Free Legion of the Damned by Sven Hassel

lads, and they were now carrying him to Bazar Street and the young lady he had won from the unlucky baron.
    Then they picked up the sedan chair and bore it swaying on its way, while we stood there shaking our heads and clutching our bottles of schnapps.
    Late that afternoon the four slaves deposited Porta, flute and all, by the wall outside the barracks. We managed to haul him inside and bribed one of the junior doctors to have him admitted to the sick bay, where he slept for two solid days. We packed his evening dress at the bottom of his kit bag, and he carted it round with him from then on.
    Perhaps that sedan chair is still standing by the wall of the barracks outside Bucharest as a sort of peaceful war memorial. If so, the Romanians will certainly look more kindly upon it than on the ruins which were the true memento the German Army left behind it.
    If there had been more Portas and considerably fewer Hauptmann Meiers there is no doubt that we would have conquered the peoples, vanquished the enemy and made him our friend and brother toper. We would have vanquished the enemy, not in bloody battle but in a drinking contest, which is never such a grim business and has the advantage that the means satisfy everyone, while it is also easier to recover from a hangover than from having a leg shot off.
    We did not come to Romania as welcome tourists, far less as fated brothers-in-arms, though the newspapers proclaimed that Germany and Romania were close allies fighting like brothers, shoulder to shoulder, for a great cause. People like Porta and The Old Un, and many others of the galley slaves in the German Army, were more to the Romanians' liking than one might have imagined, but our uniform was not, and it was that which they saw. They only saw that we were allies of the Iron Guard, of the barons, of the anti-Semites, of the dictator General Ion Antonescu, of all the gentry who harried the land with the scourge of underdevelopment. It was, in fact, almost more difficult in the land of our brothers, the Romanians, to fraternize with the people, or certain sections of them, than it was in many of the countries which the German Army had occupied as an enemy. We were brothers-in-arms for whom none could have anything but profound mistrust. It was typical that Porta made his way into the Romanians' hearts via a dissolute baron. The upper classes were the only ones who would have anything to do with us. Of course, we were there to defend their money and civic rights, to defend them not only from the Soviet or Socialism but from the maltreated, dissatisfied Romanian workers and small farmers who needed repressing with a bloody hand. A barefooted, undernourished, coerced and defiant people will not take foreigners to its bosom straight away, however much those at the top may say that they are brothers and fellow countrymen of a kind because both are neo-Europeans. Life in Romania at that time was more or less what I imagine it must be in Spain now, well nigh impossible because of having to mistrust everyone and everything, with murderous inner strife beneath the surface, yet so close to it that you had to be blind not to discover it.
    Unfortunately many German soldiers were both blind and deaf. They did not discover the proper connection between things. They were blinded by Hitler and deafened by Goebbels. They believed all they were told, and therefore could not understand why the Romanians did not receive them as conquering heroes. They did not like it; they were hurt. Others were able to smell the rottenness of everything, but they were too bemused and terrorized from home to dare face up to the problem. They let things take their crooked course and dared not look each other--far less their "brethren-in-arms"--in the face.
    Porta's was a happy expedient; he plundered a baron, had an evening out on the proceeds and then presented the remains of the booty to a trolley conductor. He managed better than we did. We had more or less to