Fiction | March 01, 1991
The Parade of Martyrs
Ian MacMillan
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I walk behind the whores, who are now too exhausted to complain. Next to me walk two French women who do not talk to me. They are as thin as I am but I am Polish thin and they are French thin, and anyway, we don’t know each other’s lanugages. Perhaps even our lice are now separated this way. Theirs are French fat lice and mine are Polish fat lice. Far ahead I can see SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Kuttner’s half-track swaying in the frozen mud of the snaking country road. For the moment we are safe from Kuttner, whose drunkennesss has wasted him into a kind of sitting corpse whose head wobbles and jerks with the unevenness of the road. It is mid-morning, and we have walked since four a.m. This is our third day marching.
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