Legion of the Damned (20 page)

"I'm not digging another teaspoonful. There are going to be no more holes in this war. Good night."

Porta, Stege and I dug for half an hour, when The Old Un and Pluto were supposed to relieve us. After a lot of bickering we got them maneuvered, grumbling, into the hole. The next couple of hours went all right, then the half-hour shift we were supposed to dig was reduced to fifteen minutes, and in the end all five of us lay on our backs, staring up into the air, unable to do any more.

But the hole had to be dug, there was no getting away from that, so after lying there for an hour The Old Un and Pluto got to their feet and the rest of us soon followed. At five o'clock next morning the hole was finished and we were able to drive the tank into it. We got our tent pitched in a trice, so that we could turn in; but being in an area where partisans were reputed to be rife, we naturally had to mount a guard. We could not agree who was to take the first turn. In the midst of our noisy squabbling The Old Un suddenly said:

"I am an unteroffizier and have no need to stand guard. You must see to that yourselves." Thereupon he rolled himself up in the blankets and was asleep.

"And I am Stabsgefreiter," said Pluto. "Good night, dear children."

"And it would make a mockery of the army if an obergefreiter demeaned himself by doing anything so filthy as sentry duty," said Porta.

That left Stege and I looking at each other.

"Don't let's do it," said I. "There aren't any partisans here."

"None at all," said Stege, outraged.

So all five of us slept.

The first to have to emerge from the tent in the morning was Stege. We wanted our coffee in bed and had drawn lots who should make it, and the job had fallen to him. Five minutes after be had got up he called out from up on the tank:

"Hurry out, the C.O.'s coming!"

We tumbled out, not wishing to be caught asleep in our tent at eleven o'clock in the morning; but it was just Stege's idea of a joke so we crawled back again and lay and shouted for coffee. In the end we got it, too, but no sooner had we finished our meal and Stege carried our mugs and jugs out again than he called out:

"Now, you'll have to come out. Hurry up! The old man and the skipper are coming. Hurry, you stupid swine, it's real this time."

But we just laughed, and Porta called back that if the C.O. wanted him Stege was to say that Porta was not at home today, which observation Porta punctuated with a thunderous fart. The Old Un followed his example.

"Come out, all of you. This is a fine business," said a voice outside, and it was the C.O.'s voice.

We tumbled out all right. As we stood at attention facing the two all-purpose vehicles that stood beside our hole, our dress was hardly what could be called regulation. The C.O. glared at us furiously. Oberleutnant von Barring's expression was unfathomable. We looked like a joke in a comic paper: The Old Un was wearing khaki shorts, socks and a shirt with dirty tails. Porta wore his drill trousers with the ends stuffed into his socks and a fiery red silk handkerchief tied round his neck. Pluto's shirt was hanging outside his trousers and he had a green scarf wound round his head like a turban.

"Are you in charge of this tank?" roared the C.O. at The Old Un, his monocle glinting ominously.

"Yes, Herr Oberst!"

"Well, what the hell are you thinking of? Am I not to have a report?"

The Old Un ran across to the C.O.'s car, smacked his heels together and in regulation fashion bellowed out into the silent steppe:

"Herr Oberst! Unteroffizier Beier reports that 1 Tank of No. 2 Section has nothing special to mention."

The C.O. went purple in the face.

"So you have nothing special to mention," said he. "But I have...." and then we got a dressing down.

Later, von Barring came back alone. "You're the most awful lot in the whole army," he said, shaking his head over us. "Surely to God you could have mounted guard the first day. You must have known the CO. would come and inspect. Now you're each getting three days in jug, to be served when you are relieved. The hole you've dug is not satisfactory and you are to dig another thirty feet farther back; and I can guarantee that the C.O. and I will be out in the course of the evening, so you would be wise to get started at once."

We sat for a long while silent after he had gone. Dig another hole? Never. But what then?

It was Stege who had the idea. "Dear little children," said he suddenly. "You should render thanks unto God that you have an intelligent man in your midst who can help you when thought is required. What we have to do is to take the old tin can and drive back to Oskol, say good day nicely and invite the Russians for a ride; as their contribution to the festivities we will ask them to bring their spades."

We rattled into the village, which lay plunged in Sunday quiet, and had no difficulty in finding more volunteers than we could use. Thus it was with a load of nearly forty men and women that we rattled back. The Russians thought it the greatest fun having a ride on a tank, and to the accompaniment of much singing and joking the new hole was dug in two hours, even though they kept throwing down their spades and starting to play and sing or dance, kicking up a cloud of dust. We were so occupied with this new type of Sunday entertainment that no one noticed Oberleutnant von Barring arrive. He stood and watched the gay gathering in some amazement. Then he shook his head:

"You don't get bored, I must say," said he; then, with another shake of his head, he drove off again. Later, in the evening, we drove those gay Russians back to their village. Porta had found a couple of girls and had them almost hanging round his neck, so it was not at all easy to drag him away.

Was it unpatriotic of those Russians to help us against their fellow countrymen? I suppose it was. But I am not certain that what they did was not more effective than the efforts of either the partisans or the regular troops. Such acts of fraternization did more than anything else to make the German private fed up with the war. I know of many who were well and truly cured of their belief in the idiotic myth of the Master Race through discovering that the "enemy" was no enemy of theirs and, still less, an inferior being. The ordinary German private extended his knowledge of men and people. Such encounters planted in him the seed of sympathetic solidarity with the ordinary people. Slowly but surely he was divorced from his sham, inflated ideals, his hysterical Fuhrer, his arrogant generals. He learned actively to hate the SS, whom before he had merely feared with an oafish, groveling fear. You have no wish to shoot at people with whom you have been dancing the day before, whether there is a war or not; so you are more than likely just to shoot up in the air, unless an officer is actually standing behind, watching you.

Smiling, he handed us our leave papers and said: "If you hurry up and get ready you can drive with me to the train. You have fourteen days' leave plus five days for traveling."

We sang and exulted; we were wild with joy. We danced to our cottage and fought for the old razor blade that we had used at least sixty times already. Porta kissed the old Russian mother fair and square on her wrinkled mouth and danced round with her, so that her slippers went flying. The old girl cackled like a hen and almost fell down, she laughed so.

"You're worse than the Cossacks." said she.

We reached gomel twenty-four hours late. The leave train for that day had already gone so we had to wait till the following day. An NCO told us that hell had broken loose up at the front. Apparently the Russians were attacking along a line that stretched from Kalinin to the Don basin, and they had managed to break through in several places.

"We've been bloody lucky, and just got away in time," said Porta.

The Old Un shook his head. There was a worried expression on his face. "Don't forget that in a fortnight we'll have to go back into it, and it's scarcely likely to be any better by then."

"Oh, shut up, you old wet blanket," said Stege. "You're a crazy old chap. A whole fortnight at home with Mother. The war can be over before we get back."

We spent most of the night elaborating on what we were going to do when we got home. I thought of Ursula's firm, rounded body, remembered the hug of her arms and the way her hands traveled down my back. I became silent and expectant.

Our train was supposed to go at 18.40, but we were already on the platform by five o'clock. We felt like kings as we held out our leave papers for the military police to see. We found a good place in the train. Porta and Pluto climbed onto the luggage racks to sleep there, and we three removed our boots and made ourselves Comfortable. Gradually the whole train filled with noisy soldiers going on leave. They lay down on the floors of the compartments and of the corridors. Schnapps bottles went the rounds and the sound of music and singing came from more than one compartment. Porta produced his flute and played the tune of a forbidden song and that set us off and we bawled out our whole repertoire of forbidden and dirty songs. Nobody appeared to object. We old sweats sang what we liked. If anyone had tried to say anything he would have been flung out of the window without further comment. We cheered as the train moved off.

Sometime in the night the train stopped in the station at Mogilev. Quiet had descended upon us by then and most were asleep and dreaming of their leave. For many it was the first for several years.

There was a jerk and the train began to move; but it only went a short distance and then stopped again. Shortly afterward we heard shouts coming from one of the carriages and almost simultaneously the doors of ours were flung open and a couple of helmeted military policemen stumped in, calling:

"Everybody out and take your equipment. All leave is canceled. The Russians have broken through and you are to be formed into a temporary reserve battalion and sent in."

There was a dreadful commotion. We called and shouted, all at the same time, and told the policemen to buzz off with their bad jokes.

But, unfortunately, it was not a joke. Sleepy and furious, we had to form up in the open space in front of the station: gunners and tank crews on the left, the others on the right: infantry, airmen, marines, no matter what, all on the right. Our leave papers were taken from us, and then came the order:

"Column--by the right--right turn--quick--MARCH!"

All night we struggled along. The going was heavy with snow and an icy wind blew in our faces. We still could not believe that this incredibly filthy trick could be true. You do not play such tricks on a soldier, do not turn him out of the train that is taking him back to a fortnight's hard-earned leave and send him marching along a confounded country road, hounding him back to the front to fight with tanks, flame throwers and shells. That destroyed the little morale or will to fight that any of us may still have possessed.

For six days we made our way forward through snow and snow and snow. Then we became engaged with enemy forces a little to the north of the village of Lischwin. The shells made such a strange plop in the snow. Slowly we yielded to the attack of the Russian infantry, who came on quite indifferent to losses. Slowly and surely our new-made formations came nearer and nearer to dissolution and obliteration. We, who had no business in the Soviet, could not stand up to these people who were determined to clear their country of us. They had the moral right, in that they really were defending themselves against an attack. To tell them they were defending themselves against an aggressor was not a device of propaganda, like those Hitler tried on us, and those people thought they could use after the war.

Our unit was called the 988th Reserve Territorial Battalion, and the joke of it was that it had everything in it from airmen and marines to home guards, but only one territorial. All sorts of shoulder tabs and patches were represented, but one thing we had in common: we all execrated the 988th Reserve Battalion and longed to get back to our own units.

East of Volkov we got involved in bitter fighting, in which the Russians sent in tanks and fighter planes. In a ruined house there in Volkov we found a red cat sitting in a cart wailing most pitiably with cold and hunger. We forced some schnapps down its throat and gave it something to eat, and when we had to leave the house we took it with us. Being red, we called it Stalin.

Stalin went through the Volkov campaign sitting in Porta's haversack. Pluto and Stege made a complete uniform, trousers, tunic and cap, which latter was tied on with a piece of thin string so that it could not fall off. Like a penal regiment's cat Stalin naturally could not wear the Nazi fowl on his chest. At first he loathed being in uniform, but gradually he got used both to it and to schnapps, and became as drunken as we. You may call that cruelty to animals, yet Stalin never left us, his fur quickly became glossy and he himself cheeky and impudent, as a cat does when all is well with its world.

By the approach of Christmas the battalion had shrunk to a single company, and then it was disbanded. We five got marching orders for Godnjo, on the Worskla River, where the 27th Tank Regiment then was. Three days later we reported to our rear HQ, and the next day we were sent up to the front line, where the tanks were. First, however, we were given our mail.

I had a whole bundle of letters from Ursula and my mother. We devoured our letters, read them again and again and finally read them out to each other, while we dreamed and longed and let each word seep down into our devout, thirsty souls. In one of her letters Ursula wrote:

Munich, December 9th, 1942.

My own darling!

I suffer with you over the beastly unfairness that has been done to you and your companions; but do not let yourself be daunted because they have stolen your leave. Hold your head high despite the bloodhounds' filthy tricks. Before we know it this nightmare will be over and the feathers plucked from the Nazi fowl, which soon all and sundry will be wearing on their chests.