Chapter Twenty-One
Berlin, Germany
4 August 1985
My sister is playing a very dangerous game, Leutnant Kurt Wieland thought, as he stepped into the barracks. And who knows what will happen when something goes badly wrong?
It wasn’t a pleasant thought. No one else seemed to have realised that Gudrun was responsible for the leaflets, but Kurt knew all too well that Gudrun had means, motive and opportunity. She might have been a girl, yet she’d been brave enough to sneak into a secure hospital just to visit her boyfriend. Kurt couldn’t have asked for more from the soldiers under his command.
“Leutnant,” Oberfeldwebel Helmut Loeb said. “The CO has called a briefing in ten minutes.”
“And I’m expected to attend,” Kurt said. Loeb was an NCO, old enough to be Kurt’s father; he’d forgotten more about war than Kurt had ever known. “I’ll be there.”
He placed his knapsack in the locker, then hurried down to the briefing room. The ordinary soldiers had an additional two days of leave, while their officers and NCOs received their orders from their superiors and planned how best to carry them out. Kurt had a nasty feeling that the Berlin Guard was going to be deployed away from Berlin for the first time in quite some time, perhaps as a complete unit. Individual companies had been rotated through Germany East, Germany Arabia and Germany South to give their officers and men some valuable experience, but the Berlin Guard as a whole hadn’t left Berlin for years. Their battle honours had been allowed to lapse.
But we weren’t meant to face real trouble in South Africa, Kurt thought. He remembered feeling envious of the soldiers who’d been sent to South Africa. It might not be a proper war, but at least it was some action. Now, if the rumours are accurate, the war in South Africa may blaze on for years with no end in sight.
He pushed the thought aside as he entered the briefing room. It was pleasantly informal while the soldiers were still on leave; the CO was standing in front of a podium while his subordinates were pouring themselves mugs of black coffee and sitting down on hard metal chairs in front of him. A large map of South Africa hung from the wall, suggesting that Gudrun had been right and the Berlin Guard was going to the war. Kurt couldn’t help a flicker of fear and dread as he poured himself coffee and sat down; he knew he was brave, but the thought of ending up like Konrad, his body a mangled wreck, was terrifying. He would sooner die.
And my family might not know what happened to me, he thought, grimly. He wasn’t quite sure how Gudrun had found out where Konrad was, but after the leaflets had started to appear it was unlikely her source would dare tell her anything else. They’d have a sudden end to my letters and nothing.
It was a bitter thought. He prided himself on being faithful – he’d always been faithful, right from the moment he’d first entered the Hitler Youth. He’d enjoyed himself; singing songs, marching in unison and practicing with guns, even as some of the more sensitive souls had found the Hitler Youth a foretaste of hell. And yet, if someone as faithful as Konrad – and an SS officer, no less – could simply be discarded, it could happen to him. How could he be loyal to the Third Reich when it was clear that the Third Reich was not loyal to its fighting men?
Kurt had no illusions. People died on military service; hell, he’d watched in horror as a boy died on the ropes, back in the Hitler Youth. The teenagers had been told that the boy had effectively been an Untermensch, that he’d deserved to die through sheer incompetence; in hindsight, Kurt wondered if it had been wise to force the poor boy to try to climb slippery ropes when his skill at climbing ropes was minimal. But even if the masters had been right, it didn’t justify hiding the dead and wounded and then lying about it. Didn’t Konrad’s family deserve some closure?
I’m sorry, Gudrun, he thought, as the CO tapped the podium for attention. I wish I was there for you.
That too was not a pleasant thought. Kurt would happily have beaten his younger brother to a pulp for daring to make fun of Gudrun’s grief, but he had no idea how to comfort a stricken soul. Gudrun had known Konrad had been badly injured, yet she’d been able to cling to hope until Konrad’s family had formally terminated the engagement. It wouldn’t reflect badly on her, Kurt was sure, but it had still been shattering. And, given what else she was doing, she really didn’t need the stress.
“Our new deployment orders have finally arrived,” the CO said, after the standard Heil Bormann. “The Berlin Guard – all 5000 of us – is going to be deployed to South Africa in the next three months, where we will be reinforcing troops already on the ground. We will commence tactical exercises as soon as the troops report back to barracks, focused around convoy protection, aggressive patrolling and counter-terrorism operations. This is an opportunity for us to be blooded as a unit, rather than as a handful of individual companies.”
And an opportunity to wind up crippled, Kurt thought, sardonically. He wasn’t fool enough to say that out loud. Who knows what will happen if one of us winds up dead or wounded?
He listened, carefully, as the CO ran through the first set of assignments. Moving a military unit from Germany Prime to Germany South would be a logistical nightmare, even though the Kriegsmarine seemed confident it had the shipping to move thousands of troops and their equipment from Berlin to the ports in Africa. After that… it would be worse, he suspected, when he looked at the briefing notes. The news claimed that Germany South was safe, but they wouldn’t have been ordered to prepare to defend their convoys if there wasn’t a risk of being attacked. And afterwards…
The population map made the problem far too clear. South Africa had fifty-seven million people within its borders, a mere five million of whom were white. It looked, very much, as though the South Africans were either refusing to breed or fleeing the country, no matter what their government had to say about it. Even if one counted the relatively small Indian and Chinese populations as white, it was still clear that the white population was staggeringly outnumbered. The CO might insist that one good German was worth ten black men, but Kurt had the uneasy feeling that the blacks could afford to trade ten of their men for one German and still come out ahead. And if there were parts of Russia that were still dangerous, even forty years after the conquest, who knew how long it would take to pacify South Africa?
“This could take a while,” Leutnant Bernhard Schrupp muttered.
Kurt winced inwardly, hoping desperately that the CO hadn’t overheard Schrupp’s rather sarcastic comment. Schrupp wasn’t a bad person, not really, but he had a tendency to grumble and ask pointed questions. Indeed, Kurt had often wondered how Schrupp had managed to win promotion in the first place. As far as he knew, Schrupp didn’t have any relatives in high places.
“A number of officers who have served in South Africa will be arriving at the barracks tomorrow,” the CO concluded. “You will have a chance to learn from their experiences and prepare exercises for the troops. Dismissed.”
Kurt saluted, then rose with the other officers. There were briefing papers to read, then officers to interrogate; he needed to be ready by the time the troops returned to their barracks and readied themselves for war. And yet, there was a gnawing feeling in his chest that all was not right, that going to South Africa might be the last thing he’d ever do. It just didn’t seem right…