Reign of Hell (4 page)

We swung into camp like a crack Prussian regiment rather than the rough vagabond mob that we were. There was always an unpleasant possibility, with Colonel von Gernstein, that he would sneak back unexpectedly twenty-four hours before he was due and start poking and prying and generally pushing his nose in where it was least wanted. For all we knew, he could be spying on us at that very moment with his field-glasses. He had done it before, and we had learned through harsh experience that he had an eagle eye for spotting even the smallest disciplinary shortcoming.

We came to a halt outside First Company block and the new recruits were left to freeze in the open air and the lashing rain for a further two hours. At that point Staff-Sergeant Hofmann decided to wander out and take a look at them.

Hofmann wore the black uniform of the tank corps, though to our knowledge had never set foot in a tank in his life. His bible. was the Staff Sergeants’ Manual, which he
carried with him everywhere. He was so attached to it that to have removed it from him would have been tantamount to putting a bullet through the man’s heart. He now moved slowly down the straggling column of volunteers, taking his time, subjecting each man to a long, penetrating stare. As he reached the last of the line, he sorrowfully shook his head with the air of one who has the cares of the entire world upon his shoulders.

‘Monkeys!’ he said, witheringly. ‘They send me a load of gibbering monkeys and expect me to make men out of them!’

He trod heavily up the steps and planted himself at the top of the flight, legs apart and flanked on either side by a respectful minion. He looked down, kinglike, upon his miserable band of victims.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right, I’ve been lumbered with you, so that’s my hard luck. It’s enough to make a cat puke, but I’m not complaining – and neither are you, if you know what’s good for you. Open your mouths too wide and it could start growing very unhealthy round here. Very unhealthy.’ He swayed slightly forward and tried a balancing act on the balls of his feet. He had seen the Colonel do it many times, but it turned out to be not quite as easy as it looked. He rocked back heavily on to his heels and jarred his spine. ‘From now on,’ he bellowed, ‘you’ve only got one guardian angel round here, and that’s me . . . Your lives are in my hands, and don’t you ever forget it. If I decide you’re not worth the air you’re breathing, then that’s that. That’s your lot. You’ve had it. OK?’ He placed his hands on his hips. ‘You with me?’

His flock bleated in chorus, nodding their weary heads in acknowledgment of his absolute power. What else, poor sheep, could they do? Many of them had been soldiers before – some among them had even been generals – and not even in their most hideous dreams could they have imagined a reception such as this. The nine-nine-nine battalion was notorious, but never before had a reality turned out to be so much more ghastly than the anticipation. It
must have seemed to them at that moment that this, after all, was the meaning of the phrase, a fate worse than death.

Hofmann swept on with his speech of welcome.

‘As from today, Company 15 will be attached to the Seventh Tank Regiment – and all I can say is, God help the lot of us. It makes me sick to my stomach, it gives me a pain right down in the guts to think that the German Army is going to be contaminated by vermin like you lot.’ He shifted his position and glared down at them scornfully. ‘I’m not complaining,’ he said. ‘I’m just letting you know how I feel. I shouldn’t like there to be any misunderstanding in the future.’

Gratefully, they mouthed their thanks for this act of generosity.

‘Here in Sennelager,’ Hofmann went on, ‘it doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past, it doesn’t matter who you were or what you were, a bleeding general or a bleeding road-sweeper. From this moment on you’re all equal. You’re all scum. You’re all grovelling in the same patch of mud together, and you can consider yourselves lucky that the Führer’s a damn sight more soft-hearted than I am, ’cos if I had my way you’d go straight off to the slaughterhouse where you belong.’ He glanced down at a sheet of paper he was holding. ‘I see we have two generals among us – two generals, one colonel and a couple of cavalry captains. That’s nice. That’s really nice. I like a bit of quality. It raises the tone of the establishment. It makes me feel good when I see a general down on his hands and knees cleaning out the shithouse. It makes me feel really gratified. It—’

Hofmann suddenly broke off in mid-sentence. From the corner of his eye he had caught sight of Sergeant Wolf leaning against a lamp-post, with his dogs, listening to his discourse. Wolf had an ironical smile on his face. Even the dogs seemed to be grinning. Hofmann’s cheeks began to mottle. Wolf was one of his biggest bugbears. He could never quite decide which one he hated most, Porta or Wolf. Generally it was Porta, but at this moment it was Sergeant Wolf. He turned to him irritably.

‘What are you lounging about for? Can’t you find anything better to do with your time?’

Wolf’s smile broadened into a grin. One of the dogs began to slowly thump its tail.

‘I’m just enjoying myself,’ said Wolf. ‘I always appreciate a good comedy show.’ He prised himself apart from the lamp-post. ‘Who writes your scripts?’ he inquired. ‘They’d pay you good money for them in civvy street. Have ’em laughing till the tears ran down their legs.’

Hofmann’s face swelled up like an overripe tomato. To humiliate a Prussian sergeant before a group of reprieved criminals! What on earth was the war coming to?

‘Sergeant Wolf,’ he said, with as much dignity as he was still able to muster. ‘I shall make it my business to report those remarks. You have gone out of your way deliberately to insult the honour of a non-commissioned officer.’

‘Honour?’ said Wolf. ‘What honour?’ He shook his head. ‘Forget it, chum, you don’t have a leg to stand on. Remember what Ludendorff said? Honour doesn’t exist below the rank of lieutenant . . . so stick that up your backside and chew it over!’

He wandered amiably away, with his two hounds ambling at his heels. Hofmann turned angrily back to his flock. He surveyed them through slatted lids, searching their faces for the least sign of a grin or a smirk, but they stared back at him with bleak, blank-eyed devotion. Their guardian angel. Their lives were in his hands. They could not afford to be amused.

‘Right,’ said Hofmann. ‘All right. That brings me to my next point. Chalked up on a slate in my office there’s a list of rules and regulations. Do’s and don’ts. Mostly don’ts. Learn them by heart. Your life depends on them. I got eyes in the back of my head and I got eyes in the cheeks of my arse. Nothing goes on round here what I don’t know about. Anyone tries stepping out of line and he’s a dead man. Do I make myself clear?’

The choir hastened to assure him that he did, and Hofmann seemed satisfied at last that he had sufficiently bent them to his will. He dismissed them contemptuously and
they stumbled inside, out of the rain, and collapsed in sodden heaps of boneless flesh on to their mattresses. There they stayed, unfed, unwashed, in their soaking clothes until morning.

Life at Sennelager, if it could properly be called life, began at four a.m. with jackboots crashing down the corridors. Piercing whistles and raucous shouts completed the awakening of anyone who could manage to sleep through the sound of endless doors being kicked open. A German NCO never approaches a door in the usual way. He never turns a handle and walks into a room as any normal, sane person might do. To him, a door represents an irresistible challenge. It is kicked, it is battered, it is assaulted with venom. That is what a door is there for. The greatest ambition of every NCO worth his salt is to kick a door right off its hinges at one blow. As Porta always used to say, ‘In the eyes of God and the Prussian Army, nothing is impossible’ . . .

At four o’clock in the morning, therefore, Sennelager’s very foundations trembled and shook beneath the onslaught. Not even Porta could train himself to sleep through it. Soldiers everywhere were hurled to the floor, and barely five minutes later every bed was a model of perfection. Such was the discipline of the place.

In the officers’ quarters, the Colonel could be seen each morning doing his exercises to the strains of military music. He had a regular set of rigorous movements which were followed with Prussian precision day after day. He always ended up with a ride on the mechanical horse accompanied by the ‘March of the 18th Hussars.’

For us, the common riff-raff fighting for existence in the overcrowded barrack rooms, it was a somewhat different picture. Splayed feet attached to skeletal legs wavered across the stone floor in search of a square inch of standing space at the washbasins. Bare toes were crushed underfoot. Men jostled and swore, and NCOs strode about in their midst adding to the confusion.

Everything was always in confusion. Too many men trying to be in too many places at exactly the same time, and
everything done at the double. I think I scarcely ever saw anyone walk anywhere at Sennelager. Wherever you went, you went at the trot. After a while, it became instinctive. It was a race for survival, and the slowest went to the wall.

‘Get a move on, there! Pick those bloody feet up! What do you think this is, Spastic bloody Sunday?’

It went on all the time. It got to be so ingrained in a man that after a while he’d find he was even disciplining himself in the same way as he went about his business:

‘Get a move on, there! Pick those bloody feet up! What do you think this is, Spastic bloody Sunday?’

One of the worst of the NCOs at Sennelager was Helmuth, the Fifth Company cook. He was one of the world’s natural bullies and arsehole creepers. What trash the Gestapo recruited for their stool pigeons. It was Helmuth who quite gratuitously threw a can of boiling coffee over Fischer, one of the mildest, softest-spoken and best-intentioned men ever to arrive in 999 battalion. It was probably this very mildness that provoked the attack. I’ve noticed before that people of Helmuth’s ilk can’t stand the meek and the humble. Poor Fischer. He’d been a minister before coming to the hell at Sennelager. He had innocently imagined that being a servant of God would afford him some kind of divine protection, and he had stood up in the pulpit and denounced Adolf Hitler and the Nazi régime to a congregation which had discreetly vanished before the end of the sermon. That same night, the bogey-men in their leather coats had come and taken him away. Parson Fischer had then commenced upon a series of experiences for which none of his bible reading could possibly have prepared him. It had begun at Bielefeldt and it had continued at Dachau, in the special torture wing reserved for men of God. The worst of it all had been when they arrested his wife and three children and held them as hostages. Dachau had been nothing compared to that.

Now they had sent him to Sennelager and men like Helmuth were pouring boiling coffee over his fingers for the sheer joy of hearing him scream. Fischer, not unnaturally, jerked his scalded hands away, dropping his tin mug as he
did so. A torrent of liquid cascaded on to the brightly shining boots of Sergeant Helmuth. Poor Fischer. With a little more experience he would have stood his ground and let himself be scalded to the very bone, if necessary. It would have been worth it, for the days of blessed peace and quiet it would have earned him in the infirmary. But Fischer was green. He had not yet learnt how to control his reflexes. He acted exactly as Helmuth had predicted. In the startled silence which followed, Helmuth picked up one of his big iron coffee pots and brought it crashing down on Fischer’s head. We stood and watched, and none of us said a word. It was typical Sennelager behaviour. Hold your tongue at all times. There was nothing to be gained by speaking out. We might have hated Helmuth, but who after all was Parson Fischer? Merely one new arrival among three hundred others. No one was going to risk his life for an unknown preacher.

Helmuth banged down the coffee pot. He came out from behind his table and indicated his spattered footwear.

‘Come on, parson! Down on your knees and do a bit of praying! Lick my boots with your holy tongue and let’s have a bit of real humility for a change . . .’

Fischer sank slowly to the ground, and I found it difficult to imagine how he was ever going to get up again. He was an old man of sixty, broken and bent by the treatment meted out to him at Bielefeldt and Dachau, and his will to live must have been strong indeed to have carried him this far. He craned his skinny neck forward. It looked like a length of perished hosepipe. Slowly and painfully, his tongue approached the toe of Helmuth’s right boot. It was a spectacle we had witnessed so many times before that we had ceased to find it degrading. We had all been put through it at some stage or another in our Army careers. You soon learned how to swallow your disgust. You had to if you wanted to survive. But it was always difficult, the first time. I hadn’t found it too easy myself, as a raw recruit in the 7th Uhlans, ordered to lick a horse’s hooves every morning for a week. It wasn’t surprising that Fischer was making such heavy weather of it. He wasn’t helped any by a kick in the teeth from Helmuth.
He fell backwards, spitting out blood and pieces of bone, and as he did so Helmuth brought the heavy coffee pot crashing down again on his skull. That was the end of the fun for that morning. Helmuth had overdone things as usual, and yet another victim was carted off unconscious to the infirmary to live or die as the doctors saw fit. Die, in all probability. An old man like that wasn’t much use to anyone. ‘Fell down a flight of stone steps due to under-nourishment in previous place of detention’ . . . By the time the report reached the previous place of detention, and by the time they had self-righteously denied the charge and the papers had been rubber-stamped and copied in duplicate and triplicate and finally mislaid in the bowels of some conveniently far-flung cabinet, the victim would have been dead and dumped so long ago that no one would have been able to remember what he looked like.