Court Martial

by Sven Hassel

  A series of gigantic explosions rocks the surrounding countryside like the shock of an earthquake. A huge column of flame reaches towards the heavens, growing and growing as if it will never stop.

  Two great sheets of flame shoot up from the thousands and thousands of gallons of petrol the rockets have ignited. The heat rolls across the ground like a hot breath from hell itself. For miles around, the snow melts and lakes come into being. Up from the middle of the camp rises a flame so clear and white that it fills us with terror. Then comes the blast wave and everything, living or dead, is swept from its path. Trees are torn up by the roots or snapped off like matchsticks. With a deafening roar it sweeps over us, throwing us far out across the frozen lakes.

  A lorry and trailer sail through the air as if they were driving along an invisible road. They fall into the snow a long way off in the forest, and become a heap of twisted metal.

  Three days later we can still see the glow of the flames far behind us. The whole horizon is a hell of fire, and even though we are forty miles from it it still seems to be just behind us.

  By now we are almost mad from exhaustion, and fights break out for the most ridiculous reasons. Tiny has been about to knock Leutnant Schnelle down twice because he continually threatens him with a court martial.

  Suddenly I break through a thin skin of ice, and only Gregor’s quick reaction saves me from disappearing into an apparently bottomless cleft in a glacier.

  A strange roar can be heard through the noise of the storm, almost like a violent artillery bombardment. Our compass needle swings about crazily, and points in all directions.

  Heide talks of magnetic storms, but cannot explain to us what they really are. Just mumbles something about them being a special kind of Polar storm which sends both men and instruments crazy. We can only agree with him. But, as often happens in the Arctic, the wind suddenly changes as if two storms are blowing in different directions. Snow and ice are sucked up into huge spirals.

  Suddenly Unteroffizier Stolp lets out a loud, piercing scream and disappears into the snow as if he had been pulled down by the feet. Despairingly we peer down into the dark crevasse into which he has fallen in a cloud of ice and snow.

  We shout, but only the echoes come back to us from the depths.

  ‘He’s gone straight to the devil,’ shudders Porta.

  ‘Fuck ‘im,’ says Tiny. ‘A rotten bastard when all’s said an’ done!’

  ‘That is no way to speak of an Unteroffizier,’ Leutnant Schnelle corrects him sharply.

  ‘NO?’ answer Tiny, looking him up and down contemptuously.

  Soon after, Barcelona goes through but manages to hang on to a ledge. We get a rope down to him and haul him up. He is almost mad with terror and says the devil was sitting down there in the bottom of the crevasse calling to him.

  Suddenly the storm drops. The silence that follows it frightens us. It feels as if the threatening, steel-grey heavens are about to fall on us. After only a few minutes the storm is back again with increased force.

  ‘Down!’ roars the Old Man, but his warning comes too late.

  Leutnant Schnelle is blown over the edge of the cliff, hovers like a bird in flight, turns over, is whirled upwards and falls straight down into the green waves below. We catch sight of him on the tip of a giant wave and then he is sucked down into the greedy white foam.

  ‘Swimmin’ on in advance, I reckon, so’s ’e can get that court martial set up for me,’ says Tiny.

  ‘It’s nothing to laugh at,’ says Heide, shocked.

  ‘You expect me to break into tears over that shit of an officer?’ asks Tiny.

  The storm increases in violence. The snow is now so thick that we can only see a few inches in front of us. The entire desert of snow has been whipped, by the storm, to a raging sea. The snow comes rolling down on us in great waves, which threaten to engulf us completely.

  The temperature has fallen to around minus 50 degrees C. Even our breath freezes to ice. The short day is over, and the darkness has descended. We press on, as if fumbling our way through black velvet curtains. The only satisfaction we get from the terrible polar storm is that it is just as bad for the Russians as it is for us.

  The strange, changeable winds blow the veil of snow aside for a moment, and Porta catches a glimpse of a party of soldiers who are coming straight towards us.

  The Old Man orders us to scatter and dig ourselves in the snow.

  ‘Where’ve they got to?’ asks Tiny, in amazement, after we have waited for some time in our snow burrows.

  ‘They must be somewhere close by,’ considers Porta, looking cautiously up over the snowy ridge.

  ‘That bloody snow! Can’t even get a sight of your prick without a telescope!’ scolds Barcelona, straightening his face mask.

  A little way across the tundra the snow has been blown together into a tall saw-edged drift. A fur-clad head shows for a moment above the rim.

  ‘Uncle Ivan,’ smiles Porta, releasing his safety catch.

  ‘I’ll knock that bastard’s teeth in for him, when he shows himself again,’ says Gregor, wickedly, laying his cheek alongside the butt of his Mpi.

  Almost two hours go by before they come, one by one, crawling over the mountains of snow. One of them half rises and gives a signal with his arm. They split into two groups. One goes north in single file. The other moves directly towards us.

  ‘Quiet,’ whispers Porta, ‘none of that crazy, scattered firing! Tiny’n me’ll do it! We’ll take the rear ones first. The noise of the storm will cover the shots.’ He lifts his sniper’s rifle and adjusts the telescopic sights.

  Tiny draws a deep breath, and aims at the fur-clad soldiers to the rear.

  Porta has the next to last of them in his sights.

  Both rifles go off simultaneously.

  The two soldiers go over as if they had been hit by a fist. When the next two fall the section leader turns round and sees what is happening. He stops, and gapes uncomprehendingly. Then he too drops, remains kneeling in the snow for a moment with his hands to his shattered face, and goes down. Those left throw themselves flat and begin to crawl backwards to cover, away from the firing.

  A salvo of bullets bores into the snow with a strange splashing sound.

  The Legionnaire throws his Mpi to his shoulder. Three shots sound singly, and the last of the enemy group jumps and dies.

  ‘What fools to go over the top like that,’ says Porta, shaking his head. ‘If they’d crept along under cover of it we’d never’ve been able to take ’em!’

  ‘Wonder what sort of a dope the leader was?’ says Tiny.

  ‘A poor devil like us,’ answers Porta. ‘The kind they always use for the dirty jobs.’

  ‘Come death, come . . . ’ hums the Legionnaire, into the howling of the Arctic storm.

  We build an igloo in a deep valley. The Old Man didn’t want to give the order to do it, but he can see our strength has almost run out.

  ‘Listen,’ says Porta, making himself comfortable in the igloo’s best spot. ‘When I was serving with Fifth Panzer-regiment in Berlin the CO once sent me to take a letter to his wife.’

  ‘Did you know Staff-Feldwebel Giese from the unarmed combat school at Wünschdorf?’ Tiny breaks in. ‘I’ll never forget ‘im, not if I live to be a ’undred. ’E left this world through a shortage of oxygen, even though ’e was a specialist in pressin’ the air out o’ people. One morning early, right at the beginnin’ of drill ’e pulled our company clown, who didn’t understand a fuck what it was all about, out of the ranks. ’E kept on gettin’ his wire round ’is own neck and comin’ close to stranglin’ ’imself.

  ‘“Look here,” explained the Staff-Feldwebel, “you put your sling round my throat and imagine I am a Russian who wants to kill you. Pull tighter man! Take a good grip on the handles and pull outwards!”

  ‘Well this dope’d been in the shootin’ club long enough to know an order was an order, so ’e pulled ’earty on the two ends of the sling. The rest st
ood looking on, the way you always do when you’re bein’ instructed. We did think it a bit queer as ’ow Giese was makin’ faces an’ stickin’ out ’is tongue at us.

  ‘“Let the Staff ’ave a bit of air then!” somebody shouted from the ranks.

  ‘By then it was too late already. Staff Giese didn’t need air no more. ’E was dead. There was a ’ell of a bother about that instruction period. Three of them snap-brim fellers came an’ talked about it with us, an’ when they left they took Ernst with ’em. They ’ung ’im as a warnin’ to the rest of the pupils.

  ‘A bit later I was sent to the war dog school at Hof, where somethin’ even nuttier ’appened. There they ’ad a grey Alsatian, which ’eld the rank of Obergefreiter . . . ’

  ‘Fuck you and your Obergefreiter Alsatian,’ Porta breaks in, impatiently. ‘Now it’s my turn. Off I marched to the CO’s crumpet. Course I was supposed to use the back door. The front door was for Leutnants and above. So in I go through the rose bushes and all the other shit there is in a CO’s garden. I was just going to open the gate into the back garden, but banged it to again pretty quick when I caught sight of a bulldog about the size of a calf, with a yellow, bristly coat and a head as big as a motor-cycle sidecar. He barked like a whole pack of bulldogs whose voices were breaking, but much, much louder. Spittle drooled down his chops and he didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was just waiting to get his English dog’s teeth into the cheeks of a German soldier’s backside.

  ‘“You bloody English’ve already lost this war,” I said to him, and moved off sharply to the front door and pressed the bell. No reaction. I rang louder. Perhaps the CO’s wife was deaf. It was only when I rang for the third time that an attractive “fuck me quick” bint opened the door.

  ‘“You rang, soldier,” she twittered, rolling her giglamps at me.

  ‘“Reporting ma’am,’ I roared, so loudly that the bulldog took cover behind the house. “Obergefreiter Joseph Porta, Fifth Panzerregiment, HQ Company, on temporary service with ordnance, has a GEKADOS letter from the Commanding Officer to his lady wife, ma’am!”

  ‘She threw the letter carelessly into a corner, as if it were last year’s newspaper.

  ‘“You’re new?’ she asked, pursing her mouth as if she was sucking a nigger prick in the rainy season.

  ‘“No, slightly used,” I answered.

  ‘“Would the Obergefreiter like a glass of wine?” she purred, staring intently at the place where my bollocks were swelling up behind my flies.

  ‘“Thank you, ma’am,” I answered, hanging my cap on a wooden nigger, one of those things classy people buy when they can’t afford to import a real cannibal to take the guests’ hats.

  ‘We smoked for a while and talked happily about the great victories we were winning all over the world. She inhaled so deeply that at a certain point in the conversation I looked under the table to see if smoke was coming out of her cunt.

  ‘After we’d emptied the bottle of livening juice and confided our passionate thoughts to one another, she let my good friend out of his cage and tickled him till I was about ready to start swinging by my army sandals from the chandelier. Not long after, I took the heights by storm and planted me old flagstaff. This happened five times, before the doorbell rang. Fortunately the CO’s wife had remembered to put the chain on. For a moment I thought it was the bulldog that wanted to be let in.

  ‘“Are you home, Lisa,” whined my CO, pushing his nose through the gap the chain allowed.

  ‘“It’s the old idiot,” she whispered, in a voice which sounded as if she’d been drinking sulphuric acid. “His prick’s so tiny he couldn’t even satisfy a humming bird!”

  ‘“Lisa! Is anybody home?” whines the voice from the doorway again.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” I think. “And that’s your CO! Who the hell’d have gone out and put the chain on from the inside.”

  ‘“Course we’re at home you bloody old prehistoric German pygmy prick,” I nearly shouted. “Come an’ dip your cock in Obergefreiter juice!” But before I really knew what was happening she’d pushed me out of the kitchen door and there was that bloody great English giant of a dog, sitting licking his chops at the thought of a nice chunk of German soldier meat.

  “Nice dog,” I wheedled, staring it in the eyes, the way I’d heard animal trainers do when they go in to have a chat with a lion.

  ‘“Hurra!” shouted the dog. At least that’s what it sounded like.

  ‘“Hurra!” I replied, and sprinted off with that English monster hanging on to my Prussian soldier’s arse.

  ‘Two days later the animal is picked up by two SD snap-brims. The new racial laws have just come into force. No non-Aryan dog was allowed in a German home. The Jewish bulldog went straight to the gas chamber.

  ‘In replacement for him my CO got himself a spotted bird-dog, but that dog too, ran foul of the racial laws. It had the blood of French Jews in its veins. It went to the gas chamber.’

  ‘Isn’t it about time you turned in, Porta,’ remarks the Finnish captain, acidly. ‘We are tired, at any rate!’

  ‘Later on they bought a Great Dane,’ continues Porta, without taking any notice of the captain. ‘There was a dog the SD could accept. They were attracted to it because of its colossal stupidity!’

  The storm drops, in the course of the night, and an unreal silence lies across the tundra. The cold air strikes us with the violence of a tank, sucking every bit of warmth out of our bodies.

  Nobody who has not experienced it, can judge where the borderline of physical endurance lies.

  Generalfeldmarschall von Keitel, February, 1945

  ‘A real minister,’ shouts Wolfgang, the Communist leader, giving a shove to Hirtsiefer, the former Minister for Home Affairs, who has just been received as a prisoner in the concentration camp at Esterwegen.

  ‘If that bureaucrat can stand on his feet tomorrow morning,’ says SS-Scharfiihrer Schramm, ‘I’ll look after you shits personally!’

  Wolfgang looks at him and smiles sardonically.

  ‘We’ll look after him all right,’ he promises, blackly.

  An SS man shoves Hirtsiefer roughly, so that he knocks two prisoners over towards the bunks. They get to their feet and strike out at him.

  ‘It was you, you lousy Social Democrat, who gave our hungry wives two cups in recognition of them having brought their twelfth child into the world’

  Growls are heard from the men surrounding Hirtsiefer. Even the SS men’s smiles have disappeared.

  ‘Comrades, you forget they also received two hundred marks,’ he says, weakly.

  ‘You shit! You deducted it from the dole money,’ screams a mousy little prisoner from the far side of the table.

  ‘And you kicked us in the arse, when we wanted an increase in the money for the kids,’ roars SS-Sturmmann Kratz crashing his rifle butt on the ground.

  ‘Your rotten two hundred marks was our lot,’ rages a prisoner, ‘and we could then die of hunger far as you were concerned. But now you’re where you belong and you can feel how it is to starve!’

  ‘Kick his balls up into his throat,’ an SS man suggests, smacking ‘Mouse’ on the shoulder.

  They took him at nightfall. They beat him and kicked him. They dragged him through the latrines. Night after night they repeated the process. When his wife came to fetch him, in a large Mercedes, he had to be carried out.

  The SS guards and the prisoners were furious. They’d got hold of a bureaucrat, and now he was being let loose.

  A few days later the Gestapo came and took three SS men and eleven prisoners. They were shot for having mistreated the prisoner Hirtsiefer.

  51 Abwehr = Counter-espionage.

  † V-men = (Vertrauensleute) = spies.

  52 GEKADOS = (Geheime Kommandosache) = Secret Command Case.

  53 Rabotschijs dvidatji porokh (Russian) = Workmen moving ammunition.

  †Krass tjuk (Russian) = Are you stealing?

  ‡Papirossa, starschij serschant (R
ussian) = Cigarette, staff-sergeant?

  § Spajisibo (Russian) = Thank you.

  ** Dashe, Mladschij lejtenant (Russian) = Very good, sir.

  THE RED ANGEL

  ‘If the lousy Germanskis come to Kosnowska we’ll knock their heads in,’ yells Mischa, making his Cossack sabre whistle in the air. ‘If I hadn’t got run over by that rotten train and lost my foot I’d have shot thousands of the fascist swine by now!’

  ‘Germans are no better’n reindeer shit,’ shouts Nikolaij, contemptuously, throwing a half-rotten potato against the wall. He is still too young to be called up, but he has already worked two years in the mines. His left leg is stiff. It happened last year when a charge went off too soon. Carelessness, said the NKVD examining committee. His father was killed in the same explosion. They carried his remains out on a tarpaulin. When the NKVD inspectors left they took an engineer and two dynamiters with them. They never came back.

  ‘I’ll eat a dog if those Germans don’t get here, soon,’ says Shenja, the hostess of ‘The Red Angel’. She bends down and her huge breasts almost touch the floor. She takes a double-barrelled shotgun from under the counter and aims it at Yorgi, the party’s political worker. ‘I’ll shoot their tails off, soon as I get a sight of them!’ she shouts, ready for a fight.

  ‘Your drawers’d drop off from the bang,’ grins Nikolaij, knocking back a vodka.

  ‘They would, would they? shouts Shenja, furiously. She puts two shells in the shotgun, cocks it and fires.

  The sound is terrific. Those closest to her are almost deafened by it.

  ‘Mad devils,’ shouts Yorgi, who has fallen to the floor from pure fright. ‘That crazy bitch could’ve killed the lot of us!’

  ‘Anybody else think my drawers’d drop off ?’ howls Shenja, loading the gun again so as to be ready if the Germans do come.

  ‘Germans are the cowardliest people on the face of the earth,’ says Fjedor, banging the flat of his hand on the table and making bottles and glasses dance. ‘Yellow-bellies! Scared of losin’ the little bit of life they’ve got in ’em. When I was at the machine school at Murmansk, one of the swine came to look at our machines. Run away from his own country. Only just managed to save his skin when Hitler took over. A real bastard he was. So bigheaded he couldn’t make do with one secretary, but had to drag two of ’em round with him. Anybody could see what they were! Couple of high-priced whores from Moscow. Prick an’ balls was all they’d been educated in. That rotten German had his nose so far into everything an honest rabotschij54 could never feel safe. Well, for our own sakes we decided we’d best get rid of him. So, late one night we pick him up coming rollin’ out of the brothel Mollnija† and stuff him in a cement sack. Believe it or not he got free before we got down to the old part of the docks. Down the street he runs, shouting his head off for help. But who’s goin’ to help anybody, particularly a German, in Murmansk in the middle of the night? We caught up with him, anyway, and give him one in the guts with a club, and then we all kicked his head about a bit and he quietened down. But they’re hard to keep calm, those German sods. We dragged him down to the Czar’s slipway. You know, there where they’ve got the barges laid up. Lord, the way he kicked and struggled when we held his head under the water. Just wouldn’t go off quiet and self-possessed like a man. Every time we thought he must be dead, and pulled him out of the water, off he goes again, howling and spouting water and beggin’ for his rotten life. A couple of us started kicking him in the balls. We kicked him so hard they must’ve ended up in his throat. He offered us all his money, every single kopeck, if we’d let him stay alive, and swore he’d put in a good word for us in Moscow. Just shows you what liars the Germans are. Who’d put in a good word for anybody who’d been doing his best to kill him?’