Monte Cassino

by Sven Hassel

  "I could tell you were one of us," Carl began, his face serious.

  At the foot of the air-shaft outside a bottle smashed against a pipe. Hurried footsteps sounded on the narrow stairs. Iron-shod boots trying to tread quietly. The military police, blasted headhunters.

  Mario jerked himself free of Isabella.

  "Hell, boys, they're here. The blind woman's heard them. Out onto the roof! Sbrigatevi!"

  I tried to crawl under the bed, but was pulled out by my legs.

  "Are you crazy?" Isabella hissed. "That's the first place they look."

  Mario shoved us out of the window.

  "Out, you buggers! And no fuss! If they find you here they'll close the bar and all this business. The devil take you Germans. As far as I am concerned, you can shoot each other as much as you like, only leave us Romans in peace."

  I had my pistol in my mouth and two hand grenades strung round my neck. My head swam as I looked down.

  Carl came just behind me. He had forgotten his trousers and was grinning sheepishly. They chucked the two sailors' kitbags and my pack into the well of the air-shaft. The sailors' carbines were the worst. They stuck them up the chimney and hoped the cartridges would not explode. We were not the only ones at it in the building. We clung to the house wall like grapes. I had my toes on a jutting brick and my fingers bored into the eaves. "Don't look down," Isabella said warningly. God, I was afraid! Why should we have been hunted by our own lot? What had we done? One night's freedom. That was all. We were soldiers in need of a let up. Damn all police.

  "My holster and cap are still in there," I whispered agitatedly.

  "Idiot," Carl whispered back and kicked on the glass. Mario looked out.

  "Per Bacco! You Germans are the idiots of all time," he said, handing the things out.

  A few minutes later, we heard the door being flung open. They treated Isabella like dirt, struck Mario and jeered at Italy. Then the window was flung open. We squeezed flat against the wall, transformed into silent brick. If we were discovered, it would mean death. No explanation could have saved us.

  I pushed the safety catch of my .8 forward. Carl had the cord of a hand grenade between his teeth. In the glow of light from the window I saw a stony face under a steel helmet. The beam of a torch plunged down into the well shaft. Christ, help us. Just this once. Let them disappear and we'll go to Mass tomorrow. You can't object to our amusing ourselves just once!

  We could hear the MPs shouting and the sound of wood splintering. Someone shrieked. Sound of truncheon falling on flesh. A pistol shot. Tinkle of glass. Oaths and curses.

  "After that swine," ordered a beery voice.

  Iron-shod boots clattered down the stairs. Wonder if they caught him. Must have been desperate to shoot. They would break every bone in his body. You don't shoot at MPs with impunity. A heavy engine sprang to life in the quiet street. A couple of BMW motorcycles added their noise.

  Now they were going. With the night's catch.

  Bit by bit we edged our way along the narrow coping. Just before we climbed in through the window, Otto said:

  "Look out. Perhaps they're doing the old dodge of pretending to go, just to entice us out."

  I took a deep breath. It was as though my brain lay bared. I had torn a nail and it was hanging by a thread, hurting like the devil, if I just moved my finger.

  A window was flung open and a steel helmet looked out. An MP peered down into the well, the beam of a torch played across the opposite wall, a blind was pulled hurriedly.

  We could hear someone up on the roof. A skylight banged a give-away. We held our breath.

  Finally the window opened and Mario and Isabella put their heads out.

  "You damned Germans will be ;the death of me*," Mario said. "That was a near thing." His dirty pullover was wet with the sweat of his anxiety. "If I ever get my hands on one of that lot, I'll strangle him myself. Tomorrow I shall go to mass. Not that I believe in God, but all the same!" He wiped his forehead with his sweat-rag. "Rita, the silly fool, had one in her cupboard. A deserter from the Luftwaffe. He's been on the run for three months. I've kicked him out once. And he had Italian papers. He could have got away with it, if they hadn't found him in the cupboard. Even a cow would suspect someone found in a cupboard."

  *When I visited Mario after the war, he told me that he had had exactly the same trouble with the Americans.

  "They found the Italian deserter and the Englishman," Isabella put in. "The one who escaped from Campo Concentramento Prigioneri di Guerra 304."

  The room filled with people speaking a cocktail of languages. We sat on top of each other on the broad bed. Most were laughing with the relief, but in one corner of the room sat a pretty young girl with a set face. The Englishman had been her friend.

  "They pulled him down the stairs, by his feet," she

  whispered. "His head bumped goodbye on every tread."

  The traffic policeman we had met earlier that evening held out a bottle of schnaps, but she pushed it away, muttering something I did not hear.

  "They got them, did they? Blast them," Mario said. "They were to have gone to the mountains tomorrow. The partisans were expecting them."

  "It's stupid to be in Rome without papers," the traffic policeman said with professional assurance. "You cannot hide here."

  "Where did they find Heinz?" asked a man with a pointed nose, who did an act in a nearby restaurant.

  "Under the washbasin in the lav.," replied a girl with a face puffy from weeping. "Just as they were going, one of them turned and shone his torch under the basin. It wasn't even one of the bullies. Only a gefreiter. He wasn't angry. He just laughed and said to Heinz: 'Better come out, little one. It must be dull sitting in there.' Heinz must have been crazy. He pulled his pistol and shot at him. He only hit him in the arm. That brought the others and they beat him to death with the butts of their rifles. They kicked him down the stairs like a football. He lay on each landing until they came down and kicked him off it."

  "Are you sure Heinz was dead?" Mario asked between two gulps of beer.

  The plump girl nodded.

  "How I hate the military police," Otto exclaimed fiercely. "They are the real butchers." He unbuttoned his coat, undid the toggles of his overalls and seemed about to embark on a lengthy exposition, but Carl cut him off short.

  "Shut up! Shit on the MPs. Enjoy the war. The peace will be long and dreadful. Haven't you as much cunt and booze as you want? Aren't you with pals? And the bloodhounds have gone. So what the hell are you grumbling about? What more do you want? Isn't God good to us?"

  Isabella put a record on the gramophone and each of us danced his or her favourite dance without regard to the music. One girl got a black eye. Mario broke a bottle over the head of the traffic policeman. We relieved ourselves out of the window. It wasn't too easy for the girls. We had to hold them to prevent them losing their balance. None of them would leave the room in case something interesting happened, while she was gone.

  Mario and an Italian sailor had got hold of accordions, and from somewhere we got hold of a man with a barrel organ. The whole house began to shake with the ghastly noise. The partition between Isabella's and the next room collapsed.

  The traffic policeman and one of the girls took the grave decision that they would together leave this world. They got themselves ready to commit suicide. We helped them fill the bath, but after we had held them under for a short while, they changed their minds. Carl got furious and banged their heads together and cursed them for characterless idiots who didn't know their own minds.

  Copulating couples lay about the corridor and out on the stairs. Mario put his dirty feet up on the small of my labouring back. It wasn't that he wanted to impede me and Anna, but there was no where else to put them, if he leaned back with his head between Luisa's lush breasts. He drew his concertina out to its full length, spat a mouthful of regurgitated beer into a flower vase, at which the yellow flowers in it shook their heads in protest.

  Du h
ast Gluck bei den Frauen, bel ami, Gar nicht elegant, gar nicht charmant . . .

  You could not call it singing. It was a savage, enthusiastic bellow. He paused for breath between every line. His sweater was half way up his chest revealing a large expanse of hairy belly.

  Otto and a girl emerged from under the bed, where they had spent quite a long time. Then with a foot that was far from clean Otto shoved her back under it again. The girl came from Warsaw and had landed in Rome with a lot of other flotsam and jetsam of the war. She never tired telling one about her noble father's estates.

  "Now shut up, Zosia," Otto called. "I cannot be bothered to listen to those stories of your ruddy nags and landaus. I'm never going to drive behind white horses." He swivelled round with his back to the bed and a girl let her bare legs dangle over his shoulders. He took hold of the back of her knees and sang:

  Wir lagen vor Madagaskar

  und hatten die Pest au Bord. . . .

  He sang of the hard lot of the sardine fisher, who, after a whole night on a stormy sea, hauls in his nets with aching muscles and counts the one fish in them, all he has to feed his flock of children.

  A couple of upperclass girls with swing-silly friends joined us. They were tired of antiques and fine crystal and wanted to see dirty nails, hear dirty oaths and smell sour beer. One of them told us that her mother and her lover had taken poison together.

  "My mother was a whore. But shit. Wouldn't you like to fuck me?" she said to Carl and flung her arms round his neck. They took up position in the corridor.

  Otto came staggering up, supported by two naked girls.

  "Don't trust the gentry," he shouted pointing an accusing finger at one of the boys. "They're all liars. Sometime or other in their rotten lives, they play at being communists and talk us honest coolies into hoisting the red flag."

  The other upperclass girl laughed, hanging round my neck. Otto tried to help her with her zip fastener, with the result that her skirt tore to the hem.

  "Black knickers, short petticoat!" he shouted, seized the girl by the arm and flung her against the bed. "Ought to have their arses kicked, bloody ersatz-proletariats. Aren't you a communist at the moment, pretty boy?" he shouted at her companion.

  Carl sang:

  Die Neger in Afrika sie rufen alle laut: Wir wollen heim ins Reich!

  "You a communist?" Otto bawled belligerently. The youth nodded. He clenched his fist and crowed something like 'Red Front'.

  "Child's play," Otto scoffed. Then he fished a .38 out of his coat and chucked it to the boy. "Go out in the streets, find a Gestapo man or military bloodhound and plug them with that, then. Only you don't dare, of course. You filthy little drawing room turd. I know you upper-class buggers. Ensigns, officer-cadets, champagne-lieutenants, pah! None of you has the courage of an old Roman tomcat."

  The accordions fell silent. People's interest had suddenly been caught. Otto nagged on. He was a typical old U-boat sailor, and hated everything connected with the upper classes and to whom the word intellectual acted as a red rag to a bull.

  An academic-looking girl wearing glasses tried to intervene and Otto glared at her furiously, then, suddenly, she found herself sitting at the other end of the corridor.

  The young man whose hair needed cutting disappeared through the door with the pistol in his pocket. One or two tried to keep him back.

  The other girl came back to me. "Throw your uniform away and come with me," she proposed. "The war will soon be over."

  I ran my hand up her thigh. She flung herself on her back on the bed, legs hanging over the edge, and I flung myself on her.

  Otto was still grumbling away:

  "Communists! Not a bit of it! They'd capitulate as soon as they see a reserve policeman with a swastika on his arse."

  The traffic policeman came in with a colleague.

  "God damn it, what luck!" he exclaimed angrily. "Two punctures, a front wheel each time. Bruno and I were on the tails of a couple of girls in a sports car. They strewed nails behind them. You only expect that of tough youths. Bruno was driving and we went straight into a tree. But I know who one of the girls is: Her old man will have to fork out!" He poured a bottle of beer down his throat. "I was at Cyrenaica," he told Otto. "I got a bloody bullet in my leg there, so I could get back to traffic work again."

  "What concern of mine is that?" Otto growled. "I'm in the navy. It's we sailors bear the brunt of this ruddy war."

  "Don't know anything about that," the dirty traffic policeman said good-humouredly and proffered a bottle of beer. "For generations all my family have been in the police. My father was shot in Naples. A bloody ponce got him. They laid my grandfather cold too. He was a sergeant in the carabinieri. They chucked his body into the ditch."

  "That doesn't worry me," Otto said. "Never have been able to stand the police. They're the same in all countries."

  "I don't wrong anybody," the traffic policeman protested. "But the kid who chucked those nails out--let her wait! Tomorrow."

  "If she's upper-class," Carl hiccoughed, "then down with her head. Perhaps I and my two pals here had better come too and help deal with her."

  Everything was dripping with beer. One of the girls vomited. She had on a pair of light blue knickers. Mario planted a yellow flower in her bum, but she was feeling too awful to notice.

  Then Mario and the two policemen staggered downstairs, each singing a different song. It was time to open the bar. When they got to the first floor they started quarrelling, accusing each other of stealing the other's beer; then Mario's good nature got the better of him and he began to sob. He tried to wipe his eyes on the policeman's holster. Then they couldn't get the door of the bar open and decided to shoot the lock out with the policeman's pistol. As soon as the lock was destroyed, Mario found the keys. That started a new, violent squabble, with Mario demanding compensation for the lock and maintaining that the policeman was sabotaging his business. He threatened to bring an action for damages. Then suddenly they were friends again.

  I was lying with Elisabetta under the bed. My head was splitting and I wished I was dead. Otto was on his knees beside the W.C. with the seat round his neck like a horsecollar. Carl and Rita were sitting in the wardrobe squabbling about the height of the ceiling, which Carl insisted was too low to comply with the regulations.

  "Come along, you drunken swine," Mario called impatiently. "Get your trousers on. Time for mass. The others are already on their way."

  The church of St. Andreas was pleasantly cool. We squeezed together into two pews and our faces assumed serious expressions.

  Rita was like a Virgin Mary. At least, our idea of the Virgin Mary.

  One by one we went up to the altar. Otto handed Carl his pocket flask. Going to mass was a bit of an undertaking for them and they needed mutual support.

  My upper-class girl was kneeling beside me.

  Otto clasped his hands in an awkward, clumsy gesture. I looked up at the figure on the cross and found myself mumbling:

  "Thanks, Christ, for helping us last night when the bloodhounds came. Help those they caught, as well."

  At that moment a shaft of sunlight struck the figure's face. How tired He looked. I felt a grip on my arm. It was Mario, still in his sweater, the sweat-rag round his neck. He stank of beer.

  "Come on, Sven. Have you gone to sleep?"

  "Go to hell," I snarled.

  The grip became firmer, almost brutal. Otto came up. He dealt me a chop with the edge of his hand on the back of my head.

  "Don't get uppish, you young bugger. No nonsense in church. Don't try to throw your weight about, as if you knew God personally."

  They dragged me out. Carl wanted to purloin a silver salver as we went, but Otto and Mario thought that would be too much.

  "If we'd run into a priest outside and he had had it under his arm, that would have been different. One on the back of the head and away with the silver; but you can't pinch things inside a church. There are limits."

  Carl gave in, but he wa
s disappointed and furious, so furious that he dealt an organ-grinder a great wallop on the head, making him drop his organ, and shouted at him:

  "How dare you churn out those tart's tunes beside a church, you heathen macaroni?"

  A couple of hours later we said goodbye to Mario and the girls and decided we would go sightseeing. We visited a number of bars and taverns, kitbag and pack on our shoulders.

  After a bit, we stopped for a beer and to visit a brothel. We also found ourselves in a picture exhibition, but that was really a mistake. Carl took a fancy to a picture of a naked girl, but when he heard the price he wanted to beat up the exhibition committee. They threatened to call the police. That kind always does. If they had offered us a glass of beer, they would not have had four big plate glass windows to replace.

  We entered a smart restaurant in Via Cavour and found that a head waiter and four other waiters did not like us. It all started when a woman in the cloakroom refused to accept our kitbags and pack, became worse when Otto decided to change his socks in the foyer, but the balloon really went up when they refused to serve us. Carl got most excited and called them all sorts of names, then he stormed out to the kitchens, picked up a large dish of ravioli and stormed out, sweeping the staff aside as if he were a typhoon loose in a forest of young trees.

  A couple of elderly policemen managed to entice us out and into a tavern in a side street, where we were more welcome. Carl never stopped swearing at the upper classes till we got there. He still had the dish of ravioli under his arm. A present from the smart restaurant, which no doubt thought it a cheap price to pay for getting rid of us.

  When we reached the tavern, Carl held the ladle threateningly under the noses of the two policemen.

  "You two lousy pavement-admirals realize that we came with you voluntarily, don't you?"

  Over a beer the two assured us that they were absolutely clear about this.