Model’s smile had all the warmth of a Moscow December night. “And so in your wisdom you set aside the commands you had received. The results of that wisdom you hear now.” The field marshal briefly let himself listen to the cries of the wounded, a sound the war had taught him to screen out. “Now then, come with me—yes you, Sergeant-major, and the rest of your shirkers too, or those of you who wish to avoid a court.”
As he had known they would, they all trooped after him. “There is your handiwork,” he said, pointing to the shambles in the street. His voice hardened. “You are responsible for those people lying there—had you acted as you should, you would have broken up that march long before it ever got so far or so large. Now the least you can do is give those people their release.” He set hands on hips, waited.
No one moved. “Sir?” the sergeant-major said faintly. He seemed to have become the group’s spokesman.
Model made an impatient gesture. “Go on, finish them. A bullet in the back of the head will quiet them once and for all.”
“In cold blood, sir?” The sergeant-major had not wanted to understand him before. Now he had no choice.
The field marshal was inexorable. “They—and you—disobeyed Reich commands. They made themselves liable to capital punishment the moment they gathered. You at least have the chance to atone, by carrying out this just sentence.”
“I don’t think I can,” the sergeant-major muttered.
He was probably just talking to himself, but Model gave him no chance to change his mind. He turned to the lieutenant of the platoon that had broken the march. “Place this man under arrest.” After the sergeant-major had been seized, Model turned his chill, monocled stare on the rest of the reluctant soldiers. “Any others?”
Two more men let themselves be arrested rather than draw their weapons. The field marshal nodded to the others. “Carry out your orders.” He had an afterthought. “If you find Gandhi or Nehru out there, bring them to me alive.”
The Germans moved out hesitantly. They were no Einsatzkommandos, and not used to this kind of work. Some looked away as they administered the first coup de grace; one missed as a result, and had his bullet ricochet off the pavement and almost hit a comrade. But as the soldiers worked their way up Qutb Road they became quicker, more confident, and more competent. War was like that, Model thought. So soon one became used to what had been unimaginable.
After a while the flat cracks died away, but from lack of targets rather than reluctance. A few at a time, the soldiers returned to Model. “No sign of the two leaders?” he asked. They all shook their heads.
“Very well—dismissed. And obey your orders like good Germans henceforward.”
“No further reprisals?” Lasch asked as the relieved troopers hurried away.
“No, let them go. They carried out their part of the bargain, and I will meet mine. I am a fair man, after all, Dieter.”
“Very well, sir.”
GANDHI LISTENED WITH undisguised dismay as the shopkeeper babbled out his tale of horror. “This is madness!” he cried.
“I doubt Field Marshal Model, for his part, understands the principle of ahimsa,” Nehru put in. Neither Gandhi nor he knew exactly where they were: a safe house somewhere not far from the center of Delhi was the best guess he could make. The men who brought the shopkeeper were masked. What one did not know, one could not tell the Germans if captured.
“Neither do you,” the older man replied, which was true; Nehru had a more pragmatic nature than Gandhi. Gandhi went on, “Rather more to the point, neither do the British. And Model, to speak to, seemed no different from any high-ranking British military man. His specialty has made him harsh and rigid, but he is not stupid and does not appear unusually cruel.”
“Just a simple soldier, doing his job.” Nehru’s irony was palpable.
“He must have gone insane,” Gandhi said; it was the only explanation that made even the slightest sense of the massacre of the wounded. “Undoubtedly he will be censured when news of this atrocity reaches Berlin, as General Dyer was by the British after Amritsar.”
“Such is to be hoped.” But again Nehru did not sound hopeful.
“How could it be otherwise, after such an appalling action? What government, what leaders could fail to be filled with humiliation and remorse at it?”
MODEL STRODE INTO the mess. The officers stood and raised their glasses in salute. “Sit, sit,” the field marshal growled, using gruffness to hide his pleasure.
An Indian servant brought him a fair imitation of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding: better than they were eating in London these days, he thought. The servant was silent and unsmiling, but Model would only have noticed more about him had he been otherwise. Servants were supposed to assume a cloak of invisibility.
When the meal was done, Model took out his cigar case. The Waffen-SS officer on his left produced a lighter. Model leaned forward, puffed a cigar into life. “My thanks, Brigadeführer,” the field marshal said. He had little use for SS titles of rank, but brigade commander was at least recognizably close to brigadier.
“Sir, it is my great pleasure,” Jürgen Stroop declared. “You could not have handled things better. A lesson for the Indians—less than they deserve, too” (he also took no notice of the servant) “and a good one for your men as well. We train ours harshly too.”
Model nodded. He knew about SS training methods. No one denied the daring of the Waffen-SS divisions. No one (except the SS) denied that the Wehrmacht had better officers.
Stroop drank. “A lesson,” he repeated in a pedantic tone that went oddly with the SS’s reputation for aggressiveness. “Force is the only thing the racially inferior can understand. Why, when I was in Warsaw—”
That had been four or five years ago, Model suddenly recalled. Stroop had been a Brigadeführer then too, if memory served; no wonder he was still one now, even after all the hard fighting since. He was lucky not to be a buck private. Imagine letting a pack of desperate, starving Jews chew up the finest troops in the world.
And imagine, afterwards, submitting a seventy-five-page operations report bound in leather and grandiosely called The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More. And imagine, with all that, having the crust to boast about it afterwards. No wonder the man sounded like a pompous ass. He was a pompous ass, and an inept butcher to boot. Model had done enough butchery before today’s work—anyone who fought in Russia learned all about butchery—but he had never botched it.
He did not revel in it, either. He wished Stroop would shut up. He thought about telling the Brigadeführer he would sooner have been listening to Gandhi. The look on the fellow’s face, he thought, would be worth it. But no. One could never be sure who was listening. Better safe.
THE SHORTWAVE SET crackled to life. It was in a secret cellar, a tiny dark hot room lit only by the glow of its dial and by the red end of the cigarette in its owner’s mouth. The Germans had made not turning in a radio a capital crime. Of course, Gandhi thought, harboring him was also a capital crime. That weighed on his conscience. But the man knew the risk he was taking.
The fellow (Gandhi knew him only as Lal) fiddled with the controls. “Usually we listen to the Americans,” he said. “There is some hope of truth from them. But tonight you want to hear Berlin.”
“Yes,” Gandhi said. “I must learn what action is to be taken against Model.”
“If any,” Nehru added. He was once again impeccably attired in white, which made him the most easily visible object in the cellar.
“We have argued this before,” Gandhi said tiredly. “No government can uphold the author of a cold-blooded slaughter of wounded men and women. The world would cry out in abhorrence.”