Comrades of War

  ‘I’ll grab her by the throat and throw her down from the third floor so she’ll land in the cellar like a bomb. A real man has to show what he’s good for to someone like that, don’t you think? Simply as a matter of discipline. Don’t you agree?’ he added, with a note of uncertainty.

  The Legionnaire nodded.

  ‘Absolutely. You have to stand up for yourself, or she’ll play pranks on you, like taking other tramps to bed and dirt like that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t give a shit about that, Desert Rambler. That’s nothing to take to heart. Everybody should have the right to amuse himself and to take the little pleasures along with the rest. And Emma isn’t likely to wear out so easily. But to be snotty and use mean words—’ he was getting excited – ‘hell, that’s going too far. What a mean little turd! I knocked politely on her door and spoke to her like a well-bred and respectable man: “My beloved Emma” – you know, just like that book you read to me about how to behave when you’re cultivated, like you and me. And d’you know what that bag answers? “Get out, you pig! Why, you stink like a corpse.” Well, I still keep cool and say, like you taught me: “Will you permit me to sit down beside you, my beloved Emma?” The fat crab sets up a grin and asks if I’ve gone nuts. Then I blew a fuse in my top and forgot everything you read to me about polite behavior. Naturally I socked her one and she’s still walking around sneezing from it. But she’s a coarse-grained woman, a real piece of sandpaper, and you can’t expect to bring her to heel simply by socking her in the teeth. “What the hell, you’re a walking cliché,” she says. What’s a cliché, Desert Rambler? And then she kicked me right here, the most sensitive spot, you know, so I had to curl up. Then she grabbed my hair and, bang, mashed her knee in my face. Next I knew, I was sitting on the stairs. Thank God I didn’t fall down. I could have hurt myself something terrible.’

  Tiny didn’t stop to think how the matron would’ve gotten hurt if he’d thrown her down.

  ‘Give her up,’ the Legionnaire recommended. ‘She gives you far too many worries. Women are unpredictable. Go down to the cathouse and find a whore for yourself. That’s much better. She doesn’t deserve you. Down there you pay and that’s the end of the trouble. It’s understood of course that you pay what you owe and with your own money.’

  ‘No, I’ll go to holy hell first,’ Tiny swore. ‘I’m not going to give up that mare. Damn it, there’s plenty of fire in her. But the fat pig will find out what I really am. I’m not going to give an inch. After all I’m a fighter.’

  ‘You’re an ass,’ the Legionnaire said kindly. ‘And sooner or later you’ll be sure to find it out for yourself.’

  ‘Who’s an ass?’ Tiny exploded and stood up menacingly.

  ‘You,’ the Legionnaire smiled, ‘and I, Alfred Kalb, former corporal in the 2nd Foreign Regiment, feel free to tell you so.’

  Tiny chomped and alternately turned red and pale. Both his fists were clenched, ready to strike. His small mean fisheyes blinked cautiously. Then all at once he went flat.

  ‘That’s what I am?’

  With a jolt he fell down by the Legionnaire’s bed and pounded the floor with both fists. He had to hit something.

  ‘She’s a dud, I swear she is,’ he affirmed reflectively. After a short pause he went on: ‘When she comes around to invite me for some sweating night work, I’ll say: “Emma, you bloated whore . . .” – is “overblown whore” better? – “. . . you may give me a mighty kiss in the ass, I’ll have nothing more to do with you, you mushroom fly.”’

  ‘Are you really going to say that?’ the little Legionnaire asked skeptically.

  Cursing and swearing, Tiny nodded. He rumbled across the floor, kicked a wash basin, for precaution smacked Mouritz in the face, and threatened to hit Stein. Then he roared out of the window after a cyclist who unsuspectingly came down the Zirkusweg dragging a pair of tires he must have stripped off some bike.

  ‘Are you trying to show off, you mutt?’

  With satisfaction Tiny noted that his roar had knocked the guts out of the cyclist. He spat and started whistling a tune remotely reminiscent of something from ‘The Merry Widow.’ When he got it all mixed up, Mouritz was ordered to sing a hymn. The first three were turned down.

  ‘The song is over! Another song! One, two, three, four!’ He kicked time against Mouritz’s bed.

  When Mouritz didn’t quite succeed in satisfying the aesthetic appetite that had suddenly hit Tiny, he was chased under all the beds three or four times. He ended up in his own bed, where he bawled out his hymn in a cathedral voice. He resembled a Christian on his way to the lions.

  Puffing, Tiny stuck his head under the faucet and wiped himself on the first sheet he could get his hands on. Both patient and bedclothes were dragged to the floor.

  ‘Stein, Bauer, the two of you will come along to pound those tramps in the cathouse,’ he decided.

  ‘So early?’ Stein asked in surprise while Bauer started dressing without a word.

  The Legionnaire chuckled. ‘Bon, let’s get going. We need some exercise.’

  Tiny threw a boot at Mouritz’s head.

  ‘Louder, you reserve vicar. I can’t hear your heavenly marching song.’

  In a squeaking treble the unhappy volunteer from the Sudeten mauled an evangelical hymn.

  We tramped off. Walking downstairs Tiny kicked a bucket of water, making it splash over in every direction.

  He raised hell wherever he went.

  ‘You dirty fink,’ he yelled at the cleaning woman, who glistened all over with fat, complacent National Socialism. ‘You put that bucket right there so I should break my neck. I’ll have you locked up for sabotage against the combat forces of the Reich!’

  The woman gave him a mean look. She planted her red fists on her swelling hips and hissed, ‘You did it deliberate, you filthy hoodlum! What a scum! I’ll get you before a court-martial and you’ll swing.’

  ‘Huh, you Hitler hag,’ Tiny jeered and gave the bucket another kick, which sent it flying through a pane of glass in the folding door.

  The woman roared and slapped her hands to her face in frantic rage.

  Equipped with a steel helmet and a pistol in his belt as prescribed for NCOs on duty, the OD came rushing on the scene.

  ‘He kicked my bucket,’ the woman spouted. ‘He insulted the Führer. He called me a Hitler hag!’

  The OD was young and inexperienced. His clear blue eyes flashed ferociously, according to custom among young NCOs. He looked at the swaying bucket on the tiled floor. He looked at the smashed pane in the folding door. He noticed the floor-cloth smiling gaily at him in the middle of the floor.

  ‘Attention,’ he commanded, whipping himself up to a bustling frenzy.

  Extremely slowly we put our heels together and assumed a position that could possibly be confused with standing at attention.

  The cleaning woman brightened up. She wiped her hands on her dirty apron, with a pale eagle in the middle of the stomach, and clattered accusingly into the corridor.

  Tiny stared stupidly and indifferently ahead of him. He tried to spell his way through a signboard about the duties of outpatients when they came for their first examination.

  The OD puffed himself up before him, put out his chest and squeaked: ‘I’ll take care of you, you pig’s ear.’

  Tiny cocked his head and scrutinized the service-happy MC noncom with a much too large helmet as if he glimpsed signs of incipient madness in him.

  ‘I mean you, you lazy bum.’

  ‘Me?’ Tiny asked in simulated amazement, pointing at himself.

  ‘Oh, God help us!’ The OD tried to roar at the top of his voice, but it came only to a breaking crow.

  ‘You see, sir,’ Tiny grinned familiarly. ‘According to regulations I should be addressed by my rank. Even when I’m in for some dirt.’ He held up his sleeve right under the nose of the MC noncom, who had to jump back a step in order not to be pushed over. ‘As the Herr Unteroffizier can see, I’m a corporal and I request you to addre
ss me as “Herr Corporal.”’

  Our faces flushed deep red with enthusiasm. No one would’ve thought Tiny to be capable of an answer worthy of Porta.

  ‘Does a stinking hick like you want to instruct me?’ the OD yelled. ‘Answer me when I speak to you!’

  ‘You’re a fanny with ears!’ Tiny said in a kind, low voice.

  The medical NCO jumped in the air like a mortar shell hitting rocky ground. He refused to believe his senses and glared at the grinning Tiny, who was eagerly awaiting what was to come.

  ‘Would you repeat what you just said,’ the OD stammered, gaping with astonishment.

  ‘Do you have dirty ears?’ Tiny asked confidentially.

  The NCO stuttered, unable to speak one clear word. With an effort he pulled himself together, pointed at all of us and meowed: ‘You’re all my witnesses to what this swine said.’

  The Legionnaire laughed softly, which caused the NCO to lose control of himself completely.

  ‘What are you grinning at, you tramp. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you, you castrated nigger!’

  The smile went out on the knife-scarred face of the Legionnaire. His eyes turned cold like a cobra’s. In his fury the NCO had made a terrible enemy.

  Stein quickly called out, ‘We report to the Herr Unteroffizier that we can witness nothing. We’ve heard nothing, seen nothing.’

  The short NCO hopped up to Stein like a rooster thrown off while mating. Stein stood big and broad, as if carved out of granite.

  ‘So, you’re going to mutiny. To arms!’ he crowed.

  Rumbling like a company of armored cars taking off, ten MC soldiers came rolling out of the guardroom. Hustling and bustling, they bunched in front of the pale OD, who reviewed his army with satisfaction. Indicating us, he screamed to his housecarls: ‘Arrest them!’

  Nobody reacted. He pointed at the guard. ‘I’ve ordered you to arrest them!’

  ‘We can’t,’ an old corporal answered in a drawling Hamburg accent.

  The OD gave a start as if hit on the head with a club. Some time passed before he could collect himself sufficiently to repeat the order.

  ‘Arrest them! Lock ’em up!’

  ‘We can’t,’ came promptly from the old corporal, who looked as if he were a longshoreman before the war.

  ‘Mutiny, mutiny,’ yelled the OD, by now totally bewildered. He was darting around like a cat who’s jumped on a red-hot kitchen range.

  The old corporal winked at us. We stood there following the course of events with thinly veiled enthusiasm, hoping for the worst.

  After an assortment of gurgling sounds the OD came back to himself. He turned with a hiss to the uniformed circle around him: ‘Think of what you’ve done! Come back to your senses! You may have to pay with your heads for this.’ With a gloved hand he made a whistling movement through the air like the guillotine in Plötzensee. ‘I’m a Hitler Youth Führer, my words carry weight!’

  ‘We thought you were a Sanitätunteroffizier in the Army,’ Stein remarked gently. ‘If you’re a Hitler Youth Führer, then we don’t belong under your command.’

  He was about to leave, but the NCO jumped on him like a wild beast, tore his heavy .38 out of his holster, cocked it and squealed with spluttering mouth: ‘In case of attempts at escape I use my weapon! You’re all arrested in the name of the Führer and you’re going to be beheaded!’

  ‘To have that kind of power is really something,’ Bauer laughed. ‘Arrest, prosecution, sentencing, execution. The whole music in two minutes.’

  ‘Don’t you grin!’ bawled the OD, who’d been brought to the point of explosion. ‘You’ll swing, you louse! You’ll all swing,’ he threatened, waving the pistol over his head.

  Then of course happened what always happens in atmospheric disturbances of this kind. The pistol went off. Not just one shot, but two. The little potswinger with the steel helmet got so frightened with the first shot that his hand cramped and he squeezed the trigger again. Another thundering shot shook the silent corridors with their many doors. He threw down the pistol. Tiny courteously picked it up and handed it to him, but not till he’d blown into the muzzle in the Texan manner and informed the NCO there were four shots left.

  The cleaning woman slipped off in fright at the row she’d caused. She didn’t forget her pail and floor-cloth.

  First Sergeant Domas strode into the corridor, still greasy about the mouth from his breakfast. In a flash he summed up the situation. The pistol in Tiny’s hand on its way to the OD. Two distinct holes in the lab door, from which a couple of fresh young maidens were peering out, sure that the tide of revenge of the Revolution was near their door. He noticed the guard standing in an uneven column and dressed contrary to regulations – some in steel helmets, others without them; three with rifles, one with a sub-machine gun; the rest without weapons and in unbuttoned jackets. He saw water on the floor and the smashed pane of glass. And before all he saw us, the old gang, in a strange posture of attention.

  He looked reprovingly at his OD, who managed to pull himself together sufficiently to deliver a report, a very long report, in which words like ‘mutiny,’ ‘execution,’ ‘sabotage,’ and ‘insubordination’ occurred several times. The army hospital sergeant was still making a little snack from the fat glistening on his lips, remnants of the stolen pork he’d put away five minutes ago.

  ‘Are you sure this report is right?’ he asked, drumming the topmost button but one on the OD’s tunic, while the latter was standing as straight as a pillar.

  He didn’t wait for an answer, but rapped out sharply: ‘Who fired?’

  ‘I did, Herr First Sergeant,’ barked the little man in the large steel helmet.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ the Sergeant said and again licked his thick lips. ‘And who was the intended target? Because I gather nobody was killed?’ He looked around with a searching glance to make doubly sure that a couple of corpses weren’t lying around on the shining tiled floor. That would have disturbed his sense of order as an army hospital sergeant.

  ‘I was the intended target,’ Tiny trumpeted loudly. The OD opened his mouth to say something, but the Sergeant patronizingly signaled him to keep silent.

  ‘Well, in that case there certainly shouldn’t have been any trouble aiming,’ he muttered. ‘But that’s the way it goes when lazy bums want to shoot.’ He started buttoning his tunic. The situation was too serious, he thought, to be dealt with in an open coat. In a subdued, threatening voice he questioned the OD, who resembled a wet hen as he stood there with his pistol in his hand.

  ‘Why did you fire, Herr Unteroffizier?’

  He strongly emphasized Herr and Unteroffizier to show his contempt.

  No answer from the officious Hitler Youth Führer who had chosen to serve his fatherland by carrying pots for nurses.

  ‘Now, then, you Unteroffizier,’ the MC sergeant smirked with deadly sweetness. ‘Why all this artillery fire? I see no one killed, and still I did hear a tremendous barrage – unless my well-developed sense of hearing has been damaged.’

  The hospital sergeant admired himself. He pointed accusingly at the two 9 mm holes in the door panel leading to the laboratory where the flaxen-haired Teuton girls had now fully emerged. Courage was again blooming in their protruding bosoms.

  The Sergeant strutted with delight. He enjoyed the feeling of being the center of attention. He was master of the situation. He could crush that louse of an NCO. He smacked his lips with relish, narrowed his eyes and looked ferocious. Already he had court-martial, incarceration, and head-hunters on the tip of his tongue, but decided to hold these delicious words in reserve for a while yet.

  ‘What did you say about sabotage, Herr Unteroffizier?’

  The OD again spluttered out his report, to him of equal importance to an attempted assassination of the Führer. But he was brutally interrupted by the Sergeant long before he could finish.

  ‘You must be insane, man! A thing like that doesn’t happen in my hospital. Simply can’t happen.
Are you seeing things? Hearing things? Do you have blackouts, Unteroffizier, eh? Would you like to receive a one-way ticket to the front?’

  ‘No, Herr Sergeant,’ crowed the OD, suddenly becoming eager.

  ‘What do you mean by “no”?’ the Sergeant inquired. He placed his fists at his sides in Prussian style and planted his feet, legs wide apart, solidly on the floor. ‘Are we then agreed that the sort of nonsense you’re trying to put over on me cannot occur in my hospital?’ He put special stress on ‘my.’ ‘Because I can’t imagine you’d care to disagree with me, Herr Unteroffizier? Well, answer, and don’t give me such a stupid look!’

  ‘Herr Sergeant,’ began the confused OD, unable to keep pace with the tactics of the experienced first sergeant.

  ‘Yes or no, none of your long speeches, you gasbag.’ He licked his still slightly greasy lips and hungrily tasted the word ‘gasbag.’

  ‘Certainly, Herr First Sergeant.’

  ‘Certainly to what, you comic worm?’ the Sergeant exploded.

  To his immense chagrin Dr Mahler, the head surgeon, then appeared. With flapping arms and white coat fluttering, he came walking along in his round-shouldered, unmilitary way. He stopped before the disturbance on the stairs. Nonchalantly waving his arms, he said with quiet authority:

  ‘This place needs tidying up, First Sergeant. It really looks terrible. Like a bombed-out depot with refugees.’ He glanced at the five of us. ‘If you have permission to go out, get lost, won’t you!’

  He pointed at the folding door. ‘That pane of glass will have to be replaced. We can’t have a mess like that around. When off duty, the guard should stay in the guardroom and not dance ballet in the corridors. This is a hospital, not a circus ring!’ To the great annoyance of the war-happy, Dr Mahler always said ‘hospital,’ never ‘field hospital.’

  He cast a short, disapproving glance at the many women who’d gathered on the stairs and corridor. ‘I dare say my female co-workers must have other things to attend to than listening to soldiers’ stories on the landing.’

  Mahler nodded and wobbled off. Nurses, cleaning women and receptionists buzzed eagerly back to work. The guard rumbled off to the guardroom. The rest of us disappeared through the revolving door. Tiny demonstratively stepped on the bits of broken glass, making as much racket as possible, while he openly grinned at the OD.