Legion of the Damned (8 page)

"
Cheris! Mes freres!
My name is Count de la Porta, by God's grace von und zu. If I am not mistaken, I know you gentlemen? Goes all well with Germany's arms? Let me see a list of today's victories."

"What the devil's that you're going round in?" said Titch. "Is our honest boxcar no longer good enough for you?"

"I am thinking of having myself transported to the Eastern Front in this special conveyance, which is now reserved exclusively for the best soldier in the German Army. James"--this was addressed to me--"you shall walk just behind me and hand me my rifle when I have to shoot. See that Germany's best man has aimed properly before I pull the trigger. We don't want any misses in this war."

"And where's your uniform?"

"Gentlemen, this war is a gentlemen's war. I have put on a gentleman's uniform.... As well as this sedan chair and these irreproachable tails, I have won 2,300 lei and a very fine music box, which I shall now play for you."

Porta dived into the depths of the sedan chair and emerged with a magnificent rococo music box, which played a little minuet while two porcelain shepherdesses danced. It was undoubtedly a valuable piece. A couple of days later he presented it to a trolley conductor.

"And lastly I have won a mistress--with thighs and the rest of it."

"A what?"

"A what?" Porta echoed. "Don't you know, child, what a mistress is? It's a toy for counts and barons. It has thighs and breasts and buttocks. That's what you play with. You can buy them in very expensive shops where you drink champagne while you inspect the models. It has to be to wound up with a check before it will move. It moves up and down till it becomes tired, then it has to be wound up with another check. If you have enough checks it will never stop."

Porta thrust a bottle of wine at his four bearers and bellowed:

"Here, slaves, fuel! Drink and be merry!"

Then he handed us a couple of bottles of schnapps and said with a flourish:

"Let us sing the praises of the good old gods!"

He put the flute to his lips and began to play, while his four delighted bearers chorused:

"
Now it is the time to drain the flowing bowl
,

Now with unfettered foot to beat the ground with dancing
,

Now with Salian feast to deck the couches of the gods, my Comrades!
"

"Where the devil did you get your Horace from?" said I.

Porta replied impudently that he had penned the lines himself.

"Did you really?" said The Old Un interestedly. "I never thought you were so old. The Romans used to sing that two thousand years ago."

Porta's slaves now gave us a vivid description of the events of the night. Porta had played poker with a young baron. Both had cheated so grossly that a child must have seen it. In the end Porta had won everything, including the clothes off the baron's back. After that he had gone feasting with the four merry lads, and they were now carrying him to Bazar Street and the young lady he had won from the unlucky baron.

Then they picked up the sedan chair and bore it swaying on its way, while we stood there shaking our heads and clutching our bottles of schnapps.

Late that afternoon the four slaves deposited Porta, flute and all, by the wall outside the barracks. We managed to haul him inside and bribed one of the junior doctors to have him admitted to the sick bay, where he slept for two solid days. We packed his evening dress at the bottom of his kit bag, and he carted it round with him from then on.

Perhaps that sedan chair is still standing by the wall of the barracks outside Bucharest as a sort of peaceful war memorial. If so, the Romanians will certainly look more kindly upon it than on the ruins which were the true memento the German Army left behind it.

If there had been more Portas and considerably fewer Hauptmann Meiers there is no doubt that we would have conquered the peoples, vanquished the enemy and made him our friend and brother toper. We would have vanquished the enemy, not in bloody battle but in a drinking contest, which is never such a grim business and has the advantage that the means satisfy everyone, while it is also easier to recover from a hangover than from having a leg shot off.

We did not come to Romania as welcome tourists, far less as fated brothers-in-arms, though the newspapers proclaimed that Germany and Romania were close allies fighting like brothers, shoulder to shoulder, for a great cause. People like Porta and The Old Un, and many others of the galley slaves in the German Army, were more to the Romanians' liking than one might have imagined, but our uniform was not, and it was that which they saw. They only saw that we were allies of the Iron Guard, of the barons, of the anti-Semites, of the dictator General Ion Antonescu, of all the gentry who harried the land with the scourge of underdevelopment. It was, in fact, almost more difficult in the land of our brothers, the Romanians, to fraternize with the people, or certain sections of them, than it was in many of the countries which the German Army had occupied as an enemy. We were brothers-in-arms for whom none could have anything but profound mistrust. It was typical that Porta made his way into the Romanians' hearts via a dissolute baron. The upper classes were the only ones who would have anything to do with us. Of course, we were there to defend their money and civic rights, to defend them not only from the Soviet or Socialism but from the maltreated, dissatisfied Romanian workers and small farmers who needed repressing with a bloody hand. A barefooted, undernourished, coerced and defiant people will not take foreigners to its bosom straight away, however much those at the top may say that they are brothers and fellow countrymen of a kind because both are neo-Europeans. Life in Romania at that time was more or less what I imagine it must be in Spain now, well nigh impossible because of having to mistrust everyone and everything, with murderous inner strife beneath the surface, yet so close to it that you had to be blind not to discover it.

Unfortunately many German soldiers were both blind and deaf. They did not discover the proper connection between things. They were blinded by Hitler and deafened by Goebbels. They believed all they were told, and therefore could not understand why the Romanians did not receive them as conquering heroes. They did not like it; they were hurt. Others were able to smell the rottenness of everything, but they were too bemused and terrorized from home to dare face up to the problem. They let things take their crooked course and dared not look each other--far less their "brethren-in-arms"--in the face.

Porta's was a happy expedient; he plundered a baron, had an evening out on the proceeds and then presented the remains of the booty to a trolley conductor. He managed better than we did. We had more or less to content ourselves with visual pleasures, with scenic beauties, the unending melancholy of the
puszta
; the flatness and extensive fertility of the Romanian wheatlands; the Picturesque realm of the mountains; the station communities asleep at noon but lively in the evening; the flocks of sheep with solitary Shepherds walking along in white, coarse coats and sheepskin caps, with a leathern bottle on a string strung across their shoulders, and all the time in the world; groups of thin adults and large-eyed, rickety children. And Bucharest, the white, splendid city with its magnificent residential quarters, expensive motorcars, arrogant rich and murmuring, miserably ragged poor; inquisitive peasants in colorful national costume.

The life of the people was just for us to look at, not to take part in, unless you were a Godforsaken gallows bird like Porta. Only occasionally did one or other of us succeed by the use of slight shades of tone in voice and behavior in awakening a certain amount of tacit sympathy--it never found expression in words-- with those in whose country we found ourselves under the most difficult of all circumstances--that of being unwelcome friends. Nor could we have been anything else, for it was the old story: we had entered the country on the pretext of coming to fight a common foe. In reality we were a necessary addition to the country's police force. On the pretext of protecting the Romanian people from being conquered by the Soviets, we had come first and foremost to help prevent the oil wells, the mines, the railway concessions, the big estates, the wine, match, textile, sugar, paper, cosmetics, and an infinity of other monopolies, in fact the whole rich country with its impoverished population, from taking the sad, sad road that leads to nationalization.

What right has a people to its own oil?

None--as long as
we
were in Romania with Hungarians, Italians and other foreign "friends" to help us. The rich were indecently rich, the poor indecently poor--and the concentration camps. . . ugh, the whole thing was indecent.

It was there in the Balkans, I believe, that I learned the need not only for revolt but for
organized
revolt against war. I came to the conclusion that the war was not so pointless as in moments of sentiment and emotion we sometimes felt it.

The point of it was that we were to pull certain chestnuts out of the fire. When we had done that, we could then see whether we might not be able to live on the ashes.

Those ideas were not clear in my head then, but they were there. I had not learned to reflect then. I lived for the moment and never thought very much. I had to get properly over what I had been through before I could embark on anything so exacting as the business of thinking.

We had written each other many affectionate letters since we parted in Freiburg, but in all Ursula's letters I found a discouraging note that at times almost sent me out of my mind with the misery of unrequited love, with longing to be able to persuade her that she was mistaken, that she did love me, only would not admit it to herself.

Her reply to my telegram came in the evening:

MEET ME VIENNA STOP WAIT IN FIRST CLASS RESTAURANT STOP URSULA.

Ursula was not there. Her train must be late. She would be coming soon. I sat down at a table from which I could keep watch on the door. There was a continual stream of people coming in and out. Now and again I stood up in a sort of semifury when so many had come in at once that I could not take them all in at one glance.

More than an hour passed.

I took her letters from an inner pocket and began reading them for the thousandth time, reading a line at a time with a look at the door in between. Suddenly I became panic-stricken: suppose she had been there while I had my eyes on a letter; suppose she had stood there and looked round without catching sight of me and so had gone again, got into a train and gone back to Munich.

After sitting there for two hours I went out and asked if the train from Munich was delayed. I was told that it had arrived an hour before mine. The man was polite and friendly, but quite uninterested in my important problem, of which I told him nothing, but which was certainly there for all to read on my face.

Feeling empty with irresolution, I walked about haphazard. What the hell had I come to Vienna for? I returned to my seat in the restaurant and sat there staring, trying to think, loving, weeping inwardly, hating, building up theories, making ingenious plans for finding her, inventing plausible improbabilities that might have happened, while round about me voices buzzed, crockery clattered, two cash registers whirred and their tills opened and shut. Everybody else was busy either serving or eating or smoking, talking, laughing--but living. I was the only one no one knew, and therefore I could not live, but must just sit, growing more and more haggard, while my inner life assumed more and more fantastic forms. I do not believe there is a more abnormal being than the person who is sitting waiting for his beloved. It was now three hours past the time; she was not coming. Mine was a very painful madness, one that perhaps would never be cured if she did not come.

But she came, as soft and graceful and rounded as a little flame. My fingers crushed the cigarette they held and the glowing end fell into my palm, but my brain did not hear the palm's call that it had burned itself, my eyes drowned the sound of it as they looked and looked--looked at the gray suit, the confident shoes, the fleeting smile, the little brown suitcase with the silver letters US and the hand that held it, just made to fit at the back of a man's neck.

"I came on the wrong train. I am so sorry."

She protested, but nonetheless I kissed her hand and shoved the table forward so that she could sit beside me.

"Darling."

"Now, my lad, first you must order your darling some food-- no, no, be good now, order something nice and a bottle of wine. Then I'll tell you what we are going to do."

I ordered paprika chicken with rice and pointed to some number on the wine list. I was still shaken and non compos, but I retained sufficient presence of mind to confine my utterances for the next quarter of an hour to the one word "darling." It was an honest admission of not being quite right in the head, and thus an admission that could only please her and be accepted.

We were going to Hochfilzen. In an hour.

"I like the place so much, and when you telegraphed that you had got leave and wanted to come, that you had five days, I thought that that was where we would go. You're mad about mountains yourself, aren't you?"

"Darling."

"You're quite impossible. You must drink lots of wine. We must get you normal again. I don't want to travel with an imbecile. Not that I'm quite right in the head myself. What have I let myself in for?"

I emptied my glass and then refilled hers and mine. The food on my plate remained untouched, but she shoveled in chicken and paprika sauce and rice and bread, and chattered away and displayed great, comforting activity. I was slightly disappointed that she did not tell me I ought to eat. She always used to say that. She always used to say that I was too thin, that I ought to eat well. She did not say it now. Something about her had changed, and I was not sure that she was not just as nervous as I, that we were not sitting there groping round the outside of each other, away from each other.