Comrades of War

Book 0: Sven Hassel War Classics

by Sven Hassel

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

We hear the crawlers closing in. A T-34. They must have seen us, Tiny whispers. - Stay low until it is right here, then we run! The horrible clattering of the crawler comes closer and closer. I know this fear, creeping up the spine. It will mean certain death if they run just one second too soon. How we get up, I don't know, the legs move automatically. The tank wiggles over the hole and crushes everything in it. Then it rumbles on...
"THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR HAS GOTTEN HIS MONUMENT" MORGENAVISEN, NORWAY

Sven Hassel was sent to a penal battalion as a private in the German forces. Intensely and with brutal realism, he portrays the cruelty of the war, the Nazi crimes and the crude and cynical humor of the soldiers. With more than 50 million sold copies, this is one of the world's best selling war novels.

Release date: December 23, 2010

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 384

Sample

We were delivered to the main first-aid station. The doctor bawled us out because we were so incredibly filthy and crawling with lice.

He’d never received such pigs before, he told us.

This doctor was very young and had seen very little. Up to then he had only sniffed at medicine in the medical factory in Graz.

Tiny told him off. He called him all sorts of names he should’ve kept to himself – and not a clean word in the lot.

The doctor flew into a rage. He scrupulously took down everything Tiny had said, as well as his name and detachment. Swearing by his newly acquired military honor, he vowed that Tiny would long remember the punishment he’d get, unless he was lucky enough to die during the transport – which he sincerely hoped he would.

The young doctor displayed vociferous pleasure at Tiny’s screaming during the operation, as grenade splinters were extracted from his well-fleshed body.

Three weeks later the doctor was shot, tied to a willow tree. He had operated on a general who’d been bitten by a boar. The general died under the knife. The medical officer had been drunk and was in no condition to perform.

Someone in the Army Corps requested a report, and the medical officer didn’t hesitate to place the responsibility on the young doctor. Incompetence and neglect of duty, the court-martial put it.

His screaming as they dragged him off to that willow tree was indecently loud. He couldn’t be made to walk, and four men had to carry him.

One of them held the doctor’s head in a vise under his arm. Two others held onto his legs. The fourth pinioned his arms to his sides and breast. He could feel the pounding of the young doctor’s heart. It raced.

They told him he ought to face it like a man, that a man should be ashamed to cry.

But it’s hard to be a man for a person of twenty-three who believes he’s a superior being for having become a reserve army surgeon with two stars.

It was an ugly execution, said those who shot him, old infantrymen from the 94th Regiment. They ought to know, they had executed many. They were capable guys, the men of the 94th.

The Frost plunged red-hot knives into everything living and dead and swept the forest with a crackling sound.

The locomotive heading the endless Red Cross train whistled long and plaintively. The white exhaust steam looked cold against the Russian winter day. The engineers wore fur caps and padded jackets.

Inside the long string of freight cars with the red cross marked on top and sides lay hundreds of mangled soldiers. As the train tore ahead, the snow on the embankment was sent swirling in the air and pierced through the frosted walls of the cars.

I was lying in car 48, together with Tiny and the Legionnaire. Tiny was lying on his stomach. An explosive had hit him in the back, and half his behind had been torn off by a mortar shell. The little Legionnaire had to hold up a mirror to him several times a day so he could contemplate the war damage.

‘Don’t you think I can wangle a GVH1 for the hunk of meat Ivan has sliced off me?’

The Legionnaire gave a low laugh: ‘You’re as naive as you’re big and brawny. D’you really believe that? Non, mon cher – a person who belongs to a battalion disciplinaire doesn’t get a GVH till his whole head’s blown off. You’ll get a nice KV2 stamped on your service record, and then you’ll be rushed straight back to the front to get the second half sliced off.’

‘I’ll give you one in the chops, you wet blanket,’ Tiny yelled furiously. He tried to get up, but fell back in the straw with a scorching curse.

The Legionnaire chuckled and gave Tiny a friendly slap on the shoulder.

‘Take it easy, you dirty pig, or you’ll be chucked out with the dead heroes next time we unload.’

Down by the wall Huber had stopped screaming.

‘He’s croaked,’ Tiny said.

‘Yes, and he’ll have company,’ the Legionnaire whispered, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He was running a high fever, and pus and blood had soaked through the week-old emergency dressing on shoulder and neck.

This was the sixteenth time the Legionnaire was wounded. The first fourteen were chargeable to the Foreign Legion, where he had served for twelve years. He considered himself more of a Frenchman than a German. He even looked like a Frenchman: he was five feet three inches tall, of slight build, and had a deep sun tan. A cigarette dangled like a fixture in the corner of his mouth.

‘Water, you damn swine,’ yelled Huhn, an NCO with a big open abdominal wound. He threatened, cursed and begged. Then he started crying. At the other end of the car someone let out a hoarse, wicked laugh.

‘If you’re thirsty you can lick the ice off the walls just like the rest of us.’

The sergeant beside me got up halfway, braving the pain in his abdomen, which had been riddled by a burst of sub-machine gun fire.

‘Comrades, the Führer will provide for us!’ He raised his arm for a stiff Nazi salute like a rookie, then began singing: ‘Hold high the banner, close tight the ranks. The S. A. is marching …’

He skipped some text, as if picking out the words he liked best: ‘Jewish blood shall flow. Across from us the Socialists are ranked, our land’s disgrace.’ Then he tumbled back in the straw, exhausted.

Laughter rang mockingly against the hoar-frosted ceiling.

‘The hero has grown tired,’ someone grunted. ‘Adolf doesn’t give a damn about us. Right now he’s most likely spooning up rabbit-feed and slobbering over his mongrel dog.’

‘I’ll have you court-martialed for this!’ the sergeant yelled hysterically.

‘Watch out we don’t tear the tongue out of your throat,’ Tiny barked, throwing a mess tin of nauseating cabbage at the ash-gray face of the sergeant.

Fairly sobbing with rage and pain, the Hitler-happy artillery sergeant yelled: ‘I’ll fix you, you stinking swine, you skunk!’

‘Bah, brag,’ Tiny sneered, waving the broad battle knife he always kept hidden in the leg of his boot. ‘I’ll carve your stupid brain out of your skull and send it to the Nazi goat that mothered you. If I could get up I’d come over and give you the treatment right now.’

The train came to an abrupt halt. The jolt made us all moan with pain.

The cold wormed deeper and deeper into the car, numbing our feet and fingers. The hoar-frost faced us with a pitiless grin.

One fellow was amusing himself by drawing animals in it with a bayonet. Nice little animals. A little mouse. A squirrel, and a puppy we named Oscar. All the other animals were erased by the frost, but Oscar was redrawn again and again. We loved Oscar, and talked with him. The artist, a Pfc in the Engineers’ Corps, said he was brown with three white spots on his head. Oscar was a very handsome puppy. When we licked the wall, we took the greatest care not to touch Oscar. When we thought that Oscar was bored, the engineer drew a cat he could chase.

‘Where are we going?’ asked a little seventeen-year-old infantryman who had gotten both legs crushed.

‘Home, my boy,’ whispered his buddy, an NCO with a head wound.

‘Did you hear that?’ cackled the Black Sea sailor, a fellow with a smashed hip bone. ‘We’re going home! What is home, you stupid pig? Hell? Heaven? A green paradise valley where Adolf’s angels, with swastikas on their foreheads, are playing “Horst Wessel” on a golden harp?’ He guffawed and jeered at the thousands of ice crystals on the ceiling. They gleamed back indifferently.

The train took off again. The emergency auxiliary field hospital train, made up of eighty-six ice-cold, filthy cattle cars, filled with heaps of human misery called soldiers – wounded for their country, heroes! And what heroes! Hundreds of coughing, slobbering, cursing, weeping and deadly frightened poor devils, writhing with pain and moaning each time the car gave a jolt. The sort of wrecks never alluded to in heroic accounts of combat or on recruiting posters.

‘Listen to me, Desert Rambler,’ Tiny whispered loudly to the Legionnaire. ‘Now, when we come steaming into this stinking hospital, I’m first going to get roaring drunk. Yes, once more I’ll get properly stoned, and afterwards I’ll take care of three little carbolic pussies all at once.’ He looked dreamily at the ceiling and snorted blissfully, licking his frostbitten lips. ‘You bet, I’ll give it to them for all I’m worth.’ His eyes shone with expectant rapture. It would be the first time in his life he’d ever been in hospital, and he imagined it as a sort of brothel with a quite extensive service for the clients.

The Legionnaire laughed. ‘You’ll learn, my boy. First, you’ll be cut up so drastically that you’ll have something else to worry about during the first couple of weeks. You’ll be sweating steel splinters from every pore. They’ll shoot syringes into you all over so you won’t conk out on them, because they can still use you for cannon fodder.’

‘Stop it! I don’t want to listen,’ Tiny shouted, white with terror.

After a few minutes silence, he asked guardedly: ‘Does it hurt very badly, you think, when those field surgeons cut into you?’

The Legionnaire slowly turned his head and looked closely at the big rascal. Every feature of Tiny’s oafish face showed fear of the unknown ahead of him.

‘Bon, Tiny, it hurts, it hurts like hell. They tear and pull the flesh into shreds and tatters so you gasp and groan. But cheer up; it hurts so much you won’t be able to utter a sound, not a squeak. That’s the way it is,’ nodded the Legionnaire.

‘Oh, Jesus Mary,’ Tiny gasped. ‘Holy Mother of God.’

‘Once they have me patched up in the hospital,’ I thought aloud, ‘I want to find a mistress, an expensive, attractive mistress in a long mink coat – a real trophy with plenty of experience.’

The Legionnaire nodded.

‘I know what you mean, a prize piece.’ He clicked his tongue.

‘What’s a mistress?’ Tiny bungled in.

We conscientiously explained to him what a mistress was. His face lit up.

‘Oh, a whore to keep at home. One of those free-lancers. Oh, Christ, if you only could hunt up one of those!’ He closed his eyes, dreaming up whole battalions of gorgeous girls. He could see them walking in a straight line down a long street, wiggling their well-shaped posteriors.

‘How much does one of those cost?’ Not to let the dream girls entirely out of his sight, he contented himself with just opening one eye.

‘A whole year’s pay,’ I whispered, forgetting the pain in my back at the thought of the mistress in a mink coat I was going to have.

‘I had a mistress in Casablanca once,’ the little Legionnaire mused. ‘It was just after I’d become a sergeant in Number 3 Company of 2nd. A good company, a nice boss, no stinking pile of shit.’

‘To hell with your boss. We want to hear about your broad, not your damned bosses.’

The Legionnaire laughed.

‘She was married to a dissolute shipowner, a real old goat. The only thing she saw in him was his dough. His fortune ran to a nice string of O’s. Her favorite pastime was buying lovers and then discarding them when she had worn them out.’

‘Were you thrown out, too?’ asked Tiny, who’d become attentive.

The Legionnaire didn’t answer, but went on with the story of the shipowner’s wife in Casablanca who bought good love.

Tiny obstinately persisted in butting in. Finally he let out such a roar that the other wounded passengers in the car started bawling him out.

‘Did you also get the boot, Desert Rambler? I’d like to know if you were kicked down the kitchen stairs.’

‘No, I wasn’t,’ the little Legionnaire yelled, annoyed by the interruptions. ‘When I found something better I cleared out.’

We knew it was a lie, and the Legionnaire realized we knew.

‘Her complexion was olive yellow,’ the Legionnaire went on. ‘Black hair, always up to some trick. Her underthings, mon dieu, were a treat like a bottle of Roederer Brut 1926. You should’ve seen them and touched them, mon garçon!’

The NCO with the head wound gave a low laugh. ‘You must be quite an epicure. I wouldn’t mind going out with you some evening and taking a look at your girls.’

The Legionnaire didn’t even bother to look at him. He was lying with his eyes closed, a gas mask container under his head.

‘Women don’t interest me any more. I only speak from old experience.’

‘Tell me a little more about your Casablanca girls, Desert Rambler. Where actually is that whorehouse, Casablanca?’

The Legionnaire gave a hollow cough.

‘Evidently you believe there are only two things of importance in this world, whorehouses and barracks. Casablanca is no whorehouse, but a lovely city on the west coast of Africa. A place where Legionnaires of the second class learn to eat sand and drink sweat and where you can order a complete Turkish band. In Casablanca, too, those asses who imagine they’re going to have a glorious time with the Legion find out they’re swine, because they’re born of swine …’

‘ … and made by swine,’ added a voice from the darkness that had gradually fallen on the car.

‘Quite true,’ the little Legionnaire nodded, ‘they are made by swine like you and me and all other joes in this world.’

‘Long live the swine!’ someone yelled.

‘Long live the swine!’ we roared hoarsely in chorus. ‘Long live the stupid swine for the Nazi piles of shit to push around!’

‘You scum, you nasty rabble!’ It was Hitler’s sergeant who’d cried out; he was quite indignant. ‘God help you, you rats, when the attack will roll forward again! Field Marshal von Mannstein will soon cross the Lowart and storm toward Moscow.’

‘In that case, it’ll be in a transport train bound for Siberia with prisoners,’ someone jeered.

‘Onward, grenadiers, saviors of Greater Germany!’ the sergeant bellowed frantically.

‘Haw-haw, you self-made Adolf, were you in action at Velikie Luki?’ Tiny inquired. ‘Since you speak so warmly of Lowart!’

‘Were you?’ asked a Pfc with only one arm, which was festering with gangrene.

‘You bet I was. The three of us sat in the stronghold with the 27th. Any objections, you dirty bastard?’ All at once Tiny confided to the whole car: ‘As soon as I’m out of the hospital I’m going to beat up a QMC officer. I’ll thrash that common thief till he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow. I’ll slash him across the jaw so he’ll have a grin stuck on his face for the rest of his life.’

‘Why’re you so mad about QMC officers?’ asked the one-armed private.

‘Did you leave your brains in your lost arm?’ Tiny exclaimed. ‘You ass, have you never gotten dripping wet under one of our rain capes? You see, those QMC fellows get their cut on everything we use. Every rain cape is made in such a way that the rain sloshes through. Don’t you see the trick? Since the QMC makes a fat profit from every rain cape, and big fools like us throw away the first two in the hope of getting something better, you can plainly see what the gimmick is.’

‘A prize stunt,’ the Legionnaire remarked. ‘If only I could get into the Quartermaster Corps and sell raincoats to those officer thieves! Should this befall me, Allah would indeed be wise and good.’

‘What about that broad you were telling us about?’ Tiny cried. He’d forgotten about the QMC officers.

‘Mind your own business,’ the little Legionnaire snarled. A little later he spoke to himself: ‘Mohammed and all true prophets, how I loved her! Twice after she dismissed me I tried to break into Allah’s garden.’

‘But you said you threw her out,’ Tiny guffawed.

‘So what?’ the Legionnaire shouted. ‘I don’t give a damn about the bitches, those short-legged, wide-hipped, jabbering creatures! And to think a man should be stupid enough to chase after something like that. Take a look at her in the morning, eyes swollen and her whole face puffed up and smeared with lipstick.’

‘Thank you,’ said a voice from the interior of the car. ‘That’s what I call a compliment to the fair sex!’

‘He’s right,’ came from somewhere else in the darkness. ‘You lose your appetite when you face one of those with metal curlers in her hair and down-at-heel slippers, and stockings dangling about her shanks.’

Through the noise of the train we could make out the drone of an airplane. We hushed up and listened, like wild animals when they scent the death song of the beaters.

‘Yabos,’3 someone whispered loudly.

‘Yabos,’ repeated several others.

We shivered, not because of the cold, but because death was there in the car with us. Yabos …

‘Come now death, come!’ the Legionnaire hummed.

The plane swerved and roared in a steadily growing crescendo. With a zooming roar it swept along the train. The blood-red star glared coldly at the numerous cattle cars with the cross of mercy on their roofs. The plane wheeled skyward, then swooped back down like a hawk upon a young hare.

Tiny got up, supported himself on his muscular arms and roared at the doors: ‘Come on then, you red devil, grind us to hash! But get it over with!’

As if the pilot had heard and wished to do his best to fulfill the request, the bullets pealed through the walls of the car and rapped against the other side. Scores of little peepholes appeared at the top of one wall in neat rows.

Some screamed. Others let out a rattle. Then they died.

The locomotive blew its whistle. We drove into a forest. The pilot returned home for tea and eggs, sunny side up.

It was such a nice morning, with clear frost. The pilot must have enjoyed the beautiful landscape from up there.

The Legionnaire said, ‘I could fancy having a sausage. Not just an ordinary sausage, but a sausage made of pork meat with a tang of smoke and strong as black pepper. It must have a whiff of acorn. This it gets from the pig running loose in the woods.’

‘You can get typhoid from eating raw clams,’ announced an infantry color guard with a smashed kneecap. ‘If I could only have a whole basket of typhoid-infected clams when I go back to the front again. Every time I go back to the front.’

The wheels rumbled along the rails. The cold was relentless. It burst in through the holes left by the Yabos bullets.

‘Alfred,’ I called. I hadn’t spoken the name of the little Legionnaire for a long time, if I’d ever done so.

He didn’t answer.

‘Alfred!’

It sounded silly. ‘Alfred, did you ever yearn for a home? Furniture and that sort of thing?’

‘No, Sven, I’m past the time for that,’ he answered with eyes closed. His mouth was set in a sneer.

How fond I was of his drawn face.

‘Now I’m past thirty,’ he went on. ‘At sixteen I went to La Légion Etrangère. I lied that I was two years older. I’ve been a swine for too many years. The dunghill’s my home. My hut down there in Sidi-bel-Abbès, smelling sour from the thick coat of sweat thousands of men have left behind and no fumigation can remove, that hut will be my last.’

‘Do you regret it?’

‘You should never regret anything,’ the Legionnaire answered. ‘Life’s good. The weather’s good.’

‘It’s damn cold, Alfred.’

‘Cold weather is good, too. All weather is good as long as you breathe. Even a prison is good as long as you’re alive and forget about how well off you could be if … It’s this “if” that drives people mad. Forget this “if” and live!’

‘Aren’t you sorry you’re wounded in the neck?’ asked the man with gangrene. ‘You may get a stiff neck and have to wear a steel collar to support your head.’

‘No, I’m not sorry about it. I can live even with a steel collar. When this is all over I’ll take a depot job in La Légion Etrangère with a twenty-year contract. I’ll be able to drink a bottle of Valpolicella every night and carry on some small trading on the black market with unclaimed depot things. Forget about tomorrow. Kick a priest in the pants when I’m drunk. Visit the mosque twice a day and say to hell with everything else.’

‘I’m going to live in Venice when Adolf’s been laid out,’ the infantry color guard cut in. ‘Saw it with the old man at twelve. First-class city. Has anyone here been to Venice?’

‘I have,’ came softly from the straw in the corner.

We were horrified when we discovered it was the dying airman. He didn’t have a face any more. Burning oil.

The infantryman piped down. Without looking at the dying man, he said, ‘So, you’ve been to Venice?’ He said it in Italian to please the airman.

Long silence. Everyone felt the rest of us should keep quiet. To hear a man so near death talking about a city was a rare privilege.

‘Canale Grande is most beautiful by night. Then the gondolas look like diamonds playing with pearls,’ the airman whispered.

‘St Mark’s Place is fun when the water rises and floods it,’ the color guard said.

‘Venice is the best city in the world. I’d like to go there,’ said the dying soldier, knowing full well he’d die in a cattle car east of Brest-Litovsk.

‘An old soldier is always gay,’ the Legionnaire said, apropos of nothing. ‘He’s gay because he’s alive and understands what this means.’ Glancing at me, he went on. ‘But there aren’t so very many old soldiers. Many call themselves soldiers, but only because they have their stripes on. You’re not a soldier till the Man with the Scythe has shook hands with you.’

‘When I’m settled in Venice,’ the infantryman mused, ‘I’m going to eat cannelloni every day. I’ll have crab served on the shell. And I’ll be damn sure to have sole, too.’

‘Merde! Clams are also good,’ the Legionnaire said.

‘But they give you typhoid,’ a voice warned from the other end of the car.

‘I don’t give a damn about typhoid. When Adolf has been strangled, we’ll all be immune,’ the infantry color guard said confidently.

‘I forbid you to speak like this about our divine Führer,’ the artillery sergeant shrieked. ‘You’re a bunch of traitors and you’ll swing!’

‘Oh, shut up!’

The brakes squeaked. The train moved in short spurts. Then it accelerated slightly and braked again. It went slower and slower till finally it came to a halt with a long wail. The locomotive blew off steam and drove off to get water and the other things a locomotive needs.

From the noise outside we could tell we were standing on a station. Trampling of boots, shouts, screams. Some people were laughing loudly and defiantly. We noted one person’s laughter in particular. We lay there getting furious at him. Only a Nazi pile of shit could have a laugh like that. No honest beat-up guy would laugh that way.

‘Where are we?’ the engineer Pfc asked.

‘In Russia,’ came the Legionnaire’s laconic answer.

‘I don’t need to be told that, damn you!’

‘Why the hell do you ask then, you fool?’

‘I want to know in what city.’

‘What’s that to you?’

The sliding door was ripped open. An MC noncom fixed us in a dim-witted stare.

‘Heil, comrades,’ he whinnied.

‘Piss me in the eye,’ Tiny yelled aggressively and spat in the direction of the Aesculapian hero.

‘Water,’ a voice moaned from the filthy straw.

‘Have a little patience,’ the NCO answered, ‘and you’ll get water and soup. Is anyone here especially sick?’

‘Are you crazy, of course not – we are as healthy as newborn babes! We’ve come to play soccer with you,’ the infantry color guard remarked dryly.

The NCO took off as fast as his legs could carry him.

An endless time passed. Then a couple of POWs turned up with a militiaman. They lugged along a pail of soup and began to scoop it into our greasy and incredibly filthy mess tins. One scoop for each. The soup was lukewarm.

We drank and became even more hungry. The militiaman promised to bring more, but he didn’t come back. Instead there came a new batch of POWs. Under the supervision of a sergeant they started hauling out corpses. Fourteen corpses. Nine of them were the work of the fighter-bomber. They wanted to take the airman along too, but he managed to convince them he was still alive. The sergeant got peeved and muttered something, but left him behind.

Late in the afternoon a reserve doctor came, accompanied by a couple of MC noncoms. They glanced quickly here and there. To everybody they said the same thing: ‘It’ll be all right, it isn’t really bad.’

After repeating the same formula to the airman, they came up to Tiny. The fun started. Before they had a chance to open their mouths, he flared up: ‘You dirty finks! Look how they’ve messed me up! But that’s not really bad, is it? Just lie down, you quack, and I’ll tear off one of your buttocks. Then you can tell me if it’s bad!’

He grabbed hold of the doctor’s ankle and toppled him over in the stinking straw.

‘Attention! Attention!’ the Legionnaire yelled.

‘Good, old Tiny, that’s the way,’ rejoiced the man with the bleeding arm and flew at the doctor. The rest of us followed suit and in a moment we’d given the doctor a coating of blood. After his two NCOs had managed to extricate him, he looked menacing.

‘Not so bad,’ we sneered in chorus.

‘You’ll pay for this,’ the shocked doctor threatened.

‘If you dare, come on once more,’ Tiny laughed.

The doctor and his two attendants jumped down from the car and slammed the door.

The train didn’t take off again till next morning. But they forgot to bring us breakfast. We cursed.

The airman was still alive the next morning, but someone else had died during the night. Two guys were fighting over his boots. No wonder, they were a fine soft pair of boots. No doubt a pair he’d had custom-made before the war. They were too long by regulations. They were lined with light fur. A sergeant from the railroad artillery got them. He gave his rival, a chasseur NCO, a smack on the jaw that made him forget about the boots for a while.

‘A damn fine pair of boots,’ the sergeant cried jubilantly, holding them up so all of us could enjoy the sight of them. He moistened them with his breath and rubbed them down with his sleeve. ‘Christ, how I’ll march in these!’ he beamed, caressing the good boots.

‘You’d better slip your own on the dead guy,’ someone warned. ‘Otherwise you might run the risk of losing them in a hurry.’

‘What d’you mean by that?’ the sergeant gaped, hiding the boots under the straw. ‘I’d like to see the fellow who dares!’ He resembled a dog guarding his bone.

‘Well, in that case just forget about putting the boots on the dead man and you’ll find out there are some who dare,’ the same man laughed. ‘The head-hunters4 will pull off that fine pair of boots for you and then string you up for looting. For that’s what it is, looting. It’s even been called corpse robbery. You see, I’ve been with the flying drumhead court-martials. I know the score.’

‘Oh, damn it all!’ the sergeant protested. ‘He won’t need those boots any more.’

‘You wont either, brother,’ came soberly from the drumhead man. ‘You have a pair from the Army.’

‘That’s just crap. Those rotten dice boxes aren’t fit to walk in.’

‘Tell that to the head-hunters,’ the other laughed. His face was pale, with bloodless lips and cold eyes. ‘They’ll beat you till you admit in writing you’ve received from Adolf the finest pair of boots in the world.’

The sergeant didn’t say any more. He had come to his senses. Cursing, he slipped the old dice boxes on the dead man.

An hour later the dead man wouldn’t have been able to recognize his outfit. It had been replaced with all sorts of unfamiliar things.

Huhn, the NCO with the abdominal wound, again asked for water. The Legionnaire shoved a lump of ice toward him. He sucked it greedily.

My feet had begun to burn. Pains were shooting through my whole body. It felt as if flames were gnawing my bones. The second stage of frostbite. I knew. First, the pains. Then the pains recede a little, and a bit later your feet start burning and go on burning till they’re numb. This numbness is the sign that it’s all over. Gangrene is in full swing and your feet die. The pains move up. In the hospital a stump will steam under the surgeon’s knife. Terror gripped me. Amputation. God, anything but that! I whispered my fear to the Legionnaire. He glanced at me. ‘Then the war will be over for you. Better the feet than the head.’

Yes, then the war will be over. I tried to console myself, but the chilling terror stuck in my throat. I tried to imagine I’d been lucky with my feet. It would’ve been worse had it been my hands; but terror didn’t loosen its grip on me. I saw myself on crutches. No, I didn’t want to be a ‘pegleg.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ the Legionnaire asked, surprised. Without knowing I had cried out ‘peg-leg.’

I fell asleep. The pains woke me up, but I was happy with my pains. My feet hurt, but there was life in them. I still had my good, wonderful feet.

The train stopped twice. Both times a medic looked at my feet. Each time the same: ‘Not too-bad.’

‘By Mohammed, what’s really bad then?’ the Legionnaire fumed. He pointed at the maimed airman, who had just died. ‘Isn’t that bad either?’

No one bothered to answer him. The emergency auxiliary hospital train continued west.

On arriving at Cracow sixty-two per cent of the wounded were unloaded as cadavers after a twelve-day transport.

In the 3rd Reserve Field Hospital, located in a former Polish theological seminary i