Free Legion of the Damned by Sven Hassel Page A

content ourselves with visual pleasures, with scenic beauties, the unending melancholy of the puszta ; the flatness and extensive fertility of the Romanian wheatlands; the Picturesque realm of the mountains; the station communities asleep at noon but lively in the evening; the flocks of sheep with solitary Shepherds walking along in white, coarse coats and sheepskin caps, with a leathern bottle on a string strung across their shoulders, and all the time in the world; groups of thin adults and large-eyed, rickety children. And Bucharest, the white, splendid city with its magnificent residential quarters, expensive motorcars, arrogant rich and murmuring, miserably ragged poor; inquisitive peasants in colorful national costume.
    The life of the people was just for us to look at, not to take part in, unless you were a Godforsaken gallows bird like Porta. Only occasionally did one or other of us succeed by the use of slight shades of tone in voice and behavior in awakening a certain amount of tacit sympathy--it never found expression in words-- with those in whose country we found ourselves under the most difficult of all circumstances--that of being unwelcome friends. Nor could we have been anything else, for it was the old story: we had entered the country on the pretext of coming to fight a common foe. In reality we were a necessary addition to the country's police force. On the pretext of protecting the Romanian people from being conquered by the Soviets, we had come first and foremost to help prevent the oil wells, the mines, the railway concessions, the big estates, the wine, match, textile, sugar, paper, cosmetics, and an infinity of other monopolies, in fact the whole rich country with its impoverished population, from taking the sad, sad road that leads to nationalization.
    What right has a people to its own oil?
    None--as long as we were in Romania with Hungarians, Italians and other foreign "friends" to help us. The rich were indecently rich, the poor indecently poor--and the concentration camps. . . ugh, the whole thing was indecent.
    It was there in the Balkans, I believe, that I learned the need not only for revolt but for organized revolt against war. I came to the conclusion that the war was not so pointless as in moments of sentiment and emotion we sometimes felt it.
    The point of it was that we were to pull certain chestnuts out of the fire. When we had done that, we could then see whether we might not be able to live on the ashes.
    Those ideas were not clear in my head then, but they were there. I had not learned to reflect then. I lived for the moment and never thought very much. I had to get properly over what I had been through before I could embark on anything so exacting as the business of thinking.
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    We had written each other many affectionate letters since we parted in Freiburg, but in all Ursula's letters I found a discouraging note that at times almost sent me out of my mind with the misery of unrequited love, with longing to be able to persuade her that she was mistaken, that she did love me, only would not admit it to herself.
    Her reply to my telegram came in the evening:
    MEET ME VIENNA STOP WAIT IN FIRST CLASS RESTAURANT STOP URSULA.
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Ursula
     
    Ursula was not there. Her train must be late. She would be coming soon. I sat down at a table from which I could keep watch on the door. There was a continual stream of people coming in and out. Now and again I stood up in a sort of semifury when so many had come in at once that I could not take them all in at one glance.
    More than an hour passed.
    I took her letters from an inner pocket and began reading them for the thousandth time, reading a line at a time with a look at the door in between. Suddenly I became panic-stricken: suppose she had been there while I had my eyes on a letter; suppose she had stood there and looked round without catching sight of me and so had gone again, got into a train and gone back to Munich.
    After sitting there for