Read The Commissar for Free Online Page B

the madness of war there has to be some order and discipline. The punishment for rape is hanging. This is the case in every reasonably civilized army. Nobody listens to him. He is pushed to one side, and drunken soldiers threaten to cut his throat.
    ‘Pricks at the ready!’ orders an Obergefreiter with a bloodstained bandage round his head. He throws himself lustfully on top of a half-naked screaming woman, old enough to be his great-grandmother. ‘
Cunt
!’ he roars, and collapses, helplessly drunk, between her thrashing legs. Others pull him away from her and fight to take his place.
    We wake up next morning depressed, and with the most horrible, hangovers. Soon the military police arrive withtheir shiny helmets, and the crescent emblem dangling on their chests.
    The court-martial is over in four and a half minutes. Eight soldiers dangle, each at the end of his rope. The whole battalion is paraded to see the show. The dead men hang there, with strangely elongated necks, wearing only their uniform trousers. Greatcoats and boots have been taken from them. There is a shortage of such things. They hang there still, turning and swinging on the end of their ropes, as we rattle past, mud churning up from our clattering tracks, on the way to Nikolajev.
    ‘
C’est la guerre
! Come death, come sweet death,’ hums the Legionnaire, sardonically, from the turret of his vehicle.
    ‘A dear fuck that was,’ sighs Porta. ‘Better to pay for it in coin of the realm, if they won’t do it for love.’
    ‘There’s more’n you’d think get it for takin’ cunt what ain’t theirs,’ growls Tiny, looking thoughtfully at the hanged men.
    Raindrops spatter on the armoured sides of the tanks. It is a cold and miserable day. The air reeks with death, and stinks of wet clothing and leather. The clouds are dirty grey. They seem to be rushing towards the west, away from the melancholy Russian day. It is no longer really day. More a kind of twilight.
    The little Colonel-general is standing on a thrown-up mound of earth, observing his 4th Tank Army. As usual he is wearing his battered silk field-cap, with its short peak pulled well down on his forehead. Beneath it his eagle nose juts out like a beak from the middle of his narrow skull of a face. His boots seem unbelievably long on his short legs. He stands, stiff as a statue, with his map-case under his arm. A hugh pair of binoculars dangle from his neck, partly covering the red tabs on his cloak. To look at this tiny man, with the oversized binoculars and the almost comically high-topped riding boots, you would never dream that he is the greatest tank general who has ever lived.
    The Old Man gives the Army Commander a regimental eyes right.
    ‘If only the neighbours’d send a 150 mm down on his napper,’ Porta wishes, with an abrupt laugh, ‘an’ send him up to give the angels a big smackin’ kiss on the arse.’
    ‘We’d only get another of the same sort,’ says the Old Man, tiredly, ‘
and
most likely one worse’n little short-arse there!’
    ‘He’s standing right on top of a busted shithouse,’ laughs Gregor Martin, who is now back with us. He is turret-gunner on Barcelona’s Puma.
    ‘Wish ’e’d drop down through the top an’ fall into it,’ growls Tiny, ‘so ’im an’ ’is fancy silk cap’d get drowned together in Russian shit.’
    Barcelona both salutes and gives the eyes right at the same time. The sight of the Army Commander has made him nervous.
    Colonel-general Hoth lifts his hand an inch or two.
    ‘Who’s that fool?’ he asks his Adjutant, who is standing to attention at his elbow as usual.
    ‘I will find out, sir,’ barks the Adjutant, smartly.
    ‘Don’t you know your men?’ asks the General, irritably. ‘My Adjutant ought to know every man in my army.’
    ‘Mad bastard,’ thinks the Adjutant. ‘There’s 80,000 men in 4th
Panzer
. I don’t know every silly sod on the staff, even.’ He is, however, an old hand. He barks out the first name