“How can you tell?”
“Only a Serb would be stupid enough to put a saddle on like that. Besides, there’s something written in Cyrillic on the leather.”
“I don’t understand why you seem to hate the Serbs so much. It can’t just be that they were part of the Ottoman Empire, otherwise why would the Ustaše have built that damn mosque in Zagreb? You even speak the same language.”
“Who told you that?”
“Lieutenant Waldheim.”
“What the fuck does he know about it?” said Geiger. “The languages are similar. I’ll grant you that. But with important differences. Serb is written in Cyrillic and Croatian in the Roman alphabet. And Serb just sounds more fucking stupid than Croat.”
“Yes, but why do you hate each other?”
“History. It’s the main reason anyone hates anyone, isn’t it? History and race. Serbs are stupid and lazy and deserve to be consigned to the racial rubbish heap.”
“That’s not exactly Hegel.”
“You want Hegel, then go back to Berlin. Here there’s just killing.”
“Believe me, I will, just as soon as I can.”
“All right, then, Serbs are backstabbers and assassins. How’s that for you? There’s Stjepan Radic, a Croat who was shot in the federal parliament by a Serb member — Puniša Racic — in 1928. And before that there was the Archduke Ferdinand, of course. But for the fucking Serbs, we might not have had a Great War. Think about that, Gunther. All of the good fellows you once knew back in Berlin who might still be alive today were it not for one dumb Serb called Gavrilo Princip and his Black Hand. That’s right. If you could ask your dead pals what they think about Serbs, I bet you’d get a dusty answer. You see, the Serbs have a habit of starting wars they don’t finish. They’re always on the wrong side. They were on the Russian side in the last lot and we Croats were on your side. Croats are more like you Germans and some of us are Germans, of course. Serbs are just peasants and communists. If you showed a Serb a lavatory he’d probably wash his hands in it. We hate them because they always stick together with the Slovenes regardless of where the interests of the country might lie. Brother Slovene, Brother Serb, that’s what we Croats say. You want more reasons why we hate them? Then there’s just this: they’re double-dealing bastards. You can’t trust Serbs any more than you can trust a fucking Jew. You can always rely on a Serb to let you down.”
“I’m glad I asked.”
He frowned. “What the fuck are you doing down here, anyway, Gunther? Captains in the SD don’t normally come out into the field like this. At least not without a special action murder squad at their back. Fritzes and Fridolins like you normally prefer to leave that kind of thing to volunteer SS like me and Sergeant Oehl.”
“Murder’s got nothing to do with why I’m here, Captain Geiger. I’m on a special mission for the Reich Minister of Truth and Propaganda. There’s a priest in Banja Luka I have to find so I can deliver a letter to him from Dr. Goebbels.”
“That gimpy little rat. What does he want with a fucking priest? He hates priests. Everyone knows that. It’s why the last Pope issued an encyclical against the Nazis.”
“He doesn’t tell me why he’s hungry, just to bring him breakfast.”
“And you aren’t just a little bit curious why he’s sent you to find a priest in Banja Luka?”
“When I was with the SD back in Smolensk I learned that it’s usually best not to question my orders.”
“True.”
I went back to the car and fetched some of the photographs of Father Ladislaus.
“But since you’re interested...”
“No,” said Geiger. “I don’t recognize him. All priests look alike to me. But I’ll tell you one thing. If he’s a priest in Banja Luka, he’s got his work cut out. Things were very bloody there a while back. And that’s saying something in this country, believe me.”
We drove on, through strangely named villages that were not much more than a couple of ruined houses. Ahead of us the sky was as gray as a dead mackerel. On either side of the road stood tall fields of ripening maize with ears that were longer than beer glasses and almost as thick, piles of still-steaming manure, plum trees, hazels heavy with nuts, then trees and more trees. A flock of starlings swooped up and down above our heads in the shape of a biblical pestilence. A herd of cows was seated so casually by a river I half expected them to have brought a picnic basket. A trio of ponies stood in the shade of an ancient oak. This was rich farming country and yet we might have been in the previous century.
We saw a trail of smoke on the horizon and caught the slight scent of cordite in the air. Then we heard the sound of artillery fire from somewhere up ahead. I slowed to a stop and we listened for a moment.
“Ours?” I asked.
Geiger looked at Oehl, who nodded and said, “Hotchkiss,” and then lit a cigarette as if this was all that needed to be said.
A Hotchkiss was a French-made tank and after 1940 we had more than five hundred of them.
We drove on and into a small village close to the Bosnian border and here, in the playground of an empty school, we saw the Hotchkiss and stopped to watch as the two-man Ustaše crew fired the thirty-nine-millimeter gun of the French tank at a semi-ruined building on a distant hillside. A few Ustaše soldiers lay sleeping in a field at the edge of the playground as the tank fired over their heads, which added a touch of madness to what was happening. Others seemed to be taking bets on the marksmanship of the Hotchkiss gunner. They all looked like they were in their teens. None of them paid us the slightest attention.
“Who are they shooting at?” I asked. “Proles? Chetniks?”
Oehl said something to one of the tank’s bearded crewmen and, grinning broadly, the man said one word: “Gadanje.”
“Target practice,” said Oehl.
Geiger handed me some binoculars, and as the tank fired again I looked in horror as an inadequate French-made round whistled feebly through the clear blue sky and hit the building, smashing some of the red-and-yellow brickwork.
“It’s a church,” I said, horrified.
Worse was the fact that there had been people inside the church; two bodies lay in the rubble. One of the Croats cheered and began to clap and the man sitting next to him handed him a banknote as if he’d won his bet.
“Why the fuck are they using a church for target practice?”
“It must be a Serb Orthodox church,” said Geiger. “They certainly wouldn’t be shooting at a Catholic one.”
“But a church is a church,” I insisted.
Oehl laughed cruelly. “Not in Yugoslavia it isn’t.”
“But can’t we order them to stop?”
“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” said Geiger. “Believe me, you wouldn’t want to spoil their fun. Just because we’re on their side doesn’t mean they couldn’t turn nasty. It’s only in Zagreb and Sarajevo that your rank makes a halfpenny’s worth of difference between you and them. Out here on the black earth of Slavonia it makes no difference at all. Things like the Geneva Convention and the rules of war only mean something back in Berlin. Down here they don’t mean shit. The one rule when it comes to dealing with the Ustaše in the field is that you don’t get between these lads and their play.”
Oehl was asking one of the men on the grass verge a question. Then he turned to us and said, “He says there’s a sort of hotel at the end of the street. We might get some coffee there.”
Leaving the Ustaše to their amusement, we drove a short way up the street to the Hotel Sunja, where my impression of the place was severely affected by the fact that immediately in front of the hotel, and hanging from the only gas lamp in the village, was the body of a man. At least I thought it must have been a man; there were even more flies on his head than there had been on the dead horse. Geiger and Oehl paid the hanged man no attention at all, as if it were hardly unusual to see a man hanged in front of a hotel, and went inside and, after a minute or two, I followed.