March Battalion Read Online Free PDF Page B

to start talking, aimlessly, about nothing at all, without expecting or ever wishing anyone to take note of his words. It was a consequence of the life we were leading, the snow, the cold, the constant fear and the nearness of death. We slept together and we ate together, we were never apart from each other and yet there was this sense of individual isolation, a desperate alone-ness, that led us from time to time to hold long conversations with ourselves as if there were no one else for miles around.
    And so it was that Heide began speaking. The words flowed from him in a compulsive stream. He spoke not to us but to the steppes, to the dogs, to the snow and the wind.. We, if we listened at all, were mere eavesdroppers.
    'My old man was a drunk,' he said, and he spat contemptuously into the wind, which threw it straight back at him. 'Drank like a fish, he did. You know that? He drank like a ruddy fish...And Christ almighty, the stuff that bloke could get through! I'm not kidding you, six bottles were nothing to my old man. Nothing at all. You think you can drink?' He laughed scornfully at the listening dogs. 'He'd have had you under the table any day of the week ... Not that he remained sober, I'm not saying that. Matter of fact, I hardly ever remember seeing him sober.' Heide frowned. 'He never was sober, that's the simple truth of it. Never sober, always pissed... And whenever he was pissed, he used to beat us kids black and blue with a whacking great leather belt he wore. Almost every day he used to beat us. We just accepted it, in the end, but my old , lady, she used to pray all the time. I never knew what she was ' praying for, she just used to mutter to herself in a corner. Dear God, please do this, dear God, please do that...'
    Heide stared past us towards the west, his eyes extraordinarily clear and blue, presumably seeing not the everlasting carpet of snow and the tall pine trees but the town in Westphalia and the hovel where he was born.
    'Know what my old man used to say when he beat us? "It's not because I'm drunk", he used to say. "I'm not doing it because I'm drunk, you mustn't think that. I'm doing it for Germany. It's all for Germany. The sinful flesh must be mortified." That's what he used to say. The sinful flesh must be mortified ... He used to mortify his sinful flesh, all right. In bed, with the old woman ... Sometimes we used to lie there listening to them, other times they'd send us out to the park for half an hour. We used to sit and look at a statue of the Kaiser sitting on a horse. Just sit and look at it until we thought we could go back in again. I even had to take my kid sister with . me, I had to carry her everywhere, she hadn't learnt to walk yet ... I had another sister once. Bertha. She was the oldest, but she died. They gave me her scarf. I remember I went to church and said thank you for letting me have Bertha's scarf, on account of it was so cold that winter and I didn't have any overcoat ... I never did have an overcoat. Except once, I half inched one, only they found out before I had a chance to wear it. I had to go and talk to the priest about it. He hit me so hard I fell down and knocked his china cabinet over. Then he hit me again, harder than ever. Almost as hard as my old man used to wallop us. He was more mad about the china being broken than me nicking an overcoat... One of my brothers, he got out and joined the army. He wrote us a letter, with a photograph, showing what he looked like in uniform, but we never heard from him again. He called himself a Communist. Probably ended up in a concentration camp. He asked for trouble, that one. Never knew when to hold his tongue. Always screaming about the victory of the proletariat.'
    Heide laughed, cynically, at his brother's innocence.
    'Then there was Wilhelm. He was another of my brothers. He was the one that taught me to jump on trams when the conductor wasn't looking, and when he came up and asked for the fare we used to jump off again