‘And does he?’ said Stege. ‘I mean, did he?’
‘Course he did,’ said Porta, scornfully. ‘With half the bleeding Army trying it on? He could spot them a mile off . . . Took him eleven days to get me back on my feet again. Eleven days of sodding purgatory. He drove me out of that place, you know that? They get you to such a state you’d sooner walk through a perishing minefield than let them go on buggering about with you . . . I remember there were four others in the same ward with me. One had rheumatism, one had kidney trouble, one had lost his memory and one was just a sodding nutter – least, I thought he was. He acted like one all right. Old Brettschneider said he was as sane as anyone else. I dunno, though . . . We were all “cured” at the same time and sent back together to the Regiment. Well, we’d only been back a couple of days when this bloke sticks a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Leaves half his brains splattered about on the ceiling . . . I dunno whether you’d really call that sane . . .’
‘It’s all very well,’ said Stege, ‘but you can’t blame the doctor. He was only doing his job. He never knows, when he sends a malingerer packing, whether he’s going to crack up under the strain—’
‘Ah, balls!’ said Porta.
‘I remember that incident,’ put in Barcelona. ‘Wasn’t it that bastard of a sergeant – what was his name, Gerner, was it? Well, wasn’t it him that drove the poor sod to it?’
‘Just like he drove many others,’ agreed Porta. ‘Were you there that time he had a go at Schnitius? You remember Schnitius? The one what ended up having his feet amputated? Well, he used to go round in fear and bleeding trembling of Gerner. Were you there that time he shopped him?’
‘It rings a bell,’ said Barcelona. ‘Something to do with an ashtray, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah. That’s the one. Gerner come round on one of his inspections – you know what he was like about the place being spotless all the time? Well, he comes round one day and we’re all standing to attention as neat as you please without a speck of dust to be seen anywhere, when old Schnitius suddenly discovers he’s forgotten to empty his ashtray. Now Gerner doesn’t smoke and he goes mad about ashtrays full of fag ends and so forth, so without stopping to think Schnitius picks it up and shoves it under the bolster on his bunk. Anyway, it all goes O.K. until Gerner’s just about to leave the room, and suddenly something makes him look round and he sees smoke rising up, like the bolster’s on fire. So of course he rushes up, screaming like a bleeding maniac, and it’s Schnitius’ bed and old Schnitius is standing right by it, so he hasn’t got much chance, really . . . And Gerner turns on him and says, is that you what’s left this shit lying round here? And Schnitius can’t very well deny it, so next thing we know Gerner’s making him eat up all the ash and the fag ends and the crap and lick out the ashtray into the bargain—’
‘Jesus, yes!’ cried Barcelona. ‘And shortly after that the poor devil spewed up his ring all over the floor of the bog—’
‘Yeah, and Gerner comes along and catches him at it and tells him he can bloody well get down on his hands and knees and lick it all up again.’
Steiner, who had been slowly and painfully recovering and had taken his seat in our midst, with a handkerchief pressed to his bleeding head, now quite suddenly transferred the handkerchief to his mouth and turned away, heaving.
I leaned forward eagerly to Porta.
‘Did he do it?’ I demanded. ‘Did he actually do it?’
‘Sure he did it,’ said Porta. ‘He was scared stiff of that bloke.’
I sat back again.
‘I wouldn’t have done it,’ I said.
Porta looked at me.
‘Schnitius wasn’t full of booze like you are. And he was new to the Army. Didn’t know how to stick up for himself . . . Anyway, he was still down there on his hands and knees, throwing up again as fast as he cleared one patch up, when the C.O. comes along . . . Lt. Henning,’ he said to Barcelona. ‘He was all right, as officers go, but it used to make him mad when he had to deal with squabbles between the men, like. So he hauls Schnitius into his office and asks him what the devil he thinks he’s doing, and Schnitius, like the stupid sod he is, goes and shoots his mouth off about Gerner and the way he’s been treating him. So then, of course, the Lieutenant gets madder than ever and calls Hauptfeldwebel Edel into his office and tells him to tear strips off Gerner. And the result is that Gerner gets put in the cooler for ten days and the rest of the N.C.O.s gang up together and beat the hell out of Schnitius for dropping Gerner in the cart. If the fool had had any sense, he’d never have mentioned Gerner in the first place. He’d’ve said he enjoyed eating spew, or he was just doing it for a lark, or something. Only like I said, we was all so green in them days—’
‘Hang on a minute,’ interrupted the Old Man. ‘I thought you were going to tell us about this girl you asked to marry you?’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Porta. ‘Yes . . . well, it was after I’d been driven out of the infirmary. While I was in there I’d seen this bird several times and taken a bit of a fancy to her, like. She used to hang about after Brettschneider when he come round the wards with his little band of followers. I was really quite gone on her. When I got out, I started sending her postcards. First one I sent, I’ll always remember that, it was one of them old ones they was bringing out, with some Feldwebel dressed up in old-fashioned gear choking the life out of a Polish dragoon or some such thing. And across the top, in large letters, it said ‘Vengeance”. I remember wondering at the time whether she’d get the message—’
‘What message?’ said Stege.
‘Well – that I wanted to slip her a length, see?’
Stege looked at him.
‘And did she get it?’ he asked, bewildered.
He had yet to learn that when listening to one of Porta’s stories you accepted it as it came, without troubling too much about the internal logic.
‘No, I don’t think she did at first. Any rate, I didn’t hear nothing from her. So in the end I sent one with a message wrote on the back of it. It was this airman, see, sitting on this bench with a bird. And the airman’s got his hands tucked down between his thighs, and the bird’s making these eyes at him, and on the back I wrote a sort of billy-doo—’
”What did you say?’ asked Tiny.
‘I don’t remember after all this time. I just know I took a lot of trouble with it. I didn’t write any old thing. I started off saying how I hoped she wouldn’t think it a liberty, me writing to a lady like her from the shitty barracks I was in, only I thought shitty mightn’t be the right word, so I crossed it out and wrote Prussian, instead. I took trouble, see? I didn’t just put down the first thing what come into my head.’
‘I hope she appreciated it,’ said Stege.
‘You bet she did! Very chuffed, she was . . . Probably never been courted like that in her life before. Mind you, she was shy at first. I had to wait days before she’d agree to see me. Then she sent some bloke round with a message and said I could go and call on her if I liked. She lived with her family, of course. An old house in the Bismarckstrasse, it was. I knew I had to create a good impression, so I had a shave, like, and smartened up the old uniform and had a bit of a wash down, and it was just as well I did, ’cos strike me when I got there it was one of them posh places and it was the maid what opened the door to me. All toffee nosed, she was. Wanted to know if I’d got a card she could take in. I don’t need no card, I says to her. You ask anyone at Paderborn, I says. I’m very well known round these parts . . . So off she goes, walking like she’s got a poker up her backside, and leaves me standing there in the hall. While she’s gone I has a quick gander round to see what’s what, and I take the opportunity to clean up my boots on a velvet cushion what they’ve got on the sofa. Velvet’s one of the best things you can get for polishing boots on, and now I’ve got clean feet and all I’m really beginning to feel like a gentleman, ain’t I?’
‘Just a minute,’ protested Tiny. ‘I thought you said you was in the hall?’
br />
‘That’s right. That’s were she left me.’
‘So how come you’re using velvet cushions off the sofa to polish your feet on?’
‘Because they’ve got this sodding great sofa in the perishing hall, that’s why! Jesus, you can tell you ain’t never been anywhere classy. I suppose you think the hall’s a farting little passage behind the front door, don’t you? Well, it ain’t, it’s a bleeding big space with furniture and pictures and all, like a flaming room. And where they sit and nosh is different from where they sit and natter. And where they sit and natter ain’t downstairs, like you and me’s used to, it’s up on the first floor. And where—’
‘And the bog’s got a mink cover on the flaming seat!’ jeered Tiny. ‘Skip the boring details and just tell us the dirty bits . . . What happened next? She come down to this hall what’s like a room and you pulled her on to this sofa with the velvet cushions and you got the meat in?’
‘Pardon me,’ said Porta, ‘but I refuse to be rushed. Either you listen to the whole story and nothing but the story and get the artistic bits along with the physical ones, or I give up and you can start telling your own perishing tales. Take it or leave it, mate, but I got my pride same as what Schiller and all that had. You want to appreciate the juicy parts, you got to sit through the rest of it first. Like not having cake till you’ve had the bread and bleeding butter.’
Tiny retired, grumbling, and telling us to give him a nudge when Porta got to the point where he put the meat in. If ever he did. Steiner turned round with a blood- and vomit-covered handkerchief and looked blearily at us.
‘What’s going on?’ he said.
‘Nothing!’ Tiny sat up again, triumphantly. ‘That’s just what I’m complaining of . . . NOTHING’S going on. If that’d been me, now, I’d have raped her ten times before I’d even got as far as the house. And then I’d have had her on the sofa, and on the velvet cushions, and—’
‘But what happened?’ I said, to Porta. ‘What happened, in the end?’
Porta shrugged his shoulders, sullenly. It was plain that Tiny had upset what he conceived to be his artistic soul and now we should never hear the end of the tale.
‘Tell her the bit about asking her father if you could marry her,’ urged the Old Man.
‘Why?’ said Porta. ‘It’s not funny.’
‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ said the Old Man, who had obviously heard the story many times before.
‘Christ almighty!’ said Porta, angrily. ‘I only asked him if I could have her bleeding hand in bleeding marriage so’s we could bleeding have it away together all nice and legal, like! What’s so funny about that, then? I could’ve clobbered her one on a park bench, couldn’t I? I could’ve slipped her a length any flaming time I liked—’
‘Pity you didn’t,’ said Tiny, sourly. ‘Might have had a tale worth telling then.’
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘you never did marry her?’
Porta just gave me a contemptuous stare and turned away.
‘Course he didn’t!’ said Tiny. ‘He never married her, he never fucked her, he never did bleeding nothing to her!’
At that moment the loudspeakers began crackling out an order for all Chiefs of Section in the Fifth Company to go to the armaments room for distribution of weapons. The Old Man knocked out his pipe and stood up.
‘Time we were off,’ he said. ‘Who’s going to carry Steiner?’
We moved to the door, all of us rather the worse for wear. Tiny was furious with Porta and Porta had reverted to being furious with everyone; Steiner had to be supported by Barcelona and the Legionnaire, and Heide appeared to be walking in his sleep. As we filed past the counter, Gerda’s head suddenly sprung up from nowhere, her pale eyes contracted with hatred, her lips drawn back over her long teeth.
‘I hope you all fry in hell!’ she hissed.
It was the end of a good evening’s drinking.
7 Sicherheitsdienst – Security Service
8 That’s the spirit
’Look, they can do what they bloody well like,’ declared the youth, vaingloriously certain of himself. ‘I don’t give a tinker’s damn for any of ’em! Far as I’m concerned, they can go and get knotted.’
He was sitting on the draining board, his feet in the sink, eating pickled gherkins from a jar. As he spoke, his companions solemnly nodded their agreement and approval. The house was full of young people, boys and girls, all very vociferous and very sure of themselves; sure of their ability to stand out against authority and of their willingness to face death rather than fight for a cause they did not believe in. On the chairs and the tables, stretched out on the floor, squatting in the corners, in the kitchen, the salon, the bedrooms and the bathroom, this band of young rebels shouted their agreement.
‘It’s not our war!’ cried a disembodied voice from beneath a table. ‘We didn’t start it, we don’t want it, and we’re not going to fight it!’
‘People are dying every day, in their thousands, and the poor fools don’t even know what they’re dying for—’
‘They torture them at the Gestapo. People are scared to open their mouths and tell the truth any more,’ declared a young girl who was not quite so young as she looked and was doing her best to seduce a nervous youth who was still a virgin.
‘Well, I’m not scared!’ screamed a fragile-looking creature from his position on top of the unlit stove. When my turn comes to be called up I shall tell them exactly what I think of them!’
‘Hear, hear,’ murmured his companions, while the nervous youth took off his spectacles and vigorously polished them, rather alarmed at his own daring at being in such company.
‘What happens if the Gestapo comes!’ queried some faintheart sitting in the passage.
‘Let them come!’ A young boy seated on the kitchen table, who was in the habit of declaiming dramatic poems that he learnt by heart, threw wide his arms and faced them challengingly. ‘Let them come! What do we care? The world is our oyster . . . and this land is our land, because we are the future! They can’t force us to fight and destroy ourselves!’
One Sunday evening, five months later, their weekly meetings were brought to an end by the sudden arrival of three men. Three men in leather coats, wearing shoulder holsters.
They encountered a small core of stubborn resistance, but for the most part the proud youth of Germany were swiftly dealt with.
The nervous youth, who greeted their appearance with shrill screams of hysteria, was silenced by one sharp slap across the face.
The young girl who was not so young as she seemed, and who never had succeeded in seducing him, managed to spit out a couple of obscenities before she was kicked in the stomach and pushed to one side.
The boy in the sink had moved to the bathroom and was making love on the floor with his girlfriend. They were separated by a few well placed prods with the butt end of a pistol and sent downstairs to join the others.
The poet wet himself with fright the very moment the intruders arrived. He offered no resistance of any kind.
In a long line, shuffling single file with their heads hanging, fifty-two boys and girls left the house and entered two green coaches that were waiting outside. The world was their oyster, but fear was an unknown quality and they were meeting it face to face for the first time.
For three days they were retained at Stadthausbrücke No. 8. Their treatment was not particularly harsh, but it was enough simply to be there; it was enough to learn the meaning of fear and to understand that courage had no place in their lives. Courage was for those with power.
After three days they were put into uniform and sent off for training. Several died during their preliminary courses of instruction; some through accidents, others because they chose to. And as for the rest, they battled on and tried to come to terms with their new situation and their new selves; tried to grow reconciled to the fact that when it came to the point they were no different from all the other poor idiots whom they so heartily despised.
br /> They didn’t want to fight. It wasn’t their war. They hadn’t started it and they didn’t believe in it. But they fought, just the same.
CHAPTER FOUR
On Guard at the Gestapo
WE saw them coming up the steps, pushing an old woman between them. The two Untersdrarführer, Schultz and Paulus, Kriminalrat Paul Bielert’s most indefatigable head hunters.
We stood at the entrance to the building and watched them go in.
‘I wonder what that poor old cow’s supposed to have done?’ muttered Porta.
I shrugged my shoulders and made no reply. What could I have said? How did I know what one miserable old woman, wearing a coat that stank of mothballs, might have done to offend the Gestapo? It was a perennial wonder to me how your actual average non-influential citizen ever managed to avoid offending them.
As the old woman passed in front of us, she turned and smiled. She half opened her mouth, then Paulus gave her a shove forward and they passed through the doors. I wondered what she wanted to say to us, two strange soldiers standing in the rain with trickles of water dripping off our helmets and down the backs of our necks.
We turned and watched as they walked towards the lifts. The old woman could hardly keep up with the two men and their long-legged strides. Schultz gave her another push.
‘Come on, granny. We haven’t got all day. You’re not the only one that’s been invited to the party.’
They pressed the button and stood waiting for the lift to arrive. Paulus suddenly caught sight of Porta and me standing watching from the doorway and he waved an impatient hand.
‘Get out of here! You’re supposed to be on guard duty, and in any case this isn’t a pantomime . . . Go on, piss off!’
‘Watch it,’ growled Porta, warningly. ‘You don’t give orders to me, darling!’