I tried to break into Allah’s garden.’

‘But you said you threw her out,’ Tiny guffawed.

‘So what?’ the Legionnaire shouted. ‘I don’t give a damn about the bitches, those short-legged, wide-hipped, jabbering creatures! And to think a man should be stupid enough to chase after something like that. Take a look at her in the morning, eyes swollen and her whole face puffed up and smeared with lipstick.’

‘Thank you,’ said a voice from the interior of the car. ‘That’s what I call a compliment to the fair sex!’

‘He’s right,’ came from somewhere else in the darkness. ‘You lose your appetite when you face one of those with metal curlers in her hair and down-at-heel slippers, and stockings dangling about her shanks.’

Through the noise of the train we could make out the drone of an airplane. We hushed up and listened, like wild animals when they scent the death song of the beaters.

‘Yabos,’
³
someone whispered loudly.

‘Yabos,’ repeated several others.

We shivered, not because of the cold, but because death was there in the car with us. Yabos . . .

‘Come now death, come!’ the Legionnaire hummed.

The plane swerved and roared in a steadily growing crescendo. With a zooming roar it swept along the train. The blood-red star glared coldly at the numerous cattle cars with the cross of mercy on their roofs. The plane wheeled skyward, then swooped back down like a hawk upon a young hare.

Tiny got up, supported himself on his muscular arms and roared at the doors: ‘Come on then, you red devil, grind us to hash! But get it over with!’

As if the pilot had heard and wished to do his best to fulfill the request, the bullets pealed through the walls of the car and rapped against the other side. Scores of little peepholes appeared at the top of one wall in neat rows.

Some screamed. Others let out a rattle. Then they died.

The locomotive blew its whistle. We drove into a forest. The pilot returned home for tea and eggs, sunny side up.

It was such a nice morning, with clear frost. The pilot must have enjoyed the beautiful landscape from up there.

The Legionnaire said, ‘I could fancy having a sausage. Not just an ordinary sausage, but a sausage made of pork meat with a tang of smoke and strong as black pepper. It must have a whiff of acorn. This it gets from the pig running loose in the woods.’

‘You can get typhoid from eating raw clams,’ announced an infantry color guard with a smashed kneecap. ‘If I could only have a whole basket of typhoid-infected clams when I go back to the front again. Every time I go back to the front.’

The wheels rumbled along the rails. The cold was relentless. It burst in through the holes left by the Yabos bullets.

‘Alfred,’ I called. I hadn’t spoken the name of the little Legionnaire for a long time, if I’d ever done so.

He didn’t answer.

‘Alfred!’

It sounded silly. ‘Alfred, did you ever yearn for a home? Furniture and that sort of thing?’

‘No, Sven, I’m past the time for that,’ he answered with eyes closed. His mouth was set in a sneer.

How fond I was of his drawn face.

‘Now I’m past thirty,’ he went on. ‘At sixteen I went to
La Légion Etrangère
. I lied that I was two years older. I’ve been a swine for too many years. The dunghill’s my home. My hut down there in Sidi-bel-Abbès, smelling sour from the thick coat of sweat thousands of men have left behind and no fumigation can remove, that hut will be my last.’

‘Do you regret it?’

‘You should never regret anything,’ the Legionnaire answered. ‘Life’s good. The weather’s good.’

‘It’s damn cold, Alfred.’

‘Cold weather is good, too. All weather is good as long as you breathe. Even a prison is good as long as you’re alive and forget about how well off you could be
if
. . . It’s this “if” that drives people mad. Forget this “if” and live!’

‘Aren’t you sorry you’re wounded in the neck?’ asked the man with gangrene. ‘You may get a stiff neck and have to wear a steel collar to support your head.’

‘No, I’m not sorry about it. I can live even with a steel collar. When this is all over I’ll take a depot job in
La Légion Etrangère
with a twenty-year contract. I’ll be able to drink a bottle of Valpolicella every night and carry on some small trading on the black market with unclaimed depot things. Forget about tomorrow. Kick a priest in the pants when I’m drunk. Visit the mosque twice a day and say to hell with everything else.’

‘I’m going to live in Venice when Adolf’s been laid out,’ the infantry color guard cut in. ‘Saw it with the old man at twelve. First-class city. Has anyone here been to Venice?’

‘I have,’ came softly from the straw in the corner.

We were horrified when we discovered it was the dying airman. He didn’t have a face any more. Burning oil.

The infantryman piped down. Without looking at the dying man, he said, ‘So, you’ve been to Venice?’ He said it in Italian to please the airman.

Long silence. Everyone felt the rest of us should keep quiet. To hear a man so near death talking about a city was a rare privilege.

‘Canale Grande is most beautiful by night. Then the gondolas look like diamonds playing with pearls,’ the airman whispered.

‘St Mark’s Place is fun when the water rises and floods it,’ the color guard said.

‘Venice is the best city in the world. I’d like to go there,’ said the dying soldier, knowing full well he’d die in a cattle car east of Brest-Litovsk.

‘An old soldier is always gay,’ the Legionnaire said, apropos of nothing. ‘He’s gay because he’s alive and understands what this means.’ Glancing at me, he went on. ‘But there aren’t so very many old soldiers. Many call themselves soldiers, but only because they have their stripes on. You’re not a soldier till the Man with the Scythe has shook hands with you.’

‘When I’m settled in Venice,’ the infantryman mused, ‘I’m going to eat cannelloni every day. I’ll have crab served on the shell. And I’ll be damn sure to have sole, too.’

‘
Merde!
Clams are also good,’ the Legionnaire said.

‘But they give you typhoid,’ a voice warned from the other end of the car.

‘I don’t give a damn about typhoid. When Adolf has been strangled, we’ll all be immune,’ the infantry color guard said confidently.

‘I forbid you to speak like this about our divine Führer,’ the artillery sergeant shrieked. ‘You’re a bunch of traitors and you’ll swing!’

‘Oh, shut up!’

The brakes squeaked. The train moved in short spurts. Then it accelerated slightly and braked again. It went slower and slower till finally it came to a halt with a long wail. The locomotive blew off steam and drove off to get water and the other things a locomotive needs.