‘Excuse me, sir,’ he managed around the burn in his throat, and the burn he could feel on his cheeks. ‘You were saying?’
The lieutenant colonel raised his glass and pointed it at him. ‘We’ve met,’ he repeated.
‘Forgive me, sir, but I am not sure I can recollect when I might have had that honour.’
The officer clicked his fingers repeatedly, staring at Reinhardt with his smile seemingly stuck on his face. ‘I’ve almost got it,’ he exclaimed. ‘R… Ran… Rein… Rein something or other. Damn it, it’s on the tip of my tongue!’
‘Reinhardt. Gregor Reinhardt.’
‘That’s it!’ he exclaimed, a finger in the air. ‘And you don’t remember me! You need a clue, Monsieurrr?’ he asked, dragging out the French word and almost gargling it at the back of his throat.
That was what did it, though. Reinhardt smiled, offering his right hand. ‘Johannes Lehmann. 1st Panzer. Although you were a captain last time I saw you, sir.’
‘What can I say? Promotion comes pretty fast in a panzer unit! But fancy meeting you here. Long way from France, no?!’
‘A long way, indeed. When was it, then? May, June 1940? Dunkirk, right?’
‘That’s it,’ Lehmann replied, jovially. ‘We had just finished chasing the Tommies into the sea, and you were what, doing interrogations or some such?’
‘Debriefings of captured enemy officers,’ said Reinhardt.
‘That’s what they call it, do they?’ snorted Lehmann, taking a swig from his glass. ‘Well, you must’ve had your work cut out for you, because we certainly gave you plenty of officers to debrief.’
‘No complaints from me on that score,’ said Reinhardt. He breathed deep and slow to cover his surprise. ‘Last time we saw each other was, when? Paris, wasn’t it? Christmas?’
‘Christmas in Paris! Those were good days. France. The weather. The wine, the parties. The girls,’ he finished, with wide eyes beneath raised brows.
Reinhardt would have added victories to that list of good things. There were not that many of them anymore, especially for the tankers, since the glory days of 1940. ‘You were divisional intelligence, weren’t you?’
‘Still am. Still am. And you? Still with Abwehr?’
‘For my sins,’ said Reinhardt. He glanced at Lehmann’s decorations. He wore the gold-and-silver panzer assault badge pinned to the breast of his coat, the white tank destruction ribbon on his right arm, and the red, white, and black stripes of the Winter Campaign medal made a diagonal slash of colour across the big lapels of his black uniform. He raised his glass at them. ‘You’ve been busy, I see. Where has the war taken you?’
‘Poland and Russia mostly. We were with Army Group North. Got to within sight of Leningrad before we got pulled back. We were beaten up pretty badly,’ he said, swigging from his beer. ‘Then Rzhev, for about a year. We were pulled out again and sent back to France for refitting in January this year. God, what a relief that was! You?’
‘Since Dunkirk? Here, until the end of forty-one. Then North shy;Africa until September last year. Italy for a bit. Then back here.’
‘Riding with Rommel, eh?’ Lehmann’s eyes flicked over Reinhardt’s map, then back up. ‘You still in counterintelligence?’ shy;Reinhardt nodded, as he slowly folded his map away. ‘Look, I’m here as advance liaison for the division. We’re deploying out of here in June, to Serbia and Greece mainly. I’m getting the official line from all the right people, but I’d appreciate any information you have that could be useful to us, especially on the Cetniks, seeing as we’re going to be in Serbia. Something a bit more local. Anything to put things in perspective.’
‘I understand,’ replied Reinhardt. ‘And I’m at your service, sir, of course.’
‘C’mon, don’t make it sound so formal. Just talk, over drinks or something. Like whatever you’ve got about the politics here. They seem pretty messed up. Like nothing we’ve experienced anywhere else.’
‘They are labyrinthine, indeed. But you said you’d be in Serbia, and my area of operations is Bosnia, so I’m not so sure what use I’d be to you.’
‘Well, there’s Serbs here, and Serbs in Serbia. Right… ?’
‘Granted, but it doesn’t mean they’ve the same motivations.’
‘Does my head in,’ said Lehmann, putting his empty beer glass on the bar top. He pointed at Reinhardt’s glass. ‘Another?’ Reinhardt hesitated a moment, then nodded, glancing quickly at his watch as Lehmann called the barman over for their drinks. ‘So, in Bosnia you’ve got Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. No Croats in Serbia, right? For which I’ve been made to understand I should be eternally grateful. Then you’ve got all these damn organisations. Cetniks, Ustase. I’m still trying to get that straight. I went through it all again at that conference the other day. It made sense then, but now it’s fading. Here, cheers,’ he said, handing Reinhardt his slivovitz.
Reinhardt clinked glasses with him. ‘Firm ground under your tank,’ he said, running what Lehmann had just said back over in his mind to make sure he had understood.
Lehmann snorted. ‘ “Firm ground”. I like that,’ he said, taking a swig from his beer. ‘What it all means,’ he continued, ‘is that a simple tanker like myself can’t make head nor tail of it all. It was easier in Russia. There, it was just us and them.’
‘History is layered here, like anywhere else, really,’ said Reinhardt. ‘Each people’s version of the past, and the present, like the carpets you see for sale in the market. But the layers don’t just lie one atop the other. They clash and rub up against each other as each side’s fortunes wax, then wane, and the versions compete for the truth to the exclusion of any other. Compromise is not easy in such situations, and each side invariably expects – and receives – the worst from the other.’
‘Well, what do you expect?’ mused Lehmann into his beer. ‘Always been the way.’
That did not seem right. It seemed… easy. Stereotypical. And coming from a German soldier… ‘Well,’ Reinhardt said, finally, looking inward at himself and feeling disappointed he could not come up with more. He sounded weak. ‘It’s not, actually. Relations have often been strained, but actually they aren’t any more prone to fighting themselves than anyone else, and often when they’ve fought its because they’ve been dragged into something bigger.’
‘What?’ snorted Lehmann. ‘Like this war, y’mean? So it’s our fault these people keep falling out with each other?’
Reinhardt smiled, feeling it strained and shallow. ‘Some might say that. But, for instance, here, in Sarajevo, the communities help each other more than not. Serbs in the countryside massacre Muslims, but the Muslim authorities here have often defended the city’s Serbs against Ustase depredations. And the Ustase are Croat, but many of the city’s Croats resent their behaviour.’
‘So it’s complicated.’
‘It’s complicated,’ agreed Reinhardt. ‘Like I said, this war in Bosnia is many wars all piled up. You need to understand the many to understand the whole.’
‘But the Muslims are with us, right?’
Reinhardt sighed, sympathising with Lehmann’s need for simplicity in the face of complexity even if he did not agree with it. ‘The Muslims don’t have a big brother to look after them, and they have nowhere else to go. So, the way they see it, to survive this they keep their heads down, or they ally up either with the Croats or, more and more, with the Partisans, or with us.’ Lehmann’s eyes seemed to glaze over. ‘You said you were here on a conference?’ asked Reinhardt, sipping his slivovitz.
‘Yep,’ Lehmann replied, licking foam off his lip. ‘Senior officers planning for Schwarz. I was there as advance liaison for the division, as part of the area that the op will cover is in Serbia.’