Reign of Hell (6 page)

Whenever you saw him in the blurred grey light of early morning, limping across the courtyard with his flask of kummel in his hand, you could be sure that an execution had been arranged. He used always to snatch a few minutes’ extra drinking time at a point mid-way between the ammunition stores and the officers’ mess, where he was safely out of sight of von Gernstein and his prying binoculars. He would sit down on a low wall, rest his chin on the hilt of his sabre, and stare into space thinking God knows what uncomfortable thoughts before pushing his flask back into his pocket and hobbling on his way with his artificial leg creaking with every step. When he arrived at the camp prison he was inevitably offered a large glass of beer; which just as inevitably he accepted. Some time later he would
appear with the firing squad and make for the courtyard where the executions took place.

Once an execution was over, he obliterated all traces of the victims from his memory. There was a story told in the camp, and we all believed it, of how the Adjutant had asked him one night in the officers’ mess ‘what sort of show the General had put up?’

‘General?’ said Schramm, looking bewildered. ‘What general?’

‘The one you shot this morning, old boy,’ said the Adjutant. ‘Major-General von Steinklotz.’

‘Von Steinklotz?’ said Schramm. ‘I shot Major-General von Steinklotz?’

He plainly thought he must be suffering from drunken delusions. Amid roars of delighted laughter, he finished off his kummel, staggered out of the mess and fell flat on his face. He was taken home to his wife by a couple of sympathetic lance-corporals, who undressed him and put him to bed without his ever knowing a thing about it.

On two occasions at least he attempted suicide. The first time he hanged himself from the rafters of the attic in his home, but his wife discovered him and cut him down. The second time he took an overdose of drugs, but was flushed out with a stomach pump and sent back on duty. Now and again, in his more lucid moments, he would sit down in the officers’ mess and play the piano. He was an excellent pianist, but rarely sober enough to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time.

Colonel von Gernstein had also lost a leg on active service. He lost two, as a matter of fact, but it was difficult to notice. One thought at first that he was just a bit ungainly in his manner of walking. He had a stiff neck, as well, and was unable to turn his head without also turning the rest of his body. His spine was supported in a steel jacket. His mouth was a thin mauve line, lipless and puckered. He’d left half his face behind at Smolensk, in a battle between German Tigers and Russian T34s. Von Gernstein had been the only survivor to crawl out of the hatch of a burning tank. But he had paid
dearly for the privilege. His right eye was fixed for ever in a sightless glassy stare, and one of his hands was a withered talon. And yet it was impossible to feel sympathy for the man. His character repelled you, and after five years of war we had seen far too many obscenities inflicted on the human body to be easily moved to pity.

According to his batman, von Gernstein used to sit up till four o’clock in the morning playing poker with Death and the Devil. He swore that one night he caught a glimpse of them, Death was dressed all in black from head to foot with the cross of the Hohenzollerns round his neck and the Devil in the uniform of an SS Obergruppenführer. A fanciful tale, but some of the more credulous among us actually believed it to be the truth. Many were the rumours of von Gernstein communing with the Devil, von Gernstein holding black masses, von Gernstein resurrecting the dead . . . It was certain, however, that there was some mystery about the man. The light burned in his quarters throughout the night, and always at his private door were parked two big black Mercedes, which arrived every night, punctually at midnight and left again at dawn.

Porta and I one bold, fine day, stoned half out of our senses, risked our lives taking a look inside the Colonel’s quarters. For once even Porta was deprived of speech. It was like coming across Aladdin’s cave in the middle of the Sahara Desert. There were thick pile carpets and Persian rugs all over the floor; Old Master paintings hanging nonchalantly on the walls; rich velvet curtains at the windows and a glittering chandelier winking at us from the middle of the ceiling . . . It scarcely seemed possible that such splendours could exist within the squalor of Sennelager.

One night, I remember, I was on guard duty with Gregor Martin and Tiny. We were standing near the garages and we were watching the thousand flickering lights of the chandelier in the Colonel’s apartment. Quite suddenly, Gregor yelped like a startled dog and dropped his rifle. I jumped backwards with a muffled squawk of terror, and Tiny turned tail and went galloping off with a shout into the night. For
there, in profile at the window, there before our staring eyes, was the dread figure of Satan himself . . .

We stood transfixed, Gregor and I. Even when the figure slid out of sight we were unable to take our eyes off the window. Gregor sagged at the knees and clawed about the ground for his rifle, his head tilted back at an angle and his gaze rigid. Tiny, back at the guardhouse, had obviously made his point with some force, for it was only a matter of seconds before Sergeant Linge appeared on the scene demanding to know what all the panic was about. Gregor straightened his sagging knees and extended a tremulous hand towards the window. He opened his mouth and made a croaking sound like a toad with a fishbone stuck in its throat.

‘It was the Devil—’

‘The Devil—’

‘In uniform—’

‘Uniform—’

‘
Uniform?
’ Linge looked from one to the other of us. ‘What the hell kind of uniform?’

‘SS,’ moaned Gregor.

‘Obergruppenführer,’ I added, feeling it was about time that I made some kind of original contribution to the proceedings.

Linge looked exasperated.

‘For Chrissakes,’ he said. ‘All SS Obergruppenführers look like the Devil. Tell me something new!’

‘This one had horns,’ said Gregor, on a note of sudden and desperate inspiration. ‘Bloody great filthy horns . . . two of ’em, sticking out of his forehead . . . And what’s more,’ he added, with a touch of defiance, ‘he was drinking smoke.’

‘Drinking
smoke
?’ said Linge.

‘Sulphur,’ I said. ‘Sulphur and brimstone, that’s what it was.’

By this time, the area around the garages was swarming with soldiers coming to our support. Linge clicked his tongue impatiently against his teeth.

‘Hogwash,’ he said, sharply. ‘Balls and bloody hogwash. I never heard such a load of flaming nonsense in all my flaming—’

‘Look!’ said Gregor. ‘There it is again!’

The figure passed across the window and disappeared. Gregor turned and ran, and I wouldn’t swear to it, but I rather think Linge followed him. At all events, when I came to my senses I found I was alone. The whole area was silent. Still as the grave, and twice as sinister. Only the pinpoints of light still flickered and winked in von Gernstein’s apartment, and somewhere on the other side of the windows stalked Satan himself in devilish profile . . .

Twice on my panic-stricken dash across the open courtyard my helmet tumbled off my head and went clattering on to the flagstones, and twice I had to crawl trembling on hands and knees in search of it before I eventually reached the shelter of the guardroom and flung myself, gibbering, through the door. Linge was there, with a face like a bowlful of tripe. He was muttering to himself in a sort of manic frenzy, and he clawed at me as I ran past him.

‘Mum’s the word!’ he said. ‘Don’t tell a soul! You haven’t been near the place all night! Remember that: you haven’t been near the place!’

‘Oh sure,’ I said, sourly. ‘Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me there wasn’t any Devil—’

‘Fuck the Devil! You haven’t been near the place!’

In a sudden frenzy, Linge kicked out at a tin helmet lying on the floor. It sailed up into the air and flew gracefully out the window, which happened to have been closed at the time. There was a shower of broken glass, a dull thud and a yell of angry pain.

‘Someone’s copped it,’ I said.

Tiny crossed the room and peered out through the broken window, with its one jagged pain of glass sticking up like a broken tooth. He turned with morbid satisfaction towards Linge.

‘Lieutenant Dorn,’ he said, simply. ‘He stopped it in the chest.’

The Lieutenant burst into the guardhouse as if a dozen T34s were snapping at his heels. He stared round, wildly.

‘Who threw that helmet? Answer my question!
Who threw that helmet?
’

Sergeant Linge performed a sideways shuffle round the perimeter of the guardhouse and gave a nervous guilty grin.

‘What the devil are you sniggering at?’ barked the Lieutenant. ‘Are you out of your senses? Are you a homicidal maniac? Do you realise you could face the firing squad for assaulting an officer?’

‘Sir, I didn’t throw it at you, sir,’ said Linge, with extreme and unctuous earnestness. ‘It slipped out of my fingers, sir. I happened to be standing near the window at the time, and it slipped out of my fingers. It was gone before I could stop it. I put out my hand to catch it, but it went before I had a chance.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sergeant, stop babbling like a bloody cretin!’ The Lieutenant took an impatient step forward, and it seemed suddenly to strike him that the guardroom was curiously overcrowded for that time of night. ‘What’s going on here? What are all these men doing in here?’ He looked suspiciously round the circle of anxious faces, and instantly put his finger on the weakest link in the chain: Private Ness, who was universally acknowledged as a certified moron. Dorn strode up to him, snapping his fingers at him as if he were a dog. ‘Come along, man! Out with it! Don’t stand there dribbling!’

Private Ness gave him a look of vacant despair. Across the far side of the room, behind the Lieutenant’s back, Sergeant Linge was busy informing him in hideous dumb show that his throat would be slit open if he dared say a word. Ness’s lower lip began slowly to fall apart from its moorings.

‘Well?’ snapped the Lieutenant. ‘Do you intend to answer my question or do you want to face the firing squad along with Sergeant Linge?’

Ness sprang quivering to attention. His eyes swivelled piteously from the Lieutenant to the Sergeant. His big baggy cheeks were shaking with fright.

‘They seen the Devil,’ he said. ‘They seen the Devil, sir.’

Well, that was it, of course. As soon as Ness had opened his great gaggy mouth, the rest of the bunch were only too anxious to pipe up and start filling in the details. Give Linge his due. He had sense enough to know that it was a matter best kept to ourselves. He and I and Tiny stood in tight-lipped disgust as the cretins poured out their own varied and garbled versions of the tale. Gregor had wisely disappeared, God knows where. Ness was by now babbling louder than any of them, and the Lieutenant was thrashing about with his hands and trying to shout over the hubbub.

‘For God’s sake, shut up! Shut up, I say! I want a proper military report, not a bloody horror story!’

He got his proper military report: at precisely 0105 hours the Devil had been seen to walk in the Colonel’s rooms. Every man present had witnessed it, and several were prepared to swear to the existence of horns, brimstone, forked tail, etc. One man in his zeal even added the embellishment of cloven hoofs, but this was angrily dismissed on the grounds that it could not have been possible to see them unless he was walking on his hands with his feet in the air.

Lieutenant Dorn perched himself gingerly on the edge of the table and sat for a while without speaking. I could understand his predicament. He himself could scarcely have been in ignorance of the rumours that ran round the camp; and even if he might not believe in horror stories, it was nevertheless pretty obvious that there was something untoward going on. No smoke without fire and so forth, and who was it who came a-visiting every night on the stroke of twelve in two big black Mercedes limousines? On the other hand, we could all picture the Colonel’s wrath when a report came in that the night guard had been discovered gathered together in the guardhouse babbling about the Devil. And we all knew who would be in command of the very next company to be despatched to the front: the officer who was responsible for making the report. Lieutenant Dorn . . .

I glanced sympathetically at him, and he raised a palsied, grey face in my direction. It was his duty to report the
incident, no doubt about it. I was only glad that I was in my own shabby, ill-fitting boots and not his.

‘All right,’ he said, at last. He rose heavily to his feet. ‘Let’s get matters straight. Who was it who first claimed to have seen this mythical creature in the Colonel’s rooms?’

‘Corporal Creutzfeldt, sir, and Private Hassel,’ said Sergeant Linge, as quick as they come.

He would pay dearly for that accident with the helmet, and I daresay he was only too eager to drag someone else down into the mire while he was about it.

The Lieutenant walked across to Tiny and stood thoughtfully regarding him for a moment.

‘Corporal Creutzfeldt,’ he said. ‘Did you by any chance have anything to drink before going on duty tonight?’

‘Certainly, sir.’ Tiny assumed an expression of imbecilic wisdom and counted up on his fingers. ‘Four bocks and a couple of glasses of kummel.’

‘A couple, Corporal Creutzfeldt?’