The Commissar (24 page)

‘My general didn’t like that one much. It was too tame. So instead I sang:

The horses race
Like a storm along –
A shot through the head –
The Rittmeister’s dead!
We smash the enemy –
Chase him home . . .

‘Then my general wouldn’t hear any more. He sat there and seemed to shrink in on himself on his dead horse.

‘“Unteroffizier Martin, you have a spot on your mess-jacket,” he said, a little irritably, pointing to a spot no bigger than a wart on a fly’s arse.

‘“Do you think I am going to die?” he asked, placing our monocle in his eye.

‘“I’m sure of it, Herr General, sir,” I answered. “Those the heavenly warrior loves he calls home to his table.”

‘“Yes, we all have to go some time,” he sighed, with a hopeless glint in the eye wearing the monocle.

‘After this sad discovery, he had to take another cognac, a double one. Between the second and the third glass my general found out that the whole of life was only a preparation for death.

‘“Unteroffizier Martin, since you are only an Unteroffizier, and in no way a learned man, I conclude that you have never thought about how sad everything is. Alone we come into the world, and still more alone we march out of it again.”

‘We were silent for some time, each of us alone with his thoughts. I was standing there thinking how great it would be if the old clown’d pull the cheeks of his arse together and slide into the world of dreams, where everything was all splashed over with German and Russian blood. I had a bint waiting for me, you see, at the Bismarck statue that’s all
covered over with pigeon-shit.
Blitzmädel
*
she was an’ fucked with the whole regiment. When she got into top gear she could make a corpse come.

‘My general took another nip from the bottle of Corsican optimism. “You are firmly believed then that I am going to die, Unteroffizier Martin?” he starts up again with the verbal diarrhoea, between a couple of well-satisfied grunts.

‘I was permitted to take a little one, as a reward for my honest answers, a very unusual thing where my general was concerned. Of course I had to drink it standing at ease, which is the way things are done in general officer circles.

‘Then him and our monocle started marching backwards and forwards in the room. Our spurs jingled real Prussian-like. When we had our night uniform on we always wore boots and spurs till we climbed into beddy-byes.

‘The way he looked walking up an’ down there he reminded you of a whole regiment of hussars going at the throat of Germany’s enemies, and knockin’ ’em on the head with sabres. It was typical of my general, and our monocle, that they always marched about when they had to get the blue blood to run out of their heads an’ down into their arses so’s they could think.

‘After some time of this, when I was getting dizzy from turning round all the time to keep facing my general, he finally stopped and stared at me for a long while. He looked like an executioner takin’ an eye measurement of the neck of a bloke, who’s due to turn up his toes.

‘“I am going to give you an order, Unteroffizier Martin, and the devil will come and take you if you don’t carry it out punctually and properly!” After a lengthy pause, while he rubbed his eagle-nose thoughtfully: “If I have to go off to serve in the great army, which will probably be before you dismiss for all time, you must see to it that the band of 5
Hussars blows
Rote Husaren
*
at my funeral.”

‘“Very good, Herr General, sir,” I replied, cracking my heels smartly. “All shall be arranged as the general orders. The buglers of the Hussars shall blow until their trumpets are red-hot!”

‘“I’ll trust you with that then, Unteroffizier Martin! But you also see to it that Stabsmusikmeister Breitenmüller of 5 Hussars places two
Leibhusaren
in full parade uniform with sabres in the mourning position at the head of my coffin. Two more hussars from 5 Regiment’s corps of buglers are to play
Der Tod reitet auf einem kohlenschwart rappen
†
. To be played
andante
of course. But should we be so unfortunate as not to be able to get 5 Hussars bugle corps, because they are out fighting for old Germany, then you are to see to it that a well-trained choir of soldiers is commanded out, not less than 25 men, and you, Unteroffizier Martin, will sing the solo. Is that understood?”

‘“Yes sir, Herr General, sir! Beg to report sir, I’m already singing!”

‘Then my general gets up into his pit at last. He was that taken up with kickin’ the bucket that he’d got all the way down into bed before he found he’d still got his boots and spurs on. He got a bit rotten about that. But we got his boots off, and after I’d read him a bit about Old Fritz he went off into a deep sleep.

‘Next morning we gave inspection a miss. Instead we went off an’ inspected the flowers in the castle park. The Cavalry bed with the yellow tulips pleased him, as they usually did. They stood there straight as a string, bowing their necks just like the sodding horses of the 7 Uhlans in Düsseldorf, our regiment. They were the ones who rode straight to hell in a crazy cavalry attack at Cambrai in 1915, with my general in the lead. We were Oberstleutnant then. We always got ourselves very worked up when we talked
about that ridin’ trip. Sneaky as the English always are, they’d spotted machine-guns all over the place, so it wasn’t easy to launch a nice-lookin’ cavalry charge. If it’d been
them
that’d sent out their dragoons to charge
us
we’d have met ’em in the stirrups, face to face, with drawn sabres and lances at the ready. When we got to the white lilies my general got wrinkles all over his forehead, and started cursing like a whole gang of seamen in an Arab knocking-shop!

‘“Typical infantry,” he trumpeted, “look like a flock of nuns who’ve just been raped by French sailors. See that stupid lily there? Two centimetres out of line. Remove it, Unteroffizier Martin! On to the muckheap with it! If we’re not careful, everything will go to pieces.”

‘At the red roses – the artillery bed – our humour went up a couple of degrees and our ice-blue eyes lit up, joyfully. The roses stand there, battery by battery. They look really soldierly.

‘“That’s the way!” said my general, and took the monocle out of his eye three times, as a sign that he was well-pleased.

‘We walked backwards and forwards a bit, enjoyin’ the sight. But it clouded over when we got to the supply troops, the blue cornflowers. Good Lord, what a mess! But that’s the way it always is with echelon troops. Yokels, the lot of ’em. They don’t even know the difference between right and left. You give ’em a bit of hay round one ankle an’ straw round the other and then you shout “Hayfoot! Strawfoot!” Their horse detachments can’t find a girl who’ll have anything to do with them, and have to have a go at the horses when they get the chance.

‘My general sentenced the whole cornflower bed to be executed, so at dawn I ran our hand lawnmower through the lot of ’em.

‘The panzer troops, the pink roses, made a better showing. What a straight-backed lot! I felt proud to be a Panzer Unteroffizier. We stayed a long time looking at them
and in the end we’d convinced ourselves things weren’t as black as they looked.

‘“Takes balls to be a panzer soldier,” my general said, rattlin’ his false teeth.

‘We nodded in passing to the engineer troops, black tulips. They’re the coolies of the army anyway. But when we got to the catering lot, the cabbage bed, we got a shock. The Moses dragoons were standing there droopin’ like so many gonorrhoea-infected pricks.

‘My general sentenced them all to death on the spot. “To the gas-chambers with them,” he snarled, without a thought in his head of how important a catering corps is.

‘Everything went wrong when we got down to the orchards, and inspected the scarecrows. They were wearing Russian uniforms. My general got a funny look on his face when we found the first one with unpolished boots. The two next had their coats buttoned crooked, and the last was wearin’ his cap back to front.

‘My general nearly swallowed the gardeners, who come on the run. We chased ’em up through the orchards with that many threats, and so fast, their tongues were hanging out of their arseholes an’ their piles were up around their ears.

‘An old, white-haired feller cracked open like a maidenhead on a summer night, an’ threw up all over the general’s boots. My general pulled out his pistol and aimed it at this
untermenscb
and of course, he fainted from fright. They sent him to the front the day after, to spend the rest of the war with a corpse-collection unit.

‘We were in a black humour, as we marched back to the castle. The Angel of Victory received only a perfunctory salute in passing. The sentries slammed the doors open, but one of them made a mess of it and his door swung back and hit my general right in the face. You should’ve
heard
him. He didn’t shout, like some stupid Unteroffizier. but what he did say, through his nose, sat right in the bullseye. He literally shot those two guards down with his words.

“‘Never beat around the bush with people of that sort,” he twanged down his nose.

‘Yes, my general did just what he liked with every man in our division. He signed death warrants without even reading ’em. We didn’t waste much time on that sort of thing, anyway.

‘In the corridor we ran into the Catholic padre, who was so fat he had the shakes permanent. Every part of him shook like a jelly. My general stopped in the corridor without acknowledging the fat padre’s salute.

‘“Well, it’s you is it, reverend padre? It’s not often you put in an appearance, but you are, perhaps, busy preparing the way for the many soldiers who fall for the Fatherland?”

‘“Very good. Herr General!” mumbled the sky-pilot weakly, looking as if he was about to drop dead on the spot.

‘My general had pulled his long neck down into his collar at the sight of the Staff Padre, but now he suddenly shot it right out again, and screwed his monocle more firmly into his eye.

‘“Yes, you must be very busy, reverend father,” he spat out. The nostrils of his eagle-nose vibrated as if he were smelling a corpse. “Your boots are not polished, but there are perhaps other clothing regulations for the gentlemen of the Corps of Padres, with which I am not familiar? Three days confined to quarters, reverend padre, and you will report every other hour to my Adjutant with well-polished boots and equipment. It is possible that you have been allowed to slouch around in a state of unregimental filthiness in the division you came from, but
not
here in my division!”

‘So we left the Jesus dragoon standin’ there to think over things. After we had slashed at our riding boots with our riding whip a few times we ordered war games for the whole garrison. That’s what we always used to do when the officers were goin’ to get some stick. They were all there when we arrived. My general understood this sort of thing. He was always master of the situation. Nobody ever took
him
for a
sleigh-ride. My job was to look after the cardboard clock, so I had a good view of what was goin’ on, and I stood so’s I could have a good grin now and then without ’em seeing it. Our division had the best terrain model of anybody in the whole Army. My general’d looked after that. There was dozens of streams and rivers, and guns and tanks; and bridges all over the place that we could blow up just before the enemy got to ’em.

‘My general stood there for a long time, glarin’ nastily at all the nervous faces round the war table. Then he gave ’em a long speech about what was going to happen if Germany, as usual, got its arse kicked up round its ears by our rotten enemies.

‘“This time they will drink their ale from our skulls,” he predicted. “Our sexual organs will decorate the walls of their officers’ messes.” But, he swore by our monocle, before it gets that far – and may God forbid it, he added, in the tone of an archbishop – we must see to it that our enemies get to know us. “We shall bombard them with fire from our long-range artillery,” he explained, waving his pointer backwards and forwards over the simulator table. “Then our armour will roll forward in a destructive flying V formation. Our heavy Tigers will take away their appetite for war. Those who are left we will smash under the tracks of our self-propelled guns, and those who have gone into hiding we will blast with our flamethrowers.” He hammered his pointer down on a village, destroyin’ it with one blow.

‘All the officers turned their eyes sadly towards the shattered village. The terrain was a German landscape, you see, with German cows and our fat German peasants on it!

‘“Germany will never capitulate, gentlemen, mark my words,” hissed my general, lettin’ our monocle fall out of his eye. Suddenly he realized what a terrible lot of nonsense he was talking. When he had taken a break, in which he punished a couple of Leutnants by postin’ ’em away to the infantry for gigglin’ at a dirty story, he nodded to the Chief-of-Staff. “The Wild Boar”, a dried-up stick of a
Major-General with a stiff leg and a patch over one eye, took over, and the war stimulation was on the go.

‘The first who got the hammer was a Rittmeister who was going too fast. He mistook his own lines for the enemy’s and let a couple of Stukas smash up his own armour that was waiting in ambush for the neighbours’ T-34s. That Rittmeister was letting his tears fall in a front-line regiment the very same night. My general didn’t even give him the regulation three days leave. Nobody could feel himself safe with us. Just when they were enjoying things with the staff and countin’ on an uncomplicated life, offthey went, all of a sudden, to a front-line unit, the anteroom to the Valhalla mess.