Legion of the Damned (32 page)

"Can you remember when Adolf screeched on the radio: 'If I want to conquer Stalingrad, it is not because I like the name, but because it is necessary that this important nerve center in the Russian river traffic be taken from the enemy, and I shall take Stalingrad when I consider the time is ripe!' And a few weeks later, when the whole Sixth Army was captured, how the idiot stood up and shouted, to the wild applause of his imbecile Party members: 'When I saw the pointlessness of taking Stalingrad, which has no significance whatever for the ultimate victory of our troops, I gave orders for a temporary withdrawal!' People cheered that speech. One hundred and eighty thousand, however, could not be withdrawn. They were annihilated in the fighting for Stalingrad, the 'unimportant.'"

"Tchah!" I replied. "We can see the swindle; but what can one penal regiment do against sixty to seventy million bawling people who cannot see anything because they do not wish to? Rather die than lose the war, that's what they are saying today, when the war is already lost. What they mean is: rather let others die than that we lose our lives. I heard a woman in Berlin say that even if there was just one single German regiment left at the front Germany would win, provided that regiment was the SS Leibstandarte!"

"The women are the worst of all," said von Barring. "The Lord preserve me from fanatical women. But to hell with it all. Hitler has lost the war, but whether we two will see the glorious collapse is a different matter. It will be our turn soon. Fancy just living on the hope that the whole thing will go bust as soon as possible! Let's drink, Sven, that's the only thing for us to do."

"Let's drink to a speedy meeting with a pretty woman. Fanatical or not, it's all the same to me."

"Yes, they are all the same on their backs: an amenity. If only they weren't such a damned oppressed lot that you cannot even talk with, because they have never learned to do anything but lie on their backs and say 'yes' and 'amen' to everything you suggest. Have you ever met a woman who had an opinion of her own?"

The jangling ring of the field telephone interrupted us. It was to tell me that I was being sent to Lvov to fetch forty precious tanks, possibly the last the army could rake together.

That trip to Lvov had to be postponed, however, as the Russians chose that moment to attack and gave us plenty to do for the next week.

One day von Barring came to my dugout while making his inspection. He stood and looked about him with dull gaze.

"Now I can't be bothered any more," said he and went.

I hurried out after him.

Outside my dugout he began firing off Very lights of all colors, so that our guns did not know what was wanted. We overpowered him, tied him up and carried him back to the dugout. He kept shouting in a hoarse, rattling voice, and he just stared straight in front of him, his eyes wide with terror, a terror that only he felt, but that we others could imagine only too well:

"At your service, your majesty! Majesty Hitler, ha, ha, ha! Oberstleutnant von Barring of the Regiment of Death reporting for duty in hell. Here with the establishment's best pitchforks, your majesty! The murderer von Barring reports for duty, Majesty Hitler!"

I stuck my fingers in my ears so as not to hear his laughter. When I saw that he was on the point of causing a general panic among those in the dugout, where everyone was staring as though hypnotized at the madman, I had to knock him out.

Now, of the Regiment of Death only Hinka and I were left. Von Barring, who once, so young and friendly and filled with genuine kindness of heart, had stood up for us when we suffered under the swine Meier had now broken under the strain.

Sometime later, when Hinka and I were on a brief duty journey, we stopped at Giessen and went to the army mental hospital there, where von Barring was. He was strapped to his bed and grinned idiotically without recognizing us. Saliva ran down his chin and he was a loathsome sight even to us, his friends. When we were in the train again we were so shaken that neither of us dared speak for a long time. Finally Hinka gave a nervous--no, a desperate laugh and said:

"So we aren't as hardened as we thought."

"No," I replied. "It was horrible."

"In case that happens to either of us--shouldn't we agree to help each other out of it?"

He held out his hand.