Comrades of War (28 page)

The dark-skinned fellow stood like a rock behind George, keeping a watchful eye on him.

Red began rummaging in the rucksack. His black leather coat opened, showing a light brown leather belt by which his shoulder holster was held in place under his armpit. You could sense the heavy .38.

George stared hypnotically at Red as he brutally pulled the neatly folded military underwear out of the rucksack. A can of marmalade rolled along the floor, followed by a fluttering picture of a gray-haired lady.

‘Mother,’ George screamed frantically, following the photo with his eyes.

A couple of schoolbooks were thrown to the floor. A Bible followed. A knife in a sheath appeared. The sort of knife Finnish soldiers always carry in their belt.

Red slowly pulled the knife out of the reindeer sheath and looked briefly at the shining steel with the deep blood track.

‘It’s yours, isn’t it, my little friend?’ He slipped it into the pocket of his black leather coat.

Then, between two fingers, the Kripo cop held up a pair of white undies for our inspection. A blue pair followed. Again a white pair. All in all, six pairs.

He stood up, nodded to George. All his friendliness seemed blown away. It was the bloodhound that barked: ‘The comedy’s finished! You’re the one who murdered the girls! Denying it will only make it worse for you. So come along!’ He nodded towards the door. Both he and the dark fellow caught George by the shoulder.

‘Leave me alone! I’m sick. I have fever!’ George screamed desperately. He tried to kick the two large men.

‘Take it easy,’ the dark fellow said. These were the first words he had uttered.

Far down the stairs we could hear George cry: ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone! I have fever!’

When the car halted at the Reeperbahn shortly afterward, George succeeded in tearing himself loose from his guards. He rushed along Glacis Chaussee and jumped over the fence to the sports ground.

The two policemen followed close on his heels.

‘Halt!’ they roared. Three times they called ‘Halt!’ as demanded by regulations. Then there was a crack of volleys behind George. It was like a fleeting kiss. The bullets from the two machine guns swept him into the air and made him hover there for a moment as if on an air cushion, then flung him brutally to the ground again.

He scratched the black earth with crooked fingers and stammered unintelligibly.

Red turned him over with the toe of his boot. ‘Our job is done,’ he decided tersely. ‘He’s kicked off. Let’s hurry off to Pretty Paul with the body.’

With the dark fellow at the wheel they drove to Police Headquarters.

‘Aren’t we lucky, the two of us!’ Red grinned. ‘No front command for us!’

‘The man I could get to love hasn’t been born,’ Aunt Dora said.

‘Love for the individual is barbarism,’ the Legionnaire said.

But they said this before they met each other.

They had become children, dreaming about a paradise with seven bar stools and a conch curtain.

Aunt Dora wanted the Legionnaire to desert, but he was too old and foxy to attempt such a naive act of madness.

The train drove off. They separated, the same way as so many others.

The war went on more savagely than ever.

The war was running out of control.

XI

The Leave Train

The depot officer, a captain, looked at our papers and said curtly: ‘The leave train Berlin-Warsaw-Lemberg on Platform 4.’

‘It’s all up,’ the Legionnaire sighed.

The captain glanced at him and said with a jeer, ‘I see you can say what Caesar said when he crossed the Rubicon!’

The Legionnaire grinned. ‘
Alea iacta est!
’

The captain looked in surprise at the little scarred panzer soldier. ‘Are you a student, Corporal?’

‘No, a holy swine, 2nd Foreign Regiment,’ the Legionnaire grinned. He enjoyed seeing the captain’s amazement.

‘Perhaps you don’t know what it means?’ the captain asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ the Legionnaire answered caustically. ‘In soldier’s language: Sophie has had it!’

The captain flushed and waved us off.

Further down the platform Tiny asked: ‘What sort of foreign stuff did you serve up to that silver pheasant?’

‘Just what you heard. Sophie has had it!’

Tiny stopped and burst into a roar of laughter: ‘You’ll have to teach me that! I’ll use it on First Sergeant Edel when we’re back with the gang. Christ, that’ll make him gape, the stupid pig!’ He shoved back his cap, uttered another howl and stormed forward on the platform.

He had caught sight of the Battleship, who surprised everybody by coming to say good-bye to him. They clashed like a pair of army elephants.

A crowd of soldiers milled around beside the train, which was standing by the platform like an insatiable serpent.

I glanced at the large depot clock. The second hand was rushing across the dial. Black and menacing. Round and round. Minute after minute. Soon it would be over.

The East Prussian and Thomas Jensen slouched slowly through the platform control, dragging heavy infantry packs.

Stein and Bauer hung out of a compartment window shouting they had five seats. They received our equipment through the window.

A Red Cross sister asked if we’d like some coffee.

Drinking from a common metal cup, we finished off the hot liquid which was supposed to be coffee, but which tasted more like soup boiled on a jute sack.

‘Everybody on board!’ the transport officer roared for the fourth time. But no one reacted.

A couple of soldiers were brutally shoved into the train.

Tiny hit out at an MP noncom. ‘Scram, head-hunter!’ he shouted.

The NCO grumbled and uttered all sorts of threats, but beat it quickly. He didn’t want a row on a leave train. He knew from bitter experience that the most fantastic trouble might arise. At such train departures nerves were on edge.

A woman’s voice called: ‘Alfred!’

The Legionnaire whirled around and walked rapidly up to one of the kiosks, where Aunt Dora stood half hidden with her collar turned up around her ears.

Putting her hand on the little Legionnaire’s shoulder, she said gently: ‘I have brought civvies with me. Hurry to a toilet and change. Get away from them!’

The Legionnaire squinted at her.

‘Dora, old bitch, let’s not do anything foolish! You know the head-hunters as well as I do. Not one in a thousand gets away safely, and if they catch me with you, you’ll go straight to jail.’

‘I’m not afraid of their jails.’

‘Nah, but of their bullets.’ He pulled a newspaper clipping out of his pocket. The latest news from
Völkischer Beobachter
.

She moved her lips while she read:

WARNING AGAINST DESERTERS AND COWARDS

I called upon the German people and German women in particular to be on the lookout for cowards trying to escape from east to west by hiding in refugee columns. Show no misplaced pity for these dirty dogs. Men who run away from their detachments in the Army, Air Force and Navy do not even deserve a piece of dry bread.

On you more than anybody else, proud National-Socialist German women, rests the sacred duty of being on guard against these elements.

Do your duty. Do not let yourselves be persuaded or affected by anti-social elements. Denounce ruthlessly, and on the slightest suspicion. Have no pity, whether they are stranger or your own husbands, brothers, or sons.

Show them the contempt they deserve. Make them once more recognize their duty. If words fail to bring them around, have them picked up by the Military Police, which knows how to punish these miserable rats who do not know what honor is and for whom there is no room in our National-Socialist Greater Germany.

Heinrich Himmler

SS Reichsführer

Chief of Police

Minister of the Interior

Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army

Aunt Dora nodded.

‘A rotten bastard, but just wait. The balls of that black shit will boil some day, believe me!’

‘So will ours probably,’ the Legionnaire answered dryly. ‘If we lose our heads. Our only chance of surviving this madness is to fall into line. Quietly, without any fuss. Hold back wherever you can get away with it.’ He passed his hand under her chin and went on. ‘And take care to have valid papers in your pocket, or they won’t be proof against the meticulous scrutiny of the head-hunters!’ He pointed at an MP sergeant who looked like a hippopotamus. ‘Look at that fellow with his crescent-shaped badge! He’s dying to nab deserters and string ’em up with a piece of cardboard on their chests. Listen, old girl – but you’re crying! What’s this? Aunt Dora doesn’t cry!’ Clumsily he wiped away the tears from her heavily made-up cheeks.

‘You’re a stupid pig,’ she sobbed and hid her face on his shoulder. ‘I’m going to write to you, Alfred, every week.’ She stroked his cheek with its long knife scar.

She looked at the train, which was hissing out steam in white clouds, thinking; It’s like an insatiable grinding machine asking to be fed with flesh, blood and bones.

She looked up at him: ‘Where are you heading for, you think?’

He looked toward the bridge at a couple of rattling trolleys before he answered.

‘The Old Man wrote in his last letters that the Regiment is now standing in the vicinity of Orsha in the central sector. Orsha is a junction of the highway Minsk-Tula-Moscow. Well, actually it leads all the way to Siberia,’ he added, ‘ending in Kolyma, where our comrades from Stalingrad are now slaving in the mines.’

Orsha, she thought. A name. An unknown name. A dot on the large maps. A filthy and infinitely sad spot in the immensity of Russia. A place through which thousands of soldiers are marching. Men dressed in green and brown, most of whom never return. She stroked his hand, destined by evil fate to press the trigger of a machine gun and cause death and destruction to other soldiers. She could teach those hands to shake a mixer.

‘Alfred,’ she whispered, looking into his ugly, scarred face. Her unfeeling eyes were blinded by tears. ‘But don’t you understand, you stupid pig, that I love you, you stinking desert jackal. I swear to God, I love you! Why, I don’t know myself. I was raped by some man when I was twelve. When I was fifteen I liked it. Now it doesn’t interest me any more. We’ll love each other as two people who know enough to see our fellow men as swine till the opposite is proven. We know that life is one long rotten carnival night and the only requirement is that you have on a good mask. Alfred, I’ll wait for you even if it takes thirty years! One of these days we’ll wake up from this bad dream. Then we’ll sell the saloon and slip off where we can run a decent place with girls, schnapps and beer!’

The Legionnaire laughed. ‘And where would that be? In Tibet, perhaps?’

She shook her head. ‘No, in Brazil. I have a sister there who runs a regular brothel. There’s the right soil for us two. No head-hunters. No Stapo. You have the right to breathe as you like.’

Sister Lotte, a little nurse who’d been to the Führer school of the League of German Maidens, came dancing along the platform and fastened a spruce branch to the door of one of the cars. She had seen this done in a war movie. She wiped her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief. She had also seen this in a war movie. Then she kissed the nearest soldier on the cheek. Flinging her head back like a Valkyrie, she cried in near ecstasy: ‘My hero, my unknown hero! I thank you for fighting for us German women and for making us feel safe from those Soviet monsters.’

The soldier, an infantryman with a foxy face, glanced at her, farted loudly and yelled: ‘Go to hell, you officer’s bedwarmer!’

Lotte’s cheeks flushed. ‘You swine!’ she hissed. ‘I’ll see you get a trip east.’

The retort was a loud roar of laughter from the soldiers nearby. The infantryman smacked her behind.

‘Hurry home and make yourself ready for the victors. They’re on the way!’

Gnashing her teeth Lotte retreated. She tore the spruce branch from the car door and placed it three cars further down where she thought they were more worthy of receiving her branch. She said something to an MP sergeant, who just shrugged his shoulders and pushed her aside.

A whole family had showed up to take leave of a seventeen-year-old boy who’d been drafted and was going to a training battalion in Poland.

‘Be proud and brave,’ cried his father, who turned out to be a
Regierungsrat
. ‘You have to be a credit to your family!’

‘We’ll be looking forward to a letter from you soon, nephew,’ whinnied an old white-haired man wearing the phantom uniform of a colonel from the time before World War I, ‘in which you’ll inform us that the Führer has awarded you the Iron Cross.’

‘Send us a picture of yourself in uniform as soon as possible,’ his mother squeaked, whisking away a traitorous tear.

The father looked reprovingly at her through his monocle, ‘German women don’t cry, Louise! We Germans are proud.’

A minister with a stiff white collar and a ridiculous derby hat on his head put his arms around the mother’s shoulders and said unctuously: ‘How wonderful it must be to be able to send a son to the battlefield to fight our barbarous enemies who threaten to overrun our Fatherland!’

A member of the family in a brown uniform looked at him. ‘What do you mean by saying that our enemies are about to overrun our Fatherland? Hasn’t the Führer explained that the strongly winding front lines have to be straightened out?’

Making sure the Party man didn’t overhear, an NCO in the compartment window beside them muttered: ‘We’ll be straightening out the front lines till we stand with our backs against the Chancellery of the Reich in Berlin.’

The minister nervously blinked his eyes. He passed a finger along his starched collar. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He looked ingratiatingly at the Party man.

‘The District Leader probably misunderstood me. I mean that our enemies are overrunning the Ukraine, which according to the Führer’s words also is our Fatherland.’

‘Where and when did the Führer say that?’

The minister looked at him. ‘The Führer has said many times and also the Minister of Propaganda has often written in
Völkischer Beobachter
that the Greater German Reich is going to extend to the mountains of the Caucasus, and that’s where our enemies are at the moment.’