March Battalion (12 page)

Barcelona staggered towards us, followed by the rest of his crew. He looked at our tank, then looked at us, as if unable to believe that we had come out of it alive. We turned and followed his gaze, seeing the Tiger for the first time and sharing his incredulity. The gun had been torn completely away; the tracks were buckled like switchbacks; the bonnet was staved in; most of the wheels were missing, the petrol tanks were flattened, and the vehicle as a whole simply no longer existed.

We stood staring for several minutes, until at last Porta shook his head and wiped the blood from his eyes. 'God, that was a tank and a half,' he said, sadly.

Torgau. Called a prison; in fact a hell. A cold grey hell, staffed by sadistic maniacs with whips and jackboots, with the unfortunate inmates reduced to the level of a herd of cattle and treated a great deal worse.

There were but two exits from Torgau: one led to the firing squad and one to a disciplinary battalion and the Russian front. Ninety per cent of the prisoners took the former way out. Perhaps, in the long run, they were the lucky ones.

T
HOSE
of the regiment who survived were sent back to Germany. It was felt, perhaps, that we had earned a rest.

Our company were put on guard duties at the military prison at Torgau. It was a forbidding place, where everything was grey: the stark stone walls were grey, the main gates were grey, the uniforms were grey, the bars across the windows were grey. The very sky itself, when you were lucky enough
to
get a glimpse of it, was grey.

The great double doors were swung open to admit another prisoner, marched in in handcuffs between two guards. He jumped nervously as the doors clanged shut behind him. For a moment his mouth twisted, his face contorted, we thought he was going to shout aloud. But he just muttered to himself, and we caught the words 'a living death'.

'Hold your tongue!' screamed the feldwebel. 'In this place, you speak when you're spoken to and not before ... And as a general rule the only time they bother to speak to you is to ask whether you want a bandage tied round your eyes.'

Feldwebel Schmidt sniggered with self-satisfied laughter. He was always laughing. His fellow warders called him 'the Joker'. He might have been taken for a jolly, jesting fellow, except that his sense of humour unfortunately operated only at other people's expense. He was not, in that respect, altogether normal. His desire to be constantly laughing at other people's expense amounted to a definite obsession. But there again, he was not so very unusual: none of the warders employed in Hitler's prisons could ever, by any stretch of the imagination, have been described as 'normal'.

Feldwebel Schmidt pressed the bell that rang far away in the depths of the prison, in the room marked 'Reception', which was the domain of Hauptfeldwebel Dorn. The prisoner was marched off.

The Hauptfeldwebel lived his life in a carefully contrived; muddle of papers and documents. Filing cabinets stood in all four corners of his office. Wire trays filled with papers stood, before him on the desk. Files marked 'For Signature', 'Urgent', 'Pending', 'Top Priority' and so on lay scattered about for all to see, proclaiming to the world that Hauptfeldwebel Dorn was a man much occupied by prison affairs. There was an impressive array of pens, pencils, rubber stamps, bottles of ink, rulers, and other office paraphernalia. And behind it all sat Hauptfeldwebel Dorn, conscientiously doing as little work as possible. In the third drawer of his desk, hidden beneath the pile of the 'Volkischer Beobachter', which no one would ever think of reading, was a dark green bottle marked 'Glue'. In fact it was cognac, which always proved a good restorative if ever Dorn found himself with his back to the wall and having to pick up a pen and sign a few letters.

The office door opened to admit Schmidt and his fellow warder and the handcuffed prisoner.

'Heil Hitler!' barked Schmidt.

As a matter of principle, Dorn ignored him. He sat hunched behind his desk, apparently fully absorbed in the contents of a file that he was studying. Inside the file, typed on several sheets of official paper stamped 'Gekados' (Secret) was a pornographic story.

Feldwebel Schmidt scraped his throat, deferentially, to call attention to his presence.

'Silence!' snapped Dorn. 'You can see that I'm busy.'

For the next few moments there came only the sound of heavy breathing and the important rustling of the secret papers. At length Dorn closed the file, placed it in the drawer with the bottle of Glue beneath the 'Volkischer Beobachter', and turned majestically to survey the prisoner. Without a word he held out a hand to Schmidt. Schmidt silently passed over the prisoner's papers. Dorn glanced at them and said 'Hm!' in tones of contempt and importance. He tossed them nonchalantly into one of his wire baskets, stood up, paused a moment for effect, then strolled slowly round the desk and placed himself before the prisoner.

'Well?' he demanded.

The prisoner stiffened. 'Lt. Heinz Berner, 76th Artillery,' he said.

'Well?' asked Dorn, once again. 'May one inquire what it is that brings you to Torgau? Or is it, perhaps, sehr gekados?'

Lt. Berner looked down at the floor.

'Sentenced to death for murder... sir.'

'An officer turned murderer?' Dorn raised his thin eyebrows. 'An officer of the German Army? It scarcely seems credible... Who, if it's not too much trouble, was the unfortunate victim?'

'My fiancee.'

'Your fiancee?' Dorn threw back his head and whinnied like a horse confronted with a bag of oats. 'That's good! I like it! It's the best thing I've heard in a long time! Well, never mind, Lt. Heinz Berner: you'll soon be reunited with her. We have no place for men like you in the German Army.'

Lt. Berner was taken to the third floor and shut up in a cell measuring 3 by 11/2 metres. He felt as if he were in a sardine tin. Any minute now someone would turn the key and peel back the lid, and that moment would mean death to Lt. Berner.

He sank heavily on to a wooden stool, put his head in his hands and sat without moving for almost half an hour. It seemed to him that his life was over, almost before it had even begun. Most of his friends had turned against him; for them, he was already dead. At any minute he could expect to hear the man with the key and he would know that they had come for him, that the firing squad was waiting somewhere in the yard outside.

It seemed impossible that it was such a short time ago that he had left the military school in Potsdam covered in glory, promoted to lieutenant, sent home on leave, met at the station by his proud parents and devoted Else. Even now, looking back, it was difficult to see exactly how it had all happened, where it had really started to go wrong. He thought, perhaps, the first inkling of trouble had appeared that day he had taken Else out to dinner. He had kissed her in the vestibule of the restaurant. A lingering kiss with the tip of his tongue exploring inside her mouth. Such a kiss as he had read about in that book by - who was it? Some American name. Muller? Miller? Yes, that was,, it. Henry Miller. The book had been confiscated and ostentatiously burnt after half the camp had read it. Else had reacted to the kiss like an outraged virgin. Upon reflection, she probably was a virgin, and she had most certainly been outraged. For two days she had refused to speak to him, and had then only resumed the relationship on the strict understanding he should not lay so much as a finger on her, never mind a tongue. Else was a member of the B.D.M.(*) And according to their doctrine, no officer should ever demand 'that sort of thing' from, one of their girls. Chastity until marriage. Desire should not exist. And if by some misfortune, by some freak of nature, it did rear its horrible head, then it should be firmly extinguished until a couple were safely wed. Did the Fuhrer, they asked, go about subjecting young girls to gross behaviour? Obviously not. It was unthinkable.

(*) Bund Deutscher Madel - League of German Girls

Heinz had done his best to extinguish his freakish desire to possess Else. After all, he owed it to the Fuhrer. Unfortunately his desires refused to be extinguished.

'An officer of the German Army should simply not behave that way,' Else told him.

'What way?'

'You know quite well, Heinz.'

'Then how should he behave?'

'He should wait until he's married.'

Heinz accepted it, since he had no choice, although as far as he could recall they had never laid down any specific rules on the subject at the military school at Potsdam.

'Let's get married, then,' he suggested. 'From the moment we belong to each other physically, you can count yourself as my wife. Surely that would be all right?'

Else flung herself upon him and for several moments they kissed each other with all the forbidden fervour described in the Henry Miller book. And then, suddenly, she had thrust him away from her and was staring with revulsion in her eyes, as if he were some hideous monster.

'So? Is that the only reason you want to marry me? Because you want to go to bed with me? How disgusting! I find that sort of thing utterly contemptible. I've just reported one of my best friends for having sexual relations with a man.'

It took him the next few hours to convince her that she was misjudging him. By the time he had succeeded, it was almost true: desire had, at least for the moment, been repressed.

And then, the next day - how had it happened? How had it possibly happened? They had been so happy together. The brutes of the Kripo, they refused to believe that he really couldn't remember. They'd beaten him up and threatened him with 'a little outing', which, they assured him, would quickly restore his memory. He hadn't understood what they meant, but he had gathered it was something unpleasant. The Chief Inspector had punched him several times in the face and accused him of murdering other people besides Else.

'Tell us about it,' he said. 'Take us into your confidence and we'll do all we can for you. We'll have your case heard here at Hamburg instead of Berlin. You'll do better in Hamburg. We treat people fairly here.'

They had thrown him about the room and kicked him in the guts, until at last he had vomited up blood. He thought they must be mad. They made him lick up his own vomit, and several other things he preferred to forget. Finally, he was put in preventive detention and a new set of warders occupied themselves with him. They broke two of his fingers, one on each hand, choosing the middle-finger because that was the one that gave most pain, and because it could successfully be broken in three places. The doctor who examined him afterwards thought it quite amusing.

'Slipped on the floor, eh? Amazing the number of people who've done that just recently. I keep telling them they shouldn't put such a high polish on it. They'll have a really serious accident one of these days.'

And so, now here he was, in Torgau ... Torgau! My God, was it really true? Was he really in Torgau, of all places? Torgau, a name that was synonymous with hell, with torture, with death ...

Once again, the Lieutenant buried his face in his hands; and this time he sobbed like a child. He didn't want to die, not even the death of an officer, and please God they would at least grant him that - but he wasn't ready for death, he was too young. Only twenty, and full of patriotic fervour. Why did they have to kill him? He wanted to fight, for the Fatherland, for the Fuhrer, for the sheer honour and glory of it. It would be idiocy to waste so valiant an officer. What could he do? Write to Generaloberst Haider? Yes. Haider would help him. Sure to. It was his duty to write to him. He owed it not only to himself but to Germany.

The Lieutenant jumped up and ran to the door of his cell. He clutched at the bars and shouted at the top of his voice.

'I want to write a letter! I want to write a letter!'

Outside in the passage, someone beat on his door.

'Stop that flaming row in there!'

The Lieutenant fell back. He sank in a kind of daze on to his wooden stool. For a long time there was silence. Now and again he heard footsteps in the corridor, the jingle of keys. It was a sound that drove him to the very edge of panic. Each time, he imagined they were coming for him.

The brutes of the Kripo had treated him as some kind of sex maniac. The court martial had expressed the regret that he could die only one death and not be killed ten times over. And yet even now he could not remember clearly how it had all happened. He had loved Else. He had had no wish to harm her.

He had been drunk, he knew that. Too drunk to have full control of himself; not so drunk he did not know what he was doing. And he had torn off his clothes, he knew that, also. Else had screamed and fought, but no one had heard her. Or if they had, they had taken no notice. It was the fault of the war. You became accustomed to violence and accepted it as a normal part of life. In the end it made no impact on you and you failed even to notice it.

Else had kicked him hard on the shins. It had hurt, but he had only laughed and tightened his grip on her wrists.

'Let me go! Let me go!'

And he hadn't. No, he definitely hadn't. He could remember holding on to her. She had fought like a creature demented. She had called him a swine, a brute and a Jew, which were the three worst insults she knew. She had punched him in the face, and a Sevres vase had fallen from the mantelshelf and shattered, he remembered all that. He seemed also to recall the untimely end of a piece of Dresden china, an ornate looking-glass and several other valuable knick-knacks.

He remembered all that, but what he did not remember were the things that followed. He did not, for instance, remember pulling out Else's hair by the roots, or tearing at her flesh until she bled; or hurling her to the ground, or firing twice at point-blank range upon a portrait of the Kaiser. He did not remember sinking his teeth into Else's throat, nor licking Up the blood, hers mingled with his; nor the warm salty taste of the blood, nor the strange rattling in Else's torn throat, nor the sudden softness of her previously unyielding body. All this he did not remember.