Читать книгу World War 2 Thriller Collection: Winter, The Eagle Has Flown, South by Java Head - Jack Higgins, Justin Richards - Страница 28

Leutnant Pauli Winter had never been in no-man’s-land like this before. He’d never known it in the full foggy raw light of morning. Like all the other front-line infantry, he’d come here only at night, on patrols to mend the great jungle of rusty barbed wire, which was constantly damaged by shell and mortar fire, or to raid the enemy trenches. Always under cover of darkness.

Until now his world had consisted only of narrow trenches and dark dugouts. The sky, seasonally grey, azure, or black with rain clouds, had been only a narrow slot framed by the muddy edges of the trench parapet. No one in his right mind raised his head above the parapet to stare across at where the unseen English inhabited their own subterranean dominion.

It was impossible to remember all the stories he’d heard about no-man’s-land. There were stories about fierce animals that were said to live out here, skulking in their warrens and emerging by night to feast on the dead and dying. And certainly some of the noises they’d all heard encouraged the belief. Other soldiers’ stories said there were men living out here in this great churned-up rubbish tip. Deserters of all nationalities were said to have formed a community, a bandit gang, who lived deep in the ground, stole money, watches and personal possessions from the bodies that littered the ground, and fed upon stores plundered from both sides of the line. It was all nonsense, of course, but hugging the ground out here, the barrage whistling overhead, the earth stinking of cordite, faeces and decomposing flesh, made such yarns seem only too likely.

But today was March 21, 1918, the start of the great attack that was going to break the British-held front line and end the war with a victory for the Kaiser. Pauli and two of his company – his runner and his youthful sergeant major – were crouched in a shell crater about a hundred metres in front of the German lines. The rest of his company were similarly hidden nearby, and so were other ‘Storm companies’ crouching unseen in no-man’s-land all along the front line.

The three men had their hands clamped over the sides of their heads to protect their eardrums against the deafening roar of the German guns. The preparatory bombardment had been going on for nearly five hours. Now it was nine-forty and the guns would stop, and in the pearly light Pauli would lead his men into the attack.

‘Nothing could have lived through that,’ shouted Feldwebel Lothar Koch as the artillery fire lessened. Koch was young – he’d given a false age to get into the army – a pimply fellow with a square protruding jaw that moved as he chewed on a plug of tobacco. Partly due to the immense pride his promotion had given him, he was still optimistic about the outcome of the war. Deep down in his heart, young Koch entertained the hope of being commissioned, or at least becoming a noncommissioned deputy officer by the time he took part in the promised victory parade through conquered Paris. He looked at the other two men with his mournful eyes. They both stared back at him blankly. ‘Nothing could have lived through that,’ repeated Koch.

Pauli touched the silk stockings under his collar: black, a pair of them knotted to form a long scarf that wound around his neck five times. It prevented the collar of his uniform from chafing his neck, and also reminded him of a glorious few hours in Brussels with a girl he’d met in church! He looked at his pocket watch – wristwatches did not survive in these conditions – and up at the heavy fog. Thank God for it. He dragged himself to his feet. His uniform was caked with mud; his canvas bag of stick grenades felt heavier than ever. ‘Bugler!’ he shouted and from a muddy hillock nearby the bugler slowly pushed up through a chrysalis of heavy mud. ‘Sound the advance.’

On every side German ‘storm troops’ emerged from the incredible collection of broken debris that littered the ground. They met with the clattering sound of a British Lewis gun and some intermittent rifle fire from Tommies who had not been rendered useless by the artillery’s systematic destruction of the British front line trenches. But the fog was too thick for the British to see what was happening, and the fire that greeted their advance was aimed into the white mist, so that only a few unlucky Germans screamed and fell. Pauli heard calls for stretcherbearers and a bugle sounding the advance.

‘Is the company advancing?’ Pauli asked the young Feldwebel. There was mud in his mouth and he spat it out and wiped his face with a dirty lace handkerchief. Her handkerchief! Her name was Monike. She spoke the Belgian sort of Plattdeutsch that he could understand. A tall, slim, shy creature with wonderful green-grey eyes, heart-shaped face, and all the mysterious promises of a first love. She’d taken him home and given him chicken soup that her mother had left on the stove for her. Thick chicken soup with beans and carrots. He loved Monike. He thought of her every day. And wrote her long letters, every one of which he carefully tore up.

‘Yes, Herr Leutnant. The company is advancing.’ Koch could see through the fog no better than his company commander, but they both knew that the men would do as they were ordered. They were Germans, and their readiness to obey instructions was a measure of their civilization, and their tragedy.

Pauli kept running over the uneven ground. With the swirling white fog wrapped round him, he stumbled into pot holes and tripped over the roots of trees, sandbags, corpses, balks of ancient timbers, and large sheets of corrugated iron that, together with untold other stuff, littered this old battlefield. The intelligence reports said no-man’s-land was two hundred metres wide at this place, but now it seemed much wider.

Sergeant Major Koch, a thin, wiry figure, was just a few paces ahead of him: hurrying as best he could, ungainly and uncertain about the going. His machine gun was slung over his shoulder, and in his hands he held a huge set of heavy-duty wire cutters. Bullets zinged past but the German bombardment was now no more than a few desultory bangs and crashes far in the enemy’s rear areas. How soon before the British artillery and mortars began to lob their explosives into no-man’s-land? Surely they must have guessed that the five-hour bombardment was a prelude to an infantry assault. Or were the British pulling their howitzers and field artillery back into safer, rear areas. Such defeatism was too much to hope for. Or was it.

Now Koch had started cutting through the wire. The artillery had done their job well; endless fields of wire – so carefully tended by the night patrols from both sides – were now a shambles. Koch found the weakest parts of this metallic thicket and cut a path just wide enough for the infantry to follow through. The wire sprang back with a loud noise like a peal of bells. At night such carelessness would have brought a burst of fire and almost certain death, but now speed was all that mattered. The stolid Koch, crouched low, went chopping his way through the undergrowth of rusty tendrils.

Behind Pauli the bugler was sounding ‘close up!’ the prearranged call to indicate the way through the defences.

‘Koch! Get back, damn you.’

Once through the last of the wire, Pauli pushed ahead of his sergeant major. In the storm companies it was a matter of pride that the company commander led his men into battle. More bullets came now: closer, for they no longer zinged but cracked like a ringmaster’s whip. Chest-high. Alongside him, two men bowed low to die, heads down, snorting and gurgling briefly as the blood flooded into their lungs. He ran on, stumbled and touched the silk stockings – or, rather, made a gesture in the direction of his throat – Monike had said that she would be his good luck. It was a childish thing to say, for she was a child, and he believed it, because, for all his brutal experiences, he too was little more than a child. She hadn’t given him the stockings, of course. She was not that sort of girl. He’d taken them from the laundry basket in her bedroom.

More firing of rifles and machine guns. Over to the left – and very close – there came the sound of a heavy Vickers gun, stertorous, like a wheezing generator. But it was too late now to worry about bullets. Pauli found himself on the brink – the parapet – of the foremost enemy trenchline. He jumped. It was almost three metres deep. Burdened as he was with bombs and machine pistol, his weight took him right through the damp duckboards that formed the floor of the trench. The rotten wood snapped with a loud noise, and Pauli went deep into mud, so that he had to bend and extricate his boots from the broken slats. Thank God this section of the trench was unmanned.

He ran along the trench, splashing his way through the stagnant, watery mud. God! Did the British stand in this shit night and day. He came to a surprised looking British soldier. Pauli pulled the trigger of his pistol and the youngster was punched backwards by the force of the bullets. He sank down without any change in the expression upon his pinched, pale face.

Pauli ran on, along the communications trench and then to a junction of the support trench. Here the conditions were even worse: he was ankle-deep in stinking mud. The trenches were unmanned here. Had the British gone over the top to face the attackers, or fled? A sign marked the rear trench ‘Pall Mall’, and there were other painted wooden signs pointing the way to Company HQ and a field dressing post.

The trench lines zigzagged to minimize the effects of blast. At the next turn half a dozen khaki-clad soldiers were bunched in the corner of the entrance to a dugout. They were wide-eyed with fear. Two of them were sitting on the fire step hugging themselves. Their uniforms were blackened with rain, and the heavy wet cloth hung on them like a dead weight. Pauli swung aside. From behind him Koch fired a burst from his MP 18, and the brown-coated soldiers stiffened and grew taller before toppling full-length like lead toys.

As they ran forward again, a British officer put his head out of his dugout immediately ahead of them and shouted loudly. He was a middle-aged fellow with a neat moustache. He looked not unlike Pauli’s father.

Pauli stopped, undecided what to do, but Koch hit the officer with the butt of his gun and then threw two stick grenades down through the dark entrance and raced on. There was a tremendous bang and muffled screaming. Pauli looked back. He saw the British officer as the blast caught him. The wretched man was blown to pieces in a pink cloud of blood. The mangled body, its khaki sleeve and insignia intact, hit the sides of the trench. Round the upper part of the arm was a mud-stained white armband with a red cross on it. The dugout was of course a temporary casualty station. Too late now.

Ahead of them the sound of firing and, emerging from the white fog, more men. ‘Wer da?’ He climbed up one of the trench ladders and ran along the edge of the parapet.

‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ They were Germans from the next company. ‘Wer da?’ More challenges as grey-uniformed men appeared like wraiths in the dispersing fog. Pauli recognized the faces of some of them. The bugler sounded the close-up signal again. Pauli saw their officer, a captain named Graf, a thin, irritable man with a red nose, his heavy steel helmet grotesquely large for his small ferret face.

‘Keep going, Winter. We’ve got them on the run.’

‘Ja, Herr Hauptmann.’ He turned and shouted to the rest of his men to hurry. The Punishment Battalion had changed Pauli. At one time he would have been terrified by a man like Hauptmann Graf. Now it took a great deal more to frighten him.

There was a loud roar behind him, and the narrow trench was suddenly lit by a brilliant orange glow. Pauli turned to see the great balloons of ignited fuel ripping a hole through the white fog. The flame throwers were systematically burning out the dugouts all along the support trench. Poor devils – even a bayonet in the guts is better than that.

They hurried on; the earth was firmer behind the support trenches and the fog much thinned. Crossing the sunken road that the British had used for their supplies and reinforcements, the Germans chased across the open ground. No one was firing at them now. To the left was a forest of tree stumps, the trunks short, broken, and bared white like pencil stubs. To the front of them the ruins of a village, with only waist-high walls remaining. The church had been devoured by the war: its relics and valuables stolen, its doors and pews chopped into firewood, the roof collapsed, its lead improvised into drains for waterlogged trench-lines, and its tower reduced to rubble by artillery fire to deprive the British of an observation post.

Behind the village were twenty or thirty brown-clad soldiers, British service troops without rifles, an officer wearing the badges of the Royal Engineers, and two men carrying wooden crates. At the first sign of the Germans they raised their hands in the air. The Germans, in too much of a hurry even to rob them, pointed back the way they’d come. Reluctantly the British shambled off to the east, walking slowly, in the hope that a counterattack would free them before they got to the German rear.

In the ruined village was a mobile bath unit. It had been abandoned hastily by men who’d left behind parts of their uniforms, towels, webbing and even a rack of Lee-Enfield rifles. But even the sight of clean hot water and the wonderful fragrance of disinfectant and soap did not halt the advancing Germans.

They pressed on. Pauli was fit and strong, but the pace was wearing. He sniffed the air. Was it gas? And if so what type? Not mustard gas anyway. That was the one most to be feared, but the plan of attack said that the artillery would only put mustard into British rear areas, into which the Germans would not advance. So it couldn’t be mustard. Could it? He stopped and bent down to prod loose a clod of earth and sniff at it. Foolhardy, but it was what was expected of men in the storm companies. He started running again and swung his gas mask round to the front of his belt as he ran. Soon they slowed: the pace was too demanding even for young, fit bodies, and there was no sign of the enemy.

Walking now. The girl came back to his mind. The house was empty, she said, her parents visiting her grandmother. They’d kissed and ended up in bed. First time for Pauli and first time for the girl. What a fiasco. All his sexual fantasies shattered by two minutes in bed. The girl had cried. I’m still a virgin, she’d said. Then, her mood changing, she’d laughed. Well, it wasn’t funny for him. He’d fled from the house with only the stockings around which to weave stories for his fellow soldiers. But by the time he’d got back to his company, he had no wish to mention her to anyone. There was no one to whom he could confide his story. He was in love; he wanted her too much to talk about her. What a fool he’d been. If only he’d let the relationship develop at its own pace. Then perhaps he wouldn’t have got the letter telling him that she never wanted to see him again. He blamed himself unceasingly: a girl you meet in church doesn’t expect to be treated like a whore.

Twice they were halted by pockets of determined resistance: fierce Scots veterans whose rapid, accurate rifle fire caused severe casualties among the by-now careless Germans. Soon the regiment’s trench-mortar units arrived, and after a relentless pounding the Scotsmen came out, calling, ‘Kamerad!’

By this time it was late afternoon and already the wintry daylight was beginning to go. They moved on again. They were all more cautious now, and tired. On the left, the bugler for the next company was sounding rally. Pauli stopped and his bugler did the same. Time for reforming, and a moment for the fleet of foot to recover their breath and the slower men to catch up.

A runner from Battalion Headquarters told him to consolidate his position and take possession of a British twelve-inch howitzer battery several hundred metres to the west. They found it without trouble. Hauptmann Graf was already there. His men were energetically plundering the enemy stores.

The captured battery was a revelation to the German storm troops. The Germans were trying on the superb sheepskin coats that the British supplied to their sentries, and there were many who wanted one of the fine leather jerkins. More than one fellow was striding around in British officers’ hand-sewn leather boots. In the officers’ mess were all manner of forgotten luxuries, including Stilton cheese, smoked salmon, and a dozen unopened cases of Scotch whisky.

Pauli looked around with interest and apprehension. These were specially selected and well-trained soldiers. Given the order, they’d abandon their booty and continue the advance. But what of the ordinary German conscripts behind them? What would they be doing tonight?

Pauli decided that such conundrums were best left to the generals. He went to report to Captain Graf. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ said Graf. He took off his heavy helmet. He was a jug-eared little man, gnomelike: a homosexual it was whispered. But homosexual or not, Graf was a fearless soldier, respected by every man in the regiment. ‘Shells were ready and fused. I blame the officers. No attempt to disable the guns: dial sights in position, breech blocks in full working order. It’s disgraceful.’

‘Yes,’ said Pauli, amused that Graf should be so indignant about the enemy’s lack of soldierly dedication.

‘Cowards.’

‘We must have come five kilometres,’ said Pauli. ‘There’s never been a breakthrough like this before.’

Captain Graf grunted. He was smoking and holding in his hand a gold-coloured tin of fifty English cigarettes. ‘Try one,’ he said and offered the open tin.

Pauli lit one up and, after breathing out the smoke, said, ‘If the advance has been the same all along the battlefront, we must have captured a huge piece of ground.’

‘Like them?’ said Graf. ‘English cigarettes: damned good.’

‘Yes,’ said Pauli. He’d never smoked anything so delicious. He studied the pale tobacco appreciatively and decided that if he ever became rich enough he’d smoke such cigarettes all the time. In the sandbagged shelter behind Graf, one of the men had found a gramophone and was winding it up. ‘Do you think we’ll go all the way to the coast, Herr Hauptmann?’

‘The coast?’

‘The war is won, isn’t it?’

‘Look at those stores, Winter,’ said Captain Graf, turning to look at the German soldiers gobbling the captured food. ‘Last week I severely punished four of my men who’d ground up horse fodder to make flour. They said they were hungry. They were, of course. We are all hungry. We ration out the shells to our artillery. We don’t have enough rubber to make more gas masks.’ He blew smoke. ‘Have you seen what’s in that mess hut, Winter? Food for the rank and file. Tinned beef, plum jam, good white bread, that yellow English cheese. Did you see how much of it there is? They told us the English were starving, didn’t they?’ He sniffed. ‘No, the war is lost, Winter. The courage of our young men and our meagre supplies of shells and bullets can’t prevail against this sort of plenty.’

‘The war is lost?’ said Pauli. Captain Graf was a tough regular officer from a good regiment, not the sort of fellow who was easily discouraged.

‘The war is lost,’ said Graf. ‘No matter how much ground we occupy, we cannot win.’ The gramophone started playing ‘Poor Butterfly’. For a moment the two officers listened to it. ‘Get your casualty returns sorted out. The infantry will be close behind us. They’ll pull the storm companies back later tonight, or before first light in the morning.’

Pauli looked to where Koch and other men of his company were sitting on the ground, too exhausted even to join in the plundering. How could the war be lost? It wasn’t fair; it just wasn’t fair.

‘The damned war’s not over’

‘I wish to God that you’d stop saying the war’s over,’ Peter told his father. He was propped up on an armchair in the drawing room of his parents’ house in Berlin. His dark-blue naval officer’s tunic was resewn where it had been ripped, and the gold was missing from one sleeve of it. His left leg was in splints and his face badly bruised. ‘The damned war’s not over and perhaps never will be.’

‘They signed the armistice nearly two months ago,’ said his father gently. His son was in pain and frustrated by his immobility.

‘The British navy is still blockading us. Our people are starving. The warships of the High Seas Fleet have red flags flying from their mastheads. There are bands of armed ruffians in the streets shooting at each other. That traitor Liebknecht has been carried shoulder-high through the streets by soldiers wearing the Iron Cross – and has made a speech from the balcony of the Royal Palace. The army has disintegrated. The Kaiser has run away to Holland. How can we negotiate a peace treaty? We have nothing to bargain with.’ It was a cry of pain. The defeat seemed to have affected Peter more deeply than any of the rest of the Winter family. Attacked in the street by a group of Spartacists, he’d been knocked to his knees by clubs and rifle butts. There is little doubt that this drunken, vicious little mob would have killed him, but for another mob that came along and started a brawl, during which Peter escaped. Since then he’d been confined to the house and had done nothing but stare out the window and brood on the consequences of the chaos in the streets below.

Pauli Winter got up from the armchair. He was wearing the better of his two army uniforms. It was far from the elegant costumes in which Prussia had sent officers to war. Its motley stains had not been removed by scrubbing and cleaning, and its shape not been improved by regular baking in the delousing ovens. The fine leather boots he’d gone to war wearing were long since lost and he wore simple boots and grey puttees like the ones worn by the storm troops. ‘I must get back to Battalion Headquarters,’ said Pauli. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Peter.’ He was in fact on a twenty-four-hour pass, but Pauli found that a couple of hours in the gloomy house near Ku-damm was all he could endure. He’d bought a few cheap presents from a department store in Leipziger Strasse, and now he placed them carefully under the Christmas tree in the corner. One of the servants had found a few logs, and today, with Christmas so near, a fire was burning in the stove. On the sideboard he noticed that all the family photos were arrayed, their silver frames gleaming. There they were in 1913, the happiest of happy families: two smiling children and Mama and Papa standing proudly behind them. How long ago it seemed. The family had changed dramatically since then. Now – with riots in the streets and Bolsheviks occupying Winter’s factories – even a log on the fire was a treat to be relished. Harald Winter was stunned by the sudden change in his fortunes, and Peter had become a crusty invalid. Now it was Mama who held them all together, ventured onto the streets, coaxed food from the shopkeepers, and persuaded the servants to keep working.

‘Battalion Headquarters! With that ridiculous little Captain Graf in command,’ said Peter scornfully. ‘You still go on pretending, do you? Your Freikorps battalions are just a lot of uniformed gangsters, and Graf is no more than a brigand.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Pauli. It was because they were so close that Peter knew where to put the knife. ‘The Freikorps is a fine organization and the army fully approves. There are thousands of us: disciplined and armed. And not just in Berlin – they are being formed all over Germany. Every one of our soldiers is a volunteer signed on month by month. In the East they will be defending our borders now that the army are withdrawing. The Poles, and the rest of them, would have been looting Berlin by now if it wasn’t for the Freikorps units out there.’

‘Then why don’t you march eastwards?’ said Peter.

‘Because, like you, we are temporarily immobilized. When the transport and our orders arrive, perhaps we’ll go.’ Pauli’s tone was mild, not just because he remembered the good times they’d shared, but because he was frightened that Peter might thoughtlessly blurt out something about the court-martial and Pauli’s assignment to a punishment battalion. He’d do almost anything to prevent his parents from finding out about that.

‘An under-strength battalion commanded by a captain?’ said Peter sarcastically. ‘Four machine guns, an antique tank, and two armoured cars? What sort of battalion is that?’

‘The next time the Reds try to take over Berlin, you’ll see,’ said Pauli. He put on his field-grey overcoat and steel helmet and tightened the strap under his chin before reaching for his belt and pistol.

‘What’s that crooked cross sign you’ve painted on your helmet?’ his father asked.

‘It’s called a swastika. Many of the Freikorps units wear it to distinguish us from the regular army.’

‘Be very careful, Pauli. Remember what happened to your brother.’

Pauli did remember. Peter had been beaten up just because of the ‘imperial insignia’ on his officer’s uniform. Many army and navy officers had been similarly beaten – and several murdered – by jeering and catcalling thugs who were determined to blame the officer class for the war and its outcome.

‘I wear a private’s greatcoat and no badges,’ said Pauli.

‘But you have an officer’s sidearm,’ said his father.

‘And I’ll use it, too,’ said Pauli. ‘I’d be grateful for a chance to pick off a few of the bastards who tried to kill Peter.’

‘Don’t say goodbye to your mother: she’ll only worry until you telephone.’

‘I’ll telephone if I can, but the telephone lines are sometimes cut.’

‘Take care of yourself, Pauli,’ said his father. ‘Those mutinous swine are holding the Chancellor to ransom…. My God, who could have guessed it would come to this? The Chancellor held prisoner by Marxist hooligans.’ They embraced, and as he grasped him in his arms Pauli was struck by the slight, frail frame of his father. Although not yet fifty years old, Winter had grown old and tired and apprehensive. Perhaps it was only temporary, but it was a sad transformation in a man the boys always remembered as dynamic and rather frightening.

Harald Winter regarded his son with equal sorrow. The war had made Pauli into a ruffian. He was brusque and dismissive of all the values that Harald Winter revered. This new Pauli who’d come back from the war was someone his father found difficult to cope with. As much as he’d disliked the dependence that Pauli had demonstrated as a child, he preferred that to the new rough-spoken man he’d become. In other words, like many fathers, Harald Winter hated to see that his son had grown up.

Pauli took the S-Bahn to Alexanderplatz. The trains were running normally but as Pauli walked towards the palace he kept a wary eye open for marauding bands of troublemakers. He saw a small procession of factory workers – women, too – going over the Schlossbrücke. They were not armed but they carried red banners and chanted slogans, so he remained in the shadows until they passed. It was as well to be cautious. Schinkel’s beautiful little guardroom – designed like a Greek temple – was brightly lit and he could see soldiers inside, some of them huddled in blankets on the stone floor. Were they loyal soldiers assigned to duty by the High Command, or Bolshevik renegades? There was no way to know. He hurried past.

The Royal Palace, or what was usually called just the Schloss, was lit only by light from the cathedral across the road, but against the darkening sky he could see the red blanket that mutinous sailors had hoisted up. The palace had had no official residents ever since the Kaiser abdicated and ran away to Holland. It was at present the home of about three thousand bellicose revolutionary sailors of the self-styled ‘People’s Naval Division’ who were now holding the head of government for ransom.

Pauli kept walking along Unter den Linden. The streetcleaners were not in evidence, and in places Pauli had to clamber over piles of snow. Only the streetcar tracks had been systematically cleared of it. Despite the occasional sounds of rifle fire – and sometimes even the explosion of a grenade – the shops were open, and some taxicabs, buses and streetcars were still running. But the shortage of fuel meant that there were more horses: ancient Droschken with half-starved animals plodded through the snow. There were a few shoppers hurrying home past street peddlers selling crudely made paper Christmas decorations and hot chestnuts.

Pauli crossed the road to avoid the crowd milling around the gates of the Russian Embassy. Since April 1918 the Imperial Russian Embassy had been called the Soviet Embassy. At the 1918 party conference, Lenin had told the delegates that ‘…we shall go under without the German revolution.’ And in response the new staff, of no fewer than three hundred people, had been frantically circulating Bolshevik agitators, ready cash and crate-loads of revolutionary literature throughout Germany. The new ambassador – a wealthy Jewish philanthropist from the Crimea – had had hoisted across the embassy’s façade a huge red banner that urged ‘Workers of all countries, unite!’ Soon afterwards he’d been deported back to Russia, but the banner remained.

Guarding the Interior Ministry were three men with rifles slung over their shoulders. Round the corner was a truck with more armed men, their shabby, makeshift uniforms and red armbands identified them as members of an irregular band recruited by the new police chief – Emil Eichhorn – a radical of the extreme left. On the corner of Wilhelmstrasse were some women, one of them weeping uncontrollably. They were on their way back from Dorotheen Strasse, where the army’s casualty lists were still being displayed, with new names every day. The fighting had ended, but corpses were still being identified. Pauli walked past them and crossed back across the road to the Adlon Hotel.

He checked his helmet, overcoat and pistol belt at the cloakroom. The elderly attendant showed no surprise. He placed the gun and helmet on a shelf with silk hats and gave Pauli a small yellow ticket. Pauli went into the bar. There was a crowd in here, but the heating was not working, and some customers had their overcoats on. He had arranged to meet Alex Horner here, and true to form, Alex was sitting near the door with a bottle of wine in an ice bucket at his elbow. An extra glass was in place. From the dining room next door came the high-spirited music of a gypsy band.

‘How goes the army command?’ said Pauli. He sat down and waited for the waiter to pour his wine.

‘Excellent!’ said Alex. ‘And how are things at home?’ Alex was not in uniform. He was wearing a smart new grey flannel suit, white shirt and dark tie, but no one in the bar – or in Berlin, for that matter – could possibly have mistaken him for anything but a Prussian of the Officers Corps.

‘Peter is still moaning. Papa won’t leave the house and says it’s on account of the influenza epidemic. Mama has become something of a tyrant but she still manages to serve meat, even for lunch: sauerbraten today. I had two helpings.’

‘Your mother is a woman of infinite resource,’ said Alex.

Alex had secured an excellent job – or rather, his influential relative in the War Department had secured it for him. After the failure of the big German offensive of 1918, he was sent to Supreme Headquarters in Spa, Belgium, and appointed an aide de camp to General Schammer, the military governor of Berlin.

The present military governor was a rather disreputable civilian but that didn’t prevent Alex from lording it over his old friend, for there was a great difference between duties on behalf of the headquarters of the Imperial German Army and being with the Freikorps, an ad hoc assembly of enthusiastic volunteers consisting almost entirely of men the army had no place for.

Alex liked to give his friend insightful anecdotes about life among the generals. For a few minutes Alex entertained him with stories about the new commander of the German Army. ‘General Groener is a good sort,’ said Alex. ‘He’s highly intelligent and not at all stuffy.’

‘He’s a Schwab,’ said Pauli before sipping some wine. ‘Get rid of all these damned Prussians, I say.’ It was a Riesling from Alsace, just cold enough and it tasted delicious. Goodness knows when he’d taste its like again: under the terms of the armistice Alsace was now a part of France once more.

Alex grinned. Although Pauli was born in Vienna to an American mother, his upbringing was hardly less Prussian than his friend’s, but there was a running joke that Alex was a Prussian of the most inflexible old-fashioned kind and Pauli was the oppressed Southerner. The friendship between the two boys was based on a long time together and mutual respect. And yet, right from the time they’d first met at Lichterfelde, Pauli was the admirer and Alex, by common consent, was granted an edge of seniority. The admiration that Pauli had always shown for his elder brother Peter was reflected in his respect for Alex. And, typically, Alex responded to this faith that Pauli showed by revealing to him his most treasured secret. Alex said, ‘Although the Chancellor is being held prisoner in his office there’s a secret telephone line from the Chancellery to the army. Chancellor Ebert has asked the army for help.’

‘Good God!’ said Pauli. Everyone believed that the mutinying sailors had cut all the lines from the Chancellery and that Ebert – the new socialist head of government – was being held incommunicado.

‘That’s just between the two of us,’ said Alex. ‘It’s a closely guarded secret, not to be passed on even to your father.’

‘Just as you say, Alex. But it changes things, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, and the army will do what has to be done,’ said Alex enigmatically. ‘Those mutinous pigs will find out what it means tomorrow.’

‘Christmas Eve?’ said Pauli. ‘Why?’

‘Are you in a hurry?’ said Alex languidly.

‘I’ve got all the time you need,’ said Pauli, sipping some more wine and leaning forward to hear what Alex had to tell.

‘It all began on November 9,’ said Alex.

‘Everything did,’ said Pauli.

That much was true: everything began on November 9, 1918. The army’s commanders – too arrogant to face the consequences of their own defeat – had sent some unfortunate civilians through the wire of no-man’s-land to seek an armistice from the Allies, as the Turks and Austrians had already done. During that Saturday, the Imperial German Army ceased to exist as a unified fighting force. Red flags were flying all over the land as soldiers’ committees took control. Alex Horner, on one of his regular visits to Supreme Headquarters from Berlin, was shown the reports. It was amazing: the army’s command structure collapsed like a deck of cards. ‘Riots in Magdeburg’; then, early in the afternoon, ‘7th Army Corps Reserve District rioting threatened’. Halle and Leipzig were declared ‘red’ by 5:00 p.m., and soon afterwards Düsseldorf, Halstein, Osnabrück and Lauenburg went, too. So did Magdeburg, Stuttgart, Oldenburg, Brunswick, and Cologne. By this time the soldiers at Supreme HQ had stopped saluting the officers, and some of the offices were deserted. At 1900 hours, news came that the general officer commanding 18th Army Corps Reserve at Frankfurt was ‘deposed’. It was all over. By early evening Kaiser Wilhelm, German Emperor and ‘All-highest Warlord’, was sitting in the dining car of his private train, waiting for it to leave the siding and start the journey that would take him to exile in Holland.

In Berlin the socialist Cabinet, which had been created without any legal transfer of power, could not contain the disorder. They ordered the army to rip up sections of railway line and so interrupt the trainloads of mutinous soldiers and sailors that were arriving in the capital in ever-increasing numbers. When Alex arrived at the Lehrter station, in a train that had taken two and a half days to reach Berlin from Belgium, he was startled to see that army machine-gun teams commanded a field of fire along every platform and the main concourse. Troops were occupying the gas and electricity works, the government buildings on Wilhelmstrasse were all guarded, and there were even armed soldiers outside some of the town’s finest restaurants.

By the time that Leutnant Horner reported to Berlin’s military governor, that governor was a socialist civilian named Otto Wels. The Imperial Army’s Berlin garrison having deserted – and having no more than a handful of civil policemen at his disposal – Wels had put together a force of ex-soldiers and armed civilians. Most of the rifles had been bought from the deserters who, standing alongside the flower girls, were doing a brisk trade at the Potsdamer Platz at two marks per gun. Even the ‘army’s’ trucks had been purchased in this way from the deserters. Wels had given his scratch force the grandiose title of Republikanische Soldaten – the Republican Soldiers’ Army – but they were a motley collection difficult to distinguish from the extreme left Sicherheitswehr that the Police President employed, or from any of the other armed mobs who patrolled the city looking for victims and plunder. Moreover, Wels’s army was infiltrated by many Spartacists and the extreme-left Independents.

It needed only one visit to the military governor’s office to convince Alex Horner that his officer’s uniform was not suitable attire. He bought a suit in a tailor’s shop in Friedrichstrasse – the first ready-made suit he’d ever worn – and went back to work feeling less uneasy. He did notice the way that the carefully positioned beggars watched him as he arrived. There were few beggars to be seen on the streets in these early days of the revolution. Most of the uniformed ex-servicemen who stood outside the department stores and food shops hoping for money still had enough dignity to be offering a tray of bootlaces, matches or candles. Yet these fellows made no pretence of being pedlars, and Alex was convinced that they were spies. Police spies, Bolsheviks, Spartacists and foreigners, too: the city was alive with spies of all shapes and sizes, and of every political colour. Berlin had always been a city of spies and informers, and it probably always would be.

Berlin’s most serious problem was created by the naval mutineers who’d arrived from the Northern naval bases and settled themselves into the Imperial Palace. The fiasco of this People’s Naval Division turned sour when the sailors became more menacing and demanded their ‘Christmas bonus’. The sailors had been under the influence of Karl Liebknecht ever since occupying the Imperial Palace. And it was Liebknecht’s declared intent to bring down the moderate socialist government of Friedrich Ebert – a forty-seven-year-old ex-saddle maker – by anarchy and confusion. Having the sailors demand ever more money was very much to Liebknecht’s taste. If Ebert was frightened by the extortion and paid out the money, the government would demonstrate their weakness. If they moved against the sailors, it would be a sign that they were the sort of treacherous, reactionary, anti-working-class government that Liebknecht said they were. Either way it would make things easier for Liebknecht to seize power and set up his Leninist regime.

It was December 20 when the sailors announced that they’d spent the first 125,000 marks the government had paid them for guarding the Imperial Palace. Now they wanted more money.

Alex Horner was in the anteroom of the Chancellor’s private office when Otto Wels came out with Ebert. It was the first time Alex had seen the Chancellor at such close quarters. He was an imposing figure, broad and muscular, with jet-black hair and a large moustache and small beard. The government had agreed to pay more money, but first the palace must be evacuated and the People’s Naval Division reduced to six hundred men. The money would be paid only after the keys of the emptied palace had been given to Otto Wels.

On the morning of the day on which Alex and Pauli met, Alex had hurried down to the lobby of the Chancellery in response to a phone call from one of the secretaries. A delegation of sailors was being taken to one of the drawing rooms that were situated to the side of the fine Empire vestibule. One sailor was carrying a leather case that he said held the keys of the Imperial Palace. They wanted their money.

‘Herr Horner is one of the military governor’s assistants,’ said the secretary who was dealing with the sailors. He was a sniffy little man with the curt and superior manner that distinguishes career bureaucrats.

The spokesman for the sailors, a tall petty officer with crooked teeth, asked for Alex Horner’s identity papers. Luckily Wels had arranged such formalities as soon as the young officer got back to the revolution-stricken city. Taken to a Reichstag office by an attendant wearing the livery of the old regime, he’d been given a pass by a woman clerk wearing a red armband. It was an inexpertly printed card on stiff red paper. It said that Horner was ‘authorized to maintain order and security in the streets of the city’. Accompanying it was an identity card issued by the ‘Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council’ saying he was ‘trustworthy and free to pass’. Neither document mentioned his military rank, and if the woman issuing the papers to him knew him to be an army officer she gave no sign of it. From the way she handled the office files, it looked as if she was occupying the same desk as she had before the revolution. Most of the workers were doing the same thing that they’d done during the Kaiserzeit without the red bands and banners. For the Berliner, life was simply a matter of exchanging time for money and money for food. Even during the shooting, the buses ran on time and the water and electricity supply continued normally.

Having scrutinized Horner’s papers, the petty officer showed him his card in return. ‘Petty Officer Esser’. How curious that so many of these revolutionary servicemen clung so tightly to the badges and titles and privileges of the old regime.

Esser politely but firmly explained to Horner and the secretary that the political committee of the People’s Naval Division had decided that they’d not deal with Otto Wels, who, although a socialist, was ‘a class enemy’.

‘Then give the keys to Herr Barth,’ suggested Alex. He was grateful that the secretary had not revealed the fact that he was an army officer.

‘Herr Barth is in a meeting and cannot be disturbed.’ The secretary expected them to hand the keys to him and depart without further delay. Despite wearing a small red ribbon in his buttonhole – a sartorial accessory that had been adopted by many middle-class office workers during the previous few days – the man did not hide his impatience and his distaste for the unwashed revolutionaries.

‘Then get him out of the meeting,’ suggested Alex.

The secretary shook his head to show that there could be no question of interrupting the commissioner. Emil Barth was amongst the most radical of the commissioners, but these wretched socialists had quickly adapted to the bureaucracy of Wilhelmstrasse: meetings, meetings, meetings. And the bureaucrats had easily adapted to their new masters.

‘That would be impossible,’ said the secretary. He was an elderly man with rimless spectacles, bushy eyebrows and a celluloid collar that was going yellow at the edges, like the documents that were to be seen on every side.

‘Try,’ suggested Alex, and the sailors vociferously agreed.

Now there were more arguments and some telephone calls. Everyone who might have placated the sailors had gone to lunch, and the revolutionaries were becoming angrier every minute.

Before the problem was resolved, a messenger came rushing into the lobby with an urgent request for Alex Horner. He must go immediately to the office of Herr Otto Wels. Wels had been kidnapped.

It was not difficult to discover what had happened. Wels’s staff were standing in the corridor talking in loud voices. Some of the women were sobbing. They told how another group of sailors had entered the building by a side door, found their way upstairs, and demanded the Christmas-bonus money from Wels. Wels was heard to say they’d get no money until he had the key.

Which of the sailors was the first to strike Wels makes no difference, for soon he was beaten and frog-marched back to the Imperial Palace, which the sailors obviously had no intention of leaving. According to a message that Alex received later that day from a paid informer, Wels was beaten with rifle butts and thrown into a rat-infested cellar.

That afternoon a large party of the sailors went back to the Chancellery. They were in a bitter frame of mind. They pushed their way into the lobby, posted armed guards at every exit, and took control of the Chancellery telephone exchange. No one – not even the Chancellor – would be permitted to enter or leave the building. They had Wels as a hostage and they wanted their money.

Pauli had listened to Alex Horner’s long story with intermittent attention. He’d studied the other people in the bar, with particular interest in the younger women. He’d had so little free time since the war began – so little time amongst civilians that he’d still not got accustomed to the shorter skirts and the display of female ankles. Women had worn full-length skirts since ancient Greece; surely there was something apocalyptic about the new fashion. If not apocalyptic, certainly provocative, especially when some of the younger ones wore these flesh-coloured stockings!

Between them they’d finished one bottle of wine and were nearly at the bottom of a second one. Now Pauli realized that Alex had reached a stage in his story when some contribution from Pauli was expected. ‘What did you mean about the sailors’ finding out something tomorrow?’

Alex glanced back over his shoulder to be sure he wasn’t overheard. Next door the gypsy band was playing sad Hungarian ballads. ‘The Chancellor used the secret telephone link to summon help from the army. Groener is sending troops. We’ll crush those Red swine once and for all.’

‘Sending them here? To the Royal Palace?’

‘The government is a prisoner, Pauli. They are being held hostage by those people. Groener has ordered several squadrons of the Imperial Horse Guards from the Potsdam barracks to march. They’ll be here by midnight.’

‘Will the troops fire on the sailors?’

‘The Imperial Horse Guards have remained loyal to their officers. There are a few other reliable men coming. Artillery, too. They’ll blast their way into the palace.’

‘The sailors won’t stand much chance against artillery.’

‘They’ve brought it on themselves. I’ve no sympathy for those gangsters.’

‘That fellow Esser you mentioned. I know him.’

‘The petty officer?’ Alex’s blasé mask dropped and he registered surprise. ‘How the devil did you come to know a fellow like that? From the Punishment Battalion?’

Pauli laughed. ‘No, the real rogues don’t end up in the Punishment Battalions, Alex. The real ones end up as generals. We both know that.’

Such remarks made Alex nervous. He looked round again to make sure they weren’t overheard; even so he disassociated himself from such sentiments. ‘I’m not sure about that, Pauli,’ he mumbled.

‘I’d like to try and get Esser out of there,’ said Pauli.

‘Get him out?’

‘He’s a good sort.’

‘There are no “good sorts” there, Pauli. They are all scum.’

‘I can’t leave him to be killed,’ said Pauli. ‘He was my friend. He’s the son of a villager from where my grandparents lived.’

‘It’s too dangerous,’ said Alex.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Pauli. ‘No one’s going to harm me simply for going along to the palace to have a word with Esser.’

‘You’re in uniform.’

‘A private’s uniform.’

‘These people are mutineers, Pauli. One look at you and they’ll know you’re a member of the Officer Corps. And the Freikorps is the avowed enemy of the revolution.’

‘I’ll have to go. Was it midnight you said the soldiers will arrive?’

‘On your honour, you mustn’t warn them,’ said Alex.

Pauli smiled. ‘You must be joking, Alex. No secrets remain secret in this town for more than half an hour.’

‘Then I shall come with you. Perhaps I can persuade them to release Wels.’

‘That would be a feather in your cap, Alex.’

Alex nodded seriously and swigged the last of his Riesling. ‘The more I come to think of it, the more amusing it sounds. Let’s go, Pauli.’

It was only a short walk down Unter den Linden from the Adlon Hotel to the Imperial Palace. As they came out of the hotel, the street was illuminated by the lights of the British Embassy. The Armistice Commission were said to be using it, but there was no sign of British soldiers there. From the far side of the Pariser Platz, close to the Brandenburg Gate, they heard a brass band playing energetically: a Christmas carol. It sounded like a military band, but there was no way to be sure. Beyond the gate, the Tiergarten was being used as a military camp, but no one knew the allegiance of the soldiers. Probably the men were just remaining close to the army soup kitchens that had been set up there. Half a metre of snow had fallen upon Berlin, and the sounds of the city were muffled under the white blanket, so that even the music of the band was distant and muted. They plodded on, icy impacted snow under their feet.

‘You’ve changed, Pauli. You’ve changed a lot.’

‘We’ve grown older,’ said Pauli, dismissing the idea. His father was always talking about the way Pauli had changed. Hadn’t Peter changed? Hadn’t Mama changed? And hadn’t Harald Winter changed most of all?

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ persisted Alex. ‘Was it the Punishment Battalion?’ They’d been together many times since Pauli had served his sentence, but until now the Punishment Battalion had been a taboo subject.

‘Changed in what way?’

‘You’re tougher, more determined. In the old days you wouldn’t have come looking for trouble. You’d have let a fellow such as Esser fend for himself.’

‘The Punishment Battalion was nothing. It was a relief to get away from that pig Brand. Sometimes I pitied you for still having to endure the brute.’

‘But they sent you into all the hardest fighting.’

‘It wasn’t so bad. It made a man of me. I learned how to survive – survive when all the odds were against survival, survive when all around me were dying.’

‘And after that you went to serve in a Sturmbataillon. Tell me about that. Was it like the Punishment Battalion?’

‘It was like nothing you’ve ever seen. With more such units we would have won, Alex.’

‘It wasn’t the lack of storm battalions, Pauli. It was these damned civilians who stabbed us in the back. As an officer I remain loyal to the government, but it’s hard to forget that these politicians we take orders from are the cowards and socialists who railed against the army all through the war….’ He stopped; even now his officer training inhibited him against such outbursts, ‘But tell me about the storm battalion.’

‘No rifles: carbines, and lightweight machine pistols, and small flame throwers. Everything was designed for lightness and fast movement. Even the other ranks got pistols. Special uniforms, leather pads on elbows and knees. No cartridge pouches – we stuffed rounds into our pockets. Round our necks we carried bags of grenades. We were unstoppable …and ruthless.’

‘They took you as a Stosstruppführer.’

‘They didn’t care that I’d been in a Punishment Battalion, if that’s what you mean. Yes, they made me a Stosstruppführer. There were plenty of vacancies: officers always had to lead their men into the attack. Only young, unmarried men were accepted, and the physical was the strictest I’ve ever had.’

‘I envy you the experience, Pauli. The storm battalions have become a legend. But you were lucky to survive.’

‘You mustn’t believe all the stories you hear, Alex. Storm troops were kept in the rear until they were needed for some special task; even then they took us most of the way by truck. And we had lots of leave, and the food was always the very best available.’

‘You sound nostalgic, Pauli.’

‘Let me explain something to you, Alex. You grew up wanting to be an army officer. But I never wanted to go to cadet school. It was my father’s idea. I loved my father – I still do – but my father has no respect for me; he thinks I’m brainless, and he doesn’t care about anything except brains, especially the sort of brains that know how to make money. My elder brother doesn’t give a damn about Father, but he’s the one my father loves. I realized that I didn’t have the brains that my brother Peter has, so I went to the cadet school the way Papa wanted. Now soldiering is the only trade I know.’

‘Well, now the workers’ and soldiers’ committees are taking over all your father’s factories, it’s ended up making little difference to you.’

‘Papa will find a way; he always does.’

‘But you seemed happy enough at Lichterfelde.’

‘Yes, I came to like it. I’ve always been adaptable: younger brothers have to adapt to what everyone else wants. And I liked the respect that an officer’s uniform got for me. Do you remember, Alex? Members of the Officer Corps were gods. I loved all that, Alex, the bowing and scraping that I got from civilians. I loved being saluted, and the way that people stood aside to let me pass in the street and let me be served first in shops.’

‘I suppose we all did. And yet here we are: me skulking in civilian clothes and you masquerading as a private soldier.’ Pauli looked at his friend. Alex was wearing a grey bowler hat and an old-fashioned Inverness – a loose-fitting grey overcoat with attached shoulder cape. It wasn’t a particularly odd costume amid the curiously garbed people to be seen on the city’s streets, but it was hardly appropriate for a Prussian officer.

Pauli nodded. ‘And I even loved the Kaiser. I loved the idea that someone knew what was best for Germany and what was best for the army and the Officers Corps and what was best for me. And when the war went on and all sorts of riffraff like Brand managed to get commissions, I still didn’t care, because those people weren’t real officers: the Prussian Officer Corps was still a small elite that outsiders couldn’t enter.’ They walked in silence for a few moments while Pauli collected and ordered his thoughts. ‘And then came the Sturmbataillon. It was a world I’d never known. It let me be myself. I wish you’d been with me, Alex.’

‘You said that in one of your letters.’

‘We spoke using “du”, officers and men alike. I called my men by their first names, and often we’d be sitting around talking together with no rank deferentials. Arguing politics, or talking about what kind of Germany we’d have after the war.’

‘And did any of you guess it would be like this?’ Alex whipped his walking stick through the heaped snow.

Pauli snorted. ‘Who could have guessed it would end like this? No one! Who would have guessed that the Kaiser would run away so that Fritz Esser and his friend Liebknecht would be sitting in the Imperial Palace? Who’d guess that a collection of half-baked intellectuals and socialist draft dodgers would be running Germany as a ramshackle republic, and that the Imperial Horse Guards would be answering their call for help?’

‘I thought you were about to tell me that your time with the common man had provided you with a new understanding of the socialists, Pauli.’

‘Socialists are dreamers. The time for dreaming is long past. Our Fatherland is dying, and no one goes to help.’ He kicked the top from a mountain of snow, so that it shattered into a white cloud.

When they got to Friedrichstrasse they had to wait for the traffic before they could cross the road. It was astounding how life went on, seemingly unaffected by the fact that the city was in the throes of revolution. Even while shooting could be heard, the Christmas shoppers crowded the pavements and the motor buses kept going. There was the smoky smell of roasted chestnuts and the sound of American jazz music from one of the nearby clubs. A shop assistant and a chauffeur were loading dozens of coloured parcels into a large car while a fur-coated matron counted them. It was hard to believe that the dull thuds heard earlier that day had been mortar shells exploding, and that right now artillery was on its way to assault the Imperial Palace.

‘Civilians have their own affairs to attend to,’ commented Alex as they crossed the road, dodging a taxicab.

‘Making money, do you mean?’ said Pauli scornfully.

‘You can’t live without it.’

‘There are other, more important things than money, Alex. That’s what I learned with the storm troops, and that’s what many of our Freikorps volunteers believe.’

‘Are they men from your old storm troops?’

‘In my battalion a dozen or so are old comrades. That’s what made me join. If recruiting continues as at present, I’ll have my own company next month.’

Alex Horner chuckled. ‘And all this time I’ve been thinking that you’d become old and cynical, Pauli, While really you are the same fervent optimist and dreamer that I’ve always known.’

‘You can mock me, but…’

‘I’m not mocking you, Pauli. We all feel the same way. Everyone I know and respects feels more or less the way that you do. They all feel frustrated watching this damned government being treated with contempt by every rascal at home, and spat upon by Paris, London and Washington.’

‘But you remain aloof? Or are you just fatalistic?’

‘If the mob wants to be ruled by the Spartacists, then so be it. I’m a professional soldier; I’ll obey lawful commands from the army, just as the Russian army do under Lenin.’

Pauli shook his head. ‘You are too naïve, Alex. Do you really think that Lenin represents the Russian worker? Lenin’s party is a tiny, noisy, violent group that seized power and then slaughtered all the opposition. Now, here in Germany, Ebert’s socialists are in the majority but the Spartacists are already trying some of Lenin’s tricks to get power in Germany. And then heaven help Liebknecht’s opponents. They’ll be put against the wall and shot without trial.’

Behind them they heard the sound of marching men coming down the Linden from the direction of the Tiergarten. In the darkness the soldier’s hobnailed boots were striking sparks from the paving. They were Uhlan Guards. The two young officers watched approvingly as the soldiers wheeled into the entrance to the university. There were few such trained and disciplined units left in the whole of Germany.

As the two men got closer to the Imperial Palace, Unter den Linden became more crowded. There were the usual streetcorner groups of men in makeshift uniforms. Most of them had their rifles slung over the shoulder muzzle-down in what had become the style of all the revolutionaries. But these armed men were outnumbered by sightseers who’d arrived in response to the rumours that were now being spread across the city. They wanted to see how the army was going to tackle the bellicose sailors. Or, as another rumour had it, they wanted to watch the army’s monarchists staging a counter-revolution.

When Alex and Pauli reached the main entrance of the palace, three sentries were there, pale-faced youngsters with soft, sailor hats, and bandoliers crossing their chest. They were warming their hands at a bonfire on the pavement. In the fire could be seen bits of antique furniture, its polish and gilt bubbling and blistering in the flames. They asked the guards for Esser. It took a long time to find him. Alex and Pauli stood by the fire and tried to see into the courtyard. Even from their limited view of the interior it was clear that the sailors were excited and frightened by the prospect of a pitched battle with the army units that were marching from Potsdam.

After about fifteen minutes an armed sailor took them inside and upstairs. Esser, typically, had bivouacked in the Empress’s private apartments, and that is where they were taken. Although the whole place had been ransacked, many of the personal possessions of the royal occupants were in evidence. Lace jackets and long ball dresses were still hanging in the Empress’s dressing rooms. Her writing desk had been broken into, and sheets of stationery and envelopes were scattered round, presumably by those people who’d been hawking examples of the royal correspondence round the streets. On the floor were powder boxes, some hairbrushes, combs and silver frames from which photos had been wrenched.

And yet the overall impression of this sanctum was of charmless vulgarity, an ostentatious collection of frivolous knick-knacks that might be expected in the house of some nouveau-riche tradesman.

‘The chairman of the sailors’ and workers’ emergency committee will come in five minutes,’ announced a bearded sailor.

‘Is that Fritz Esser?’ Pauli asked.

‘Yes, Comrade Esser,’ said the sailor. ‘You are not permitted to touch anything or to leave the room on pain of death; do you understand?’

‘Yes, we understand,’ said Leutnant Horner. He had by now grown used to the extravagant rhetoric of the revolution.

For ‘Chairman’ Fritz Esser of the People’s Naval Division it had been an eventful day, even when compared with the other crowded days of the past few weeks. But, as had happened so often since those early days of November 1918, he’d been outguessed and out-manoeuvred and eventually shouted down.

The trouble was that Esser never properly evaluated his opposition. It had been like that right from the time the naval mutinies began. Fritz Esser was usually the first to spot an opportunity, but he lacked the skill and cynicism to follow through his advantage.

For instance, the Spartacists and the left-wing radicals of the Independents had always expected that the revolution, about which they’d talked for years, would begin amongst the tired, frightened and exhausted front-line soldiers, rather than amongst sailors or civilians. It was Fritz Esser who’d persisted with his secret meetings and inflammatory leaflets directed at the crews of the battleships and battle cruisers of the High Seas Fleet, which had spent almost the entire war anchored in the Northern ports.

It was Esser – in a secret report to one of Liebknecht’s acolytes – who’d told them that fighting men would be the last ones to mutiny. That was evident here in the seaports, where there was little interest in Karl Marx amongst the U-boat crews or the men who’d chosen dangerous duty with the torpedo boats and destroyers that regularly sailed out to fight the enemy. The men who came to his meetings were the crews of the big ships: conscripts from the cities, bored, discontented men who chafed at the restrictions of military life and had nothing to do but parade, chip rust and paint their towering steel prisons. These men, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, were the ones who listened to Esser’s dreams of tomorrow.

Even the previous summer, after Esser had encouraged men of the battleship Prinzregent Luitpold to walk ashore at Wilhelmshaven in defiance of orders – a crime for which two of Esser’s fellow believers faced an army firing squad – the Spartacists did not believe that the High Seas Fleet was a fertile ground in which their agitators could scatter the seeds of revolution. Esser’s reports were ignored. In September a Spartacist leader told Esser that the Naval High Command’s reforms – ‘food committees’, elected by the sailors, were henceforward to distribute the rations – had removed the promise of further revolt.

It was only when, posted to Kiel, Esser had got the real mutinies going there that the Spartacist leadership started to take notice. But even then they were lukewarm and pointed out that the mutiny was only a reaction to being ordered to sea for a final suicide battle with the British navy. The Spartacists’ political committee in Berlin seemed offended by the fact that the sailors lacked political motivation. They insisted that this mutiny would never become the workers’ revolution they wanted.

Esser and his friends ignored the dicta from Berlin. It was one of Esser’s young disciples whose speeches prompted the stokers on the battleship Helgoland to draw their slicers through the coals, bring them out on the floor plates, and damp the fires with the hoses. Without heat enough to make steam Admiral von Hipper’s order to put to sea could not be obeyed.

And when the U–135 threatened to torpedo the Thüringen unless its mutineers surrendered, it was one of Esser’s converts who persuaded the Helgoland’s gunners to level their sights at the submarine. That Esser wasn’t present for this fiasco, which ended with the mutineers in prison, did not change his proud claim to have started the revolution. For within a few days not only Kiel but dozens of other towns and cities as well were under the control of workers’ and sailors’ councils. The army did nothing to put down the revolt: it was too widespread.

And so, when Esser got to Berlin with the vanguard of the mutinying sailors who now called themselves the Volksmarine or People’s Naval Division, he expected to be greeted with praise and thanks by the Spartacist hierarchy. But Esser was brushed aside as the politicians took control of the revolution in which they had shown so little belief. Esser became no more than a minor party functionary, a chairman for a committee that until today was asked to do nothing more important than arrange duty rosters for the cleaning of the billets and settle disputes between the numerous drunks, thieves and petty criminals who soon attached themselves to the sailors.

The important decisions about Spartacist policy – or lack of any – were being made by the same people who’d given Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg such bad advice in the past. Self-serving men with hard eyes, dark suits and sharp city accents dismissed Esser and his like as country bumpkins without the sort of political sophistication that was needed to steer the forthcoming revolution, which would sweep the temporary socialist government from power and replace it with uncompromising authoritarian rule.

And yet the men and women who could hear only Esser’s country accent would have done well to study his conclusions, for Esser was shrewd and perceptive. Esser’s report on the irregular army formations – Freiwillige Landesjägerkorps or Freikorps – now springing up all over Germany was something that Spartacist leaders would have done well to read. Esser had become an expert on discontent, and he was able to distinguish the discontent of the sailors he’d helped to bring to a state of mutiny and the sort of discontent that was furnishing the Freikorps with more men than they could properly clothe and arm.

Few sailors of the Naval Division had seen any action in the war. Typically they were unmarried ex-factory workers with no fixed addresses. Some of them went on regular forays of looting and housebreaking and even demanding money from well-dressed people in the streets, always disguising their crimes with neat political labels. The sailors remained in the Imperial Palace because they were being provided with payments by the government – who were frightened of them – and because it was warmer and more comfortable than the street to which they would otherwise be relegated. As long as Liebknecht and Luxemburg encouraged them, they would cheer the Spartacists’ speeches.

The men of the Freikorps were a totally different proposition, as Esser pointed out. The Freikorps recruits came largely from front-line soldiers. For these men the world was divided into ‘the front’ and ‘the rear’. The rear were the civilians who’d made so much money in the war factories and the bosses who owned them. The rear were the bankers and the financiers, the pacifists who’d made speeches against the war, and the ‘November criminals’ who’d signed the armistice. Although officers were excluded from the People’s Naval Division, the Freikorps soldiers readily included their battle-hardened officers as part of their exclusive fraternity.

Perhaps it was while compiling his neglected report that Fritz Esser began to discover something about himself. Esser had never been in battle. His naval service had been spent in the comparative comfort and the indisputable safety of Imperial Naval barracks. And although he’d never admitted it, Esser felt uneasy about his passive role in this great ‘war to end wars’, for Esser – despite his revolutionary declarations – had the inborn respect for the warrior that so burdens the German soul.

Endless bickering, inarticulate committees meeting long into the night without reaching any conclusions, had wearied and disillusioned him. And on this Monday evening, the 23rd day of December, 1918, Esser had reached the end of his patience. The prospect of the Imperial Palace coming under attack by loyal units of the army frightened him, and he made no secret of his fear. Even the light artillery that informers said were being readied at Potsdam would be enough to blow the main doors in, and the effect of shrapnel fire in these confined spaces would not bear thinking about.

And yet trying to get this simple fact understood by his committee had proved far beyond his power. Not that any of the committee members offered a sensible alternative to his suggestion that they open talks with Ebert and release their hostages – Otto Wels in particular – as a gesture of good faith. He was shouted down by cries of ‘Traitor!’ and ‘No surrender!’ rather than defeated in rational discussion. Finally Esser exploded with rage. He yelled obscenities at these pompous pen-pushers – Bonsen, he called them – and stormed out of the meeting. It was then that the messenger came to say that two army plenipotentiaries were waiting for him downstairs. This was the beginning of the end. He felt frightened. Now what was he supposed to do? Temporize, yes, but how?

‘I am Esser, committee chairman. What is it?’ Esser fixed them with his dark, piercing eyes. Pauli immediately recognized his friend, who’d grown into a barrel-chested giant, pea jacket open, red neckerchief at his throat and sailor cap on the back of his close-cropped head.

‘Fritz! Remember me, Pauli Winter? Travemünde.’

Esser didn’t recognize Pauli. His eyes went to Alex Horner. He recognized Horner from the meeting in the Chancellery; he was some sort of military side to Otto Wels. It was to be expected that the army would send him to parley about the release of Berlin’s military governor. Esser had opposed the idea of holding the socialist politician here as hostage: it was nothing better than kidnapping and extortion. Such tactics would not endear the People’s Naval Division to the working class. Esser knew the working class: they were moralists.

‘Come away from the palace, Fritz. I want to talk to you.’

Esser went to the window. It was dark outside, but he could see the crowds. He thought he could see the lights from the cathedral shining on steel helmets. But steel helmets didn’t mean that the army had arrived; half the population of Berlin seemed to be wearing steel helmets and carrying guns. He turned back to look at the two men. The fellow from Wels’s office was unmistakably a Prussian officer, despite the bowler hat, walking stick and long overcoat. The other was dressed in a battered army greatcoat and a steel helmet with a swastika painted on the front. They shouldn’t have let him in here with that pistol strapped to his belt, but it was too late now.

‘Fritz!’ said Pauli once more.

He recognized him now. The kid from the big house at Travemünde: Paul Winter. Perhaps it was going to be all right. He grabbed the young man’s outstretched hand. ‘What the devil are you doing here? Did the army send you?’

‘The army? No.’

‘Good God, Pauli, the guards only brought you in here because they thought you were sent by the army to negotiate with us.’

‘Come and have a beer, Fritz.’

Esser turned to Alex Horner. ‘You haven’t come here to ask for the release of Otto Wels?’

Alex was on the point of saying, to the devil with Wels. Instead he told Esser, ‘Herr Winter is my friend.’

‘Then let’s go and drink beer!’ said Fritz Esser loudly. He smiled to show his crooked teeth. ‘I’ll buy you more beer than you can drink, young Winter.’

‘That might be a lot of beer, Fritz.’

‘It’s not a trick?’ said Esser, his face suddenly darkening.

‘You have my word,’ said Alex Horner formally. He clicked his heels.

‘My friend is a Prussian stuffed-shirt,’ Pauli told Esser, ‘but under that shirt there is a goodhearted fellow.’

‘I’ll trust you,’ said Esser. It seemed a long time since he’d trusted anyone very much, but now he wanted to shed the worries of the day and forget, forget, forget. Let those know-it-alls of the committee continue their arguments without him. ‘Where shall we drink?’ Just to be on the safe side, he strapped a belt and pistol around his waist. He ran his hand over his bristly hair and felt his scalp damp with sweat, then plonked his cap back on his head.

Pauli had his answer ready: ‘There’s a Kneipe behind the Spittelmarkt: Guggenheimer’s place. Know it?’

The choice of venue reassured Fritz Esser. Guggenheimer was a Jew with half a dozen children, all of whom attended the university, with varying degrees of success. His bar was a student hangout with cheap food and strong beer. All sorts of odd people went there. It was the sort of place that a sailor, a Freikorps man and a smartly dressed civilian might be able to drink together without getting unwelcome attention.

Alex stole a glance at his friend. Had it all been planned by Pauli? He could be devious and cunning: it was a part of his nature that few people knew. And yet Pauli was sincere, too; that was what so beguiled Esser.

‘The pay is not important,’ said Pauli Winter after several tankards of Guggenheimer’s best dark beer had been consumed. ‘It’s the comradeship: men you can trust with your life. Good fellows, every one of them. But the money is good, too. Every volunteer has a daily basic pay of forty marks, and now the government are adding another five. Then there’s the food: two hundred grams of meat and seventy-five grams of butter and a quarter-litre of wine. Plenty of beer and cigarettes, too.’ He held up his beer. ‘In our canteen this would cost us almost nothing. But a lot of the men join because Freikorps service counts towards their pension. Take you, Fritz,’ he added, as if taking an example entirely at random. ‘You’d be taken into the Freikorps at your present naval rank and pay – in fact, you’d become my sergeant major, because I’m getting my own company next month – and your Freikorps service counts towards your pension. Plus the regular family allowance will immediately start again for your parents. How are they, by the way?’

‘My father is not well,’ said Fritz Esser absent-mindedly.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Pauli. It was a part of Pauli’s charm that he could express his genuine sorrow that the ‘pig man’ was unwell, then immediately continue his description of life in the Freikorps, without seeming uncaring. ‘People who can handle the administration side are difficult to find. The storm battalions were not noted for their paperwork. But now we can only get pay, allowances, food and all the other supplies we need if the office work is properly done. These socialists are all bureaucrats, you see; we have to play their game.’

‘Why do we have to play their game?’ Esser inquired. ‘I don’t trust this government.’

Alex nodded agreement and leaned forward to hear Pauli’s reply.

‘For the time being,’ said Pauli. ‘When the right time comes, Germany will have proper leadership.’

‘An emperor?’ asked Alex Horner.

‘Perhaps,’ said Pauli. ‘But somehow I think we’ve seen the end of the House of Hohenzollern. His Highness lacked the qualities of a true Prussian soldier-king, and no one who’s seen the Crown Prince at close quarters would hope he’d be any better.’

‘Heartily agreed,’ said Alex Horner, and belched. Esser took off his old patched jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. His bare arms were covered with tattoos: serpents, girls’ names and expressions of fidelity in elaborate scrollwork.

‘Get more beer,’ said Pauli.

‘It’s my turn,’ said Fritz Esser. He was the oldest of the three men and determined to pay his way. He got up and walked to the counter with only the slightest unsteadiness.

With Esser out of earshot, Alex Horner whispered, ‘You’ll never recruit this wretch to your damned Freikorps Graf.’ Alex didn’t like Captain Graf, the diminutive homosexual who ran his private army like some medieval war-lord, but he was cautious about voicing such thoughts to Pauli who’d become something of an apologist for this strange man.

‘There’s not one there who could take on the job of a sergeant major,’ said Pauli.

‘Not one where?’

‘In the company that I’ll take over next month. Good soldiers, good fighters, good comrades, but no skewer upon which I can fix them.’

‘You’ll never do it, Pauli. The fellow’s a Spartacist.’

‘He’ll see reason,’ said Pauli complacently. ‘Fritz is a sensible fellow.’

‘You mad fool. Did you have this in mind right from the start?’

Before Pauli answered, Esser was back with three foaming steins of beer. He slammed them on the table. ‘Drink, drink, drink,’ he urged. He looked round to see who was seated nearby. ‘And then there are a couple of things you must tell me about this Freikorps business.’

Fortified with several litres of Guggenheimer’s beer, the trio went down Leipziger Strasse, visiting various bars, until they turned north along Friedrichstrasse, where the nightlife was even more raucous: male and female prostitutes mingling with beggars, drunks, and pickpockets, and from every side the frantic sounds of recently arrived American jazz.

Fritz Esser never went back to the Imperial Palace. When, early on that Christmas Eve morning, the army’s artillery opened fire on the palace, Esser didn’t even hear the gunfire, for he was in an upstairs room over a club behind the Schiffbauerdamm Theatre, asleep in the arms of a half-undressed nightclub hostess.

As 1918 tottered to a close, Fritz Esser was enrolled in the Freikorps. On the other side of the city, Liebknecht joined his Spartakusbund to the Independent Socialists and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, called his new political entity the Communist Party of Germany, and began arming his supporters.

Everywhere in Berlin the madness continued: lines of hungry people formed outside the bakers’ shops, and butchers’, too, and stared into expensive restaurants, where war profiteers and their gloriously attired women gobbled champagne and caviar. On the Western Front the Allies had stopped fighting but their naval blockade continued, and thousands of Germans died of malnutrition. Throughout Europe the influenza virus decimated the tired and hungry population; it brought death to seventeen hundred Berliners in a single day.

Whatever reservations Fritz Esser had had about serving under the command of his young friend they soon evaporated as Pauli Winter led his company across the rooftops of Wilhelmstrasse despite Spartacist snipers across the street. Soon Pauli had repaid any debt he owed Esser for hauling him from the sea so long ago. More than once Pauli saved his sergeant major from death or injury. Once his strong arms saved Esser from sliding off the rain-swept slates into the street below. Esser had followed Graf and the others along the ridge of a saddleback roof. It required balance, daring and speed, and Fritz Esser, burdened with rifle, bandoliers, and a heavy bag of grenades, had none of these in adequate amounts. He slipped on the icy ridge tiles, and his rifle went across the slates and down into the street far below. As Esser started to fall, Pauli grabbed him by the greatcoat collar and held him spread-eagled across the steep roof, while men on the roof on the far side of Wilhelmstrasse fired at him. Only with great difficulty was the unfortunately heavyweight Esser dragged to safety. Pauli laughed about it. Under fire the clumsy Pauli became another man: not just commander of ‘Winter Company’, he was also the most audacious and skilled fighting man in that very formidable unit, Freikorps Graf.

Once, during the heavy fighting in the centre of the city, the two men met briefly with Leutnant Alex Horner. It was during the violent fighting of January 11, 1919, when Freikorps units battled their way into the Police Headquarters on Alexanderplatz, where Spartacist resistance was fierce. It was something of a massacre. The defenders’ morale was weakening as they realized that Liebknecht’s communists were not going to win power by force. Pauli and Esser were amongst the first inside the Police Headquarters courtyard. Esser lobbed a stick grenade through a downstairs window, and both men scrambled into the smoke-filled wreckage; the others followed without hesitation. Now the defenders fell back, room by room, floor by floor, but the merciless Freikorpskämpfer slaughtered everyone they found.

Alex Horner protested at the slaughter. He took his formal objections to Captain Graf. But the Freikorps men were in no mood to listen to technicalities from the regular army. They left no one alive.

The regular army, too, had men who gave no quarter. A few days later an informer reported the presence of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht in a middle-class apartment in Wilmersdorf. The captive pair were taken to the Eden Hotel, near the Memorial Church, which the Horse Guards were using as their head quarters. After a brutal interrogation they were murdered, and with their deaths ‘Spartacus week’ ended.

During this respite the Freikorps reformed and refitted, and Lieutenant Pauli Winter lost his sergeant major. Fritz Esser had, in his brief service with his company, shown only moderate aptitude for infantry tactics, and unless Pauli was at his side he didn’t have the combat experience or the reckless bravery that most of the others showed. But there had been time to recognize the administrative skills he’d learned during his naval service. Fritz Esser was promoted to be an assistant to the battalion adjutant. Then, just two weeks later, after the adjutant was hospitalized, Esser was made battalion adjutant.

Whatever extravagant claims are made for the democratic style of the Freikorps units, there was strong opposition to making Esser an officer. So he became adjutant with that strange compromise rank that the German army invented for such social dilemmas. He was made a Feldwebel-Leutnant, so that he could do an officer’s job with officer’s badges and shoulder straps and officer’s pay without being the social equal of his peers. It was an arrangement that made all concerned very satisfied.

The man that Fritz Esser now worked alongside was Captain Georg Graf, and he was not an easy man to get along with. Despite first appearances, the little Munich-born career officer with big ears, red nose, and unconcealed homosexual preferences wasn’t a figure of fun to anyone who’d fought alongside him, anywhere from Verdun to Alexanderplatz. He was mercurial, violent and unforgiving.

Fritz Esser and Captain Graf – both men difficult and argumentative by nature – worked amicably together. Pauli Winter teased Esser that Graf had fallen in love with him, because that idea made the unmistakably heterosexual Esser nervous. Esser stoically replied that he admired Graf for his physical bravery under fire and appreciated the very real concern he showed for the men under his command. But, whatever the exact nature of the relationship, the mutual regard Esser and Graf showed for each other was genuine and lasting. And that was just as well, for Feldwebel-Leutnant Esser became Graf’s de facto second in command. When Graf was not available, Esser was always consulted. ‘What would Captain Graf probably want…?’ The question was always phrased in such a way that Esser gave an opinion rather than an order, but his underlying authority was undisputed, and Graf supported his adjutant’s decisions, whatever his true feelings may have been.

Feldwebel-Leutnant Esser’s assignment to Headquarters did not mean there was any change in the relationship between him and Pauli Winter. They were very close. Esser was grateful to Pauli for bringing him into the battalion, and though Esser could never replace his brother, Peter, in the role of mentor and protector, or Alex Horner as conscience and example, Fritz Esser was the most priceless of companions. Fritz could be outrageously funny, and he had a sharp eye for the sort of cant and humbug that the new socialist government plentifully supplied every day. Fritz was not a committed socialist; nor was he a communist or a Marxist. And whatever was the political creed that bound the Freikorps men together, Fritz Esser had no heartfelt devotion to that, either. Fritz Esser was an anarchist by both conviction and nature, and Pauli found his anarchistic attitude towards life not only amusing but illuminating and instructive, too.

When Freikorps Graf moved out of Berlin, first to Halle and then to Munich, Esser’s role as quartermaster, mother superior, slave-master and general factotum earned the respect of the entire battalion. En route there was always a hot evening meal ready, a dry place to sleep, and some sort of breakfast, too. Every soldier in the battalion had well-repaired boots and fifty rounds of ammunition in a bandolier in case there was trouble with the local populations, who sometimes preferred their communist committees to the freebooting warriors. And if sometimes they had to march too far, then that was because not even the amazing Fritz could keep all the ancient trucks in good enough repair to transport a battalion of men. Besides, soldiers marched – everyone knew that. Freikorpstruppen liked to march and shoot and sleep rough; that was why they were in the Freikorps. People who didn’t like such hardships and the comradeship that went with them remained civilians, and all good Freikorpskämpfer despised civilians of every political creed.