Comrades of War

by Sven Hassel

  ‘Holy Jesus, my whole front armor is getting hot,’ he groaned, all excited. ‘Really, Old Man, be a good pal and let poor Tiny have his hard-earned pleasure. Everybody is so mean to me. Remember mother’s letter – that bitch,’ he added.

  ‘You won’t touch her,’ the Old Man decided. ‘She has to be questioned by Lieutenant Ohlsen.’

  ‘Fine,’ Tiny cheered up, ‘then let’s have a preliminary investigation. Like the cops when they pick up someone, to soften him up for the big grill.’

  ‘No tricks now, Tiny. Just forward march!’

  When they were well into the spruce forest Tiny suddenly yelled:

  ‘Yob tvoyemat’!’

  Maria shrieked hysterically. The Old Man whirled around, horrified.

  ‘The whore has no panties on. I’ve just checked.’ Turning to the girl he laughed: ‘Will you play Moy lyubimets, play love with Tiny?’

  ‘Cut out that filth!’ the Old Man fumed, swiping at Tiny’s hand with his sub-machine gun. ‘Her gang, the partisans, may be right by, and you can think of something like that!’

  Covered by the Old Man’s sub-machine gun they marched into camp.

  Porta whistled long and suggestively when he noticed Maria in her tattered clothes and Tiny’s lustful face. But before he could say his mind, Tiny trumpeted:

  ‘What a nice little piece of furniture, collapsible and all. And she has no panties on! Her ass grins gaily under her rags like on a sow in heat on its way to the boar. A real hot piece. Just my size.’

  Lieutenant Ohlsen sprang up. He faced the Old Man. ‘What have you done to her?’

  The Old Man looked at him with unwavering blue eyes. He didn’t answer.

  Lieutenant Ohlsen felt embarrassed. ‘Forgive me, Beier. Naturally nothing happened, since you were there.’ He held out a fumbling hand to the Old Man, who accepted and squeezed it with a wry smile.

  The girl was questioned.

  First they threatened her. But the swastika branded on her forehead spoke a plain enough language. There was no ground for doubting her story.

  She related jerkily. It took her an hour and a half to finish.

  ‘Where are the partisans now?’ Lieutenant Ohlsen asked.

  Maria pointed east, into the forest, ‘V lyesu.’

  ‘Are there many?’ the Old Man asked.

  ‘Da,’ Maria nodded. ‘You get away quick. Davay, davay! Nix nemma! No sleep!’

  ‘No,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen said. ‘Let’s get out!’

  The girl got a seat between Porta and Tiny. A Russian infantry cap was pushed over her forehead. With her slanted eyes she looked exactly like a young Caucasian soldier.

  Julius Heide handed her a sub-machine gun.

  As she felt the cold steel in her hands, she gave an evil grin.

  ‘I take revenge. Shoot dead the Kalmuck Igor. Only I that do,’ she said in broken German.

  Porta shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘He’s the last one you should want to meet, my girl, especially now when you’re with us. You would die very slow. It would take you at least two weeks.’

  Hour after hour we pushed ahead on the narrow forest road. At every halt Maria told us what had happened to her. She told us things that made us see red.

  Lieutenant Ohlsen interrupted her story again and again and urged us on. He had become quite a different man since the offensive had rolled over us. He urged us on without rest.

  ‘His neck is itching for a medal,’ Porta grumbled.

  But it wasn’t true. Lieutenant Ohlsen had no desire to be a hero.

  ‘His hustling drives me insane,’ Julius Heide growled. ‘The only explanation is that he’s eager to get some tin around his neck.’

  In the midst of our grumbling conversation Lieutenant Ohlsen came over and threw himself down beside us. As if he’d heard what we’d been talking about, he said:

  ‘You’re probably thinking I aim to be a hero, that I’m running after tin. I’m not, only I want to get away from this vile forest. Only two things drive me on: homesickness and the desire to survive.’ He pulled out his wallet from his breast pocket and handed us a snapshot. ‘That’s Inge and Gunni. My wife and my boy. He is seven. I haven’t seen him for three years.’ He spat. ‘So you see it is pure selfishness which makes me hustle you. No one ever gets away from this damn country by himself.’

  We sat silent for a moment. He seemed to expect us to say something.

  Heide hummed quite softly:

  Long is the way back to our homeland,

  So long, so long, so long . . .

  ‘I can use you, as you can use me,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen went on. ‘We can choose. To croak as slaves in this country’s endless taigas or help each other get home. No high-falutin words about fighting for the Führer and for Greater Germany. All we want is to go home. To die in this rotten forest is far too senseless.’

  Porta glanced up.

  ‘I guess all of us want to live! We do and so do our opposite numbers on the other side, and yet damn few of us will.’

  ‘That’s because we are swine, born of swine and meant to be slaughtered,’ the Legionnaire said. ‘We have only a slightly stronger instinct for self-preservation than our fellow-creatures with snouts. We are like wolves that snap at the knife that butchers them.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Julius Heide broke in. ‘We’re a herd of nasty cattle. Too cowardly to give up.’

  ‘No,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen shouted, ‘this is precisely the danger. We must feel and think as the SS feel and think about Hitler and the NKVD guard units about Joseph Stalin. Except that the object of our feelings and thoughts should be an iron will to survive, no matter what. We should be ready to gnaw our way through forests and mountains to reach home!’ He wiped the sweat from his forehead and kicked his steel helmet, sending it rolling some distance away.

  The Old Man drew a deep breath.

  ‘I don’t want to discourage you, but I don’t think any of us will return home. For me, a workshop, a wife and three children are waiting, but I know they’ll never see me any more.’

  Lieutenant Ohlsen caught the Old Man by his chest and pulled him to him. He whispered almost imploringly: ‘You mustn’t think this way, Old Man. Deep inside you, you must believe that we will get home. The war’s almost over. It must be over. The Russians are chasing us like rabbits. Our new soldiers are worth nothing. We’re short on arms. Ammunition. Gasoline Provisions. We loot to fill our bellies. Our police and military police are hunting us like rats, and at home they’re smashing one house on top of the other, while our coolies in Italy are being chased just as we are. It’s only a question of a few weeks or months, then the whole pigsty will collapse.’

  ‘Yes, and then the super-butchers will go to work,’ the Legionnaire sneered. ‘The victors will take bloody revenge on us soldiers. Don’t make the mistake of thinking we’ve survived just because the war’s over. They’ll lock us up behind a barbed-wire fence and starve us till we start devouring each other.’

  ‘No, that’ll never happen!’ Lieutenant Ohlsen cried. ‘They won’t do that.’

  ‘Who’d stop them?’ Julius Heide asked.

  ‘They can use us,’ came despairingly from Lieutenant Ohlsen.

  ‘No,’ the Legionnaire answered. ‘No one has any use for us worn-out starving hired killers. We’re superfluous material. The sooner we pinch our ass-holes together for good, the better. Because we’ve forgotten how to work.’

  ‘It isn’t true,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen yelled. ‘It can’t be true. I could begin at the office tomorrow. I’m dying to, just as the Old Man is dying to get back to his cabinetmaker’s shop.’

  The little Legionnaire shrugged his shoulders and blew some dust from the lock of his sub-machine gun.

  ‘Stay in the Army like me. There you get board, clothes, lodging, a bit of money so you can get drunk in your free time, and, best of all: an instant death to put an end to it all.’

  ‘The Army, ugh! Not for me,’ Porta said tersely. ‘I ce
rtainly won’t need the aid of that stinking club to keep my ass afloat.’ He clicked his tongue, raised his finger and looked around as if about to share a great secret with us. He lowered his voice. ‘D’you know what I want to do? I’ll catch a pack of sluts, just like the head-hunters catch deserters. Then I’ll give them a kick and send them flying into the bunks of a first-class whorehouse – and I’ll be the manager. Do you realize what kind of money such bitches take in?’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his dirty hand and pushed back his silk topper. ‘That’ll be the time, boys! I can sense things acting up in my pants already.’

  ‘Swine,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen sneered. He spat.

  ‘Why, Herr Lieutenant?’ Porta asked dumbly, fanning away some mosquitoes with his topper. ‘The girls don’t mind, and why not make business out of pleasure, and profitable business at that? There are few women who would mind taking a crack at that profession. They just don’t have the courage and opportunity.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Tiny exclaimed. ‘Would you let me be your bouncer, Porta? You won’t have to give me very much for it, as long as I’m allowed to feel the goods when I like.’

  ‘That would be quite often, wouldn’t it?’ came from Heide.

  ‘That’s as it should be,’ Tiny nodded, licking his lips, ‘If I knew for sure there were enough broads in Siberia I’d stick my thumbs up my ass and ride there on my elbows without changing trains in Omsk!’

  In dead earnest Porta started giving us all jobs as employees in his future business – except Lieutenant Ohlsen and the Old Man.

  Two days later we came upon the MPs.

  Heide was the first to see them. He had walked into the woods together with Tiny and Maria. They were looking for partisans. Instinct told us there were some.

  Tiny cut a fiendish grimace and readied his steel sling, but Heide signaled him to lay off.

  When the rest of us got there, with Lieutenant Ohlsen in front, the head-hunters – there were three of them – were at first surprised to see us turn up in the woods. Afterwards they became insolent. They had altered their uniforms so one couldn’t really see they were MPs. One would take them for ordinary infantrymen.

  One of the three, a first lieutenant of fifty or sixty, large and heavy, requested our marching orders from Lieutenant Ohlsen, who literally gasped at this piece of insolence.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then the MP officer again opened his mouth.

  ‘Lost your voice Lieutenant? Or are you slow? I wanted to see your papers, so I can determine with what right you are roaming around in these woods.’

  ‘Christ, you must’ve been bitten by a mad dog,’ Heide exploded.

  ‘Shut up, you dirty fink,’ the MP officer roared with an ominous thrust of his lower jaw. The muzzle of his sub-machine gun pointed straight at Lieutenant Ohlsen’s breast.

  At the same moment a piercing voice from the brush behind the MPs cut into the silence of the forest.

  ‘Lay down those sprayers!’

  As if they had burnt their hands on their weapons, the head-hunters dropped their sub-machine guns to the ground with a clatter.

  ‘Up with your paws, and make it snappy,’ the voice from the brush went on.

  Three pairs of fists shot up. Then Porta and the Legionnaire came out. Porta carried our heavy machine gun in a strap across his shoulder.

  The Legionnaire gave the First Lieutenant a kick.

  ‘On your knees, you son of a bitch. Pretty soon your balls will be loaded.’

  Puffing, the heavy officer fell on his knees.

  The two NCOs got their faces slapped by Tiny.

  ‘You also kneel down!’

  ‘Leave them alone!’ Lieutenant Ohlsen ordered.

  ‘You shall pay for this,’ the First Lieutenant threatened, not even trying to conceal his rage. ‘You’ll find out that laying hands on an MP during discharge of duty is punishable with death in accordance with Section 987.’

  ‘As far as I know, desertion is punishable with court-martial and hanging,’ came dryly from Lieutenant Ohlsen.

  The MPs didn’t suspect what Maria had told us, even less that she was with us.

  She knew the MPs had been with them. Had heard them discuss running over to the Russians as ordinary infantrymen. Their idea was to let the offensive overtake them, then wait till it was quiet behind the front and pass themselves off as Communists. A brilliant job had been done on their forged papers. They had also talked of crossing the mountains to the Balkans. Maria knew they had their pockets full of blank marching papers with a faked general’s signature. The First Lieutenant was in possession of a special order which would open most doors and remove most stumbling blocks for him and his pals.

  ‘So you’ve stepped off the dung-cart?’ Porta leered, jabbing at the First Lieutenant with his battle knife.

  A gurgling sound came from the lips of the fat officer: ‘You shall pay for this!’

  ‘Dear me!’ Porta grinned. ‘We’ll know before dawn, but by that time your ass will for certain be cold, my boy. Tiny is dying for permission to strangle you.’

  ‘Shut your mouth, Porta,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen cursed. ‘Search them,’ he went on curtly.

  ‘I protest!’ the First Lieutenant yelled. ‘Doing this to an officer is defamation.’

  ‘You bet it isn’t,’ Tiny grumbled. ‘It’s preparation for hanging.’

  Porta laughed malevolently. ‘I dare say it must seem strange to you that this time you are the victims. You may be sure we’ll do a good job of it, nothing shall be omitted. You’ll be permitted to stand up when Tiny strangles you. He’ll use his steel sling and hold you at least four inches from the ground till your very last gasp has hit the clouds.’

  ‘I told you to shut your mouth, Porta!’ came sharply from Lieutenant Ohlsen.

  The Old Man handed him some papers we had found in the pockets of the MPs, among them three blank special orders with a general’s signature.

  ‘I guess this tells the whole story,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen said, waving the compromising papers. He sounded tired.

  ‘May I strangle them now, Herr Lieutenant?’ Tiny grinned. Out of his pocket he pulled a long piece of steel wire with two pieces of wood at either end – the steel sling for noiseless strangulation.

  Lieutenant Ohlsen fumed. ‘You’re not going to do a thing. The three of them are going back with us to our own lines. When I’m in command we’ll have no so-called drumhead court-martials. Remember that,’ he added threateningly.

  Heide and Fatty were ordered to lead the three prisoners over to the truck, where they were tied up, hands behind their backs.

  They caught sight of Maria and went pale. She slowly came walking up to them, stopped in front of the heavy MP officer, spat in his face and hissed:

  ‘Chort!’

  Maria had known his love in a forsaken hut by the roller conveyor. He had almost strangled her when she refused to give in to him. He had caught her brutally under her dress. He had puffed and panted, slaver dribbling from the corners of his mouth while he tore at her body. He had sunk his teeth into her breast. Yet, he was not a pervert. He was a heavy stupid peasant in an officer’s uniform who was boiling over with lustful desire. An animal in human form. Not a sick animal. Not a sexually depraved individual. He was simply stupid and inexperienced.

  When he felt satisfied he had let his staff sergeant take her.

  Maria let him.

  The thick lips of the staff sergeant dribbled with hackneyed words of love. He thought this was part of rape.

  Meanwhile she lay as if stone dead.

  She had vomited. It was worse than the partisan lieutenant. The lieutenant was wild and wicked, but the staff sergeant was repulsive and sickening. A human gutter.

  A rock hit the large broad staff sergeant in the back of his head.

  Maria laughed like a hyena.

  Tiny handed Maria another rock. ‘Throw it straight at his face!’

  Maria collapsed, weeping, and dropped the rock.

&nbs
p; Tiny shook his head, unable to grasp that Maria had no desire to kill the staff sergeant. He shrugged his shoulders and gave the man a kick which made him fall forward. Tiny stood for a moment contemplating the big lump on the ground. Then he took careful aim and calmly and deliberately kicked the prostrate man in the groin.

  A long drawn-out animal howl rose toward the tree tops of the black forest. The large body curved upward like an over-arched bow.

  Lieutenant Ohlsen came running. He was in a rage. Tiny stood at attention and let the shower of abuse flow over him.

  The MP lieutenant, who sat on the ground beside the truck with his hands tied up, yapped indignantly.

  ‘This is torture. Perverted sadism. But I’ll take care to get that man executed. He has manhandled my staff sergeant, an active non-commissioned officer. You’ll pay for it.’

  No one bothered to answer the ass. When we got back to the regiment he and his two subordinates would get short shrift: desertion, forgery and cowardice in battle.

  It was the Old Man who discovered that the prisoners were gone. It happened just after dawn. We were shocked when we realized what had happened.

  Fatty had been on duty. He lay unconscious beside the tree the prisoners had been tied to.

  Lieutenant Ohlsen blew up. He questioned us, but all Fatty could say was that he had suddenly fallen down. He started sobbing when Lieutenant Ohlsen threatened him with court-martial for having gone to sleep on duty. With tears streaming down his face, he swore he’d not been asleep. His whole pig’s body shook under Lieutenant Ohlsen’s fit of rage.

  ‘They must’ve cleared out,’ Tiny grinned, looking at Porta and the Legionnaire who sat chewing a turnip each, with Maria between them.

  The Old Man looked up and scrutinized the four of them. He nodded without saying a word, slung his sub-machine gun across his shoulder and walked into the forest.

  ‘You’re our comrade, aren’t you?’ Porta called after him.

  The Old Man turned around without a word. Then he walked on.

  We had finished packing the truck when the Old Man returned.

  ‘Did you see anything?’ Lieutenant Ohlsen asked inquisitively.

  ‘Yes,’ the Old Man answered curtly, staring at Porta and Tiny who stood by the truck playing craps. They were laughing noisily after a good throw.