Comrades of War

by Sven Hassel

  Stege nodded. ‘There’s something to what you’re saying. At the moment we are the big joes. Later, when the war’s over, you will be. The whole thing works like a dial, with “sun” and “rain” as on the old barometers. Today, we’re in the sun and you in the shade. But soon the situation may be reversed. At the moment, in any case, the Jews are one of the best items on the political market.’

  The old Jew sat listening with open mouth. Despair shone in his hollow eyes.

  ‘It isn’t true,’ he whispered. ‘The chains will soon be broken, as when Moses brought us out of slavery in Egypt.’

  The old prisoner let out a tired laugh.

  ‘That was possible a couple of thousand years ago; it isn’t today. Some of you’ll escape the gangs of Himmler, but on the other side there will also be Himmlers, and they’ll know how to use you to their own advantage. You are and will continue to be a mere object.’

  ‘No,’ said the old Jew. ‘A new age will come.’

  Bending toward him, Porta gave him two hundred marks.

  ‘This will give you a start in the new age you’re talking of. When you’ve found it, be sure to send us a postcard.’

  Loud laughter.

  The Jew gently passed his hand over the bills. He looked at Porta with a feeble smile. ‘What address should I send it to?’

  Porta shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows?’ His voice softened to a confidential whisper: ‘If you notice a rusty steel helmet on the ground, knock at it and ask: “Who is rotting here?” When you come to mine, I’ll answer: “One of the stupidest swine in the whole German army.” Then you just place your postcard under the helmet and I’ll pick it up at full moon.’

  V

  The Jew

  ‘I love you,’ I told her, and at the same time I thought: I have said that so many times. I wonder if I mean it this time.

  She laughed softly. The crow’s-feet around her eyes displayed their finest texture.

  ‘We aren’t likely to have much luck at it,’ she said, putting her arms around my neck and kissing me.

  We sat down on the sofa and looked through the window out upon the Alster. A boat was sailing out there, an old boat loaded with people. She passed a finger along my broken nose.

  ‘Did it hurt very much when your nose was broken in Torgau?’

  ‘Nah, but it bled like a fountain.’

  ‘Didn’t it hurt at all?’

  ‘A little, maybe – well, yes, afterwards it hurt quite a bit.’

  ‘Your eyes are cold, Sven, even when you laugh. They are hard. Try to make them kind!’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘That’s my eyes. Can one’s eyes be changed? Yours are brown and gentle. Mine are gray and evil. I’m evil because my work demands it.’

  ‘No, not evil. You’re not evil.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I am. I am one of Hitler’s soldiers and must be evil.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’re not a soldier and certainly not Hitler’s. You’re a boy who has been slipped into an ugly uniform with tin on the breast. The war is evil. Not people. Kiss me once more! Hold me close. Tighter. Tighter! Ah, now. Now I’m comfortable. It’s so lovely to feel safe. If one only could be safe always.’

  Instead of answering I kissed her. We lay down on the sofa and fixed our eyes on the rosette on the ceiling. In the street some people were quarreling. A trolley braked with a grating noise.

  ‘How do you look in civilian clothes?’

  ‘Oh, go to hell. Worse than a fool,’ I assured her.

  ‘You use ugly language.’

  ‘I know, but it belongs to my trade.’

  She raised herself on her elbow and looked into my eyes, as if trying to see to the bottom of a well. She looked at me for a long while.

  ‘You’re afraid of yourself,’ she said and pressed her lips to mine. Hot lips, a taut body – for a moment they kindled something in me which resembled tenderness. A soldier at war is not accustomed to being loved for his own sake, only for his body and his uniform – and because there is no one else.

  Rot, I thought and again looked indifferently at the ceiling. We were both lying on our backs again, resting our eyes on the rosette in the ceiling and letting our minds wander.

  ‘How I should love to go hunting for a spell,’ I broke the silence. ‘Duck-hunting,’ I added after a moment. ‘The ducks are lovely around this time. They come from the east, big and fat.’

  ‘My husband and I often went duck-hunting,’ she said absently. Then she pinched her lip because she’d said something about her husband.

  ‘Where’s your husband now?’ I asked, though I didn’t care at all where he was.’

  ‘With his division in Russia.’

  Christ, what’s that to me, I thought, and still I listened to her soothing whisper.

  ‘My husband is a colonel. He received the oak leaves.’

  I smiled. ‘We call it vegetables. Is your husband a hero? I should imagine he would be, with his iron and vegetables!’

  ‘You’re mocking, Sven. Now you’re cruel.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Is your husband, the colonel, a hero?’

  ‘No, he is a reserve officer like you.’

  ‘Hell, I’m no reserve officer. Good Lord, no!’ I ejected the words with a grimace, as if I had swallowed something nauseating.

  ‘I mean, he is like you. He can’t stand either the war or the Führer.’

  ‘It’s a mystery to me why you meet so few people who like Adolf. How the hell did we get stuck with him?’

  ‘Weren’t you ever for Hitler?’ she asked, getting up on her elbow. She looked closely at me.

  I turned my head and looked out upon the Alster while I examined the devious maneuvers of my brain.

  ‘Weren’t you ever for Adolf Hitler?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes, Gisela, a long time ago I was for him and believed in him.’ I let out a shrill laugh. ‘Great God, fancy believing in that absurd figure!’

  ‘Did you say absurd?’ she asked incredulously. ‘Can you really see anything absurd about him?’

  ‘Nah, when you stop to think, he’s quite the opposite of absurd. Anyway, now I don’t believe in him any longer. What of it? Tiny simply says: “He’s a stupid swine.” Was your husband, the colonel, also for him at one time?’

  ‘Yes, he believed he’d save Germany.’

  ‘What was he to save Germany from?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, but it was understood he’d save Germany. Everyone said so. Didn’t you, too, believe he’d save Germany?’

  ‘No, never. I believed he’d give us food and work.’

  ‘Well, didn’t you get it, Sven?’

  ‘True, but as time went on the food became slightly rationed and the work, you know, wasn’t quite what we’d bargained for. But shut up now, you bitch, I can’t stand talking about it any more.’

  ‘Sven, you’re impossible. You’ll never be fit for decent society. A person simply doesn’t use the word “bitch” to someone he loves. He doesn’t use the word “bitch” at all.’

  ‘Is that so? All women are bitches and nothing else. They’re whores, too, all of them. Didn’t you come to Wind Force 11 to play at being a whore?’

  ‘It isn’t true, Sven.’

  ‘Hell it isn’t! You wanted to see whores. You wanted to see sex-crazy men. You wanted to see sex, feel sex. That’s why you went to Wind Force 11 with Lisa. Lisa got what she wanted. You chickened out, like the amateur you are.’

  ‘You’re disgusting.’

  ‘Perhaps I am. Would you expect anything else? You think perhaps we were taught good manners in Hitler’s barracks yards and on the Eastern Front? We’re the filthiest pack of hired killers that ever existed. I feel sorry for the society that’ll have to readmit us sometime!’

  She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me so hard that I tasted blood on her lips. Then she relaxed again.

  ‘I think there’s going to be a thunderstorm,’ she said drowsily.

  It was very muggy. She was lying in her slip. Lilac w
ith wide lace trimming. The slip of a whore, I’d said. One of the expensive ones.

  The street echoed with the noise of many people and frequently stopping streetcars. Number 12 in particular made a racket. Number 12 was altogether a stupid streetcar.

  I’d thrown my tunic on the floor. It looked abandoned as it lay there on the red carpet. Black and ugly. One death’s head was grinning fatuously at the ceiling. What ass invented those death’s heads, only God knows!

  Far away a siren started hooting. It rose to an infernal howl. We glanced out of the window. A lady in a lilac slip and a soldier with a broken nose.

  ‘Air-raid alarm,’ she said and glanced up at the cloudless sky, tinted red from the sunset.

  ‘To hell with the alarm. Come here and let’s spend the time together as best we can.’

  ‘You’re horrible!’

  I pulled her down on the sofa and forced her to lie back.

  While death dropped on the streets below us, our two bodies met and for a few moments we forgot everything else. Two wasted aimless people who didn’t know what else to do with themselves. Her slip tore. It only goaded us on to greater frenzy. She screamed. We forgot everything.

  Far above the big bombers were drawing their white lines.

  ‘You’re a whore. One of the expensive ones,’ I whispered.

  ‘You think so?’ she laughed.

  ‘And I love you. I’ll stay here with you. To hell with everything else.’

  ‘And everybody else?’

  ‘Well, everybody else, too. You . . .’

  Bombs were falling, but far away. Probably somewhere around Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse.

  She sighed and hugged me tight. I felt her tensing her slender body against mine. It was smooth and supple and gave off a scent of freshness. Not the stale and foul smell of a soldier, that peculiar dusty smell that sticks to all soldiers. God, how it had filled me with loathing throughout these years. I could never get used to it. Her nails were polished blood-red. She held up a foot and I could see the red toenails through the sheer texture of the stocking. Her legs were long and well-shaped.

  With my hand I traced the curve of her leg, from the ankle over the knee to the roundness of the hip.

  ‘If your husband came now he’d shoot us,’ I said.

  ‘My husband won’t come. He’s with his division. A storm division.’

  ‘In what division is the heroic colonel?’

  ‘Drop it, will you. Horst is in the 28th Chasseur Division. He’s commander of a regiment.’

  ‘I know that division. It has a falcon for its emblem. We call it the Falcon Division. We fought side by side with it at Gomel and Nikopol. A real butcher division. You’ll never see your husband again!’

  ‘Don’t say a thing like that.’

  ‘Are you thinking of him now?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, her eyes assuming a far-away look. ‘Is it possible to love two men at the same time?’ she asked a bit later.

  ‘I suppose so. I don’t know.’

  She started crying, mutely, quietly. The tears wouldn’t stop flowing.

  I stroked her naked body, not knowing what to say. I stroked her hair like you stroke a cat.

  ‘The war’s to blame for everything,’ she said.

  The all-clear was sounded. The street noises of the warm evening again came back to us. People laughed again, relieved. It was only a light attack. Just a few hundred dead and wounded.

  We drank tea with rum and then we climbed the mountain together. The ever young and lovely mountain where everything is new and where oblivion lies waiting at the summit. We were skilled mountain climbers familiar with every crater and peak, and yet we felt our way with wonder. We were explorers with a truly oriental verve. Then we grew weary and fell into a delicious light sleep. With peace.

  ‘Tell me something of what goes on out there,’ she said all at once.

  I tried to ignore it, but she kept pestering me. She insisted. I couldn’t understand why she wanted to hear about what was going on out there.

  ‘Is it true that people are killed because they are of another race? I mean Jews?’

  ‘You can take it from me it’s true. Killing people is only part of it. You can buy a sack of Jews or gypsies for fertilizer.’

  I took a bite from an apple.

  ‘Who knows? Maybe I’m right now eating a Jewish child. Because the ashes are also used for fertilizing fruit trees.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘No? And that’s not all. You have no idea . . .’

  ‘Why do people hate the Jews so much?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. Personally I have nothing against Jews or other races, but I’ve often met people who do. And they weren’t even Nazis. On the contrary.’

  ‘They must be mad,’ she said.

  ‘Of course they’re mad. We’re all mad. Completely crazy. And those who’re not mad are locked up behind barbed wire and prison walls. The world has turned upside down and only madmen have a right to exist. I’ve seen so many things I can never forget. Like the time we ran into a Jew when we were hunting partisans.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she said and stretched drowsily.

  ‘It’s a long story. Are you sure you really care to hear it?’

  ‘Why not. Tell it.’

  ‘We were hunting partisans in the Czech mountains. A nice job, really, because we were free to look out for ourselves and roam around in small patrols with little or no control. Now and then we fired in the air to make it sound impressive. As expected, the invariable upshot of these immense losses of ammunition was that our reports of the great partisan battles we’d become involved in were credited. As a matter of fact, we hardly ever saw or heard anything of the partisans. They avoided us and we avoided them.

  ‘We always managed to find something to eat and drink, and if we didn’t have anything, Tiny and Porta went out hunting chamois bucks – in bowler and top hat and armed with sub-machine guns.’

  ‘Did Porta wear a top hat?’ Gisela asked, surprised.

  ‘He did. Porta had once won a silk top hat playing cards in Rumania. This was before we went to Russia. He always wore it, just as Tiny always wore a bowler he’d picked up in a home for the aged.’

  ‘That must’ve looked comical,’ she laughed.

  ‘That’s not the word, but it is a relief to be able to turn Adolf’s damned war into a joke. He wouldn’t have been very happy to see what fantastic quantities of ammunition these hunting expeditions cost the German Armed Forces. It was seldom they returned with a chamois buck or deer. More often it was a pig or a calf, which were easier to shoot since they were tethered.

  ‘One evening shortly after sunset we reached an abandoned mountain cabin and decided to settle there for the night.’

  ‘Who’s we?’ she interrupted.

  ‘You don’t know them. A gang of devil-may-care professional killers in one of those regiments with one foot permanently in the grave.

  ‘The inmates had evidently managed to take in a good meal before they had to run. The delicacies were still standing on the table. It was like a luxury hotel in some place where war was unknown. Pork, a roast goose.

  ‘We would’ve enjoyed the meal even more if we hadn’t noticed a strange, sweetish smell from the very moment we entered the house. While we were eating, this stench seemed to become increasingly stronger. Porta went upstairs to check if the stench came from there. In a little while we heard him call. As he appeared on the landing, he was wiping off his top hat on his sleeve.

  ‘“There’s a fellow up here who’s croaked in his bed,” he said. “That’s where the stench comes from.”’

  ‘Heide grinned. “Imagine him lying there popping off in his bed – it’s an insult to the war and to Hitler’s call for heroism.”’

  Gisella had gradually dropped off. I, too, had grown sleepy, speaking to deaf ears. We dozed a little, but I couldn’t dismiss the thoughts of the night in the ski cabin.

  All twelve of us went up
stairs to take a look at the man. He was an old man resting nicely in his white shirt.

  ‘That pig has shit in his bed,’ said Porta, who’d lifted up the heavy peasant quilt. ‘What an old pig. The nice bed we were going to sleep in.’

  ‘Phew, how he stinks,’ Stege said, crinkling his nose.

  ‘So, our student can’t stand the odor?’ Porta asked. He prodded the corpse with his bayonet.

  ‘See he doesn’t spring a leak so the corpse gas seeps out,’ the Old Man warned. ‘Then we won’t be able to stand it here any longer.’ Surveying the room and pulling his nose – which he was in the habit of doing when faced with some problem – he went on: ‘Instead, we should get him buried.’

  Tiny and Porta each grabbed one end of the sheet and carried out the corpse. But it was impossible to dig a grave; the ground was too hard. So instead they buried him in the dunghill. It was considerably easier to get to.

  When the burial was over we again went on eating, drinking and playing blackjack.

  ‘There is a puttering noise from somewhere in this damn cabin,’ Heide growled, glancing around the room where we were sitting.

  The kerosene lamp smoked and cast a murky light about us.

  ‘Cut out that crap,’ Porta hissed impatiently. ‘Either play, or clear out and join the old codger on the muck heap where you belong.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean, you red brute?’ Heide was getting worked up. He pushed over his chair.

  Broad and large, Tiny got up, shoved back his bowler and wiped his nose on his fingers. Then he grasped the heavy oak table with plates, meat, bottles, cans, weapons and all the rest and put it aside to make room for Heide standing pale and furious at the other end. With a snarling grin Tiny slid across to the brawny Heide.

  ‘Why’re you poking your nose into this?’ Heide yelled. ‘This is a matter between Julius Heide and Joseph Porta. It’s nothing that concerns you, you stupid gorilla.’

  Tiny grunted, swung out his fist and hurled Heide to the floor with a resounding slap.

  The table was put back again and the game went on. But it was hard to concentrate on it. We strained all our senses to listen. Heide had only cried out about what worried us all. Our primitive instincts had been aroused. Somehow we were warned. Something was wrong in that cabin.