And then, in one instant, everything changed.
Just off to Adolf’s left, a young lad of seventeen or eighteen jumped up and started shouting obscenities. As usual, Adolf ignored him and went right on. But when the boy reached in his pocket and withdrew a round stone about the size of a tennis ball, Hans was instantly on his feet and racing toward him. Just before he reached him, the boy shouted something particularly vile about Adolf’s mother. It was enough to break Adolf’s concentration, and he turned angrily in the boy’s direction.
That was all it took. An older man just behind the head table jumped up on his chair, an empty beer stein in his right hand. He clenched his other fist and raised it high. “Liberty!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, and then he flung the stein at Adolf with all of his strength.
“To arms!” Hitler screamed as he ducked and the glass shot past him and smashed against the wall.
Men on all sides leaped to their feet, clutching beer steins or drawing clubs, brass knuckles, or short lengths of pipe from beneath their clothing. At the same instant, Hans’s boys sprang into action too. But Hans wasn’t watching them. Directly in front of him now, the first boy whipped out a two-foot length of lead pipe. With a cry, he flung it at Hans’s head. Hans jerked to one side and the pipe flew past him, barely missing his head. There was a dull crunching sound followed by a horrendous shriek of pain. Hans whipped around in time to see a heavyset man with a baseball bat in his hands drop the bat and clutch at his face. His nose was spurting blood and there a deep cut above eye.
The man had been about to strike Hans from behind when the pipe hit him in the face. Hans dropped to a crouch, lashed out with his right foot, and kicked the man in the knee with the toe of his boot. The man screamed again and crashed to the ground, writhing in pain. Hans jammed his own club back into his belt, scooped up the bat, and lunged at the boy, who was now staring in horror at what he had just done. Using the bat like a fireplace poker, Hans jabbed the boy in the solar plexus with all the force he could muster. The kid’s eyes bugged out as the air whooshed out of him. He dropped to his knees, gagging as he fought for breath. Thinking how close that pipe had come to hitting him in the face, Hans stepped forward and clubbed the boy alongside the head with his clenched fist, dropping him like stone.
“Protect the Führer!” Hans yelled.
The hall was pure pandemonium now. Chairs crashed to the ground as men leaped to their feet. Men were shouting, women were screaming. People were rushing for the exits. Beer steins were flying back and forth overhead, glass shattering on every side. Out of the corner of his eye, Hans saw one of the ringleaders he had identified smash a chair against the floor and then snatch up one of the broken legs and start for Adolf, who was crouched down watching the fray, but certainly not cowering under cover of the table.
Fritzie and Anatoly leaped in front of the speaker’s platform, their cudgels swinging. The man with the chair leg changed his mind, whipped around, and fell on one of the storm troopers from behind. Hans saw the chair leg break in two as the man brought it down on the trooper’s head with full force. The storm trooper screamed and stumbled to his knees.
“Protect the Führer!” Hans bellowed again, pushing toward his friends. Quickly there was a half circle of men forming a cordon around Adolf and the rest of the committee leadership. They were swinging their fists or their clubs at a crush of men trying to push past them to get at Adolf.
Hans sidestepped a blow thrown at him by a factory worker and then clubbed him to the ground with his new weapon. He saw a couple of men from one of his squads slashing their way through the maelstrom, trying to get to him. He waved them off with his free hand. “No! Help Hitler.” Not waiting to see whether they did or not, he waded in, swinging the bat in vicious arcs back and forth, knocking beer steins out of clenched fists or striking numbing blows to the back of exposed necks or the base of skulls. He was dropping men with virtually every blow, clearing the area around the head table.
He glanced behind him and was gratified to see that some of Roehm’s men were already moving in and dragging off the kid, who was howling like a baby now.
Hans screamed in pain as searing fire shot through his left shoulder. He rolled away, but not fast enough. The face coming at him was nearly covered with facial hair—a thick, long beard, heavy sideburns, and eyebrows so thick they nearly hid the piggish eyes beneath them. The man was a full head shorter than Hans but probably outweighed him by twenty or thirty pounds, and every pound of him was solid muscle. He raised the beer stein again and swung it at Hans’s face. Hans threw up an arm and jerked his head to one side. The heavy mug caught Hans squarely on his left elbow and then glanced off and smashed into the side of his head.
Flashes of brilliant light exploded in his head. Down he went, his knees slamming hard against the wooden flooring. Somewhere in the back of his mind it registered that the stein had shattered as pain ripped through the side of his head. At the same instant, he also realized that his entire left arm and hand were completely numb and that he no longer held the bat in his right hand.
Above him, a dark shape loomed large, trying to shove someone out of his way so he could get to Hans. He saw the beard and the eyebrows and the tiny, close-set eyes glittering with malice. And then he saw something else that froze his blood. The man still held the handle of the broken beer stein, but jagged glass was all that was left attached to it. The man was leering at Hans as he shoved someone else out of the way and bent over. “Let’s add a few more scars to that ugly face of yours,” he growled.
November 4, 1921, 8:53 p.m.—Great Hall, Hofbrauhaus Keller
Hans tried to roll away, but the man’s foot lashed out and stomped on his paralyzed arm. He thrashed wildly back and forth, but the man’s weight was too much for him. Something dark flashed across his vision. An animal roar split the air, and the bearded man disappeared. A moment later, it was Ernst’s face looking down at him. “Hans, are you all right?” Ernst bent down, offered his hand, and helped him sit up. Hans cried out as he did so. A moment later, Fritzie was there too, along with two or three others wearing the party’s armbands. Fritzie was bleeding from a cut on his cheek. Ernst had a gash just below the hairline, which he had tried to wipe at with the sleeve of his shirt, smearing blood across his forehead.
“I’m. . . .” He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. “I’m all right.”
“Let’s get him over to the table,” Fritzie shouted. They each grabbed an arm and lifted Hans up, and with the three S.A. men clearing a path for them, they quickly made their way to the speaker’s area. Only then did Ernst let go long enough to peer at the back of Hans’s head. “You’ve got a nasty cut right behind your ear,” he said. “Nothing too bad, though.”
Fritzie was holding Hans’s left arm up so they could see the underside of it. “Look at this.”
Hans was shocked to see that his arm was trickling blood from half a dozen cuts or more. He stared at it, not feeling anything, not even sure if it was his arm. “I’m all right,” he mumbled again, pulling free from Fritzie’s grasp.
There were miniature battles raging all across the hall and the noise was deafening, but the crowd of men that had been trying to get to Hitler had now dissolved into individual groups battling with small groups of storm troopers. And they needed help. “Where’s my bat?” Hans cried.
“Here.” A blond S.A. man stepped forward and handed it to him.
“Danke.” He looked up at Ernst. “Go!” He pointed toward the hall. “They need you more than I do. I’ll stay here with Adolf.” He looked down to where the bearded man was sprawled out on the floor, his head bleeding profusely. “Get that trash out of here.”
9:01 p.m.
By twenty minutes into the fray, almost all of those who had bought tickets to the rally had fled the main dining hall to escape the violence. And wisely so, for major fights had broken out in virtually every part of t
he hall. They raged back and forth as the outnumbered S.A. squads threw themselves at the troublemakers like a pack of ravenous wolves. If they were driven back, they came back for more. If one group was being overwhelmed by superior numbers, others would race in to help. The face and head of virtually every man wearing an armband was covered with blood.
The hall looked as though a bomb had been detonated inside of it. The floor was covered with shattered glass, beer steins, overturned tables, smashed chairs, puddles of spilt beer, and smeared blood. And the noise was thunderous.
Still quite dazed, Hans looked around. He was relieved to see that the group that had rushed in to attack Adolf when the violence erupted had been pushed back. And Hans saw now that the tide had turned dramatically. The ferocity of the storm troopers’ response had taken the leftists by surprise, and Roehm’s counsel to drag them out as soon as they were subdued had leveled the odds tremendously.
Then Hans realized something else. There were other men, men without armbands, standing shoulder to shoulder with the storm troopers, battling the Reds. That puzzled him for a moment, but then he realized that these were members of the audience who had come to hear a lecture, and when violence erupted, had thrown themselves into the middle of it. With the exception of one or two small clusters still battling it out here and there, the bulk of the fighting had shifted to the back corner of the hall, which thrilled Hans. Greatly reduced in number, the enemy had fallen back, clustering together for protection, and the first and second squads had met them with a vengeance. Hundreds of men were going at each other in fierce individual battles. Hans felt a surge of pride as he saw four members of his third squad standing back to back, slugging it out with fists and clubs against a circle of ten or twelve men.
Then he saw Ernst, Fritzie, Anatoly, and Dimitri also standing shoulder to shoulder, their backs against the wall. Anatoly’s leather truncheon was a blur, and with every stroke a man either went down or fell back screaming in pain. They too were covered in blood. Dimitri was bleeding profusely from a wound above his left eye.
Hans turned. Adolf was just a few feet away, standing with the other party leaders, pointing and shouting out encouragement to the men. He still had several guards nearby, so there was no immediately threat to him. The area right around the head table resembled an aid station in a war zone. Half a dozen of the storm troopers were laid out on the floor and were unconscious, their heads heavily bandaged. Others were sitting up, moaning in pain, or stoically enduring their wounds. They were being aided by an older nurse with grey hair and two men that Hans knew had served in the medical corps during the war.
Suddenly light-headed, Hans groped for the back of a chair and steadied himself before moving over to Adolf. “I think we should get you out of here.”
“No,” Adolf shot back. “I will not leave. I told you that.”
“But. . . .” Hans raised a hand and rubbed at his eyes. It was curious. His head was throbbing like a kettle drum with some fiendish little gremlin pounding on it, yet at the same time, it felt somewhat detached from his body, as if it didn’t really belong to him. The same with his left arm. His shoulder and elbow were on fire with pain, yet his fingers were numb. “I. . . .” He stopped again, not sure what he had meant to say.
Adolf grabbed his good arm and shook him gently. “Hans? Are you all right?”
“Just need to sit down for a minute,” he mumbled, looking around for an empty chair.
“Nurse!” Adolf barked.
A moment later, the grey-haired woman was at their side. “Yes, mein Führer?”
“Something’s wrong here. Can you look at him?”
She stepped forward, peering into Hans’s eyes. “What happened?”
Hans blinked and blinked again. “I’m all right,” he finally said.
One of the S.A. men standing nearby had been one of those who had come to his aid with Ernst and Fritzie. He leaned in and said something to the nurse. Her eyes widened a little and she walked around behind Hans. “Oh, my,” she said quietly. Then to the man, she said, “And the beer stein actually hit him in the head?”
“Ja. Hard enough that it shattered.”
Coming back around to face Hans, she pointed to a nearby chair. “Sit down, bitte.” When he did so without protest, she removed the stethoscope from around her neck and placed it against his chest.
“Really,” he mumbled. “I’m okay now. Just a little sore is all.”
“Shhh!” She finished listening and turned to Adolf. “The wound on the back of his head needs to be dressed, but it’s not that deep. It can wait for now.” Then she gently lifted Hans’s left hand. He gave a little yelp and tried to jerk free. She held it fast and began rubbing his fingers softly. “Can you feel that?”
He was looking into her eyes, not down at his hand. “Feel what?”
She scratched the palm of his hand with her fingernail. “That?”
But now he was watching. “Uh . . . yeah.”
She shot him a cool look and turned his arm over so his hand was palm down. She gasped. The underside of his arm was now covered in blood. “What happened to you?”
Again the S.A. man answered. “When the guy knocked him down, Lieutenant Eckhardt tried to get up, so that gorilla stomped on his arm to hold him down. There was lots of broken glass on the floor.”
“Ah.” She gently probed at one of the larger spots.
“Ow!” Hans jerked his arm free.
The nurse looked at his arm for a long moment and then said, “You still have pieces of glass in some of these cuts. They’re going to have to come out.”
“Okay, but not now.”
She nodded. “Agreed. But soon. Before the night is over, or you’re going to get badly infected.”
Hans had an idea. “My wife is also a nurse. She can do it when I get home tonight.”
The nurse gave him a long, skeptical look, but Adolf spoke. “It’s true. She’s a good nurse.”
There was a curt nod. “Okay.” Then she looked into Hans’s eyes. “Open your eyes wide, bitte.” A little surprised at that, he did so and she peered into them. “Do you have a headache or feel pressure in your head?”
“Uh. . . .”
“Don’t lie to me, soldier,” she snapped. “I need to know.”
Hans sighed. “Ja, I’ve got a roaring headache, but then I did get hit with a beer stein.”
She turned to the storm trooper. “There’s some aspirin in my bag on the table. Will you get four of them for me?”
As he moved away, she went on. “Did you lose consciousness after you were hit?”
The S.A. man was close enough to hear her. “No, he didn’t black out.”
“Gut. Do you have any dizziness or are you seeing stars?”
Strongly tempted to downplay this whole thing, Hans was nevertheless concerned. It had been a terrific blow to his head. “I’m a little light-headed when I stand up.”
“Mental confusion?”
“Not any more than normal,” he said, managing a smile.
She didn’t smile back. Adolf leaned in and said something to her. She nodded and went on. “Can you tell me your full name, please?”
“Hans Eckhardt.”
“And that’s your full name?”
“No, Otto Eckhardt.”
“Do you mean Hans Otto Eckhardt?”
“That’s what I said,” he growled. “Are we about done here? There’s a war going on here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
She ignored that. “Can you tell me what the date is today?”
“Uh. . . .”
“What day of the week?”
Hans was concentrating now, wanting to scream at her. Chaos was raging around them and she wanted to know what day of the week it was? But Adolf gave him a stern look, and so he concentrated. “It’s Thursday. No, wait. Friday. It’s Friday.”
>
“Yes, it is,” she said, and then she turned to Adolf. “He is manifesting some symptoms of concussion. I don’t think it is terribly serious.” She lowered her voice. “But you need to keep him away from further violence. If he were to take another blow to the head. . . .” She shrugged.
Adolf replied, “That may not be possible.”
She frowned but nodded. Reality was reality. Suddenly a gunshot blasted like a cannon at the far end of the hall. In an instant, pandemonium turned to utter bedlam.
Hans jerked around in time to see that Ernst was no longer standing beside Fritzie. BLAM! Another gunshot blasted off. He leaped to his feet, grabbing the baseball bat off the table. “Ernst!” he screamed. “Ernst!” He took three steps and then stopped, as the room was suddenly spinning like a carousel gone berserk. He grabbed blindly for the back of the nearest chair, missed, and went down hard, landing on his left shoulder. He shrieked once in agony, and then, blissfully, everything went black.
9:21 p.m.
Hans thought he was back on the fields of Verdun with a morning fog obscuring everything around him. Then gradually things started to come into focus, and with a start he remembered where he was and what was happening. Directly above him he saw the face of the nurse. She was bent over, looking squarely at him. “Herr Eckhardt?”
He blinked. “What happened?”
“You fainted,” she said bluntly.
He considered that for a moment and then said, “Girls faint. Men pass out.”
The nurse laughed and straightened, turning her head to speak to someone he couldn’t see. “He’ll be all right. Let’s get him up into a sitting position.”
Immediately Fritzie’s and Anatoly’s faces appeared above him, and they were both grinning down at him. “Welcome back, soldier,” Fritzie said.
They lifted him to a sitting position, and Hans cried out as pain shot through the whole left side of his body. But they soon had him sitting in a chair, and the pain subsided a little. Then more things came back to him. He twisted his head around. “Ernst? Where’s Ernst?”
Fire and Steel, Volume 3 Page 35
