At times of great crisis, words can be more powerful than bullets. Churchill had proved that time and again during the days of the Blitz when he had precious few bullets and little else with which to resist the enemy and to maintain British morale. He was conscious of the effect his words could have, yet, as he resumed his seat to the congratulations of his parliamentary colleagues, he had not the slightest notion of the impact they were causing several hundred miles away, at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, where his congratulatory telegram was bursting into fire like a grenade thrown through the window.
‘What in God’s name is this crap?’ The message trembled in Eisenhower’s hand.
British troops are ready … Now is the moment to swarm across the bridgehead at Remagen …
The flush of anger was spreading across his face as he read every new sentence. The adjutant who had delivered the telegram took another precautionary step backwards; the general was reputed to have an unreliable temper, and he didn’t care to be around to suffer the uncertain consequences.
German resistance and morale may collapse if you strike before the enemy has time to regroup …
Eisenhower continued to quote from Churchill’s missive. ‘Shit, doesn’t he realize we’ve got less than two hundred men perched on that bridgehead and they could get blown away any time? If we put so much as another pack of paperclips across that stinking bridge it’ll topple into the river. What’ll happen then? Our guys on the bridgehead become sandwich meat, that’s what!’
Suddenly he pounded his head as if to inflict punishment on himself. ‘What a fool I am … Losing my wits. Why didn’t I realize straight away what that scheming old bastard was up to?’ He read on.
The arguments for a direct drive on the German capital become irresistible. Let us drive down the autobahns which Hitler himself has built and not dare to stop until we have reached Berlin.
‘Berlin! So that’s still his game.’
He turned in his chair and screamed through the open door into the next office to his chief of staff. ‘Beetle! Get in here and bring a stenographer. I want to send a reply.’
Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith and the stenographer scuttled in without a word and perched in front of Eisenhower. There they sat, pencils poised, for several long moments while Eisenhower remained lost in thought. Ice seemed to have taken the place of the fires within him. Eventually Bedell Smith could stand the uncertainty no longer.
‘Changed your mind?’
Eisenhower raised his head from his thoughts and looked at him with piercing blue eyes.
‘Beetle, how do I say “Fuck You” in British?’
The commander tapped his stick against the chair to demand silence. In the darkness of the night the entire prisoner complement of Transit Camp 174B huddled together on the exercise square in search of companionship and warmth, forming a human amphitheatre around the flames of an open fire. Their faces stared gaunt and drained of colour in the flickering light like ghosts gathered around a grave. They expected no comfort from the commander’s words. An Ehrenrat had been called, a ‘Council of Elders’, and that only happened when there was a real mess.
The commander sat at their head, with his two senior officers on either side and several others standing behind. He was leaning on his stick even while seated, his face a lurid mask as some player in a tragedy.
‘My friends,’ the commander began. A few of them noticed that he had forsaken his customary formal greeting – ‘Men of the Wehrmacht!’; there was no suggestion of command in his voice. ‘My friends, I have gathered you all together to share with you the news I was given today. I can find no words to lessen the pain, and so I …’ He lowered his head, struggling for composure and fresh strength. He cleared his throat, as if the words were sticking in his gullet like phlegm.
‘The Russians are fighting on German soil. They are already well advanced into Pomerania, and have crossed the Oder. They are less than a hundred miles from the Hauptstadt, Berlin.’
The words carved like a razor through their midst as damp wood spat on the burning pyre, cremating their last hope of salvation. No one bothered to contest the news, to pretend it was enemy propaganda. Such bravado belonged to the days when they had bombers in the air and food in their bellies, and those days were long since gone. They all understood what the news meant. Many of them had fought on the Russian Front, had seen the bestiality with which the Russian peasant soldiers treated captured Wehrmacht and civilians alike. They had found the mass graves of butchered officers, shot in the back of the head, of the women raped and mutilated, of the children slaughtered for no reason other than they had got in the way. The Russians knew only one method of fighting war, to the bitter end, and that end was now in sight. Cossacks swarming through their homeland, penetrating their villages and their women, pillaging everything and everyone in their path. They, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, had failed, leaving their loved ones to pay the price.
‘I’m so sorry,’ was all the commander could find to say. He fell into silence until it became oppressive and he had to find something else to break it. ‘My only satisfaction is that you have survived. You are brave men, I have fought and served with many of you. We have survived. That, at least, is something. Perhaps we may yet have the opportunity of rebuilding our country …’
He trailed off in a savage fit. of coughing. There was shrapnel in his lungs and in other vital parts of his body, and to a man they knew that whatever might lie in store for the rest of them, the commander would not be part of it. They had all seen the tell-tale translucence of the skin clinging to his skull, the glaze across his eyes and the bloodstains on his handkerchief; only his pride and sense of duty had kept him going this far. In sympathy and silent embarrassment they watched as the commander brought up a little more of his rapidly fading life.
They stood aimlessly, staring silently into the flames, dispirited and without hope, lost in contemplation of a homeland far away. Then something moved, a man, one of their own, who stepped forward into the circle surrounding the fire. He wore the tattered uniform of an Oberleutnant in some tank regiment – it was impossible to tell which; almost all the insignia were missing. Nevertheless he was a striking-looking figure, tall, lean to the point of gauntness, his cropped black hair parted near the middle so that it stood up in a defiant, almost disrespectful manner before flopping across the forehead of his long face. His features were finely carved as if sculpted from smooth clay, his cheekbones high – looks that suggested intelligence and sensitivity which seemed out of place in the middle of a band of warriors. Yet he had obviously seen combat, and sported a scar through the top of his lip which dragged one edge of his mouth downward, giving the impression of a perpetual sardonic smile. There was suffering in the face, and nowhere more clearly than in the eyes which were remarkably dark and deep-set as if trying to keep their distance from the world. They were careworn from more than just the numbing tiredness of past combat, yet as the commander gazed at him they became almost transparent. He felt he was peering right into the man’s inner soul, and inside he could see flames of torment. There was passion and anger in this man. The prisoner snapped to attention.
‘Permission to speak, sir?’
‘You are …?’
‘My name is Hencke, sir.’