March Battalion (4 page)

The Professor wiped his nose on his sleeve.

'I shan't ever get back home again.'

'No?' said Porta. 'Well, in that case it's the Ruskies that'll get you. You listened to Moscow radio recently?'

'Of course not. It's forbidden to tune into foreign ' stations.'

Little John smote his fist hard against his forehead.

'Holy cow, just listen to him! You still think the great German Army's going to win this war?'

The Norwegian doubtfully shook his head.

'You think we're going to lose? he asked.

'Let me tell you something.' Little John took the Professor's arm, turned him round and pointed in a vague, northerly direction. 'Over there, they've got enough cannons to blow the whole of the Sixth Army sky high. And all the rest of the bunch, too, right down to the last soldier.' He paused. 'You know who that's going to be?' he demanded.

The Professor blinked myopically.

'None other than yours truly!' declared Little John, puffing his chest out. 'And when the Chancellery of the Reich is nothing but a heap of rubble, it's going to be me that stands amongst the ruins and spits on it all. And on all the bones of our glorious dead heroes.'

'That wouldn't surprise me in the slightest,' murmured Alte.

Little John kicked angrily at the snow, and then gave a shout of surprise and fell on his knees and began digging. Suddenly, a hand appeared, like a plant growing out of the earth. Shortly afterwards Little John uncovered a face, hideous to look upon, blue, shrunken, lips drawn back over the teeth, eyes sunk deep into their sockets. After a moment's shock, we all fell to scraping away the snow like a pack of terriers. There were two bodies in the shallow grave. Two German infantrymen. The arm of one was still held upright, finger crooked, frozen into position, as if beckoning us to join him. Little John prodded it with his toe and turned away in disgust.

'I never accept invitations from strange men,' he said.

'Have a look in his pockets,' urged Barcelona.

'Have a look yourself,' retorted Little John. 'I don't care for corpses.'

Barcelona hesitated.

'Well, go on, if you're so interested!'

It was the Legionnaire who stepped forward. With a swift movement he took out his knife, bent over one of the bodies and slashed off a flask that was attached to the belt of the uniform. He tossed it towards Heide, who caught it awkwardly and stood for a moment with his mouth open, looking at it. Eventually he unscrewed the lid and held the flask beneath his nose. He twitched his nostrils delicately.

'Smells like vodka.'

He held it out to Barcelona, but Barcelona shook his head. Little John also declined the offer. It seemed suddenly that the whole group had turned teetotal.

'Bloody idiots.'

The Legionnaire stepped forward and snatched at the flask. We watched apprehensively as he raised it to his lips. We watched his Adam's apple rise and fall. Then we waited, expecting God knows what to happen. The Legionnaire wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

'Not bad,' he said. 'It's not vodka, but it's certainly alcohol.'

At that, we reverted instantly to type. Porta and Little John soon had possession of the second flask, and amongst us we finished off both of them within a matter of seconds. Steiner thoughtfully removed the personal papers and identity discs from the two corpses, and we then retired into our roughly-built igloo, hudded together in a tight circle. Ignoring Alte's protestations, we were firmly bedded down for the night and had every intention of falling asleep on the spot. No one was anxious to stand guard duty. As Little John remarked shortly before I sank into unconsciousness, we had twelve able-bodied dogs to keep a watch-out for us.

The Legionnaire mocked at everything, had pity for no one
.
There were but two subjects on which he felt deeply: one washis religion (he was a fanatical Muslim) and the other wasFrance. He himself, of course, was a German, but many yearsspent in the Foreign Legion had made a Frenchman of him.

Beneath the black uniform of the tank regiment he wore the Tricolor, wrapped round him like a scarf. In his breast pocket, with his military papers, he carried a small yellowing photograph of the man he persisted in calling 'mon General'. Lt. Ohlsen told us one day that it was a photograph of a Frenchman, Charles de Gaulle, who was fighting with the Free French in Africa.

Heide stored up this piece of information and made use of it at a later date, during the course of a violent disagreement with
'
the Legionnaire, when he gratuitously referred to 'mon General' as 'a shit of the desert. Before any of us could move, the Legionnaire had whipped out his knife and scored a deep cross on Heide's cheek. The wound had needed several stitches and even now, whenever Heide grew angry, the shape of a cross appeared lividly on his face. The rest of us found it highly amusing, but both Heide and the Legionnaire took the affair very much to heart
.

'Say what you like about anyone else,' said the Legionnaire, 'but if I hear another word against mon General somebody's going to get this knife right between his ribs. I'm telling you.'

We took note of his warning, even though we laughed. No one ever insulted mon General again - at least, not in the Legionnaire's presence.

'O.K., take it easy. We'll break for half an hour.'

Alte called the team to a halt. The rest of us thankfully unstrapped our skis and flopped down into the snow. The dogs lay panting, their breath forming clouds in the frosty air. Alte lit up a pipe, Barcelona gnawed on a frozen crust of bread. There was silence, comparative peace. And suddenly into this silence, Heide began to pour out the story of his life.

The words flowed out of him, and to begin with we none of us paid any attention. It was not unusual for one of us to start talking, aimlessly, about nothing at all, without expecting or ever wishing anyone to take note of his words. It was a consequence of the life we were leading, the snow, the cold, the constant fear and the nearness of death. We slept together and we ate together, we were never apart from each other and yet there was this sense of individual isolation, a desperate alone-ness, that led us from time to time to hold long conversations with ourselves as if there were no one else for miles around.

And so it was that Heide began speaking. The words flowed from him in a compulsive stream. He spoke not to us but to the steppes, to the dogs, to the snow and the wind.. We, if we listened at all, were mere eavesdroppers.

'My old man was a drunk,' he said, and he spat contemptuously into the wind, which threw it straight back at him. 'Drank like a fish, he did. You know that? He drank like a ruddy fish...And Christ almighty, the stuff that bloke could get through! I'm not kidding you, six bottles were nothing to my old man. Nothing at all. You think you can drink?' He laughed scornfully at the listening dogs. 'He'd have had you under the table any day of the week ... Not that he remained sober, I'm not saying that. Matter of fact, I hardly ever remember seeing him sober.' Heide frowned. 'He never was sober, that's the simple truth of it. Never sober, always pissed... And whenever he was pissed, he used to beat us kids black and blue with a whacking great leather belt he wore. Almost every day he used to beat us. We just accepted it, in the end, but my old , lady, she used to pray all the time. I never knew what she was ' praying for, she just used to mutter to herself in a corner. Dear God, please do this, dear God, please do that...'

Heide stared past us towards the west, his eyes extraordinarily clear and blue, presumably seeing not the everlasting carpet of snow and the tall pine trees but the town in Westphalia and the hovel where he was born.

'Know what my old man used to say when he beat us? "It's not because I'm drunk", he used to say. "I'm not doing it because I'm drunk, you mustn't think that. I'm doing it for Germany. It's all for Germany. The sinful flesh must be mortified." That's what he used to say. The sinful flesh must be mortified ... He used to mortify his sinful flesh, all right. In bed, with the old woman ... Sometimes we used to lie there listening to them, other times they'd send us out to the park for half an hour. We used to sit and look at a statue of the Kaiser sitting on a horse. Just sit and look at it until we thought we could go back in again. I even had to take my kid sister with . me, I had to carry her everywhere, she hadn't learnt to walk yet ... I had another sister once. Bertha. She was the oldest, but she died. They gave me her scarf. I remember I went to church and said thank you for letting me have Bertha's scarf, on account of it was so cold that winter and I didn't have any overcoat ... I never did have an overcoat. Except once, I half inched one, only they found out before I had a chance to wear it. I had to go and talk to the priest about it. He hit me so hard I fell down and knocked his china cabinet over. Then he hit me again, harder than ever. Almost as hard as my old man used to wallop us. He was more mad about the china being broken than me nicking an overcoat... One of my brothers, he got out and joined the army. He wrote us a letter, with a photograph, showing what he looked like in uniform, but we never heard from him again. He called himself a Communist. Probably ended up in a concentration camp. He asked for trouble, that one. Never knew when to hold his tongue. Always screaming about the victory of the proletariat.'

Heide laughed, cynically, at his brother's innocence.

'Then there was Wilhelm. He was another of my brothers. He was the one that taught me to jump on trams when the conductor wasn't looking, and when he came up and asked for the fare we used to jump off again shouting all the rude words we knew. And we knew some, I can tell you ... We thought that was fun, shouting words at him when we could get off and run and he had to go on standing there and couldn't do a thing about it. Only one day he did it and Wilhelm fell under the tram and got crushed.'

Heide shook his head.

'They blamed me for that. They said I'd led him into trouble, but it wasn't true, I was younger than he was. It wasn't my fault he died ... I wanted to have his shoes, only they wouldn't fit me. I was bigger than Wilhelm. Younger but bigger, see? Wilhelm was always a skinny little bugger. So they gave his shoes to Ruth, but that was just a waste. She didn't need them for long on account of she was bought by some rich people in Linz - well, THEY called it adoption, only my old man got money for it so what I call it is selling her. She didn't half cry when she knew she'd got to go. The old man beat her black and blue until she stopped ... He got fifty marks for Ruth. It mightn't sound much to you, but it was a fortune to us, I can tell you. Kept the old man in booze for a few days, any rate ... He'd have sold the whole lot of us, if anyone'd been willing to buy, but no one wanted a couple of snotty-nosed brats. That's what he said. He went out and got plastered that night and when he came back we hid under the roof and didn't come down till he'd passed out, but anyway he beat us just the same in the morning ... It wasn't long after that when I came home from school one day and found the old lady sitting on the bed, weeping. I remember that day. I shall always remember that day.'

Heide glanced up at the falling snow, then held out his hand to his hated enemy, the leader of the dog team, the mangy yellow cur he was always threatening to punch in the throat. To our amazement, the dog crawled up on its belly and began earnestly licking Heide's face, while Heide thoughtfully scratched behind its ear. By this time, we were all listening to his story.

'I never knew why she was weeping,' he said. 'But I sat down on the bed with her and I started weeping, too, and we just wept together until I fell asleep. The other kids weren't there, I don't know where they'd gone. Playing in the streets, I expect. Anyway, it was dark when I woke up. I knew something was wrong - you know how you do? I could feel the old lady still lying there, but it was like being alone, all by myself. I couldn't hear her breathing or anything. I was so scared I couldn't move ... After a bit, I lit the candles and she was just lying there, staring up at the ceiling with her eyes wide open. I knew at once she was dead. I was only ten - nine and a half - but even at that age you know when someone's dead.'

Heide suddenly looked directly at us, and his hard blue eyes, were full of tears.

'My mother,' he said, very earnestly, 'was a good woman. She came from a good family. Respectable and hard working. She never used to beat us or swear at us. And you can believe this, or not, but I'm telling you it's the truth, my mother never once got drunk in all her life. The old man tried to make her, once. Him and one of our neighbours. They tried to force a bottle of booze down her. But she wasn't having any of it. You know what she did? She got hold of the bottle and she bashed the old man over the head with it. And when he got mad at her, she simply picked up the breadknife and stuck it into him,' Heide chuckled, reflectively. 'That put a stop to it, I can tell you! He had to have a couple of stitches, put in his leg ... Of course, he beat the hell out of her afterwards. That was only to be expected. But he couldn't force her to do anything she thought was wrong.'

'What happened that time you were talking about?' demanded Little John, suddenly breaking in on the monologue. 'When you woke up and found her?'

Heide scratched at his frostbitten face, removed a scab and handed it to the dog. The dog sniffed at it suspiciously, then ate it. Heide frowned.,

'The old man came in. Pissed as a newt, as usual. Just roaring for a fight with someone. He brought one of his pals with him. A fellow called Schmidt. A real bum.'

Heide's frown intensified. His eyes were dry again, very hard and bright, and his mouth took on the thin, bitter line that we knew so well of old, lips pulled together as if he were sucking a lemon.

'One of these days, I'm going to get that bastard Schmidt,' he said.

'Why?' demanded Little John,.at once interested. 'What's he done to you?'

'He's a shit,' said Heide, as if that in itself were sufficient reason. 'He used to work down the mines with my old man, then they threw him put of there and he went to the local loony bin and called himself a male nurse. Nurse! From all accounts he used to bash the patients about something terrible. He must be having the time of his life right now. He's in charge of the crematorium, and believe me there are plenty of bodies waiting to be burnt. They're being killed off like flies down there. It's supposed to be a government secret, but everyone knows about it.'