Читать книгу The Company of Strangers - Robert Thomas Wilson, Robert Wilson - Страница 11

18th November 1942, Wolfsschanze HQ, Rastenburg, East Prussia.

Voss wanted to remove his eyeballs and swill them in saline, see the grit sink to the bottom. The bunker was silent with the Führer away at the Berghof in Obersalzberg. Voss’s work had been finished hours ago but he remained at the situation table, chin resting on his white, piled fists, staring into the map where a rough cratering existed at a point on the Volga river. Stalingrad had been poked and prodded, jabbed and reamed until it was a dirty, paperflaked hole. As Voss looked deeper into it he began to see the blackened, snow-covered city, the cadaverous apartment buildings, the gnarled and twisted beams of shelled factories, the poxed façades, the scree-filled streets littered with stiffened, deep-frozen bodies and, alongside it, growing to midnight black in the white landscape and becoming viscous with the cold, the Volga – the line of communication from the south to the north of Russia.

He was sitting in this position long after he could have gone to bed, contemplating the grey front line that was now stretched to the thinness of piano wire since the German Sixth Army had ballooned it over to Stalingrad, because of his brother. Julius Voss was a major in the 113th Infantry Division of the Sixth Army. This division was not one of those fighting like a pack of street dogs in the ruins of Stalingrad but was dug into the snow somewhere on the treeless steppe east of the point where the river Don had decided to turn south to the Sea of Azov.

Julius Voss was his father’s son. A brilliant sportsman, he’d collected a silver in the epée at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He rode a horse as if it was a part of him. On his first day’s hunting at the age of sixteen he’d tracked a deer for a whole day and shot it in the eye from 300 metres. He was a perfect and outstanding army officer, loved by his men and admired by his superiors. He was intelligent and, despite his life of brilliance, there wasn’t a shred of arrogance in the man. Karl thought about him a lot. He loved him. Julius had been his protector at school, sport not being one of Karl’s strengths and, having too many brains for everybody’s comfort, life could have been hell without a brother three years older and a golden boy, too. So Karl was taking his turn to watch over his brother.

The German position was not as strong as it might first appear. The Russians had trussed up ten divisions in and around the city in bloody and brutal street-to-street fighting since September and now, unless they could hammer home the death blow in the next month, it looked as if the rest of the German army would be condemned to spend another winter out in the open. More men would die and there would be little chance of the Sixth Army being reinforced until the spring. The situation was doomed to a four-month deep-frozen stalemate.

The door to the situation room crashed open, cannoned off the wall and slammed shut. It opened more slowly to reveal Weber standing in the frame.

‘That’s better,’ he said, trying to put some lick on to his lips, clearly drunk, steaming drunk, his forehead shining, his eyes bright, his skin blubber. ‘I knew I’d find you in here, boring the maps again.’

Weber swaggered into the room.

‘You can’t bore maps, Weber.’

‘You can. Look at them, poor bastards. Insensate with tedium. You don’t talk to them, Voss, that’s your problem.’

‘Piss off, Weber. You’re ten schnapps down the hole and not fit to talk to.’

‘And you? What are you doing? Is the brilliant, creative military mind of Captain Karl Voss going to solve the Stalingrad problem…tonight, or do we have to wait another twenty-four hours?’

‘I was just thinking…’

‘Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You were just thinking about what the Reichsminister Fritz Todt said to you before his plane crash…’

‘And why shouldn’t I?’

‘Because it’s morbid in a man of your age. You should be thinking about…about women…’ said Weber and, placing both hands on the table, he began some vigorous, graphic and improbable thrusting.

Voss looked away. Weber collapsed across the table. When Voss looked back, Weber’s face was right there, giving him the wife’s-eye view, head on the pillow, husband sweaty, lurid, tight, pink skin and wet-eyed.

‘You shouldn’t feel guilty just because Todt spoke to you,’ said Weber, licking his lips again, eyes closed now as if imagining a kiss coming to him.

‘That’s not why I feel guilty. I feel…’

‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know,’ said Weber, sitting up and shunning him with a hand. ‘Bore your maps, Voss. Go on. But I’ll tell you this,’ he came in close again, devil breath, ‘Paulus will take Stalingrad before Christmas and we’ll be in Persia by next spring, rolling in sherbet. The oil will be ours, and the grain. How long will Moscow last?’

‘The Romanians on the River Don front have reported huge troop concentrations in their north-west sector,’ said Voss, flat and heavy.

Weber sat up, dangled his legs and gave Voss the gab, gab, gab with his hand.

‘The fucking Romanians,’ he said. ‘Goulash for brains.’

‘That’s the Hungarians.’

‘What?’

‘Who eat goulash.’

‘What do Romanians eat?’

Voss shrugged.

‘Problem,’ said Weber. ‘We don’t know what the Romanian brain consists of, but if you ask me it’s yoghurt…no…it’s the whey from the top of the yoghurt.’

‘You’re boring me, Weber.’

‘Let’s have a drink.’

‘You’re stinking already.’

‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing Voss around the shoulders and barging him out of the door, their cheeks touching as they went through, horrid lovers.

Weber slashed the lights out. They put on their coats and went back to their quarters. Weber crashed about in his own room while Voss moved the chess game, which he was playing against his father by post, away from the bed. Weber appeared, triumphant, with schnapps. He crashed down on to the bed, hoicked a magazine out from under his buttocks.

‘What’s this?’

‘Die Naturwissenschafen.’

‘Fucking physics,’ said Weber, hurling the magazine. ‘You want to get into something…’

‘…physical, yes, I know, Weber. Give me the schnapps, I need to be braindead to continue.’

Weber handed over the bottle, bolstered his wet head with Voss’s pillow, whacking it into position with his stone cranium. Voss sipped the clear liquid which lit a trail down to his colon.

‘What’s physics going to do for me?’ burped Weber.

‘Win the war.’

‘Go on.’

‘Give us endless reusable energy.’

‘And?’

‘Explain life.’

‘I don’t want life explained, I just want to live it on my own terms.’

‘Nobody gets to do that, Weber…not even the Führer.’

‘Tell me how it’s going to win us the war.’

‘Perhaps you haven’t heard talk of the atom bomb.’

‘I heard Heisenberg nearly blew himself up with one in June.’

‘So you’ve heard of Heisenberg.’

‘Naturally,’ said Weber, brushing imaginary lint from his fly. ‘And the chemist Otto Hahn. You think I don’t stick my ear out in that corridor every now and again.’

‘I won’t bore you then.’

‘So what’s it all about? Atom bombs.’

‘Forget it, Weber.’

‘It goes in easier when I’m drunk.’

‘All right. You take some fissionable material…’

‘I’m lost.’

‘Remember Goethe.’

‘Goethe! Fuck. What did he say about “fissionable material”?’

‘He said: “What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.’”

‘Gloomy bastard,’ said Weber, snatching back the bottle. ‘Start again.’

‘There’s a certain type of material, a very rare material, which when brought together in a critical mass – shut up and listen – could create as many as eighty generations of fission – shut up, Weber, just let me get it out – before the phenomenal heat would blow the mass apart. That means…’

‘I’m glad you said that.’

‘…that, if you can imagine this, one fission releases two hundred million electron bolts of energy and that would double eighty times before the chain reaction would stop. What do you think that would produce, Weber?’

‘The biggest blast known to mankind. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘A whole city wiped out with one bomb.’

‘You said this fissionable material’s pretty rare.’

‘It comes from uranium.’

‘Aha!’ said Weber, sitting up. ‘Joachimstahl.’

‘What about it?’

‘Biggest uranium mine in Europe. And it’s in Czechoslo-vakia…which is ours,’ said Weber, cuddling the schnapps bottle.

‘There’s an even bigger one in the Belgian Congo.’

‘Aha! Which is ours, too, because…’

‘Yes, Weber, we know, but it’s still a very complicated chemical process to get the fissionable material out of the uranium. The stuff they’d found was called U 235 but they could only get traces and it decayed almost instantly. Then somebody called Weizsäcker began to think about what happened to all the excess neutrons released by the fission of U 235, some would be captured by U 238, which would then become U 239, which would then decay into a new element which he called Ekarhenium.’

‘Voss.’

‘Yes?’

‘You’re boring the shit out of me. Drink some more of this and try saying it all backwards. It might, you know, make more sense.’

‘I told you it was complicated,’ said Voss. ‘Anyway, they’ve found a way to make the “fissionable material” comparatively easily in an atomic pile, which uses graphite and some stuff called heavy water, which we used to be able to get from the Norsk Hydro plant in Norway – until the British sabotaged it.’

‘I remember something about that,’ said Weber. ‘So the British know we’re building this bomb.’

‘They know we have the science – it’s in all these magazines you’re throwing around my room – but do we have the capability? It’s a huge industrial undertaking, building an atomic pile is just the first step.’

‘How much of this Ekarhe—shit do you need to make a bomb?’

‘A kilo, maybe two.’

‘That’s not very much…to blow up an entire city.’

‘Blow up isn’t really the word, Weber,’ said Voss. ‘Vaporize is more like it.’

‘Give me that schnapps.’

‘It’s going to take years to build this thing.’

‘We’ll be rolling in sherbet by then.’

Weber finished the bottle and went to bed. Voss stayed up and read his mother’s part of the letter, which contained detailed descriptions of social occasions and was strangely comforting. His father, General Heinrich Voss, sitting out the war in enforced retirement, having made the mistake of voicing his opinions about the Commissar Order – where any Jews or partisans encountered in the Russian campaign were to be handed over to the SS for ‘treatment’ – would add an irascible note at the bottom and a chess move. This time his move was followed by the word ‘check’ and the line: ‘You don’t know it yet but I’ve got you on the run.’ Voss shook his head. He didn’t even have to think. He dragged the chair with the chessboard to him, made his father’s move and then his own, which he scribbled on to a note and put in an envelope to post in the morning.

At 10.00 a.m. 19th November the first conference of the day got underway with a discussion over an enlarged map of Stalingrad and its immediate vicinity. No attempt had been made to alter the map to show the true state of the city. All it indicated was neatly packaged sectors, red for Russian, grey for German, like peacetime postal districts.

At 10.30 a.m. the teleprinters shunted into life and the phones started ringing. General Zeitzler was called from the room, to return minutes later with the announcement that a Russian offensive had started at 05.20 a.m. He showed how a Russian tank force had broken through the Romanian sectors and was now heading south-east towards the river Don, and that activity had broken out along the whole front to hold German forces in their positions. A panzer corps had been sent to engage the advancing Russians. Everything was in hand. Voss made the necessary alterations to the map. They went back to the Stalingrad situation leaving Zeitzler fingering the small flag of the panzer corps and rasping a hand over his sandpaper chin.

By lunchtime the next day news reached Rastenburg of a second large Russian offensive starting south of Stalingrad, with such huge numbers of tanks and infantry it was inconceivable that they’d had no intelligence.

The Stalingrad map was rolled and stacked.

It was clear that full encirclement of the Sixth Army was the Russian intention. Voss felt sick and empty as Zeitzler dragged him and his inexhaustible memory around wherever he went. Voss stood over Zeitzler’s telephone conversations to the Führer, vomiting information which the Army Chief of Staff would use in a desperate bid to impress on Hitler the dire circumstances and the need to allow the Sixth Army to retreat. The Führer paced the great hall of the Berghof swearing at Slavs and hammering tables into submission.

Sunday, 22nd November was Totensonntag, the day of remembrance for the dead, and after a subdued service they heard that the two Russian forces were about to meet and that encirclement was a foregone conclusion. The Führer left the Berghof for Leipzig to fly on to Rastenburg.

As Voss began the monumental task of drafting orders for the phased withdrawal of the Sixth Army the Führer stopped his train en route to Leipzig and called Zeitzler expressly to forbid any retreat.

Zeitzler sent Voss back to his room and, to take his mind off the disaster, Voss pored over the chess game. In doing so he suddenly saw his error, or rather, he perceived his father’s strength of position. He searched for the letter he’d scribbled days ago and found that one of the orderlies had posted it for him. He took out another sheet of paper and wrote one word on it. Resigned.

The Führer arrived in Rastenburg on 23rd November and after the initial shock of the Russian success nerves steadied. In the days and weeks that followed the disaster, Voss witnessed the transformation of the Rastenburg HQ. It ceased to be a military installation and became instead the stuff of legend. Men would arrive, tear off their cloaks and capes and perform miracles in front of their glassyeyed leader. Vast and powerfully armoured divisions, miraculously supplied, would appear and drive up from the south to relieve the stricken army. When, as in some bizarre game of three-card monte, this force failed to materialize, another maestro would whisk away a silken sheet and show fleets of aircraft supplying and resupplying until, brought back up to full strength, the Sixth Army would take Stalingrad, break the Russian encirclement and assume their position in Germanic legend. Everything became possible. Rastenburg became a circus where the greatest illusionists of the time came to perform.

At this stage, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, a sickness settled itself in Voss’s gut. The news of men dying of starvation and cold, and the back to back shows from prestidigitators from all the forces, sealed off his stomach. His blue eyes sunk back into his head, his uniform hung off his ribs. He sipped water or schnapps and smoked upwards of fifty cigarettes a day.

In mid December an attempt was made to relieve the army from the south. The Russians stalled the attack and proceeded to smash the Italian army and decimate the air transport fleet. Still the Führer refused permission for the Sixth Army to retreat; his eyes seared the situation maps demanding deliverance.

Voss listened, first to the quality of the silence in the situation conferences, which were black, crushing and hideous, and then to the boot-licking apostles of the High Command who would pledge the impossible for one look of love from the Führer. He asked for a transfer to the front. Zeitzler refused him and, perhaps after seeing the bones appearing through the skin of Voss’s face, went on Stalingrad rations himself. They became known as ‘the cadavers’.

There had been no improvement in the German Sixth Army’s position by the beginning of January 1943 and Voss, pale with his facial skin drawn tightly over his skull, found himself on his bed in his room smoking and sipping some of Weber’s violent schnapps. He had two letters in front of him on the seat of a chair where he used to keep the chess games he played with his father. There’d been no chess since his resignation back in November. The two letters, both short, one from his father and the other from his brother, had presented him with a problem whose only solution involved calling on SS Colonel Bruno Weiss.

The Kessel, Stalingrad

1st January 1943

Dear Karl,

You know better than anyone our situation out here. I can only thank you for trying to send us the sausages and ham for Christmas but it was a lost cause. They probably never got off the airstrip. Real meat has not been seen for weeks. Krebs and Stahlschuss came up with some shreds of dried mule so that we managed to have some kind of celebration for the New Year. It wasn’t as good as Christmas which, whatever happens to me now, will have been one of the greatest military experiences of my short career. It’s difficult to believe in this unbearable environment that men can find (I’ve thought about this a long time to try to find the right word) such sweetness in themselves. They gave each other things which were their last and most important possessions and if they had nothing they made something from bits of metal or carved bone retrieved from the steppe. It was remarkable to find the human spirit so undaunted. Glaser has tried to have me taken to the hospital again (I’m yellow, and the legs are still badly swollen so that I can’t move about) but I’ve refused. I never want to see that vision of hell again. I won’t tell you. You must have heard by now.

I listen to the men and there’s been a change in their mood now. Before the New Year they would say that the Führer will rescue them. Now, if they still think that, they don’t say it. We are resigned to our fate and you might be surprised to hear that we are cheerful because, and I know this will sound absurd in the circumstances, we are free.

I think of you and am always your brother,

Julius

Karl read this letter over and over. His brother had never been one for the examination of the soul and his discovery of the nobility of man in these desperate circumstances was a revelation. Karl was sickened by the thought of playing on Weiss’s side of the fence to get what he wanted.

Berlin

2nd January 1943

Dear Karl,

We have had another letter from Julius. His are not censored like some of the junior officers’. Your mother cannot read them even though he makes light of the terrible things around him. He seems so inured to the desperate circumstances that he doesn’t see that what he considers normal is, to people in Berlin, unimaginable horror. I do not ask this of you lightly. I only ask this of you because I saw some of this pointlessness in the Great War. It goes against every military instinct I have but I would like you to do everything you can to get your brother out of that place. I know it is forbidden. I know it is impossible but I must ask this of you on behalf of your mother and for myself.

Your father

Voss lay back on the bed, his boots up on the metal bar at his feet, the two letters on his chest resting against his protruding ribs. He lit another cigarette from the one he’d been smoking. He knew that if anything happened to Julius it could potentially destroy his family. Since his father had been ‘retired’, he’d invested all his hopes and aspirations in his first-born son. He thought it possible that his father might be able to bear Julius’s death in glorious victory but not, definitely not, in miserable defeat.

Voss swung his feet off the bed and slapped a sheet of paper on to the chair. He would have preferred to ask this favour of General Zeitzler but knew that he could not possibly grant him the request. SS Colonel Weiss was the only man with whom he had any leverage, if that was a word he could use when it came to the SS.

He began writing in his horrible, cramped scrawl, handwriting that had developed because his brain always worked faster than his fingers. He balled his first attempt and tried again. He screwed that one up, too. He didn’t know what he wanted for his brother. He wanted to save him, of course, but on what terms? Julius, his state of mind heightened to rare acuity, would not be easily duped.

Rastenburg

5th January 1943

Dear Julius,

The officer who will give you this letter will be able to get you out of your predicament, fly you out of the Kessel and eventually into hospital back in Berlin. You have a stark and terrible decision to make. If you stay, our mother and, you know this to be true, more especially our father will be heartbroken. You, his eldest son, have always been his lodestone, the one to whom he is naturally drawn, from whom he derives his energy and now, since his retirement, in who he has invested all his hope. He would be a broken man without you in his life.

If you leave, your men will not despise you but you will despise yourself. You will bear the guilt of the survivor, the guilt of the chosen one. This is possibly, and only you can answer this question, reparable damage. Whatever happens in our father’s mind will not be.

I cannot believe I am having to deliver the burden of this choice to you in your desperate circumstances. In earlier attempts I tried to dress it up nicely, a temptation for Julius, but it refused to be pretty. It is an ugly choice. For my part, all I can say is that, whatever you decide, you are always my brother and I have never felt that there’s any better man living.

Karl

Voss buttoned his tunic, put on his coat and went out under the icicle fringes of his hut into the frozen air. His boots rang on the hard, snow-packed ground. He entered Restricted Area I and went straight to the Security Command post from where he knew SS Colonel Weiss would be running his brutal régime. The other soldiers looked at him as he entered. Nobody came willingly into the Security Command post. Nobody ever wanted to talk to SS Colonel Weiss. He was shown straight in. Weiss sat behind his desk in a state of livid surprise, his white skin even whiter against the deep black of his uniform, his crimson stepped scar from his eye to cheek redder. Voss’s nerve ricocheted around his stomach looking for a way out.

‘What can I do for you, Captain Voss?’

‘A personal matter, sir.’

‘Personal?’ Weiss asked himself; he didn’t normally deal with the personal.

‘I believe we reached a very special understanding between each other last February and that is why I have come to you with this personal matter.’

‘Sit,’ said Weiss, as if he was a dog. ‘You look ill, Captain.’

‘Lost my appetite, sir,’ said Voss, lowering himself into a chair on shaky thighs. ‘You know…the situation with the Sixth Army…is traumatic for everybody.’

‘The Führer will resolve the problem. We will win the day, Captain. You will see,’ said Weiss, giving him a wary look, already at work on the subtext of the words.

‘My brother is in the Kessel, sir. He is extremely sick.’

‘Haven’t his men taken him to the hospital for treatment?’

‘They have, but his condition did not respond to the treatment they have available in the field hospital there. He asked to be taken back to his division. I believe his condition is only treatable outside the Kessel.’

Weiss said nothing. The fingers he ran over his scarred cheek had well-cared for nails, glossy, packed with protein but tinged blue from underneath.

‘Where are you quartered, Captain?’ asked Weiss after a long pause.

It caught him off guard. He wasn’t sure where he was quartered any more. Numbers tinkered in his brain.

‘Area III, C4,’ he said.

‘Ah yes, you’re next to Captain Weber,’ said Weiss, so quickly that it was clear that his question hadn’t been necessary.

The chair back cut into Voss’s newly exposed ribs. You didn’t build up any credit in Weiss’s world, you always had to pay.

‘Captain Weber is not a careful individual, is he, Captain Voss?’

‘In what respect, sir?’

‘Drunken, loose-tongued, curious.’

‘Curious?’

‘Inquisitive,’ said Weiss. ‘And I notice you don’t disagree with my first two observations.’

‘Forgive me for saying so, sir, but in my opinion Weber is the least inquisitive man I know, very concentrated on his task,’ said Voss. ‘And as for drinking…who doesn’t?’

‘Loose-tongued?’ asked Weiss.

‘Who’s there to be loose-tongued with?’

‘Have you been with Captain Weber on any of his trips to town?’

Voss blinked. He didn’t know anything about Weber’s trips to town.

Weiss played the edge of his desk one-handed, a tremolo finished with a rapped flourish.

‘He has a very sensitive position right in the heart of the matter,’ said Weiss. ‘What do you two talk about when you’re drinking together?’

Voss shouldn’t have been shocked, but he was, at Weiss’s apparent omniscience. A squirt of adrenalin slithered through his veins, panic tightened his neck glands.

‘Nothing of importance.’

‘Tell me.’

‘He’s asked me to explain things to him.’

‘Like what? Chess?’

‘He hates chess.’

‘Then what?’

‘Physics. He knew I went to Heidelberg before I was called up.’

‘Physics?’ repeated Weiss, eyes glazing.

Voss thought he sensed a nonchalance that made him think that this was perhaps dangerous ground, mine-sown.

‘The evenings are long here in Rastenburg,’ said Voss to cover himself. ‘He teases me. He says I should be thinking of things more physical. You know, women.’

‘Women,’ said Weiss, laughing with so little mirth it became something else.

‘He’s more frustrated than he is inquisitive,’ said Voss, aware that Weiss wasn’t listening any more.

‘So you would like to get your brother out of the Kessel,’ said Weiss, opting for an alarming change of direction which left Voss thinking he’d said things he hadn’t. ‘Yes, in view of our earlier understanding I think that could be arranged. Do you have his details?’

Voss handed over his letter, wondering if the tiny morsel about Weber he’d offered was as good as a whole carcass to Weiss’s paranoia.

‘Rest assured,’ said Weiss, ‘we will get him out. I look forward to continuing our special understanding, Captain Voss.’

Voss heard nothing more from Weiss and he didn’t put himself in the man’s way. He wrote a note to his father saying that he’d put the process of getting Julius away from Stalingrad in motion, he was waiting for news and it might take a little time because of the shambolic state inside the Kessel. He avoided Weber and began to play against himself at chess without, curiously, ever being able to win.

A week later there was a conference in the situation room with all the senior officers in the Wolfsschanze present. It was a meeting that would change Karl Voss. A captain had flown in from the front and Voss had heard that he had been primed to deliver a speech on the real situation on the ground. Voss slipped into the meeting in time to hear the captain deliver his vision of horror. Lice-ridden men living off water and shreds of horse meat, others jaundiced with their limbs swollen to twice the size, hundreds of men a day dying of starvation in the brutal cold, the wounded at the airstrip left out in the open, their blood congealed to ice, the dead stacked on the impenetrable ground. The Führer took it, shoulders rounded, lids weighed down.

And then the moment.

The captain moved on to a complete rundown of the decimated fighting strength of every unit within the Kessel and without. Hitler nodded. Slowly he turned to the map and squeezed his chin. As the Führer’s slightly shaking hand moved out from his side the captain faltered. Hitler stood a flag up which had fallen over and began to talk about an SS panzer division, which was three weeks from the action. The captain’s words still came out as he’d no doubt rehearsed again and again, but they had no meaning. It was as if all the conjunctions and prepositions had been stripped out, all the verbs had become their opposites, all nouns incomprehensible.

Silence, as the captain’s boot squeak retreated. Hitler surveyed all his officers, his eyes beseeching, the terrible violence of red on the map below him flooding his face. Field Marshal Keitel, face trembling with emotion, stepped forward with a thunderous crack from his boot heel and roared over the deadly silence:

‘Mein Führer, we will hold Stalingrad.’

At breakfast the next day Voss ate properly for the first time in weeks. Afterwards, as he headed to the situation room, he was called to the Security Command post. He sat down in Weiss’s hard chair. Weiss leaned over and gave him an envelope. It contained his own letter to Julius unopened and with it a note.

The Kessel

12th January 1943

Dear Captain Voss,

An officer arrived today saying that he had come to pick up your brother. It is my sad duty to inform you that Major Julius Voss died on 10th January. We are his men and we would like you to know that he left this life with the same courage with which he endured it. His thoughts were never for himself but only ever for the men under his command…

Voss couldn’t read on. He put the note and letter back in their envelope, saluted SS Colonel Weiss and went back to the main building where he found the toilets and emptied his first solid breakfast in weeks into the bowl.

The news that afternoon, of the final assault on the abandoned Sixth Army, reached Voss from a strange distance, like words penetrating a sick child’s mind. Did it happen or not?

There was nothing to be done and he finished work early. The sense of doom in the situation room was unbearable. The generals crowded the maps as if coffin-side at a vigil. He went back to his quarters and knocked on Weber’s door. A strange person answered it. Voss asked after Weber. The man didn’t know him. He went to the next door, found another captain sitting on his bed smoking.

‘Where’s Weber?’ he asked.

The captain turned his mouth down, shook his head.

‘Security breach or something. He was taken away yesterday. I don’t know, don’t ask. Not in this…climate, anyway. If you know what I mean,’ said the captain, and Voss didn’t move, stared at him so that the man felt the need to say more. ‘Something about…well, it’s only rumour…don’t hold with it myself. You wouldn’t if you knew Weber.’

Voss still said nothing and the captain was sufficiently uncomfortable to get off his chair and come to the door.

‘I know Weber,’ said Voss, with the certainty of someone who was about to be proven wrong.

‘They found him in bed with a butcher’s delivery boy in town.’

Voss went to his room and wrote to his mother and father. It was a letter which left him exhausted, drained of everything so that his arms hung hopeless and unliftable at his sides. He went to bed early and slept, waking twice in the night to find tears on his face. In the morning he was woken up by an orderly and told to report to General Zeitzler’s office.

Zeitzler sat him down and didn’t stand behind his desk but leaned against the front of it. He looked avuncular, not his usual military self. He gave Voss permission to smoke.

‘I have some bad news,’ he said, his fingers pattering his thigh. ‘Your father died last night…’

Voss fixed his eyes on Zeitzler’s left epaulette. The only words to reach him were ‘compassionate leave’. By lunchtime he found himself in the half-dead light, standing away from the edge of the dark pine trees alongside the railway track, a grey sack of clothes on one side and a small brown suitcase on the other. The Berlin train left at 1.00 p.m. and although he was heading into his mother’s grief he could only feel that this was a new beginning and that greater possibilities existed away from this place, this hidden kingdom – the Wolfsschanze.