Comrades of War Read online

  Born in 1917 in Fredensborg, Denmark, Sven Hassel joined the merchant navy at the age of 14. He did his compulsory year’s military service in the Danish forces in 1936 and then, facing unemployment, joined the German army. He served throughout World War II on all fronts except North Africa. Wounded eight times, he ended the war in a Russian prison camp. He wrote LEGION OF THE DAMNED while being transferred between American, British and Danish prisons before making a new life for himself in Spain. His world war books have sold over 53 million copies worldwide.

  They were not so much people, as animals. Sometimes small and frightened, huddling together in cattle cars, wounds gaping, tongues swelling even as they licked the moist frost from the walls – each of them wondering if he would be the next to die before reaching the crude operating table . . .

  And sometimes brawling, robbing and raping as they swept into Hamburg to glut themselves on life for one more day, or just one more night . . .

  And sometimes they were heroes, pushing their way through the Russian lines – the Legionnaire, Sven and Tiny, all of them knowing they had lost the war . . . and every last shred of their own humanity.

  By Sven Hassel

  Legion of the Damned

  Wheels of Terror

  Comrades of War

  March Battalion

  Assignment Gestapo

  Monte Cassino

  Liquidate Paris

  SS General

  Reign of Hell

  Blitzfreeze

  The Bloody Road to Death

  Court Martial

  OGPU Prison

  The Commissar

  Translated from the Danish by

  Sverre Lyngstad

  The slightest pain in your little finger

  causes you more uneasiness and anxiety than

  the destruction and death of millions of people.

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO ALL

  COMMON SOLDIERS BORN IN THE

  YEAR 1917, WHO SUFFERED THE

  MOST DURING THE LAST GREAT WAR.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Dedication

  About the Author

  By Sven Hassel

  I: Auxiliary Field Hospital Train 877 East

  II: Death’s Depot

  III: Dictator Tiny

  IV: Aunt Dora

  V: The Jew

  VI: Revenge

  VII: Tiny Gets Engaged

  VIII: Wind Force 11

  IX: Bombs in the Night

  X: The Sex Killer

  XI: The Leave Train

  XII: The Roller Conveyor

  XIII: Back at the Front

  XIV: Behind Enemy Lines

  XV: The Partisans

  XVI: The Reunion

  XVII: An Evening Party at the SS

  XVIII: A Casual Affair

  Copyright

  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.

  I

  Auxiliary Field Hospital

  Train 877 East

  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 wit
h 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 onearmed 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.’