‘That all you’ve got to say, you limp German prick?’ she scolds him, forgetting she is a highly-placed, aristocratic lady. ‘What’ve you got a head for? Do something! Give your orders! You are a German, aren’t you? Just sit there swilling coffee and cognac!’ She goes on furiously for some time, spitting out the foulest oaths in the language. Words she certainly did not learn in her aristocratic home.
‘Yes, it is a bit shitty ain’t it?’ Porta admits. ‘I must say it’s nice and pleasant having a bundle of cash in your pants, but it does bring a lot of excitin’ situations with it. Tell me, girl, does your feller drink?’
‘No, never,’ she says. ‘But why do you ask?’
Porta sucks on a tooth, and pulls at the lobe of his ear.
‘Does hubby work hard?’
‘Indeed he does. I guarantee you that. He has worked like a horse all his life for the lousy state. It is only seldom he drinks, and then he gets really drunk.’
‘That does ease my mind,’ nods Porta. ‘People who drink too much, y’know, see things through rosy spectacles an’ everythin’ goes easy. I must admit I was scared of the lot of it being just drunken dreams. Let me talk a bit of my Russian German to your hubby. Where’s your radio? We’ll soon get things on the right track an’ be wealthy people with houses an’ fishin’ rights in Sweden. D’you like salmon, girl?’
It is easy to keep clean when you do not engage in trade or mix with other people.
Henri de Montherlant
‘Let me go,’ babbled the old Jew, trying to tear himself away from the brutal grip of the three young men.
‘Where’ve you hidden the-stuff?’ shouted the big stormtrooper, hitting the old man in the face.
The woman screamed and tried to help her husband. She was thrown back into the dark corridor. She screamed again when the SA man’s boot sank into her. She screamed for the last time when a rifle butt smashed into her face. Then they looted the shop.
When the police arrived they found the old man lying weeping across his wife’s body. They turned him in to the collection point at Old Moabitt, and hanged him for wife murder eight days later. That was the day Dr Goebbels decreed:
Ordnung muss sein!
It was 3 April, 1936.
*Geheime Kommandosache: German for Secret Command Matter
*Bautzen: A notorious German prison
THE BURIAL OF GREGOR’S GENERAL
The men who have been on leave are beginning to return. They come plodding down the long straight highway. Some have managed to thumb a lift, but most of them have had to walk the fifty kilometres from Svatogorskaja. The leave train didn’t go any further. It is easy to tell which of them are town boys and which come from the country. The farm lads are giving way at the knees from the weight of all the good food their families have loaded them down with when they left. The townies have only their equipment to carry. One thing they all have in common. They are unbelievably sorry for themselves, and under their influence the whole regiment is very soon in the grip of the blackest kind of depression.
We snarl at one another, punch-ups are started for the slightest of reasons. Tiny had already beaten eight men up so viciously that he has been tied to a tree as if he were some kind of watch-dog. We have no guardhouse to keep him in. The Unteroffizier-cook, a fellow we call ‘Fried Egg’ because he looks like one, gets himself scolded almost to death when two men back from leave throw him into the soup cauldron. All he’d done wrong was to say: ‘Welcome back to the joys of the Eastern Front.’
Porta is slouching grumpily down the broad main road, when he runs into Sonia Pushkova, her round fat face shiny with sweat as usual. She believes herself to be very attractive, although she would be none the worse for a close shave. She crashes into Porta with all the grace of a fully-loaded truck, and throws both her fat arms around his neck.
‘Like to come into my chicken coop an’ have a look at the new hen?’ she asks him, licking the inside of his ear with her fat, wet tongue.
But Porta is far too low in spirits to be interested.
‘Shit on your new hen,’ he mumbles, and gives her broad rump a hearty smack. I’ll come an’ fuck you some other day, and your hen can sit on her perch and cackle in time to the beat!’
All alone, Gregor comes limping into what was once a fine hotel, before the war, but is now a half shot-up heap of ruins. A primitive sort of bar has been opened in it, but the kind of bar which is only for people with money – and a lot of it.
‘What a shithouse of a place, ‘Gregor says, sitting down alongside Porta on a rickety bar-stool. ‘Beer and champagne,’ he orders, sourly.
‘What the devil are you doin’ here?’ asks Porta, and stares questioningly at his stick. ‘And what’s happened to your leg?’
‘Sprained my ankle at the funeral,’ explains Gregor, swallowing half the contents of his tankard in one go. He stares at the girl behind the bar.
‘You are pretty man!’ she says in Russian.
‘I know that,’ he replies. ‘I don’t believe in the German God any more,’ he turns and says to Porta. ‘When you’ve had it good for a bit, and then come back to this godforsaken country, then you really understand for the first time what kind of a bucket of shit the German High Command’s offerin’ its tired heroes! Hell’s bells?
The Old Man comes in, followed by Tiny and Barcelona.
‘Now I’ve seen the lot,’ roars Tiny, exploding into a shout of laughter at the sight of Gregor. ‘’Is ’Ighness the Chauffeur-General ’as come back to the poverty-struck!’
‘You been decorated?’ asks Porta, pointing to the colourful KVK* on Gregor’s chest.
‘My general awarded it to me on his deathbed,’ answers Gregor, assuming a sufficiently sorrowing expression.
‘Well, well. So he’s gone to Valhalla too?’ says Porta, sadly. ‘The Fatherland certainly does require sacrifices from us. I know the family of a colonel that’s sacrificed three sons an’ two daughters on the altar of the Fatherland, and God help me if they don’t still wave paper flags on all the national holidays!’
‘Yes, it’s rough enough,’ sighs Gregor. ‘My general’d stayed alive, my fate’d have been different.’
‘No doubt about that,’ admits Porta. ‘The winners would probably have strung you up alongside your general!’
‘Could be,’ agrees Gregor. ‘But what’s worst? Rolling round in Russian muck with a pound o’ lead in your guts an’ dyin’ slowly, or dropping down a couple o’ yards through a hole with a rope tied round your neck? Oh well! I had some good times with the General Staff. Me an’ my general, an’ our monocle, had some fine manoeuvres together. In the beginning it was like the day after a Harvest Festival!
‘“All we need here to make the similarity perfect,” said my general, polishing away at our monocle, “is the smell of cowdung. That would be it! We’ve got to get this crowd in line,” he trumpeted through his eagle-beak of a nose. “Unteroffizier Martin, you will move in to staff quarters,” he barked, semaphorin’ with our monocle. “In twelve minutes we drive to church and remind God that it is His duty to give German arms the victory!”
‘I took over the quarters of a Leutnant who’d been reduced. They stunk of perfume worse than a whore’s scent factory. This Leutnant’d been a brown-holer, so they’d made him a slave in Germersheim. On the way I met my old mate the Adjutant, the rotten swine. When he saw me he stopped dead as if somebody’d hit him between the eyes with a club.
‘“You,” he groaned. “God in Heaven, you! And I hoped and prayed you’d been shot to bits and spread all over the Russian steppe.” He glared at me like an admiral out on the high seas just before he gives the order to open fire with a full broadside. Then he stuck his face up close to mine and opened his mouth so I could see his tonsils. “You know what, Unteroffizier Martin,” he squealed, like a tom-cat that’s got its balls trodden on. “You are the nastiest, and most repelling individual I have ever met. You’re a barracks rat! That’s exactly what you are! A meaningl
ess shout on a wet barrack-square! But you’re not going to fool me! I’ve seen through you! Your conduct can be compared to that of a money-grubbing Jew, but I imagine I’ve told you that before.”
‘“Yes sir, Herr Rittmeister sir!” I smiled, crashing my hobnailed heels together twice. “I realized a long time ago, sir, that the Herr Rittmeister did not regard me with the same warm affection as he would a son!”
‘You should’ve seen that lousy bicycle dragoon, ‘Gregor goes on. ‘He made a face for all the world like a travellin’ salesman dealin’ in moth-eaten rabbit skins. On the way to the mess my general got annoyed because some blokes didn’t salute us, even though the divisional flag was waving merrily on the front mudguard. The Staff Padre got a rocket straight off. ’cos his dog-collar wasn’t as clean as my general wanted. This made the dope of a sky-pilot nervous, of course, and he got mixed up in his bible text and told us Jesus was at the Battle o’ Carthage, and handed out Hannibal the Iron Cross.
‘“You need a rest, my good parson,” barked my general right in the middle of the prayer, and banged him with eight days confined to quarters, before he’d got to the “Amen”. But it wasn’t till we got to the war game in the afternoon my general really went up the wall. He’d got a message from Füihrer HQ, you see, that told him that it wasn’t us who’d be gettin’ 53 Panzer Corps, but some shit of a South German who’d got his party book in order. My general an’ our monocle took that very near. We’d been looking forward, you see, to smashin’ up an armoured corps and shedding a bit of good German blood on the battlefield.
‘It was a deep secret, but we were really jealous of a Russian colleague they called “the Butcher of Khiev”, because of his remarkable efficiency at finishing off the troops he was put in command of. My general wanted to be talked of as “the Butcher of the Ukraine”. Things like that look great in the history books!
‘“There are dark times on the way,” predicted my general. “No war game today!”
‘Well, the message from Führer HQ went into the waste-paper-basket, we polished our monocle, and took a stiff drink. We were in such a bad mood we even forgot to mark the bottle so we could check if anybody had taken a swig on the sly.
‘When I helped him on with his uniform, at exactly 23.00, he looked funny. It was as if his eagle nose had begun to droop a bit. He didn’t check his bedtime with the three watches he carried around with him. He’d been hit pretty hard by them havin’ given our armoured corps to some fat-gutted party dope from the Bavarian beer-halls.
‘“Soon the ravens will come to fetch us,” he said, through his nose, and sent me a steely glance through our monocle.
‘“Yes, Herr General, sir!” I replied, banging my steel-shod heels together. “It really looks dark! The civilians have stolen our uniform and us gentlemen for God and the Kaiser’ve got to stand in the corner with our monocle in our hand! Yes sir, Herr General, sir, these are wicked times. We can expect nothing good from the civilians. They are the spawn of the devil. They will spit in our beer!”
‘We were silent for a while, thinking things over.
‘“Play a little for me, Unteroffizier Martin,” he ordered, lounging down in the large general’s chair he had had made from the skin of his late horse, Baldrian, which was so German it even topped the mares in Wagnerian rhythms.
‘I sat down at the mechanical organ and sang:
Even I, a strong man,
Have felt the fiery
Heat of love . . .
‘My general didn’t like that one much. It was too tame. So instead I sang:
The horses race
Like a storm along –
A shot through the head –
The Rittmeister’s dead!
We smash the enemy –
Chase him home . . .
‘Then my general wouldn’t hear any more. He sat there and seemed to shrink in on himself on his dead horse.
‘“Unteroffizier Martin, you have a spot on your mess-jacket,” he said, a little irritably, pointing to a spot no bigger than a wart on a fly’s arse.
‘“Do you think I am going to die?” he asked, placing our monocle in his eye.
‘“I’m sure of it, Herr General, sir,” I answered. “Those the heavenly warrior loves he calls home to his table.”
‘“Yes, we all have to go some time,” he sighed, with a hopeless glint in the eye wearing the monocle.
‘After this sad discovery, he had to take another cognac, a double one. Between the second and the third glass my general found out that the whole of life was only a preparation for death.
‘“Unteroffizier Martin, since you are only an Unteroffizier, and in no way a learned man, I conclude that you have never thought about how sad everything is. Alone we come into the world, and still more alone we march out of it again.”
‘We were silent for some time, each of us alone with his thoughts. I was standing there thinking how great it would be if the old clown’d pull the cheeks of his arse together and slide into the world of dreams, where everything was all splashed over with German and Russian blood. I had a bint waiting for me, you see, at the Bismarck statue that’s all covered over with pigeon-shit. Blitzmädel* she was an’ fucked with the whole regiment. When she got into top gear she could make a corpse come.
‘My general took another nip from the bottle of Corsican optimism. “You are firmly believed then that I am going to die, Unteroffizier Martin?” he starts up again with the verbal diarrhoea, between a couple of well-satisfied grunts.
‘I was permitted to take a little one, as a reward for my honest answers, a very unusual thing where my general was concerned. Of course I had to drink it standing at ease, which is the way things are done in general officer circles.
‘Then him and our monocle started marching backwards and forwards in the room. Our spurs jingled real Prussian-like. When we had our night uniform on we always wore boots and spurs till we climbed into beddy-byes.
‘The way he looked walking up an’ down there he reminded you of a whole regiment of hussars going at the throat of Germany’s enemies, and knockin’ ’em on the head with sabres. It was typical of my general, and our monocle, that they always marched about when they had to get the blue blood to run out of their heads an’ down into their arses so’s they could think.
‘After some time of this, when I was getting dizzy from turning round all the time to keep facing my general, he finally stopped and stared at me for a long while. He looked like an executioner takin’ an eye measurement of the neck of a bloke, who’s due to turn up his toes.
‘“I am going to give you an order, Unteroffizier Martin, and the devil will come and take you if you don’t carry it out punctually and properly!” After a lengthy pause, while he rubbed his eagle-nose thoughtfully: “If I have to go off to serve in the great army, which will probably be before you dismiss for all time, you must see to it that the band of 5 Hussars blows Rote Husaren* at my funeral.”
‘“Very good, Herr General, sir,” I replied, cracking my heels smartly. “All shall be arranged as the general orders. The buglers of the Hussars shall blow until their trumpets are red-hot!”
‘“I’ll trust you with that then, Unteroffizier Martin! But you also see to it that Stabsmusikmeister Breitenmüller of 5 Hussars places two Leibhusaren in full parade uniform with sabres in the mourning position at the head of my coffin. Two more hussars from 5 Regiment’s corps of buglers are to play Der Tod reitet auf einem kohlenschwart rappen†. To be played andante of course. But should we be so unfortunate as not to be able to get 5 Hussars bugle corps, because they are out fighting for old Germany, then you are to see to it that a well-trained choir of soldiers is commanded out, not less than 25 men, and you, Unteroffizier Martin, will sing the solo. Is that understood?”
‘“Yes sir, Herr General, sir! Beg to report sir, I’m already singing!”
‘Then my general gets up into his pit at last. He was that taken up with kickin’ the bucket that he’d got all the way dow
n into bed before he found he’d still got his boots and spurs on. He got a bit rotten about that. But we got his boots off, and after I’d read him a bit about Old Fritz he went off into a deep sleep.
‘Next morning we gave inspection a miss. Instead we went off an’ inspected the flowers in the castle park. The Cavalry bed with the yellow tulips pleased him, as they usually did. They stood there straight as a string, bowing their necks just like the sodding horses of the 7 Uhlans in Düsseldorf, our regiment. They were the ones who rode straight to hell in a crazy cavalry attack at Cambrai in 1915, with my general in the lead. We were Oberstleutnant then. We always got ourselves very worked up when we talked about that ridin’ trip. Sneaky as the English always are, they’d spotted machine-guns all over the place, so it wasn’t easy to launch a nice-lookin’ cavalry charge. If it’d been them that’d sent out their dragoons to charge us we’d have met ’em in the stirrups, face to face, with drawn sabres and lances at the ready. When we got to the white lilies my general got wrinkles all over his forehead, and started cursing like a whole gang of seamen in an Arab knocking-shop!
‘“Typical infantry,” he trumpeted, “look like a flock of nuns who’ve just been raped by French sailors. See that stupid lily there? Two centimetres out of line. Remove it, Unteroffizier Martin! On to the muckheap with it! If we’re not careful, everything will go to pieces.”
‘At the red roses – the artillery bed – our humour went up a couple of degrees and our ice-blue eyes lit up, joyfully. The roses stand there, battery by battery. They look really soldierly.
‘“That’s the way!” said my general, and took the monocle out of his eye three times, as a sign that he was well-pleased.