Legion of the Damned by Sven Hassel Read Free Book Online

place on a huge training area called Sennelager. There they had built whole villages, bridges, railway lines, all complete except for the inhabitants, and there we had to fight our way through tangled undergrowth, bogs and rivers, over swaying bridges that were just laid loosely across deep chasms.
    That, perhaps, sounds romantic, like playing red Indians on a large scale; but we lost a man while we played. He fell off one of the unsteady bridges and broke his neck.
    One of the games consisted of digging holes in the ground just deep enough for us to be below the surface when we curled up in them; whereupon heavy tanks came up and drove over the holes while we cowered in them shaking with fear.
    This "thrill" was immediately followed by another. We had to fling ourselves flat on the ground and let the tanks drive over us. We felt the steel bottom of the tank brush our backs, while the heavy caterpillars clattered past to right and left.
    We were to be hardened to tank shock.
    At any rate we were scared, and that is the normal thing. The German soldier is brought up on fear, trained to react like a machine through sheer terror, not to fight bravely because he is fired by a great ideal that makes it seem obvious to sacrifice himself if the need arise. Perhaps you could call this moral inferiority the characteristic feature of the Prussian mentality and the chronic ill of the German people.
    The day after the end of this exercise we took the oath of allegiance. For this the company formed up along three sides of a square into the middle of which a tank drove, and on either side of this a machine gun was placed. As soon as this neat little tableau was arranged the commandant appeared, accompanied by his adjutant and the chaplain, who, to make the occasion more solemn, was got up in all his trappings.
    The commandant then made a speech:
    "Men of the Prussian Army! Your training is now complete. In a short while you will be attached to various field regiments like grenadiers, antitank, fusiliers, scouts or even a home defense unit. But no matter where you are sent, you must do your duty. You are outcasts, but if you show that you are brave and courageous, the day may perhaps come when the great Fuhrer will take you back into favor again. You are now to take the old oath of allegiance, the oath you have once forsworn, but I am sure that from now on, and for the rest of your lives, it will bind you in loyalty to your country. I expect of each one of you that you will never again forget your oath and your duty to our ancient land and our great people, your duty to the Fuhrer and our God."
    Shortly after that we all kneeled, removed our steel helmets and folded our hands over the muzzles of our rifles. It must have looked very moving, just the stuff for a newsreel. The chaplain then spoke a short prayer to the great, almighty and, of course, German God, who would bring the Nazis victory. The idiot did not actually use the word Nazis, but what else could he have meant when he said:
    "Almighty God, our Lord, show us Thy greatness and goodness and grant to German arms victory over our barbarian enemies."
    Their barbarian enemies, mark you, being peoples who had bred men like Ibsen and Nansen, Hans Andersen, Rembrandt and Spinoza, Voltaire and Rene Clair, Tchaikovski and Gorki, Shakespeare and Dickens, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Dreiser, Chopin and Copernicus, Socrates and Homer, and women like Florence Nightingale and Emmeline Pankhurst, Marion Anderson: and Mrs. Roosevelt, Marie and Irene Curie, Catherine II, Joan of Arc, Isak Dinesen, the Bronte sisters, Anna Pavlova.
    After that he blessed the weapons with which we were to exterminate barbary, but I do not think that helped. For a miserable little priest to stand up and make the sign of the cross at a great tank can scarcely be very effective magic even if you believe in magic, which I cannot. At the most you might imagine such a creature bewitching small arms. And, anyway, they lost