Read The Commissar for Free Online Page A

think of anythin’ better’n boiled rice with tiny ’errings.’
    ‘I can give you the address of a good eating-house in Pekin,’ grins Porta, putting on speed.
    The armoured division rolls relentlessly on, pushing deeply into the Ukraine. Many fall, more are mutilated. The landscape is grim. The grey coldness of a Russian winter is approaching. Tanks rattle and roar through sooty-black villages, plough past huge piles of coal. We do not see a single tree. Vegetation, grass, all green things are gone. Not the least trace, even, of the much vaunted sunflower fields is left. The wild madness of war has eaten up everything in its path. Omnivorously.
    The company halts for an hour before a middle-sized provincial town. We have never heard the name of it before. A Russian armoured division has taken it over and turned the town into a hedgehog defensive position. Then our Stukas come roaring out of the grey, snow-filled clouds with sirens howling relentlessly’. Heavy bombs whirl down through the air. One swarm of dive-bombers follows the other. The town disappears from the face of the earth –
ausradiert
as they say in the propaganda programmes.
    Then the tanks pass over what is left of it, killing everything left alive and crushing the dead to pulp under their tracks.
    When we reach the next town the Stukas have already visited it, and prepared it for the taking. The dust of pulverized bricks and mortar hangs like a red-grey cloud in the air. Artillery and Cossack horses lie in the shattered streets, stiff-legged and with swollen bodies. Guns lying on their side, wrecked lorries and mountains of tangled equipment, are scattered amongst heaps of bodies. Dead and wounded Russian soldiers lie against walls, or hang from gaping window openings.
    Dispassionately we stare at the bloody scene. It has become an everyday sight. In the beginning we puked and felt sick to our stomachs. It is a long time since any of us puked.
    ‘That’s the way to take a town,’ shouts Julius Heide, enthusiastically. He leans triumphantly out of the forward hatch. With a jeering smile he stares at a Russian soldier sitting up against a wall and looking blankly at his crushed legs.
    ‘You’re wearin’ the wrong uniform,’ says Porta. ‘You talk like those puffed-up arseholes in the shit-brown uniforms, an’ the yellow leather equipment to hold their fat guts in. You’re a shit of shits, you are, Julius! You’re blinded by your crazy belief in the Führer. I really think you’d be glad if one of the shit-brown sods knocked on your mother’s door one day an’ screamed: “Heil Hitler, Frau Heide! Your son,Unteroffizier Julius Heide, has fallen for the Führer and Greater Germany! We feel for you in your proud sorrow, Frau Heide! The Führer thanks you!’”
    ‘Old Man, you are my witness,’ explodes Heide, in a rage. ‘This is an insult. I will not stand for it!’
    ‘Sit down then,’ says the Old Man, indifferently. ‘There’s a lot of things
I
won’t stand for. Come on,
Panzer Marsch!
And keep your traps shut, too! I can’t stand the sound of your voices. And you, Porta, stop insulting Adolf!’
    The night is dark. Snow and rain fall at the same time. It is cold on the way to Nikolajev.
    We stop in the middle of a huge factory. It is Porta, of course, who discovers it to be a vodka distillery. Half an hour later we are stoned out of our minds. We reel around, falling over one another, pour vodka over our own heads and lick it into our mouths like cats lapping up cream. We dip our bread in vodka, and become more drunk than ever.
    A Feldwebel dies of alcohol shock. A Gefreiter sets fire to himself, to convince a friend that vodka can be ignited just as easily as petrol. We try to put it out by throwing more vodka on him, and laugh foolishly at his screams of pain.
    Some of 3 Section come along, dragging four women with them. They throw them across a packing table.
    An infantry Feldwebel threatens them with a court-martial. Even in