Reign of Hell by Sven Hassel

to attention. His eyes swivelled piteously from the Lieutenant to the Sergeant. His big baggy cheeks were shaking with fright.
    ‘They seen the Devil,’ he said. ‘They seen the Devil, sir.’
    Well, that was it, of course. As soon as Ness had opened his great gaggy mouth, the rest of the bunch were only too anxious to pipe up and start filling in the details. Give Linge his due. He had sense enough to know that it was a matter best kept to ourselves. He and I and Tiny stood in tight-lipped disgust as the cretins poured out their own varied and garbled versions of the tale. Gregor had wisely disappeared, God knows where. Ness was by now babbling louder than any of them, and the Lieutenant was thrashing about with his hands and trying to shout over the hubbub.
    ‘For God’s sake, shut up! Shut up, I say! I want a proper military report, not a bloody horror story!’
    He got his proper military report: at precisely 0105 hours the Devil had been seen to walk in the Colonel’s rooms. Every man present had witnessed it, and several were prepared to swear to the existence of horns, brimstone, forked tail, etc. One man in his zeal even added the embellishment of cloven hoofs, but this was angrily dismissed on the grounds that it could not have been possible to see them unless he was walking on his hands with his feet in the air.
    Lieutenant Dorn perched himself gingerly on the edge of the table and sat for a while without speaking. I could understand his predicament. He himself could scarcely have been in ignorance of the rumours that ran round the camp; and even if he might not believe in horror stories, it was nevertheless pretty obvious that there was something untoward going on. No smoke without fire and so forth, and who was it who came a-visiting every night on the stroke of twelve in two big black Mercedes limousines? On the other hand, we could all picture the Colonel’s wrath when a report came in that the night guard had been discovered gathered together in the guardhouse babbling about the Devil. And we all knew who would be in command of the very next company to be despatched to the front: the officer who was responsible for making the report. Lieutenant Dorn . . .
    I glanced sympathetically at him, and he raised a palsied, grey face in my direction. It was his duty to report theincident, no doubt about it. I was only glad that I was in my own shabby, ill-fitting boots and not his.
    ‘All right,’ he said, at last. He rose heavily to his feet. ‘Let’s get matters straight. Who was it who first claimed to have seen this mythical creature in the Colonel’s rooms?’
    ‘Corporal Creutzfeldt, sir, and Private Hassel,’ said Sergeant Linge, as quick as they come.
    He would pay dearly for that accident with the helmet, and I daresay he was only too eager to drag someone else down into the mire while he was about it.
    The Lieutenant walked across to Tiny and stood thoughtfully regarding him for a moment.
    ‘Corporal Creutzfeldt,’ he said. ‘Did you by any chance have anything to drink before going on duty tonight?’
    ‘Certainly, sir.’ Tiny assumed an expression of imbecilic wisdom and counted up on his fingers. ‘Four bocks and a couple of glasses of kummel.’
    ‘A couple, Corporal Creutzfeldt?’
    ‘Well – two or three. Four or five . . . Say a round half dozen,’ said Tiny, obligingly.
    ‘In other words, Corporal, you were drunk?’
    ‘No more than usual,’ said Tiny, stoutly.
    ‘Am I to infer from that remark that you are habitually drunk, when you go on duty, Corporal Creutzfeldt?’
    Tiny paused gravely to consider the matter.
    ‘Well, yes,’ he said, at last. ‘But not so’s you’d notice it.’
    ‘Just as I thought,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘Delirium tremens. You’ve been having visions, Corporal. If it’s not pink elephants it’s devils with cloven hoofs . . . A mere figment of an overheated imagination. You saw the Colonel walk past his window – you saw him drinking a cup