Free The Commissar by Sven Hassel

kill-crazy men all around us, out there in the darkness.
    I watch him through half-closed eyes. As long as we have the Old Man as our Section Leader we still have a tiny chance of getting out of this madness reasonably unharmed.He doesn’t want to see any of us killed uselessly in some idiotic caper devised by a madman a long way behind us, who is only looking for medals and a new row of salad dressing on his chest.
    A 37 mm strikes and ricochets off with a howl, but does no damage.
    Porta leans tiredly against the still-warm ruins of the silo and spits foolishly into the wind.
    ‘Holy Saint Agnes, is there anything as beautiful as a fucked-up world war which loses its breath for a minute, and has to take a break? What d’you say to coffee with somethin’ a bit stronger in it?’
    ‘Got beans?’ asks the Old Man, lighting his silver-lidded pipe.
    ‘What do you take me for?’ Porta laughs, hoarsely. ‘The day I
haven’t
got beans enough for a cup of coffee, that’ll be the day they pull the world from under my feet.’
    ‘We haven’t really got time,’ says the Old Man, puffing away at his pipe. ‘But to hell with it, make it anyway. We’re not the blasted Moscow Express, we’re only 2 Section!’
    With nimble fingers Porta rigs up his American petrol-burner.
    ‘The people who sailed across the Polar Sea with this nice little thing couldn’t ever’ve dreamed that Obergefreiter by the grace of God Joseph Porta’d be makin’ coffee on it some day,’ he grins with satisfaction.
    ‘That blasted silence,’ mumbles the Old Man, blowing into the metal cup attached to his water-bottle.
    ‘Nothing like a “little black” * on a cold morning,’ says Porta, adding a dash of vodka to each cup.
    Albert takes a big gulp of his coffee, to leave more room for the vodka.
    ‘If I do thirty years in this war, I’ll never get used to them rotten flares.’ he says, thinly, cupping his hands and blowing warm breath up along his cheeks. ‘They make me think of corpse candles. Life ain’t nothin’ but one great bigshitter,man, an’ it gets blown out from under you’fore you even know it, an’ they still say “God is good!” Enough to make you grin your tripes into knots! In all my black life I never learnt as much about bein’ scared as since I got into this rotten excuse for a war, and always soakin’ wet I am, too! If only a man could get pneumonia, at least he’d have a temperature an’ all that, but the good God has decided otherwise and here a feller’s got to go creepin’ around on the stinkin’ face o’ the earth and waiting till the neighbours shoot his black arse off!’ He takes a slug at the vodka coffee, and looks around him mournfully. ‘Sometimes I wish they’d just come and kill me an’ get it over with. When it comes to it, man, life ain’t worth livin’ with, anyway!’
    ‘
C’est la guerre, monami
,’ sighs the Legionnaire, the eternal
Caporal
bobbing between his lips. ‘You are no more than the garbage which goes to make up the military muckheap. That is as Allah has willed it!’
    Porta laughs quietly and pours more coffee and vodka into our cups.
    ‘Heide’s Führer certainly took us for a ride when he promised us eternal peace and
Kraft durch Freude
with all the trimmin’s!’
    ‘Shall we place the machine-guns?’ asks Barcelona, stretching out in the warm corn.
    ‘No, sod everything,’ says the Old Man, uncaringly. ‘Let the neighbours come and beg us to shoot at them for once. I couldn’t care less!’
    It is still dark when we turn out again, and wriggle into our wet capes. They smell of mud and ancient sweat.
    The Old Man is standing outside in the clammy morning mist, waiting for us. The flaps of his field-cap are turned down over his ears, and the silver-lidded pipe hangs slackly at the corner of his mouth. It is one of those miserable mornings, which Russia has such a wealth of. A morning fit to draw both the soul and marrow out of a man.
    Grumbling and