Court Martial

by Sven Hassel

  ‘Slacker,’ he scolds, and pulls at the nose to make sure it is firmly attached.

  ‘Can a bloke’s prick drop off from frost?’ asks Tiny, worriedly.

  ‘Can happen,’ smiles Porta. ‘The Army Institute of Science at Leipzig has compiled statistics on the subject, and these tell us that thirty-two per cent of all soldiers exposed to arctic conditions come home without a joy-stick!’

  ‘Jesus Christ almighty, son of the German God,’ groans Tiny. ‘What’d you be able to tell the ’ores if you went back to the Reeperbahn with no prick?’

  ‘You’d have no future as a pimp, at any rate, if the polar bears had made a meal of your old John Thomas,’ smiles Barcelona.

  A tall, thin Pioneer feldwebel gets up suddenly from the bed of branches, tears the blood-soaked bandages from his body and, before anybody realises what is happening, rushes out across the frozen lake.

  A couple of orderlies chase after him, but he disappears in the mist. His madness is infectious, and shortly after, two more of the wounded follow him.

  The Oberst is furious. He orders a guard mounted over the wounded. Things really begin to go wrong when a guard falls asleep with an Mpi across his knees.

  A wounded SS-Unterscharführer creeps silently across the floor and gets hold of the Schmeisser. A rain of bullets sprays the wounded who roll about desperately on their bed of branches. His eyes burn madly and froth rims his gaping mouth. When the magazine is empty he crushes the guard’s skull and attacks the wounded nearest to him with the butt of the weapon.

  The Legionnaire is the first to arrive on the scene. He throws his Moorish dagger and it bores into the madman’s throat.

  With a gurgling death-rattle the SS-Unterscharführer collapses.

  All hell is loose in the blood-bespattered igloo. The wounded run amok. An infantry Leutnant commits hara-kiri by thrusting his bayonet into his stomach and cutting upwards. His entrails pour out over his hands. An artilleryman gets Porta by the throat and tries to strangle him.

  A shot cracks. The artilleryman falls backwards.

  Shortly after this we have other things to worry about. The Russians start an attack under cover of heavy mortar fire. The attack lasts only a couple of hours. Then the snow envelops them again and they disappear into it like ghosts.

  Death is so close to us that we feel it already has us in its grip.

  Schnapps is issued. A water-bottle cap full to everyone. No. 2 Section gets half a cap more.

  ‘You know what that means,’ grins Porta, ominously. ‘They don’t give you a schnapps ration because they like the colour of your eyes. Famous last drink this is!’ He throws the schnapps down in one go.

  ‘’Eroes’ piss,’ grins Tiny, ‘couple o’ pints o’ giggle water an’ I’ll go out an’ get me a Knight’s Cross with vegetables an’ a table knife.’11

  ‘Nom de Dieu, it’s more likely to be a wooden cross,’ smiles the Legionnaire, handing Tiny his schnapps ration. He is a Mohammedan and does not touch spirituous liquors.

  ‘Out of ’taters, into ’taters, then piss it up the wall!’ grunts the Old Man, trying to get his silver-lidded pipe going.

  ‘C’est la guerre,’† sighs the Legionnaire rolling a little machorka in a piece of Bible paper, and getting a kind of cigarette out of it.

  ‘Give us a puff,’ begs Tiny.

  The Legionnaire hands him the bent-up cigarette in silence.

  All through the night we battle our way on against a howling arctic storm. The snow whirls about us so thickly that we can only just see the man in front of us. Which is an advantage. It means the Russians will have a job finding us. Now and then we hear them behind us.

  ‘They’re so certain of us, those yellow monkeys, that they can’t be bothered to conceal themselves,’ says Porta, downheartedly.

  ‘Anybody ’ere still believe in the Final Victory?’ asks Tiny with a broad grin.

  ‘Only Adolf and his faithful unteroffizier, Julius Heide, Porta gives out a typical Berlin laugh.

  ‘Why did we go to war, anyway?’ asks Tiny wonderingly What they got in Russia anybody’d want?’

  ‘So that Adolf can be a really great warrior,’ answers Porta. ‘All those shits who’ve crept up on top of the heap have to have a war so they won’t be forgotten again.’

  ‘Hear me now!’ Heide’s voice is heard from behind the snow curtain. ‘They hang defeatists!’

  ‘And twisted-up bleedin’ abortions like you, they put in cages,’ shouts Tiny harshly.

  Late on the following day the Oberst orders a halt. The battle group is simply unable to continue. Many of the group have been left behind in the snow to freeze to death.

  Our rations have run out. Only a few, like Porta, have some crumbs left. He is chewing on a frozen crust, the remnants of a Finnish army loaf.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he asks, putting the last bite into his mouth.

  ‘Rotten swine,’ snarls the Old Man.

  ‘Anybody got any vodka?’ begs Gregor. His face is dark blue in colour and has swollen up enormously after Heide’s surgery.

  ‘Lost your bleedin’ mind, ’ave you, well as your snout?’ shouts Tiny, jeeringly.

  ‘Vodka!’ says Porta. ‘It’s so long since we’ve had a drop of that Russian piss I can’t recall the taste of it.’

  ‘I could eat a pensioned-off whore from Valencia,’ asserts Barcelona. ‘I haven’t been so hungry since I was inside a Spanish prison camp.’

  Porta and the Legionnaire begin to debate just how many juniper berries one should put into a venison dressing.

  ‘Six, I feel,’ says Porta, knowledgeably.

  ‘Impossible,’ the Legionnaire rejects the suggestion, ‘but do as you wish. If you include six berries I would not even have to bother to taste the dressing. It would stink to heaven. It is also of importance that the correct kind of pot is used,’ he continues. ‘If you wish to achieve a true venison dressing you cannot use any ordinary kind of pot.’

  ‘True, an antique pot should be used,’ agrees Porta. ‘And the best of these are made of copper. When I was in Naples, I got hold of one which Julius Caesar’s chief cook used to make bouillabaisse for the spaghettis’ kaiser.’

  ‘Take a trip to Marseilles, and taste the queen of all soups: Germiny à I’Oseille,’ suggests the Legionnaire. ‘After this I would suggest Pigeon à la Moscovite with Champignons Polonaise and Salade Béatrice.’

  ‘I once dined with a chap who, God save us all, forgot to put truffles in his Perigourdin,’ says Porta. ‘He lived on Gendarmenmarkt and was celebrating his release from Moabitt prison. We had actually expected to see the wreck of a man. He’d been in the cage for five years, so you could hardly expect anything else, could you? Some people are completely crushed for ever and ever after a short turn in ‘the dark’, but this fellow was as chipper as could be, and so healthy it seemed almost indecent. But the worst thing anybody can do, in my opinion, is to be late for a meal. It ruins a meal when you have to rush through the soup and fish to catch the other shits up.’

  ‘Have you tried blue fish baked in the oven with Sauce Bearnaise?’ Gregor interrupts. ‘It’s simply heavenly. Me and the general loved it. It was our favourite after an especially bloody battle.’

  ‘I do hope we’re in the neighbourhood of this lake, when the herring roe season starts,’ says Porta, expectantly.

  ‘When we get ’ome,’ says Tiny, by home he means the German lines, ‘I’m gain’ to organise a goose, fill it up with prunes an’ apples, an’ eat the lot myself.’

  ‘I’d rather have a turkey,’ says Barcelona. ‘It’s bigger!’

  ‘I can’t bloody stand it any more,’ shouts Porta, desperately, jumping to his feet. ‘Come on, Tiny, get hold of your rocker and fill your pockets with grenades’

  ‘Where we goin’?’ asks Tiny, readying his Mpi noisily.

  We’re going over to read the neighbour’s menu,’ answers Porta, swinging the Kalashnikov over his shoulder.

  ‘Want me to take a sac
k?’ asks Tiny optimistically.

  ‘No, Ivan’s got sacks,’ considers Porta.

  ‘Anybody who won’t take a risk to get grub’s a bleedin’ idiot,’ Tiny belly-chuckles.

  ‘You’ll get shot,’ the Old Man warns.

  ‘You’re nuts,’ answers Tiny, unconcernedly. ‘We’re the ones who do the shooting!’

  ‘We’re looking forward to some of that real Russian hospitality they’re so famous for,’ adds Porta as he disappears into the snow with a short laugh.

  ‘One of these days they’re not going to come back,’ mumbles the Old Man pessimistically.

  Several hours go by with no sound but the howling of the arctic storm. A long vicious Mpi salvo breaks the stillness.

  ‘A Schmeisser,’ says the Old Man, looking up.

  Shortly after there is the sound of three handgrenade explosions, and a series of flares send a brilliantly white light out over the terrain.

  ‘They’ve met the neighbours,’ whispers Gregor, in terror.

  ‘If they get through all right,’ says the Old Man, worriedly, ‘the devil take those two maniacs!’

  ‘You ought to report them,’ says Heide, officiously. ‘It’s a serious breach of discipline. The enemy will be able to use it as propaganda. I can just see the headlines in Pravda:

  GERMAN ARMIES STARVING

  Suicide missions sent out to

  steal bread from the Red Army!’

  We sense, more than anything, the muzzle-flame from a heavy gun depressed to ground level. Loud screams and a long series of explosions follow. A couple of Maxims bark angrily.

  A long silence falls across the snow desert. Even the icy storm quietens. It feels as if the whole of the Arctic is taking a deep breath, and readying itself for something quite special.

  A colossal explosion which seems as if it will never stop rends the stillness of the night.

  ‘God save us all,’ pants Barcelona, shocked. ‘They must have mistaken the ammunition store for the kitchen!’

  ‘Alarm, alarm,’ our sentries scream hysterically, certain that an attack is on the way.

  A gigantic column of flame goes up to the north-east of us, and the earth shakes to a long rolling explosion.

  A group of officers with the Oberst in the lead come rushing out of an igloo.

  ‘What in the world are the Russians doing?’ asks the Oberst, nervously. ‘Can they be fighting amongst themselves?’ He turns to an infantry major: ‘Have we anybody out there?’

  ‘No, Herr Oberst, this battle group has no contact whatever with the enemy.’

  Oberst Frick jams his monocle tighter into his eye and looks sharply at the major.

  ‘Do you know this to be true or do you merely think it to be so?’

  The major is obviously uneasy and has to admit that he really knows very little about what is happening within the group. He is a signals officer and has never before been with a battle unit.

  A long series of explosions and a snarling MG salvo bring his eyes round to the north-east, where sharp tongues of flame can be seen against reddening clouds.

  ‘There’s some devilry going on,’ mumbles the Oberst. ‘Find out what it is.’

  ‘Yes, Herr Oberst,’ replies the major, unhappily, and with no idea of what it is he has to find out about.

  A few minutes later he is passing the buck to a Hauptmann.

  ‘I want a clear picture of what is happening! Understand me, Herr Hauptmann? There’s some devilry going on. Some damned devilry!’

  The Hauptmann disappears behind a clump of trees, where he runs into a Leutnant.

  ‘There’s some devilry going on. You understand me?’ he roars at the Leutnant. ‘I want your report here in ten minutes time. Somebody is annoying the enemy!’

  The Jäger-Leutnant jogs off down the narrow track where he runs into No. 2 Section. He points at the Old Man with his Mpi.

  ‘On your feet, Oberfeldwebel! What a pigsty this is! The enemy’s worked up and I want to know why. Understand me? I want to know. Even if you have to get it from the Russian CO in person!’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ the Old Man replies, moving around as if he were preparing to go.

  The Leutnant disappears between the trees and decides to find a hiding-place where the Hauptmann will never think of looking for him.

  The Old Man sits down quietly, and puffs his pipe.

  During the next hour we hear dispersed firing, first from one direction then from another.

  ‘They’re dead long ago,’ says Barcelona, blackly, listening to the sound of a long, vicious Mpi salvo.

  The depressed gun roars, and several handgrenades explode. Through all the noise we hear the sound of a great roar of happy laughter.

  ‘That was Porta,’ mumbles the Old Man, fiddling nervously with the silver lid of his pipe.

  Dawn is near and the storm has slackened off almost completely. Only occasionally icy gusts whirl the snow up around us.

  ‘I doubt if we’ll see them again, now,’ states Heide. ‘Nobody can hang about in the middle of an enemy retirement as long as they have without getting scalped.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re right,’ says the Old Man quietly. ‘If only I’d forbidden them to go.’

  ‘Par Allah, you couldn’t have kept them back,’ the Legionnaire comforts him.

  A well-known sound brings us to our feet with our weapons at the ready.

  ‘Ski-troops,’ whispers Heide, tensely, taking cover behind a tree.

  I am down in a hole with the butt of the MG pressed into my shoulder. The snow squeaks and crackles. There is a strange kind of grunting noise. Again a sound like the hiss of skis sliding through frozen snow. I crook my finger on the trigger. There is a shadow moving amongst the trees.

  ‘Don’t fire,’ shouts Barcelona, jumping to his feet. He has seen Porta’s cylindrical yellow topper, which seems to be bobbing about strangely high up amongst the trees.

  ‘What the hell?’ cries the Westphalian, astoundedly.

  Half fearfully we stare at the floating hat as it comes bobbing towards us. If Porta is wearing that hat he must have grown at least six feet. Then the riddle is answered. A reindeer comes snuffling out of the snow. It looks as if it has been rolling in cotton wool. It is pulling an akja12 behind it, fully loaded with boxes and sacks. On top of the load Porta and Tiny sit majestically.

  Was it you doing the shooting?’ shouts the Old Man.

  ‘Sometimes it was,’ answers Tiny, with an air of superiority. But the neighbours’ lads got shot of quite a pile of Uncle Joe Stalin’s shit, too.’

  We ran into a crazy sod of a politruk,† with a face that thin he could’ve kissed a kz‡ goat between the horns with no trouble,’ explains Porta, waving his arms about. ‘We had to take aim twice before we could hit him. Then some bungled-up arsehole starts nattering at us out of the dark, and then he begins shooting at us. We aimed at his muzzle-flash and that soon cured him.’

  But we went the wrong road,’ Tiny breaks in. ‘It was black as the backside of a nigger’s bollocks. We blunders into some staff quarters where a load o’ military geniuses was discussin’ ’ow to win the fuckin’ war. There was some vajemkom13 pushin’ out a load o’ pig-latin. I pointed me old rock-a-bye ’ere at ’is fat gut, an’ ’e stopped talking quite sudden-like! “Germanski!” ’e screams, and didn’t ’ave time to say any more ’fore ’e was a goner. Porta swept the rest of ’em under the carpet!’

  ‘You brought their charts back, I hope?’ asks Heide, professionally. He thinks of nothing else but military objectives.

  ‘What the ’ell’d we want with them?’ asks Tiny, blankly. ‘They wasn’t what we’d gone out to get. And, any road, we knew the way back!’

  Heide can only shake his head despairingly.

  ‘What a row there was then, both south and north,’ explains Porta. ‘When we got outside we got tumbled head-over-heels by a whole shower of ’em, and some cunt of an officer gave us a real shellacking. He was that mixed up he never even notic
ed when Tiny answers him: “Jaawohl, Herr Leutnant!”’

  ‘Almost more’n a bloke’s life was worth to be out in the open there,’ Tiny goes on, lighting up a cigar.

  ‘Well we kept walking about a bit and watching the confusion,’ laughs Porta, heartily. ‘A major, red in the face as a boiled lobster, gives us another bollocking and orders us to help get a PAK-gun† into position. An order’s an order in any man’s army, so we got on with helping the anti-tank boys to get their pea-shooter set up where Major Ivan wanted it.’

  ‘All ’ell’d broke loose up the other end of the camp,’ grins Tiny. ‘Up ’ad gone an ammo stores an’ there was an awful din goin’ on. We thought for a bit it was you lot come to give us a ’and. Somebody blows the alarm whistle an’ all the stinkin’ Russians dashes over to where the bullets are fiyin’.’

  ‘Now we had some elbow-room,’ says Porta, loftily. ‘We pushed our nuts into the various companies just to say hello, and suddenly there we are with the catering boys.’

  ‘I doubt if any German soldier ’as ever seen so much perishin’ grub at one time in all ’is born life,’ interjects Tiny, rolling his eyes ecstatically heavenwards. ‘They’d got every-thin’. Wobblin’ pork, smoked reindeer, pickled gherkins, the lot!’

  ‘Yes, a comparison of Russian army catering with German ditto,’ remarks Porta, drily, ‘makes one realise that belief in the Final Victory can only be supported by faith alone!’

  ‘There was a fat sod of a cook-sergeant, lyin’ there ’avin’ a wank at a picture o’ Marlene Dietrich,’ Tiny gives a dirty chuckle. ‘Biggest load ’e shot in ’is life was the last, when rock-a-bye-baby ’ere pushed forty-two tracers right up ’is bleedin’ jacksey!’

  We had to move fast, now,’ says Porta, with a short laugh. We grabbed everything we could get our hands on. When we found out we couldn’t carry the half of it we went out to try and liberate a sledge. That’s how we met this Commie reindeer, who did not conceal from us that he was a critic of the system, and since he also had an akja with him, well, we enlisted him on the spot.’

  ‘I ’ad to promise ’im some Finnish, capitalist reindeer cunt,’ grins Tiny, ’and ’e’s goin’ to get it too, if I ’ave to bend over an’ supply German arsehole to ’im, personally!’