Comrades of War
Authors: Sven Hassel
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
I: Auxiliary Field Hospital Train 877 East
XVII: An Evening Party at the SS
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 GVH
1
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 KV
2
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.