Comrades of War (47 page)
Authors: Sven Hassel
An air-raid siren started wailing in shrill treble.
They half got up and for a moment listened closely to the infernal concert sweeping over the city.
Then they fell back into each other’s arms again.
‘It’s the English,’ she said. ‘They always come in the daytime.’
‘Is it?’ he said and kissed her.
They could hear airplanes high up.
‘How can they really find Berlin in such weather?’ she asked, listening for the droning engines.
‘I don’t know, but they do,’ he answered.
She nodded. They did.
The bombs started exploding. The windowpanes rattled.
‘Should we go to the basement?’ Lieutenant Ohlsen asked.
‘No, it’s disgusting,’ she said. ‘Damp and nasty. Let’s stay here.’
They made love again. Then they fell asleep, closely embraced and exhausted.
When they woke up it was evening.
It was still raining.
They drank, ate, and made more love. They suddenly felt very young.
Next morning her sister came. She worked in the office of the SD. She was always saying: ‘What crap.’ She said it so often that Lieutenant Ohlsen got fed up with her.
‘I suppose the two of you have been playing house in the dark,’ she laughed. ‘What crap it all is. What if you got children. Heavens, what crap.’ She walked into the kitchen, where she began clattering with pots and pans. ‘They are preparing a new prosecution,’ she called into the room. She put her head through the door. ‘It’s secret. What crap. They’ll nab the last of the Talmuds. A whole regiment of SS boys have come from Poland and the Sudetenland. One of them, an SD-
U-Scharführer
, snatched me in the toilet. He apparently thinks that Central Security is a brothel. Well, it is one,’ she added. She dropped an egg. ‘What crap,’ she fumed and kicked the shell.
‘Alice is a pig,’ the girl said to Lieutenant Ohlsen, ‘but she’s kind enough. You can say anything to her. She is not a squealer. She has covered up for a Jew beside us here, and she also covered up for a colonel. But she wouldn’t help Robert. She can’t stand deserters. She says they’re cowards.’
Lieutenant Ohlsen shrugged his shoulders. When all is said and done those who didn’t desert were probably the greatest cowards. Because, if they all went back home the war would be over.
‘Would you be able to desert?’ she asked.
‘Who has deserted now?’ Alice called from the kitchen. She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Don’t you have a dishcloth?’ she called. ‘Well, here it is. God, what crap.’
‘I don’t think I’d dare,’ he said.
‘It must really be very bad on the Eastern Front. Aren’t you ever afraid?’ She stroked his cheek.
‘Yes, I’m always afraid, but if you stay, you have a chance. If you desert and you’re caught you have no chance at all. Then you’re tied to a post in Senne or Morellenschlucht.’
‘Do they shoot many?’ She was leaning on her elbow and looking down at him.
He nodded. ‘Incredibly many.’
‘Are you setting out again soon?’
‘Tomorrow,’ he answered.
She sighed and kissed him. Her lips were full and swelling like the river Inn in the spring.
Alice brought in the food. She looked them over carefully.
‘You can probably do something about it. Heinz will be coming this evening and then we’ll do something about it.’
They drank cognac and beer with their food. Anything was drinkable if you only could get it, and Alice could get a lot of things. She stole them. But she knew that the others also stole, and they knew she knew. Therefore she stole openly.
‘Alice, you’ve no morals,’ her sister said. ‘You can’t be sitting here facing my friend in your underwear.’
‘You can see yourself I can,’ Alice answered breezily. ‘Morals, pooh, what crap!’
Heinz came rumbling up the stairs like someone who knows he is entitled to rumble.
‘Hi, girl, here’s throat-wash and coffee.’ He laughed boisterously. He was an SS
Unterscharführer
. He was drunk when he arrived. He completely overlooked Lieutenant Ohlsen’s service rank, called him ‘Fritz.’ Lieutenant Ohlsen didn’t care.
They drank and feasted. At last they went to bed.
Alice squealed rapturously. Heinz laughed. He was the perfect peasant lover, a wild bull let loose in a cowshed.
Next morning Lieutenant Ohlsen left. He took off very early. He stole away without waking any of the others. He didn’t even have an idea what the girl’s name was.
He went to Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse. The platform swarmed with soldiers on leave who were going back to the front. Some were with relatives, but most were alone. People preferred to avoid leave-takings on railways stations. Little by little it became too reminiscent of a funeral.
He walked up and down on the platform.
Asinine, he thought. To go back before your leave is up.
‘Why in heaven’s name don’t you go out to Charlottenburg?’ a railwayman asked a group of soldiers. ‘It’s much easier to get a seat there. That’s where the train is set up.’
An old non-commissioned officer sitting on his pack laughed mockingly.
‘Nah, one should do exactly the opposite. One should go to Schlesischer Bahnhof.’
‘I can’t see that,’ the railwayman said. ‘That’s the last station in Berlin. The train is always chock-full when it gets there.’
‘Precisely because of that,’ laughed a corporal lying full-length on the wet platform with a gas-mask container under his head. ‘You can’t get on the train at Schlesischer Bahnhof. And so you go to the station master, get your leave papers stamped and you’ve gained one day.’
A subway train came roaring in, crammed with soldiers.
The old NCO pointed at it with a laugh.
‘Look at all those who are going to try it. I’m ready to bet anything you want that this train will empty out on Schlesischer Bahnhof. But we have to be off anyway. We played it yesterday. If we try again today the head-hunters will nab us, and then it takes some luck to escape being clamped against a wall for cowardice.’
Half a score of soldiers came rushing up the stairs, storming toward the subway train.
‘They’re in a hurry,’ the NCO laughed. ‘They spurt to the finish like well-greased lightning.’
‘Doesn’t stop before Schelsischer Bahnhof,’ called a conductor running alongside the train.
The soldiers grinned.
‘Suits us fine. The sooner we’ll be home again.’
The railwayman who had recommended Charlottenburg looked at the crammed subway train in amazement.
‘The Führer will never win the war with a gang like this.’ He walked away shocked.
A panzer-jäger first lieutenant walked up to Lieutenant Ohlsen and greeted him familiarly.
‘Have you tried the trip over Schlesischer?’
‘Nah,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen answered apathetically.
‘My dear friend, it means an extra day of leave.’
‘I can’t take the trouble,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen smiled.
The panzer-jäger officer retreated quickly. Nazi or ass, he thought. Probably both. He walked over to two infantry lieutenants, one of whom shortly disappeared into the subway train.
‘It won’t take long till we can take the subway to the front,’ an old staff corporal growled. He spat at a poster with the ostentatious text: ‘
Räder rollen für den Sieg
.’
A warning whistle from an artillery sergeant.
‘Watch out, the enemy is listening.’
Steel helmets flashed. Three head-hunters strolled along the platform. Suspicious, malevolent eyes glared from under glistening helmets.
The leave train for the front came roaring in. It stopped with wheels shrieking.
The soldiers poured in. Shouts and screams. Cursing and bitching.
‘
Zurücktreten. Zug färht ab!
’
The train rolled slowly through Berlin. It rolled across the Spree. One had a glimpse of Alexander platz with the police presidium, where hundreds of prisoners were sitting in detention prison waiting for their savage sentences.
On Schlesischer Bahnhof there was a mad crush. Only a few got on. The line by the station master’s office grew steadily. It was a line with happy faces. Some had been bold enough to make an appointment with their relatives right outside the cordon.
A long whistle. Then the loudspeakers blared warning calls.
The train drove on. It drove toward the East.
Every single compartment was crammed with people on their way to slaughter.
They still had the experiences of two wonderful weeks in their blood. But now other things awaited them. Drum-fire. Panzer attack. Hand-to-hand combat. Blood. Mud. Mutilation. Death. Words, words, words, but what didn’t they contain of inconceivable horror!
Lieutenant Ohlsen sat in a corner. He huddled up under his coat. He tried to sleep, but the others played cards, drank and told dirty stories.
Lieutenant Ohlsen wept. He wept silently. He wept for the boy he had lost. He wept because he was completely alone.
And yet! He was not completely alone. He had the gang out there, his gang.
He saw them before him: The Old Man, the fixed point, The little Legionnaire. Joseph Porta, Tiny, big and stupid. And all the others in the gang.
As the train rolled through Germany, the Russians completed their troop concentration behind the lines. They were ready for the greatest offensive the world had ever seen.
Porta, Tiny and a Russian infantryman sat in a deep shell hole shooting craps. They had tossed their sub-machine guns into a corner of the hole. All three of them had been caught behind the lines while on patrol. Tiny had already lost a bottle of vodka to the Russian when the front came alive and to their annoyance interrupted the game.
Two hundred and sixty-three infantry divisions and eighty-five panzer divisons rolled forward to the attack.
THE END
A WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON EBOOK
First published in Danish in 1960 under the title
Frontkammerater
First published by in Great Britain in 1968 by Corgi
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books
Copyright © Grafisk Forlag 1960
The right of Sven Hassel to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 2978 6581 0
Orion Books
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
