Legion of the Damned (28 page)

"Did they have stockings with slipper heels too?"

"French heels? Yes." The others shook their heads and looked despairingly at each other.

"You know, Sven, that all leave is stopped," said Porta concisely, as though that explained something, though what I did not understand.

"Porta," said I, "there's one thing I don't understand."

"What is it?"

"If only I knew. Something has happened to you, I don't know what. You have been through quite a lot, I can see. There's a pretty strong smell of filth on this sector. But it can't be that alone. There must be something more. It was the same with von Barring when I reported back. Why haven't I heard one word of filth from you, Porta?"

They looked at me. Then they looked at each other; or, rather, they looked past each other, as you do at the mention of things of which you do not dare speak. The atmosphere in that dusky, lousy cottage became unreal and terrifying. Porta got up and stood with his back to us, facing the window.

"Old Un," said I, appalled, "tell me, what's wrong? You look as though you were at your grandmother's funeral. As if you were dead."

At that word "dead" something went click in my brain. I am not superstitious, and what happened in my thoughts is not in the least remarkable or inexplicable.

I suddenly realized that they were dead, dead without there being any sensational mystery about it. They had given up hope of ever getting home alive. They regarded everything, including their own lives, as hopeless. To them my tale must have bees about something that did not exist. Their dreams of the glorious great collapse had been shattered. The revolution there was to have been when they got home, and which was to have bees over in fourteen full and bloody days, was a chimera, a phantom ship on the black sea of death. Porta's one firm anchorage in existence, his refuge, the warmth of the female belly, even that had lost its significance. That does not mean that Porta's behavior had become less immoral, for whenever he glimpsed a rounded backside he still smacked it, and both took and gave. But, as he himself said, a few days later--he had just been with the farmer's girl and was describing the proceedings in his usual graphic manner, when he suddenly stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked round at us:

"It used sometimes to be as though I stood there watching myself. I don't do that now. I stand and look out of the window, while Herr Porta, by God's grace, lies there rogering. If there only were something interesting to look at through the window: the fire brigade practicing, or if Hitler were having half his mustache shaved off before going to make a speech--but there isn't anything to look at, and I would be quite unmoved even if there were. You don't understand, of course, but that doesn't matter as I don't either."

For many days I went about trying to cast off this grim conviction that they were dead men, for I could not very well discuss it with them. Then one day I asked them point-blank if what I felt was sheer imagination or whether they really were so utterly passive as they appeared to me, even though on the face of it we were spending our time just as before.

"I don't really know what to answer," said The Old Un.

"All leave is stopped," said Porta.

"There are seven of us left out of a regiment that numbered six thousand men when we set out in 1941," and he ticked them off on his fingers: "Oberst von Lindenau, Oberstleutnant Hinka, Hauptmann von Barring, plus the honored members of this company. Allah is great, but the casualty lists are greater."

"Hallelujah and cross your --!"

"Amen!"

"Yes," said I, and my voice was a shade shrill while I took a breath with fear in the pit of my stomach. "But you can't let down the book we have promised each other to write."

They looked at me. My gaze flitted in panic from one to the other. They did not know me, or rather they knew me better than I knew myself, and they had the profoundest, calmest sympathy for me because I still cherished stupid hopes and had an anxious, pounding heart over which the winds blew.

"When you write our book," said Porta, screwing his flute together, "give all the girls my kind regards. There won't be a soul that will bother to read it, for you can't offer the esteemed public books that aren't about little Miss Switchboard and the boss's stalwart son in a double room. Or she's a nurse and he the head surgeon. But in any event, none of the characters can be lousy. As I said, you'll never get rich off our book. People just don't care. So you'll have to put your hand in your own pocket when you drink yourself tight on our account the day you finish it."

While in these positions Christmas 1943 came, and we tried to make it as festive as we could. We had planted a little fir tree in an empty ammunition box...

The propaganda sent over from the other side was fantastic in its invention. At times it presented us with such monstrous tales as no normal person could have swallowed, but none of us was normal, so they never failed in their effect. It put us into a ferment, filled us with doubt and depression at our desperate situation, our unworthy circumstances, and its Russian authors could record a rich harvest. By that I do not mean so much the men who ran across and let themselves be taken prisoner--sometimes whole units went, headed by their NCO's. Those could be counted. As far as most of us were concerned, Prussian discipline and Goebbels' propaganda about the horrors of conditions in the Soviet Union had us in a stranglehold; and even without that, the little common sense we still retained told us that, considering the way in which the German Army had spoiled and ravaged the lands of Russia, we could scarcely expect to be received with such open arms as the blandishing of the trench loudspeakers sought to persuade us would be the case. What I meant was that the Russian propaganda had a paralyzing effect on the men who preferred to remain where they were. It left our minds torn and drained.

Mostly the Russians made use of the penetrating, objective argument that stuck in your mind however much you said to yourself and the others: propaganda! It was propaganda, but it was well-founded--they had their proofs.

The Russian loudspeakers bawled out:

"German comrades! Come across to your Russian friends! Why lie there freezing? Come over to us and get a warm bed and a decent room. Pretty women will see to it that you lack for nothing. You will be given rations three times what the Nazis give you. Gefreiter Freiburg will now come to the microphone and tell you that what we say is true. He has been with us for two years. He has visited all our prisoner of war camps and seen that they were not in the least like prisoner camps as you imagine them. Our camps are in big hotels or holiday camps, and the most is two men and two women in a room. But here is Gefreiter Freiburg, so you can hear him for yourselves."

Shortly afterward a hearty voice roared out:

"Halo, comrades of the 27th Tank Regiment. This is Gefreiter Jiirgen Freiburg of the 309th Grenadier Regiment. I was born on May 20th, 1916, in Leipzig and lived at Adlerstrasse 7 in Dresden. I have been a prisoner of the Russians since August 1941, and it has been a lovely time. I have been in almost every camp in Russia, and we have everything the heart can desire."

Then for over an hour he described the paradise in which he was. Among other things he read out the menus for a whole week, which included caviar, roast pork, goose and pigeon. Our mouths watered at the mere mention of such food.

One evening they rigged up a big film screen on the parapet of the trench and proceeded to show a film that made many of us quite sick and crazy. We saw German prisoners of war sitting in an elegant salon. We then followed a couple of them from the moment they were taken prisoner, saw them being waited upon like princes in splendid rooms where were huge tables laden with mountains of glorious food that was photographed from every conceivable angle and from quite close. Many of us sat munching without realizing it as these wonders of photography were displayed, and I almost believe that if they had kept showing those pictures of food the entire 27th Tank Regiment would have rushed the screen.

The next scene was played in a luxurious room dominated by an enormous bed. A pretty young woman slowly undressed in front of a German infantryman. She slipped off garment after garment, turning and twisting in front of the soldier. When she was quite naked she undressed the soldier; and then followed a pornographic seance that it would be difficult to match for lewdness.

There was silence over the German lines. Many sighed and uttered little noises without realizing it. It was dreadful to listen to.

"Bravo, bravo, Ivan!" we shouted. "Let's have it again. Encore! Encore!"

We shouted and clapped rhythmically.

Then the loudspeaker crackled and we fell silent:

"Comrades. Don't let yourselves be murdered for a cause that is not yours. Let the SS bandits and Goring's drawing room heroes, who are enjoying life in the occupied countries, let them fight for Hitler and his gang. You old veterans of the regular German Army are too good for this swinishness. Come over to us, come on! Those of you who would like to join the Red Army and fight for your true rights will have the same rank as you now hold. But for that you must come now!"

At other times they demonstrated objectively and without comment how Hitler had broken all his fine promises. Or a Russian doctor told us how to simulate illnesses or contract real diseases.

"Comrades, throw away your weapons and come across to us! It's stupid of you to go on fighting. Cannot you see how you are being misused by the Nazi swine? Don't you know that a third of the German Wehrmacht is now enjoying life for the fourth year in the occupied countries, eating themselves fat, while you must hunger and freeze? The second third is at home in Germany sleeping with your girls, while you, the last third, have to endure hellish privations here, in the great fatherland of your Russian comrades."

"Hear! Hear!" we howled, and flung our helmets into the air to show our enthusiastic agreement with so truthful a statement.

A whole Saxon division went across, headed by its colonel. A Thuringian reserve regiment in the sector next to ours went over with all its officers.

But it also happened, and quite often, that Russian deserters came across to us and that Germans who had been taken prisoner made their way back, as I had once done. Naturally they had no tales of luxury hotels to tell, nor of splendid holiday resorts. Most of them had been through a lot, as I had: in some camps they had been treated decently, elsewhere appallingly; in some places the Russians had been eager to realize the object of their propaganda and win the prisoners of war over to the ideals and doctrine of socialism; in others they made no attempt to do so at all, and elsewhere again they were quite inhuman, often animated with a thoroughly understandable desire for vengeance which I cannot find it in me to condemn. The way the Russians were slaughtered, for example, when the SS went into action beggars all description and reason, so when the day of wrath dawned for the beaten Nazis the sorely tried victors exacted vengeance for a large sum of torment and suffering. I do not mention this in order to make excuses or embellish a tragedy or explain anything away. I mention it so as to show that it is not difficult to find proof for what are euphemistically called "Russian conditions"--but with that kind of proof you can prove that "Russian conditions" prevail in every country that has been at war.

Sometimes things happened that left us open mouthed with amazement. For example, during one attack some of our sixteenand seventeen-year-olds were taken prisoner. The very next day the Russians sent them back, having first lopped the legs off their trousers, so that they were like boys' shorts. On the back of one was pinned this note:

The Red Army does not fight against children; therefore we are sending these back and request you to send them on--home to their mothers, so that they may finish being suckled.

Greetings from the Red Army.

Or that business of the old unteroffizier.

In No. 3 Company they had an elderly man who was an unteroffizier. One day he received a telegram informing him that his wife and three children had been killed during an air raid on Berlin. He went at once to his company commander and applied for leave; but although his company commander did his best, the application was refused.

In his fury and despair the elderly unteroffizier deserted, but to our amazement he was back again the next day. He told us that the Russian divisional commander for the sector facing us had himself given the unteroffizier leave. We thought that the old man had gone off his head, but to our surprise he had both a sealed letter addressed to our colonel and a complete set of Russian leave papers, properly filled in and signed, made out for fourteen days and traveling time to and from Berlin. The Russians had even filled in the correct times of the trains he was to travel by. Von Barring later told me what was in the letter to Oberst von Lindenau. The text was as follows:

Dear Oberst,

We are profoundly surprised that things are now so bad with the German Army that you cannot even give leave to a poor unteroffizier who, like this one, has lost everything. The Red Army, however, will give its prisoner fourteen days' leave, and at the same time releases him altogether.

I am fully aware that you, Oberst von Lindenau, will perhaps now punish this unteroffizier for fraternizing with the enemy, but I suggest to you that for this once you wink at what has happened and see to it that he is able to go home on leave. Personally, I consider that he has been punished enough already through having lost everything during that raid on Berlin.

STEPAN KONSTANTINOWICH RADION

Lieutenant-General

Commanding 61 Infantry Division of the Red Army.

This letter and the man's Russian leave papers were sent to our divisional commander, Generalleutnant von Rechtnagel, for him to decide on so extraordinary an affair as that of this unteroffizier who had gone across to the enemy and by him been granted leave. For the next few days the entire 27th Tank Regiment waited anxiously for the outcome. The Russians kept asking through their loudspeaker whether the man had been given his leave, and each time we had to answer no. Bets were made about it. Most of us thought that the man would be shot. They were simply bound to punish him. That could not be avoided without rewriting the entire military code.