I spent three days working with Braune, helping him prepare documents and draw up reports. My only distraction consisted of going out to drink bad local wine in the courtyard of a canteen run by a wrinkled old mountain native. Still I made the acquaintance, not entirely by chance, of a Belgian officer, the Kommandeur of the Wallonia Legion, Lucien Lippert. I had in fact wanted to meet Léon Degrelle, the head of the Rexist movement, who was fighting in the area; Brasillach, in Paris, had spoken to me about him with wild lyricism. But the Hauptmann from the Abwehr whom I asked laughed in my face: “Degrelle? Everyone wants to see him. He’s probably the most famous noncom in our army. But he’s at the front, you know, and it’s pretty hot up there. General Rupp was almost killed last week in a surprise attack. The Belgians have lost a lot of people.” Instead, he introduced me to Lippert, a lanky, smiling young officer wearing worn, patched feldgrau a little too big for him. I took him out to talk about Belgian politics under the apple tree at my canteen. Lippert was a career soldier, an artilleryman; he had agreed to sign up for the Legion out of hostility to Bolshevism, but he remained a true patriot, and complained that despite promises to the contrary, the Legionnaires had been forced to wear a German uniform. “The men were furious. Degrelle had trouble calming things down.” Degrelle, when he had signed up, had thought that his political role would earn him officer’s stripes, but the Wehrmacht had refused outright: no experience. Lippert still laughed about it. “Fine, so he left anyway, as an ordinary rifleman. To tell the truth, he didn’t have much of a choice, things weren’t going so well for him in Belgium.” Since then, despite an initial muddle in Gromovo-Balka, he fought courageously and had been promoted in combat. “The annoying thing is that he takes himself for some sort of political officer, you know? He wants to go himself to discuss the Legion’s engagement, and that’s not right. He’s just a noncom, after all.” Now he was dreaming of transferring the Legion to the Waffen-SS. “He met your General Steiner, last fall, and that completely turned his head. But I say no. If he does that, I’ll ask to be replaced.” His face had become very serious. “Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the SS. But I’m a soldier, and in Belgium soldiers don’t mix in politics. That’s not our role. I’m a royalist, I’m a patriot, I’m an anti-Communist, but I’m not a National Socialist. When I signed up, I was assured, at the Palace, that this decision was compatible with my oath of loyalty to the king, and I still don’t consider myself absolved from that oath, no matter what they say. The rest, all the political games with the Flemish, that’s not my problem. But the Waffen-SS is not a regular branch, it’s a Party formation. Degrelle says that only those who have fought alongside Germany will have a right to speak, after the war, and have a place in the new European order. I agree with that. But there are limits.” I smiled: despite his vehemence, I liked this Lippert, he was an upright, honest man. I poured him some more wine and changed the subject: “You must be the first Belgians ever to fight in the Caucasus.”—“Don’t be so sure!” he laughed, and rapidly sketched out the fantastic adventures of Don Juan van Halen, a hero of the Belgian revolution of 1830, a half-Flemish, half-Spanish nobleman, and a former Napoleonic officer, who because of his liberal convictions had landed in the prisons of the Inquisition in Madrid, in the reign of Ferdinand VII. He had escaped and ended up, God knows how, in Tiflis, where General Yermolov, the head of the Russian army in the Caucasus, had offered him a command. “He fought against the Chechens,” Lippert laughed, “imagine that.” I laughed with him, I found him very likeable. But he had to leave; AOK 17 was preparing the offensive on Tuapse, to take control of the pipeline terminals, and the Legion, attached to the Ninety-seventh Alpine Division, would have its role to play. As we parted I wished him good luck. But though Lippert, like his compatriot Van Halen, left the Caucasus alive, luck unfortunately deserted him a little farther on: near the end of the war, I learned that he had been killed in February 1944, during the Cherkasy breakthrough. The Wallonia Legion had been transferred to the Waffen-SS in June 1943, but Lippert hadn’t wanted to leave his men without a Kommandeur, and was still waiting for a replacement eight months later. Degrelle, on the other hand, survived it all; during the final debacle, he abandoned his men on the road to Lübeck and fled to Spain in Speer’s private plane; despite being sentenced to death in absentia, he was never really bothered. Poor Lippert would have been ashamed.
