Comrades of War (33 page)

Lieutenant Ohlsen laughed softly. ‘I’d call that being consistent!’

From the inner darkness someone asked: ‘Tiny, is that you?’

The Legionnaire lit a field lantern, which to his surprise disclosed Ewald, Aunt Dora’s Ewald.

Tiny stood up. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, you also in town?’ He turned to the Legionnaire, who still held Ewald in the cone of light from the field lantern. ‘It’s not that I’m lazy, Desert Rambler, but I’m a bit tired after trudging around with that traitor bunch. As soon as I’ve had some sleep I’m going to give Ewald the thrashing that’s coming to him.’

The Legionnaire nodded and passed the cone of light further over the many sleeping people.

Letting out a roar of rapture, Tiny dashed across the sleeping figures in the musty straw. He chanced to hit the lantern out of the Legionnaire’s hand so the light went out.

From the darkness we heard him grunt and shout with joy: ‘Hell’s blazes, what luscious tomatoes!’

We could hear him romping around between cursing soldiers and stepping on them. Then, a piercing shriek from a woman and a moment later. Tiny’s ecstatic yell:

‘I’ve a roast on my fork. Ah, what sweets!’

Several women started protesting.

‘Hurry up and get here, boys. A traveling whorehouse has settled here!’

A lantern was lit. It was a captain, we saw. He gave Tiny a regular dressing-down.

What Tiny had taken for a traveling brothel was a unit of Red Cross nurses and telephone operators from the Air Force. Tiny was inconsolable. We almost had to use force to keep him down. Lieutenant Ohlsen was able to quiet the captain, who swore he would report Tiny for attempted rape.

Shortly after midnight we were waked up by a trampling of officious boots. Field lanterns flashed, Brutal voices called for service records and marching orders.

The heavily armed head-hunters stood before us like rocks. Their crescent badges gleamed ominously in the dark. An enemy machine-gun post wasn’t as dangerous as this badge.

Terror spread. An Ivan could be reasoned with, not a German head-hunter. He was the incarnation of all evil and brutality.

After a short while they had their first victim. An artillery NCO. He put up a violent resistance, screaming:

‘Leave me alone. Let me go! Comrades, why don’t you let me go! You aren’t going to kill me, are you?’ He was silent for a moment, then moaned softly: ‘Comrades, you must try to understand me! I’ve children, I’ve three children. My wife was killed in an air attack. I have to get home to the children. I’ll be sure to come back!’

‘Shut up, you swine,’ marked a head-hunter sergeant. His crescent badge emitted twinkling Morse sparks. The signal for death.

The artillery NCO suddenly went crazy. He ran completely wild.

‘Let me go, you dirty bastards, you filthy comrade-killers!’ He kicked and laid about him savagely. ‘I don’t want to die! I’ve three children. With no mother. I don’t want to die!’

But this sort of thing was an everyday occurrence to the head-hunters. Without comment they started beating him. One of them gave the NCO a kick in the groin that made him double up with a hoarse roar. For a moment he was lying on the ground like a bundle of rags. Suddenly he jumped up and rushed at the nearest head-hunter, who was pushed over by the unexpected attack.

Fear of death lent the artillery NCO the strength of a wild beast. He bit the head-hunter in the face and bellowed like an animal.

Other head-hunters rushed to the aid of their comrade in distress. With the butts of their sub-machine guns they pounded away at the artillery NCO. His face was a mushy, bloody mass of tears and groans.

They threw him on a truck which stood outside the barn, then calmly continued their patrol.

A sergeant major examined our papers with painstaking thoroughness. ‘Panzer Regiment of the Army to be used for special assignments,’ he muttered. He looked at the Legionnaire and gave Tiny a crushing glance. His eyes roved to me and the East Prussian, then fixed Stein watchfully.

‘H’m, so you have made a slight detour, you tired heroes, eh? Looks like illegal departure from a battle unit!’

Cold shivers ran down our spines. We knew that a drumhead court-martial wouldn’t listen to excuses. They were very busy, at the flying court-martials. After a ten-minute hearing you were dragged before a firing squad or hanged from a tree.

‘Last unit, you tramps?’ he growled, glaring at us.

‘Reserve Army Hospital 19, Hamburg,’ the Legionnaire rapped out.

‘And now you’re here, you corpse-robbers! So you’ve been on a little pleasure trip on the Russian lakes? You probably assumed that the war was about to end, eh?’ He pointed at the door and called to an NCO standing with his sub-machine gun at the ready: ‘Here, look after this pack of swine. Suspected of desertion! Get out, on the double!’

The thought,
It’s all over
, flashed through my mind. From the corner of my eye I looked at Tiny and the Legionnaire. They were pale, but seemed indifferent as they trotted out of the building, prodded by a brutal head-hunter NCO.

They ordered us into a truck. Its tarp had just been daubed with fresh camouflage paint.

Right behind us stumbled two telephone operators.

‘Make room for the ladies,’ a head-hunter grinned. He aimed a jet of tobacco juice at the face of one of them.

When she wanted to turn her head, he roared frantically: ‘Keep your neck straight, you bitch! There are others who will turn it for you, take my word for it!’

Four nurses came running out. One of them fell as a sergeant tripped her. Another MP kicked her in the back. She screamed loudly.

A murmur rose from the truck.

‘Shut up, you deserter swine,’ yelled a lieutenant with the head-hunter badge twinkling gaily on his breast.

Aunt Dora’s Ewald howled as he was dragged to the truck by two large MPs.

The Legionnaire whispered: ‘
Bon
. The whole German Army seems to have decamped. It can’t take long now before it’s over and Ivan comes to pick us up. Then I’ll immediately join the Russian Army in order to be permitted to shoot head-hunters.’

An NCO with tin badge flashing from his breast peered into the truck but couldn’t see anything. He contented himself with yapping: ‘Shut your traps, you sons of bitches!’

Three trucks crammed with the catch of the head-hunters were driven to the former GPU prison in the center of town. Here we were received with blows and kicks.

All cells were filled. Curses and prayers ricocheted from the gray, damp walls.

A little tank gunner was shouting his hatred of Hitler, Himmler, the war, and Stalin. He promised a huge MP in the corridor that he’d break his neck if he dared come in to him.

One of the army’s telephone operators tore off every stitch of clothing and offered herself to the head-hunter in the corridor.

‘Come in here and I’ll give you everything you want if you’ll only let me go afterward,’ she whispered confidentially.

A Russian peasant girl who had to count on getting shot because she had sheltered two deserters yelled fanatically: ‘Long live Stalin! Long live the Soviet Union! Death to Hitler!’

‘And to you, you bitch,’ the MP answered.

On the opposite side of the corridor knelt a captain, praying silently.

I don’t know in how many places God is invoked, but His name was cried out everywhere in the last war. In hundreds of prisons the prisoners implored Him for mercy. I’ve heard a divisional general pray to God for help against the panzer columns of the Russians when his anti-tank regiments gave up.

Adolf Hitler shouted God’s name in his speeches and prayed for His protection of the Pan-German Reich, at the same time as his SS units were hanging priests in the liquidation camps. These priests, in their turn, called out God’s name, making it reverberate among the desolate, lice-infested barracks till their cries were stifled by the rope.

SS men who were found with robbed gold teeth in their pockets and were sentenced to death by one of the many court-martials blubbered to God for help. They meant of course that He should help them get into the SS uniform again.

But God was deaf. He didn’t hear the condemned in the GPU prison. He didn’t hear the priests under the gallows in the liquidation camp. He didn’t help the general against the T-34s. He didn’t relieve the pains of the amputee case in an army hospital.

God was deaf.

There was a good deal of truth in what the little Legionnaire said: ‘A loaded tommy gun and a brace of hand grenades is better than a couple of Bibles and a chaplain.’

One by one they were hauled before the court-martial, which sat in the office of the former GPU boss.

Everybody was showered with the same words: name, age, detachment. A brief whisper among the three judges and a rustle of papers. Exactly sixty seconds. Then the little judge in flashing rimless glasses rapped out the next question.

‘Do you have anything to say in your defense?’

But before the accused had managed to get properly started, the judge would interrupt.

‘Rubbish, we know all about that.’

Again some whispering between the three of them. A stamp was slammed down on some papers. Then the presiding judge banged his rubber-stamp signature to the whole thing.

‘In the name of the Führer and the German people: Sentenced to death by firing squad. Next!’

Again and again. Hour after hour. The leaders of the Third Reich thought they could thus win a war.

At the other end of the corridor, where the stairs ascended, was heard a hoarse whisper: ‘In single file after me!’

The firing squad had arrived.

With lightning speed they tore open a cell door, chosen at random. The prisoners could never guess whose turn it would now be.

A nurse past fifty had to be carried out into the yard. She threw herself down and refused to get up. Then they tied her to a clothes post, hands raised high above her head. Three short commands. Twelve shots crashed.

The next one was brought out to the little yard.

The same routine, with short pauses, the whole day and night. Every other hour the firing squad was replaced with a new crew.

They dragged out the Captain by his legs. He seized hold of every iron bar, every railing. Each time they kicked his hands, till finally they were a pair of bloody stumps of meat.

He bellowed like a wounded bull. They shot him lying down.

Ewald shrieked insanely when they came for him. Somehow he slipped away from them and ran a race through the different floors. Finally he leapt over the railing on the fourth floor and fractured both legs as he landed at the bottom of the shaft.

They lashed him to the clothes post and shot him.

The truck driver who was to go to Cologne, but had lost all his papers when his vehicle burnt, walked out to the twelve shots under the clothes post as if drugged.

Two days later he was reported missing by his regiment, but then it was too late.

Before the five of us came before the court-martial, the head-hunters, to their great chagrin, had to let us go. Lieutenant Ohlsen had appeared with papers from the regiment which proved that we were under his command and were not deserters.

We were marched off toward Drubny, where the regiment stood.

Without taking aim, the strange sergeant fired a volley at the invisible opponent by the forest.

The answer was a shower of bullets. They whipped up the dust round the hole we were lying in.

Again the sergeant pressed home the trigger and emptied his magazine into the brush.

‘Ass,’ the Legionnaire growled. He tore the sub-machine gun out of the nervous infantry sergeant’s hands. ‘You don’t shoot like that!’

The Legionnaire crawled out of the hole, pressing to the ground like a partridge. He raised the sub-machine gun and blazed concentrated fire against every single bush.

A couple of figures in the brush stood up and tried to run off, but the Legionnaire’s well-directed bullets got them. He changed the magazine and fired again.

XIII

Back at the Front

In number 5 Company we were received by First Sergeant Barth, nicknamed ‘Fatty.’ Tiny later altered it to ‘Fatso.’

He examined us carefully with his small spiteful eyes under the large irregular cavalry cap with which he adorned himself like an officer. His eyes moved from left to right and back again from right to left.

What he saw apparently worried him. Sulky wrinkles appeared on his round pig’s face. He resembled a spoiled child just before he starts bawling and smacks his fist into his bowl of gruel. He thrust out his fleshy lower lip and played with a notebook peering out between the third and fourth button of his coat.

He nodded as if his worst suspicions had been confirmed. He huffed himself up before the East Prussian and asked gruffly: ‘What’s your name?’

‘Otto Bülow.’

‘Ah, really? Maybe you’re an admiral in the U-boat fleet of Lichtenstein?’

‘Nah,’ the East Prussian answered good-humoredly, ‘I’m a corporal.’

‘For Christ’s sake, really?’ Fatty whispered. ‘And I suppose, my honorable Herr Corporal that I am only a pailful of trench dirt?’ Fatty pushed his big head right up to the East Prussian’s face and waited for an answer.

‘Nah, you are first sergeant.’

‘You bet I’m first sergeant, you caveman. Your bad luck, you bag of monkey puke. What are you? What’s your name?’ He bellowed the last words into the face of the short stocky East Prussian. His voice rang against the dismal peasant huts and ripped at the gray depressing fog.

‘Herr First Sergeant, Corporal Otto Bülow reports as ordered to Number 5 Company of 27th Regiment after being discharged from Reserve Army Hospital 19, Hamburg.’

‘Lie down!’ Fatty snarled. He fired the words at the East Prussian, who lightning-quick threw himself in the mire and went into regular guard position, with both heels pressed against the ground.

Fatty examined him carefully, stepped on his rear and yelled: ‘Down into the dirt, all the way, you flat-footed water rat!’

Then he towered up before the little Legionnaire, but even before he could say anything the Legionnaire clicked his heels and crowed in the manner typical of veteran soldiers: