He glanced at the necessary permission from his own regiment’s HQ stapled to the back of the order, then looked again at the telegram. A patrol. He hadn’t expected that. Whatever it was they wanted him for, it wasn’t translating documents in a back room at HQ or explaining orders of civil obedience to cowed town mayors. No, a patrol meant he’d be moving. But where?
The thump and crumple of artillery rose again in the near distance and a thick rumble signalled the arrival of a Panzer division from around the corner of the hamlet they’d taken that morning. All around him the machinery of battle ground on regardless, of him, of anything.
Albrecht watched as the tracks of one of the tanks clipped the fence of the house next to the one he stood beside, plucking the wooden stakes from the ground as if they were candles from the icing of a cake. An infantry company followed the tanks; boys’ faces numb under steel helmets. One of them glanced at Albrecht as they passed, but there was nothing in his eyes. He was going forward, Albrecht was staying here. That’s all they said. You will live today, I may not. Except, of course, Albrecht was going forward now. He too was going on, not back. Isn’t that what a patrol meant? That they were sending him forward. Again. Just when he’d thought they would get a chance to rest.
He turned and looked at his own men sitting against the walls of the cottage behind him. Some of them were lying on its lawn, already asleep despite the massive groaning of the tanks and the muffled punches of the field guns. Lying like that they looked disturbingly like the corpses they’d passed on the roads as they came up this morning and Albrecht found himself staring at their chests, watching for movement to assure himself they hadn’t just given up and died.
A five-man patrol. For what purpose he didn’t know, but wherever it meant going at least it wasn’t here. It could be somewhere worse, of course, but right now Albrecht couldn’t imagine that. Where could be worse than here? Not in hell yet, but waiting to enter it, on the brink. Ahead of them, beyond the towns and villages of Kent, lay London, a battered city filling every hour with what was left of the Allied armies and, to Albrecht’s mind, even more dangerously, a fleeing population with their backs to the wall.
If they’d done this four years ago when he was first conscripted in ’40, after Dunkirk, then perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad. For several months back then an invasion of England had seemed imminent. As a fluent English speaker Albrecht had been posted to Wehrmacht Intelligence in Belgium, where he’d observed the massing of troops, the arrival of Italian flyers, and the conversion of hundreds of Dutch barges into makeshift landing craft. On one evening, while strolling by the docks in Antwerp, he’d been shown an entire warehouse of English signposts. There were thousands of them, leaning together along each wall, their destinations all pointing in the same direction: Tonbridge, Sevenoaks, Ludlow. The next day he’d even watched the “Invasion of England” being filmed in advance for the newsreels at home, entire battalions emptying onto St. Anne’s bathing beach as the cameras whirred from the decks of boats and along the beach itself. So unquestionable was the impending event this film was meant to represent that officers buying jewellery in town would often replace the ring or the necklace they’d been examining and walk out the door, telling the owner they’d find something better in London next week instead. But then, despite the Führer’s assurances, the invasion date slipped from August 15 to September 15, before eventually disappearing from the plans of High Command altogether. Albrecht was posted to Holland, and then, after a personality clash with a superior officer, to a fighting unit at the vanguard of the Russian offensive. It was, Albrecht knew, intended as an execution posting, but he’d survived, as much to his own surprise as that of his superiors. And not just survived either. He had, over the course of that terrible campaign, discovered something of a talent for leading men in combat, for killing, for garnering the respect and even love of those under his command. It was these men, the men of his company, whom he thought about now as he looked over the devastated scene before him, recognising how much better it would have been for all of them if the dummy invasion he’d seen filmed in Antwerp had been followed closely by the real one. England had lain exposed then, belly up. There were no Americans. But now this wounded island was only exposed in the way an injured lion or bear is exposed. Vulnerable, but rageful and thrashing too. Open to its enemy and to the very extremities of aggression as well. Albrecht knew London. He’d walked its narrow streets, felt its buckled, broken history seaming under his feet. He knew what attacking that city would be like. It would be boiling at every turn, with resentment, with anger, with desperation. It would fall, of course; it seemed they all did in the end. Even Moscow and Stalingrad had fallen. But how many of them would it swallow first? How many of them would have to tip themselves into London’s jaws before the city finally choked on their blood running in the veins and arteries of her streets?
Albrecht put the cigarette back in his mouth, found his matches, and lit it. Drawing the smoke deep into his lungs he cast his eye over the exhausted soldiers heaped about the cottage. Its two gutted windows were streaked with soot around their sills, ravaged and dark against the white walls. They reminded him briefly of Ebbe’s cried-out eyes at a party years ago, the mascara smeared over her pale cheekbones as he held her, the scent of lavender hanging heavy and sweet above them.
So which five? Who would make up the patrol? Albrecht found these decisions harder every time. Not so much because of the new faces he didn’t know, the characters that were still uncharted territory to him, but more because of the older ones he did. The men he’d fought with, the men to whom he was joined by the shared loss of other men. He had made too many of these decisions over the last three years, and now he was incapable of considering them without seeing their consequences spiralling into the future before him. The sentry he’d posted in the evening only to find him dead in the morning. The six men he’d ordered to advance into a street in Stalingrad, four of them returning minutes later carrying a fifth between them. He no longer thought as a soldier because he had been a soldier. He had seen too much. And now he had to choose again. Which of these men would he take? To which of them would he grant an alternative future? What that future was, he couldn’t say. A few more weeks alive perhaps? The lucky wound that would send them home? The bullet or shrapnel splinter that ends it all tomorrow? Whatever it was, at least it wasn’t London. They’d be sending no patrols there for weeks, maybe months, he was sure of that.
It was ridiculous, as Albrecht knew full well. There were a thousand other vagaries beyond his own decisions that held more sway over the spun threads of these men’s lives. Blocks of wood pushed across a table in Berlin. Arrows drawn on a map pinned to the wall at the new Southern UK Headquarters. The Führer’s toothache. A general’s capricious fit of arrogance. The trembling crosshairs of a sniper’s sights settling over an Adam’s apple. All of these held more potency than anything Albrecht could do or command. But as he cast his eye over the vestiges of his company he still felt the edge of fate biting into his shoulders, the thousands of possible alternatives offered up to these men in this moment’s thought.
The telegram threw up another choice too. If he was assigned to this patrol, then who would lead the company? That question, he knew, held the balance of more than just five men’s lives in its answer. But it was also not for him. He could leave that choice to old Hertz, the battalion commander. Major Hertz who made this kind of decision in his sleep, who never saw anything other than the broadest of consequences emanating from them. Old Hertz, probably the most successful battalion commander in the regiment. Albrecht need only focus on the five then. The five names this telegram had demanded, like an ancient god requesting five sacrificials for its altar. So, the same question. Which five? Who would he take with him?