Legion of the Damned (27 page)

"That's all very well for you to say," said I. "You haven't got the hemorrhage."

She did not reply, but just smiled rather mysteriously.

"Perhaps it isn't so bad?" I queried.

"It isn't bad at all," she replied.

When she had finished she covered me up again. Then she stood there a moment looking at me.

"It wasn't blood," said she.

"Wasn't blood?" said I. "But I could feel..."

It will be long before I forget her little smile. I went red in the face and felt horribly embarrassed.

"You were dreaming, my friend. You are certainly getting better." She gave me a pat on the chin and walked off with her basin.

"It must have been you he was dreaming of, nurse!" chuckled Zepp.

"Now go to sleep, both of you!"

Then she was gone.

In the end I had to ask him to keep the rest till the morning so that we could get some sleep before the entire night had gone. But it was not many minutes, before:

"Sven, are you asleep?"

I pulled my head right under the blankets.

"Sven!"

"Yes. What is it this time?"

"Margaret says there will be special one-year students' courses for the demobilized once the war is over. Do you know anything about that? Sven, come on and smoke a last cigarette with me.. Don't you think that Margaret is. . ."

"Oh, for God's sake!"

That night I almost got nicotine poisoning. He kept getting out of bed every other moment to come and sit on the edge of mine and explain everything that he and she were going to do once the filthy war was over.

It was one Thursday morning early in December 1943 that I was declared fit and told that on Saturday I was to leave and rejoin my unit.

"I am sorry to have to do it, my boy. By rights, you ought to have been here for at least another six weeks. Now you will have to manage as best you can. I don't know if you get much to eat up there; but you must eat what you can whenever you get a chance. You will only be able to stand up to it if you eat well and, preferably, a bit more than that."

Thus the head doctor at the hospital in Truskawice. He was a good doctor and ran his hospital on the system that his patients were to stay there till they were fit, and when they were he tried to find excuses to keep them a bit longer. Now, however, he had had orders from the very highest quarters that at least fifty per cent of all patients were to be pronounced fit and sent back to their units. Yet, according to the regulations, if a man were pronounced fit when he was not the doctor could be court-martialed--so that just shows how they can perform miracles up at the top. You take a certificate of fitness, a rubber stamp and a courtmartial and--lo and behold!--the sick are fit and well. That these "fit" men could be a catastrophic burden on their units by forcing their fellows to do nursing as well as everything else in the middle of a battle was not a thing that occurred to any of those at the top.

The head doctor shook his head sorrowfully when he said good-bye to me.

Barbara wept when I came and told her the sad news. I was so bitter and depressed that I felt no urge to comfort her. It would haVe been false to have tried anything so silly as comforting a woman in love whom you love. That at least is what I thought at that moment. I confined myself to drowning it all in fierce sensualism. The door was not locked but I believe that neither of us would have worried if the entire German people had walked in. We were in the right. The people had required--or at least they had let it be done in its name--so much of us that we had a right to demand a little in return: and we asked only that, but that they must let us keep, and it was not a thing we took from anyone. I remained lying on her bed when she hurried off to her ward on duty, and there I smoked a cigarette and calmly thought over my position.

Actually there was nothing to think over unless I intended to desert. I was not afraid of doing that; but neither was I really afraid of going back. I was no longer afraid of anything, only possessed by a cold, fierce hatred of all that we all hated under the common denomination: "the filthy war." No longer being afraid of anything, I might just as well go and study the phenomena from the angle of calm, disinterested bitterness from which you can observe accurately.

As I was in the middle of my cigarette Margaret came rushing in and flung herself sobbing onto her bed without noticing me. She had a letter in her hand.

So Hugo Stege had been killed.

I said that to myself and felt no surprise. I had no need to read the letter. Hugo was dead.

Without speaking, I shoved cigarettes and matches across to her. She started up in a fright.

"Oh, are you there? Sorry, I didn't see you."

"Skip that," said I. "Lock the door while I get dressed. I shan't be two minutes."

So I dressed while she lay there sobbing. Then I unlocked the door and read the letter:

Eastern Front, November 1943.

Feldpostnummer 23645

Feldwebel Willie Beier.

My dear Miss Margaret Schneider,

I am writing to you, as Hugo Stege's friend and comrade, to tell you the grievous news that he has fallen. He has told me so many nice things about you, so that I understand only too well what great and awful grief this letter must bring to you.

Perhaps it may be some comfort to you to know how it happened.

Early one morning, when we were out on patrol with our armored car, we were suddenly fired on. A bullet struck your fiance right on the temple, and he was killed instantly. In death he was still smiling that fine smile of his, so you will see that he did not suffer. Now, you must not despair; you are young and you must promise me to forget as soon as you can. Life undoubtedly holds many bright, happy days for you yet, and the wisest and only right thing for you to do--though at the moment you may not like my advice--is to find a young man whom you will come to love as much as you now love Hugo. For the sake of your fallen beloved and my friend, don't cry, for that will only make him sad, if he can see it. No, smile, and just think how much he has been spared. It is an ill wind-- What happens to our dead ones we do not know, but we
do
know that they are well off.

With my whole heart I sympathize with you.

Yours very sincerely,

WILLIE BEIER.

How like The Old Un that letter, with its paternal kindness, was. The same post had also brought a letter for me.

Dear old boy,

Thanks for your letters. We got five in a batch. Unfortunately there is only time for a short card, for we are in the midst of some pretty good filth. If Ivan isn't attacking, we are. There's no peace. It's pure hell. Do what you can to stay in the rear as long as possible.

Stege is dead and Titch missing without trace, having vanished during an attack. As far as that goes, I have written to Margaret telling her that he fell with a bullet in his head--but you know how a tank soldier leaves this vale of sorrow. Poor Stege had both legs burned off. It wasn't pleasant listening to him during the ten or twelve hours it took him to die. It's incredible where they get the strength to scream so long.

Before this rotten war's over we will probably all have kicked the bucket, and so the Party bigwigs, the generals and the rest who have kept out of it will get all the laurels--and everything else.

We are due to march now, so, dear Sven, keep in the rear ranks in your hospital, so that at least one of the right sort is somewhere where he has a chance of surviving. And don't forget that we have promised each other to write a book about this whole filthy business.

Kindest regards from

Porta and Pluto and your Old Un.

That last evening we had avocat and cakes and there was nice, soft music on the radio. Barbara had been let off duty. But we could not get the party going. There was a storm howling outside and rain lashed the windows in angry scurries. Zepp gazed sadly into his glass and said:

"On such an evening I am almost glad of my paralysis. Think of being in a trench in this weather."

Margaret went up to Elizabeth's to sleep so that Barbara and I could be on our own that last night. As Margaret was about to go out of the door with her night things she put her arm round my neck and, looking at me with tears glistening in her eyes, said gravely:

"Sven, you must be careful out there. The Old Un mustn't have to write to Barbara, too, in a few weeks' time."

Then she gave me a kiss and vanished swiftly through the door.

The next morning I dragged on the hated uniform and long gray overcoat. My haversack was heavy with good things the girls had stuffed into it: two big cakes Barbara had made herself, two jars of jam from Elizabeth, smoked ham from Margaret, a tin of pears from Zepp. Tears caught in my throat and, with the best will in the world, I could not see how I was ever going to want to eat any of it. Then I strapped my heavy army pistol round my waist, hung the gas mask container over my shoulder and, last of all, set my little black forage cap on my head.

All three girls came with me to the station. I kissed tears from Barbara's eyes.

"Don't cry, Babs; you should laugh. Remember," I went on urgently, "this isn't farewell. It's au revoir."

"Sven, promise me to take care of yourself."

When the whistle blew, all three kissed me, a last pledge of friendship, of love.

Farewell, Truskawice! Farewell, my oasis. Farewell, you peaceful rooms with clean, cool beds. Farewell, you women with fragrant, glossy hair.

I pressed my forehead to the cold, damp windowpane in the compartment, and the tears rolled down my cheeks.

An icy hand clutched at my heart when I saw how changed he was. His hair was quite gray, his skin yellow and there were black rims round his tired eyes. He was thin and bent and his uniform hung on him, now far too big. Poor, poor Old Un!

Pluto looked just like The Old Un.

Von Barring looked just as they did.

They all looked like that.

All?

There were not many left.

We had been six thousand strong when we first came out.

Now there were seven of us--seven men.

They sat for a moment looking at the cake, as if it were something sublime and sacred. Eventually Porta plucked up courage, but The Old Un hit his fingers with a spoon.

"A cake that has been baked by real girls must be eaten with morality, decorum and feeling, not with mucky fingers."

And so we laid a proper table, with a couple of towels for a cloth and the lids of our mess kits for plates. We washed and cleaned our nails and combed our hair, brushed our uniforms and polished our boots, and so, twenty minutes later, we sat down to table and solemnly ate Barbara's cake and drank Margaret's avocat.

"Was it nice?"

"Yes, it was very, very nice."

We looked at each other. I looked at their expectant, furrowed, tense faces. Now you must give the best that is in you, I told myself. I considered for quite a while before I began:

"Their clothes were cleaner than any clothes you have seen. When they bent over your bed to make it, or pulled the sheet tight under you, you smelled a smell of freshly ironed, slightly starched linen that has just been taken out of a linen cupboard It smelled entirely free of dirt, dry almost as though very slightly scorched. When they were not on duty they wore their own clothes, and those were just as clean, and they smelled of something light and warm and yet at the same time cool. They had dresses. I saw a light blue silk dress with white and light gray birds on it. It had short sleeves, and it was gathered at the neck in a mass of puckers, so that it fell in folds over her breast and back. When you pulled a white silk cord it fell off her shoulders, but then you had forgotten the two small strings on the short puff sleeves. That was her dress, the one I had. Margaret, who was Stege's, I remember best in a flame red dress of some thin woolen material that clung to her body as though it were painted on her. She was like a flame. And there was a girl who wore a skirt that swung on her hips and was always a quarter of a revolution behind when she turned. The one in the light blue silk dress," I went on in what was almost a chant, while I shut my eyes and concentrated on seeing Barbara, "that is, the one I had, when you had pulled that string and she had pulled the two small ones, and you had found the two press studs and the hook and eye at the side and undone them, then the whole dress fell as something airy and soft, and she stood there inside a ring of light blue that had formed round her feet. The girls were just as clean as their clothes, and smelled wonderfully of mitsouka perfume...."

"Mitsouka?"

"Yes, Porta; let me explain, so that you and the others will understand. The girls were as clean as a gun just before parade in barracks. Their hair glistened like the Danube on a winter's night when the moonbeams are making the ice gleam like a million diamonds. And their bodies smelled like the forest behind Beresina on a spring morning just after rain. Can you understand that?"

For several hours I had to tell them of the wonderful world where I had been. They could not hear enough.

"There is one thing I cannot rightly understand," said Pluto. "How is it that you, who have been living like an oriental prince, who have guzzled cakes and roast duck and swilled wine and have had a harem to feed you the fat of the land in suitable small bits, how is it that you are as thin as a rail?"

So then I had to tell them how, after my wounds had healed, I, Stege, Zepp and another man had bought some water for three hundred cigarettes and drunk it. Two kinds of water, to be truthful: one with typhoid, the other with cholera. "Didn't Stege tell you?" I asked. "We became ill with a vengeance. Zepp is still paralyzed below the waist and the fourth man died. I was unconscious for nineteen days, and after that I refused to eat. Barbara and a Polish wardmaid forcibly fed me, one spoonful at a time, for a fortnight. The doctor gave me up five times. They gave me injections of all sorts of medicines and salt water and glucose. Now I have been discharged six weeks too early. Heil Hitler!"