Legion of the Damned (5 page)

We, the immaculate, felt like hunted animals. We knew that whatever happened we were going to get it in the neck. The most paradoxical thing about the whole performance was that if the Hauptfeldwebel could not find anything over which to catch us out, he was furious, and one or other of us immaculate soldiers would catch it worse than ever. Woe betide him who catches it in the neck over nothing--he catches it ten-fold. It is not easy to do right in such a situation.

"Front rank one step forward--rear rank one step backward-- MARCH!"

One--TWO.

For two long minutes after the ranks have opened, the Hauptfeldwebel stands watching. He who sways even slightly catches it for refusing obedience. But we have learned to turn ourselves into pieces of wood and, as such, can stand without moving for half an hour at a time. It is a sort of trance or catalepsy to be able to achieve which is worth untold gold to the soldier who knows the value of being able to stand and just be a piece of wood.

The Hauptfeldwebel roars: "Is all ready for inspection?" The company replies in chorus: "Yes, Herr Hauptfeldwebel."

"No one forgotten to clean something?"

Chorus:"No, Herr Hauptfeldwebel."

He glares at us ferociously. Now he has us.

"You don't say so," he says ironically. "It's the first time in the history of this battalion, if it's true. But that we shall have to see."

Slowly he approaches the first piece of wood, walks round it once or twice; circling your opponent without saying a word is a very effective form of the warfare of nerves. The back of your neck grows hot and your hands become clammy and the thoughts in your head start whirling round hysterically in all directions but their natural ones. You stand stock still and work yourself into a state of nervous breathlessness, and you suddenly feel that you stink both figuratively and in actual fact.

"Yes, yes--that we shall have to see," he repeats behind the third man in the front rank.

There is dead silence while he inspects number four and number five. Then comes a bellow: "No. 3 Company--shun!" which is followed by the usual flow of verbal filth. We said of the Hauptfeldwebel that he could not talk filth without saying filth first; perhaps a poor witticism, but we were easily satisfied on that score--and it is at least a good description of this brutal, thoroughly unhealthy petit bourgeois who had been given a small share of the sweets of power.

"What the hell is this, you -- company. You can't have done anything yesterday but dipped each other in -- . Wallowing in a dung heap, that's something for a herd of swine like you. I have looked at five men now, and they all resemble pimps born of syphilitic harlots and delivered with forceps. . ."

It was not human speech but a stinking effusion. One of the brute's favorite expressions was "the French disease." He himself had the Prussian disease in an advanced degree, that pitiful urge to humiliate. It is a disease, and one not confined to penal battalions; it has permeated the whole German Army, where it is like a plague of boils. And in each boil you can be pretty sure of finding an NCO, a man who is something without being much.

We are now given the regulation punishment drill, which lasts about three hours. The finale is a long ditch several feet deep and half-full of fermenting mud with a rather yellowish, greasy scum on the surface. We have to scrape it from our eyes each time the order "prone" sends us to the bottom. Then it is dinnertime. We march back to the barracks and gulp down our food as we are. Then we have to get busy, for we must be, spick and span once more when we fall in for afternoon drill in half an hour's time.

We wash our uniforms and ourselves by the simple expedient of standing fully dressed under the shower. Our rifles and other equipment must first be washed, then carefully dried with a rag and finally oiled. The barrel has to be cleaned carefully. The normal soldier does his equipment thus thoroughly once, perhaps twice a week, if there has been an especially dirty exercise. We have to do it a couple of times a day.

When we fall in after this, our uniforms, of course, are dripping wet, but that does not matter as long as they are clean.

There was only one thing we feared as much as this ghastly Monday inspection and that was the room inspection every evening at 22.00 hours. It was incredible what the duty NCO could think of to make dead-tired men do after an exhausting day.

Before the duty NCO came in each man must be lying in his bunk and naturally in the regulation position--on his back, arms along his sides on top of the blankets and feet bared for inspection. The room orderly was responsible for there being not so much as a speck of dust anywhere in the room, that all feet were as clean as those of a newborn babe and that everything in our lockers was placed and folded in accordance with the regulations. At the start of the inspection the room orderly had to report:

"Herr Unteroffizier, room orderly recruit Brand reports all in order in Room 26, complement twelve men, eleven in their bunks. The room has been properly cleaned and aired and there is nothing to report."

The duty NCO naturally did not pay any attention to that, but looked round. Woe betide the wretched room orderly if the duty NCO found the least smear, or a locker that was not fastened properly, or a pair of feet with a mere hint of a shadow.

NCO Geerner--I believe he was a real mental case--used to howl like a dog. It sounded as though he were always just on the point of bursting into tears--and, in fact, it was not unusual for him to weep real tears of rage. When he was on duty we scrubbed and washed and tidied everything feverishly. I remember one unfortunate evening when Schnitzius was room orderly. Schnitzius was the room's scapegoat, good-natured as the day is long, but so hopelessly undertalented that he was the self-appointed victim of every one of his superiors from the Stabsfeldwebel down.

Schnitzius was as nervous as the other eleven of us who lay there waiting for Geerner wondering what we had forgotten. We could hear Geerner in one of the other rooms. It sounded as though all the bunks and lockers were being kicked to matchwood, and in between we heard his screeching, howling and sobbing voice: mangy swine, curs, etc. We blenched, pale as we already were. Geerner was in real form. He would be properly warmed up by the time he got to Room 26. We jumped out of our bunks and went over the whole room again, but we could find nothing.

The door flew open with a bang.

Oh, if only someone else than Schnitzius had been room orderly, someone with a little more gumption!

Schnitzius stood there rigid and deathly pale, quite short-circuited. He could only stare at Geerner with terrified eyes. Geemer reached him in one bound, and from a distance of two inches roared at him:

"What the hell, man! Am I to wait all night for you to report?"

Schnitzius got his report made in a quavering voice.

"All in order?" snorted Geerner. "You're making a false report!"

"No, Herr Unteroffizier," replied Schnitzius, his voice trembling, while he slowly turned round on his heel so that he kept facing Geerner as the latter prowled round the room, peering and looking.

For some minutes all was silent as the grave. We lay in our bunks, our eyes following Geerner as he walked slowly round looking for dust. He raised up the table and wiped under each of the legs. No dirt. He examined the soles of our boots. Clean. The windows and the lamp cord. Nothing. He glared at our feet as though he would drop dead if he did not find something to object to.

In the end he stood and surveyed the room with mournful, intent gaze. It really looked as though he was not going to be able to get us this time. He was exactly like someone whose girl has not turned up at the rendezvous and who thus must go home and to bed with himself and his fearful, unsatisfied longings.

He was just shutting the door behind him when he spun round on his heel.

"All in order, you said? I wonder."

In one great bound he was beside our coffeepot, a large aluminum pot holding three gallons. Each evening it had to be polished bright and filled with clean water, and that it was so Geerner had regretfully discovered a moment before. But now we realized-- and our hearts missed a beat--that Geerner had thought of something new.

He stood and peered at the surface of the water from the side. It was impossible to avoid a few grains of dust settling on the water once it had been standing for some minutes.

Geerner's howl was fantastic.

"Call this clean water! Who the hell is the filthy pig who filled this pot with --? Come here, you dung-covered splashboard!"

Geerner mounted a chair and Schnitzius had to hand the can to him.

"'Shun! Head back! Open your gob!"

Slowly the can was emptied into Schnitzius' mouth. He was almost suffocated. When the can was empty the insane NCO flung it at the wall, then he rushed out of the room and we heard him making a clatter in the washroom and a tap being turned on. Shortly afterward he flung a bucket of water into the room. When he had sent us six pailfuls, we were told to dry it up. Having only a couple of ragged floor cloths, it took some time before the floor was dry.

He repeated that joke four times before it palled. Then Unteroffizier Geerner went comforted to bed, and we were left in peace.

Furor germanicus
is what the old Romans called the special kind of battle madness they encountered when waging war with the tribes north of the Alps. May it be some slight comfort to the Romans and to the other hard-tried enemies of the Germans to know that the Germans are as demented in dealing with themselves as with their neighbors.

Furor germanicus
--the German or Prussian disease.

Geerner was a poor NCO, a diseased wretch who had to content himself with rendezvous with dust.

Peace be with him.

The commandant thereupon handed the company over to the chaplain. "No. 3 Company--for prayers--KNEEL!" roared the chaplain.

Our training ended with an exercise that lasted seven days and sleepless nights. It took place on a huge training area called Sennelager. There they had built whole villages, bridges, railway lines, all complete except for the inhabitants, and there we had to fight our way through tangled undergrowth, bogs and rivers, over swaying bridges that were just laid loosely across deep chasms.

That, perhaps, sounds romantic, like playing red Indians on a large scale; but we lost a man while we played. He fell off one of the unsteady bridges and broke his neck.

One of the games consisted of digging holes in the ground just deep enough for us to be below the surface when we curled up in them; whereupon heavy tanks came up and drove over the holes while we cowered in them shaking with fear.

This "thrill" was immediately followed by another. We had to fling ourselves flat on the ground and let the tanks drive over us. We felt the steel bottom of the tank brush our backs, while the heavy caterpillars clattered past to right and left.

We were to be hardened to tank shock.

At any rate we were scared, and that is the normal thing. The German soldier is brought up on fear, trained to react like a machine through sheer terror, not to fight bravely because he is fired by a great ideal that makes it seem obvious to sacrifice himself if the need arise. Perhaps you could call this moral inferiority the characteristic feature of the Prussian mentality and the chronic ill of the German people.

The day after the end of this exercise we took the oath of allegiance. For this the company formed up along three sides of a square into the middle of which a tank drove, and on either side of this a machine gun was placed. As soon as this neat little tableau was arranged the commandant appeared, accompanied by his adjutant and the chaplain, who, to make the occasion more solemn, was got up in all his trappings.

The commandant then made a speech:

"Men of the Prussian Army! Your training is now complete. In a short while you will be attached to various field regiments like grenadiers, antitank, fusiliers, scouts or even a home defense unit. But no matter where you are sent, you must do your duty. You are outcasts, but if you show that you are brave and courageous, the day may perhaps come when the great Fuhrer will take you back into favor again. You are now to take the old oath of allegiance, the oath you have once forsworn, but I am sure that from now on, and for the rest of your lives, it will bind you in loyalty to your country. I expect of each one of you that you will never again forget your oath and your duty to our ancient land and our great people, your duty to the Fuhrer and our God."

Shortly after that we all kneeled, removed our steel helmets and folded our hands over the muzzles of our rifles. It must have looked very moving, just the stuff for a newsreel. The chaplain then spoke a short prayer to the great, almighty and, of course, German God, who would bring the Nazis victory. The idiot did not actually use the word Nazis, but what else could he have meant when he said:

"Almighty God, our Lord, show us Thy greatness and goodness and grant to German arms victory over our barbarian enemies."

Their barbarian enemies, mark you, being peoples who had bred men like Ibsen and Nansen, Hans Andersen, Rembrandt and Spinoza, Voltaire and Rene Clair, Tchaikovski and Gorki, Shakespeare and Dickens, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Dreiser, Chopin and Copernicus, Socrates and Homer, and women like Florence Nightingale and Emmeline Pankhurst, Marion Anderson: and Mrs. Roosevelt, Marie and Irene Curie, Catherine II, Joan of Arc, Isak Dinesen, the Bronte sisters, Anna Pavlova.

After that he blessed the weapons with which we were to exterminate barbary, but I do not think that helped. For a miserable little priest to stand up and make the sign of the cross at a great tank can scarcely be very effective magic even if you believe in magic, which I cannot. At the most you might imagine such a creature bewitching small arms. And, anyway, they lost the war.

Then we took the oath. The chaplain recited it a few words at a time and the company repeated them in chorus, while one of us stood out in front of the company with three fingers touching the point of the commandant's drawn sword. That was part of the tableau.