Legion of the Damned by Sven Hassel Read Free Book Online Page B

unteroffizier, bowed low and said, "Honorable Excellency! Your Worshiped Grace, your Captivating Magnificence, Herr Unteroffizier Beier, I beg to report . .
    I looked in bewilderment from one to the other, quite unable to see what was so superbly funny. When they had recovered from the paroxysm the unteroffizier asked me where I had come from. I told them, and they looked at me sympathetically.
    "Off with your wooden legs," said the redhead. "Penal battalion in Hanover. Now we understand why you behave as you do. We thought you were trying to make fools of us when you clashed your heels together like that; but I suppose it's a God's miracle you still have them to clash. Well, here you are!"
    With those words I was received into No. 1 Section, and an hour later we were rolling along toward Freiburg, where we were to be formed into a fighting unit and sent to one place or another in crazy Europe for special training. As we rattled along, my four companions introduced themselves, and it was with these four that I went through the war.
    Willie Beier was ten years older than the rest of us, and because of that he was called The Old Un. He was married and had two children. By trade he was a joiner, and his home was in Berlin. His politics had earned him eighteen months in a concentration camp, after which he had been "pardoned" and sent to a penal battalion. The Old Un smiled quietly to himself:
    "And here I will certainly remain till, one fine day, I run too fast into a bullet."
    The Old Un was a stout companion. He was always calm and quiet. Never once during those four frightful years that we spent together did I see him nervous or afraid. He was one of those strange beings who radiate calm, the calm that the rest of us so badly needed in a tight corner. He was almost like a father to us, although there was only ten years' difference in our ages, and many was the time I rejoiced at my good fortune in being put in The Old Un's tank.
    Obergefreiter Joseph Porta was one of those incorrigible wags who can never be bested. He did not care a fig about the war, and I believe that both God and the devil were slightly afraid of haying anything to do with him in case they made fools of themselves. At any rate, he was feared by all the officers in the company, whom he could put off their stride, sometimes for good and all, just by looking innocently at them.
    He never omitted to tell all whom he came across that he was a Red. He had been a year in Oranienburg and Moabit charged with Communist activities. What had happened was that in 1932 he had helped some friends to hang a couple of Social-Democrat flags on the tower of Michaelis Church. He was caught by the police and given fourteen days, after which the matter was forgotten until, in 1938, he was suddenly arrested by the Gestapo, who made great efforts to persuade him that he knew the mysterious hiding place of the fat but ever invisible Wollweber, leader of the Communists. Having starved and bullied him for a couple of months, he was hauled before a court and accused of Communist activities. A huge enlargement of a photograph was placed before the judges, on which you could see Porta complete with enormous flag on his way to Michaelis Church. Twelve years' hard labor for Communist activities and profanation of God's house. Shortly before the war broke out, like so many other prisoners, he was pardoned in the usual way, by being flung into a penal battalion. It's the same with soldiers as with money--it does not matter where it comes from.
    Porta was a Berliner and had all the, Berliner's raffish humor, ready tongue and fantastic cheek. He only had to open his mouth to make all round him collapse with laughter, especially when he gave his voice an affected drawl and assumed so arrogant and insolent a manner as you would otherwise only encounter in the valet of a German count.
    Porta was also highly musical and the possessor of a real, natural talent. He played equally bewitchingly on