Comrades of War Read Online Free PDF

eye he saw the bovine head of Frankendorf drop into the basket.
    ‘Have you seen the photographs posted in the glass case at the Davidstrasse police station?’ asked Mouritz Klokyty, a volunteer from the Sudeten. We couldn’t stand Mouritz. ‘There ought to be a law against posting things like that,’ he continued. ‘God’s wrath will soon be upon them, upon us all.’
    ‘What d’you mean by that?’ Tiny asked and sent a gob of sauerkraut after him. He’d stuffed his mouth from an emergency pot he kept in a cardboard box under his bed.
    Mouritz grew solemn: ‘But don’t you realize that scandal will lead to a bad end? Thunder and lightning will strike you.’
    ‘I can quite see that God might get worked up a bit over some females getting ripped up from top to bottom,’ Tiny answered good-naturedly between mouthfuls of sauerkraut, ‘but that’s no reason why he should punish me, the Desert Rambler, Sven, or the Schupo’s 1 in Davidstrasse. It wouldn’t occur to any of us to chop up broads. We’d prefer to give them the old-fashioned treatment.’
    ‘Almighty God,’ Mouritz cried in indignation.
    ‘You shouldn’t curse,’ Tiny admonished, threatening with his finger.
    Mouritz couldn’t be interrupted. He turned to the rest of us:
    ‘You’re blasphemers, devil’s brood. God’s arrow will strike you, since you refuse to see the coarse morals around you.’
    Like a priest excommunicating his congregation, he pointed at Tiny, intoning: ‘You are the tempter, the vessel of evil, but the good will crush you.’
    Tiny had been struggling with a piece of pork he had a tough time biting in two. He stopped chewing. He pulled the whole chunk out of his mouth and glowered at Mouritz:
    ‘What am I, did you say?’
    ‘The vessel of evil,’ Mouritz intoned. ‘Life is a thorny path, bestrewn with vices, and you are one of these prickly vices.’ This made Tiny, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the pork in his hand, gape in astonishment. Mouritz made a threatening gesture in his direction: ‘But you won’t tempt me, you devil. Tempter and seducer, I say “No Admission” to you!’
    Mouritz was interrupted in his excommunication by the Legionnaire, who shouted laughingly: ‘ Voilà , that’s enough somber talk.’
    Tiny had gone back to chewing on his pork. Slowly, he got up. From his throat came a growl. ‘You ought to be a bit careful about abusing Tiny, you prune. Apparently you’re not aware I’m saved, that I’m now a pious person who’s bought absolution. Would you like to hear the price, you who have sold your piety to Adolf, you Czech Judas? Five quarts of vodka, a quart of cognac, and two hundred makhorka cigarettes I risked my life stealing from the QM sergeant of 27th Panzer – and then a squirt like you says I’m ungodly!’
    He pulled the pork out of his mouth again and slapped Mouritz in the face with it. Mouritz was reclining on the edge of his bed. His face had gone green with fright.
    ‘Louse of Sodom,’ Tiny remarked. He spat at Mouritz, lying now as if stone dead and staring with glazed eyes at Tiny, who had renewed his battle with the pork. Mouritz’s mouth opened and shut like the mouth of a codfish in a fishmonger’s box just before its head is cut off – to prevent the customer from discovering the cod is half dead. Tiny belched himself through the pork, which stubbornly remained in one piece.
    ‘Get out of here, you Nazi fink, and try to walk across the Alster on a nice little prayer, just like Moses when he crossed the Suez Canal.’ Tiny’s concepts of Biblical history were somewhat confused. He smacked Mouritz straight in the face with the tough piece of pork. With a shriek Mouritz fell under the bed. Without removing his boots, Tiny flung himself on his own bed and continued his efforts to best the pork.
    A nurse’s aide poked her head into the ward, to see only one thing: Tiny on the bed with his boots on. Delighted, she galloped off to announce the