March Battalion (14 page)

Lieutenant Berner was sitting on the damp flagstones, his back against the stone wall of the latrines. Next to him was a young peasant fanner, Kurt Schwartz. They sat together, but neither of them spoke. It was generally believed that Schwartz was simple, not to say downright retarded. He had been at Torgau for more than six months. Two appeals against sentence of death had already been rejected: a third one was in the process of being rejected. It was doubtful if Schwartz was even aware of them. The first eighteen years of his life had been passed more in the company of cattle than of human beings, and on being drafted into the Services he had totally failed to grasp the fact that he was now army property and no longer free to come and go as he pleased. He stayed as long as it suited him, but with the arrival of spring he knew that his first duty was to the farm, and one Friday evening he quite simply packed up his bags, shouldered his rifle and walked out. Once back at the farm he hid the rifle and the rest of his army equipment beneath a stack of potatoes in the barn and went about his daily business much as he had done before the war interrupted him. The military police had no trouble in tracing him: he had done nothing to cover his tracks. He greeted them happily, as if they were old friends come on a visit.

'Gruss Gott!'

'Heil Hitler,' replied the Feldwebel who was leading the party. 'We're looking for a Kurt Schwartz. Would that be you, by any chance?'

'Yes, that's me,' said Kurt, readily. 'What can I do for you? Whatever it is, I'm afraid I can't hang about too long, it's coming on to rain and there's a lot to be done out here.'

'Rain be damned!' retorted the Feldwebel. 'You're coming with us, and you're coming right now. There's a court martial waiting for you.'

'For me?' Kurt looked at him, puzzled. 'Why should they be waiting for me? No one's told me anything about it.' It was not until the Feldwebel lost all patience and began hitting him about and demanding to know where he had hidden his rifle that Kurt, in his turn, began vaguely to suspect that all was not well. These four men in their steel helmets filled him with a sense of unease. He wondered what he could have done to displease them. Perhaps he should not have left the barracks without first saying goodbye?

The Feldwebel became quite threatening on the subject of the lost rifle. With primitive cunning and mulish obstinacy, Kurt at once closed his mouth and kept its hiding place a secret. The Feldwebel hectored and cajoled, but Kurt remained dumb. There was talk of desertion and its dire consequences, but Kurt merely stared with blank eyes, being unable to grasp the fine degree of difference between 'absence without leave' and 'desertion', or the fact that one merely involved prison and transfer to a disciplinary regiment while the other meant death.

Now he was at Torgau waiting to be executed. Each day when Little John opened the door of his cell for the exercise period, the same conversation took place:

'Is this it?' Kurt would say.

And Little John would shake his head and reply: 'Not this time.'

And Kurt would hunch his shoulders philosophically and say:

'Ah, well. Tomorrow, perhaps?'

And Little John would agree: 'Tomorrow, perhaps.'

But they remained at cross purposes. Little John was thinking of the execution order: Kurt was thinking of his return to the farm.

Round and round the courtyard ran a blond and much decorated Oberleutnant He had been at Torgau for two months. He had lost his family, his wife and three children, during a raid on Berlin. They had been burnt alive in a cellar. Compassionate leave had been refused, so the Oberleutnant had taken matters into his own hands, forged the necessary documents and returned to Berlin. He had been picked up almost at once and it had taken a court martial barely ten minutes to reach a verdict: desertion, falsification of papers, sentenced to death.

Sitting at the top of a flight of stone steps was an elderly lieutenant-colonel, his faded blue eyes staring into the far distance. In direct defiance of orders from above, he had evacuated his regiment from an impossible situation hemmed in by Russian troops. The court martial had had no doubts on the matter: sabotage, cowardice in the face of the enemy, sentenced to death.

Rape, mutiny, murder, theft, so-called cowardice, so-called desertion - all these crimes, and many more, had been committed by the miserable inmates of Torgau,

'Do you not find it an unpleasant task,' a cavalry officer once politely asked Julius Heide, 'having to shoot people that you have come to know personally?'

'What kind of a question's that supposed to be?' grumbled Heide.

'It interests me to know. It seems to me that there's a considerable difference between fighting for your life when you're at the front - killing men you've never met, because if you don't kill them they'll almost certainly kill you - and shooting down in cold blood people you've lived with day by day over a period of months. I know you're carrying out orders, you can't do anything else but obey them, but how do you feel when the moment actually comes?'

'What a bloody fool thing to ask!' Heide was visibly disconcerted. 'What's it to you, how I feel? I don't go around asking you how you feel, do I?'

'No, but you could if you wished. I shouldn't object,' said the officer, gently. 'In fact, I don't in the least mind telling you: I'm scared stiff. Sometimes when I'm alone in my cell, just lying there wondering if it's going to be today that they come for me, I get so shit scared I can hardly stop myself from screaming... Funny thing is, I never felt that sort of fear at the front. You know you stand a good chance of dying, but--'

'Will you shut up?' demanded Heide, fiercely. 'I've got plenty enough worries of my own without hearing all yours as we11. Stop beefing, and just get this into your head: I don't know you, I never did know you, I don't want to know you.. You're nothing to me except another bloody number!'

The officer shook his head and smiled.

'You know me all right. And all the other poor devils they've got locked up here. You know us all, and you'll never forget us.'

Outside, in the courtyard, Alte blew his whistle. The precious hour was over and it was back to their cells for another day of waiting. The prisoners mutely formed up in twos, long since accustomed to the routine, but today something occurred to break the monotony: Gustav Durer, Feldwebel of the section, appeared in the doorway and brought the long column of men to a standstill. Slowly his eyes roved over them, and each prisoner shivered and did his best to hide behind his neighbour. It was generally accepted that Gustav Durer was not human. Guards and prisoners alike went in terror of him. It was said that he had a direct link with the Gestapo, and certainly it seemed as if even the Prison Governor was sometimes uneasy in his company.

'You!' Durer shot out an arm and pointed to Lindenberg. 'You over there! Come with me.'

Lindenberg's face was abruptly drained of all colour. He swayed and would have fallen but for the willing hands of his comrades. Every man there, including Alte, believed that Lindenberg was being led away to his death in the middle of the afternoon. It was the sort of trick that would delight Gustav Durer: accustom the prisoners to a routine - a visit from the Chaplain equals thirty-six hours to live - then suddenly shatter it all and create panic and uncertainty.

As Lindenberg was led off, it seemed certain to all who watched that it was the last they would see of him. It seemed no less certain to Lindenberg himself. He was unable, at first, to grasp the fact that the Stabsfeldwebel had brought him not to the firing squad but to one of the administration offices of the prison. It took him several minutes to adjust. A woman was standing in the room. A typical Party woman, tall and masculine, with an ivory complexion and hair the colour of sun bleached corn. She wore a brown uniform and carried a document case, and Lindenberg was too numb with panic to understand that she was speaking to him. With an impatient gesture, she repeated her question.

'Are you or are you not Feldwebel Hermann Lindenberg?'

'I am.' He bowed his head before her. 'Yes.'

'I have some papers for you to sign. Here, take them.' She thrust them into his unwilling hands. 'There's no necessity for me to explain them to you, you'll sign them in any case, but just for the record it's a document authorizing the State to take full control of your son and of his education.'

'What?'

Lindenberg jerked up his head and stared at the woman.. She curled back her upper lip and uncovered a row of large white teeth.

'I think you heard me ... Your wife has been found incapable of bringing up the child. No German woman who shelters a deserter and saboteur such as yourself is worthy of the honour ... I shall be glad if you'll sign at once, it will save us both a great deal of trouble.'

Lindenberg wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, mainly for something to do, something that would prevent him from striking the creature.

'If I don't sign?' he hazarded.

'You will sign. It's an order. As far as society is concerned, you and your wife have ceased to exist. The boy belongs to the State. The State will clothe him and feed him and see that he grows up to be a worthy citizen.'

Lindenberg took a step nearer the woman. Coldly, contemptuously, he spat in her face. 'That's all you'll get out of me,' he said.

Predictably, Gustav Durer's rubber truncheon came crashing down upon him, raining blows on head and shoulders. The woman wiped her face and stood smiling at the sound of Lindenberg's gasps of pain.

'Are you ready to sign now?'

'I shan't sign anything,' panted Lindenberg.

More blows. More pain. 'I shan't sign anything!'

This is ridiculous,' said the woman, abruptly. 'I should have thought you had more control over your prisoners. In any event, I can't waste any more of my time. Get him to sign these before tomorrow.'

Durer smiled significantly. 'He'll sign.'

'Well, make sure of it.'

'I'll make sure. No need to worry ... We have our own methods here. Sehr gekados...'

'I'll leave it to you, then.'

'Please do. It will be a pleasure.' The woman went out and Durer closed the door; softly, menacingly, behind her. He turned to Lindenberg. 'Now... shall you and I get down to business together?'

'Do what you like,' said Lindenberg, through clenched teeth, 'I shall be dead anyway within a few hours. You have no more power over me.'

'You think not?'

'I know not.'

'We shall see, my friend ... At least, we can do our best to make your few remaining hours as uncomfortable as possible ... and that, I think you'll find, will be very uncomfortable indeed.'

He looked at Lindenberg and laughed, exultantly, as if savouring the delights to come.

'We shall begin, I think, by breaking every bone in your body ... by every bone, I mean every bone ... There are over two hundred bones in the human body - and that, mark you, will be only the beginning. By the time I've finished with you, you'll be crying out for death.'

Quite suddenly, Lindenberg went mad. With a wild cry he hurled himself upon Durer and seized him by the throat. Durer, bowled over by surprise rather than by the ferocity of the attack, lost his footing and fell backwards, with Lindenberg still clinging to him. Both men were snarling with rage, more like wild animals than human beings. Lindenberg's fingers hooked themselves into the flesh of Durer's neck tearing and kneading. The guard's eyes were red with broken blood vessels, his breath coming in a series of rattles and gasps.

Little John, up on the third floor in a room directly above heard the thuds and bangs, the stifled shouts and the clicking of Durer's bunch of keys, and went running down the stairs to investigate. He opened the door, took one look, silently closed it behind him and rushed off again to the latrines, where Heide and Porta were playing an illicit game of dice. He came upon them in such a hurry that he caught them guiltily in the act, and they cursed him roundly for his idiocy.

'Never mind that!' Little John rushed into one of the cabinets, flushed the water, backed out and ran into the next. 'Start making a row - any sort of row - Lindenberg's in the middle of murdering Durer!'

'You're joking!'

'Go and look for yourself if you don't believe me.'

'I don't,' said Heide, but in any case the appeal of making a loud noise was too strong to be denied. 'I'll throttle you if you're having us on.'

He picked up a scrubbing brush and hurled it through a window, kicked a bucket round the floor, banged the door two or three times. Porta turned on the taps in all the washbasins and began running the water at full burst, splashing and singing as he did so. Little John crashed up and down in his army boots and flushed the water in all the cabinets.

'Surely to God,' said Porta, 'he must have done it by now?'

'If he's doing it at all,' said Heide, with a look at Little John. 'Personally I doubt it'

Little John held up a hand for silence and they all stood listening.

'Surely he must have done it by now?' repeated Porta.

'Let's hope so. We've given him enough time.' Little John opened the door and beckoned to the others. 'Come on. Let's take a look.'

There was fortunately no one else about. They crept up the passage, paused for a moment outside the room, and then, hearing no sound, opened the door and looked in.

Lindenberg was sitting on Durer's chest, his fingers still locked round his victim's throat The guard was plainly dead. His face was mottle blue, his bloodshot eyes burst alarmingly from their sockets, his tongue protruded between his teeth. The three men stood in silence. Slowly Lindenberg pulled himself to his feet. He detached the dead man's bunch of keys, turned, smiled almost apologetically and held them out to Porta.

'I strangled him.'

'So we see,' murmured Porta. 'There's not much to say except thanks very much, is there?'

'What are you going to do about it?' They looked at each other. Heide cleared his throat.

'We'll have to report it You realize that. We'll have to tell Dorn.'