There were few men of any rank about as Ritter and Meier walked from the maintenance hangars that evening, passing rows of silent aircraft on their walk back toward the barracks area in the darkness. Orders they’d received that afternoon had come as a surprise to all and were the source of some discussion and excitement. Staff Flight and Number One Gruppe of ZG26 were to prepare for immediate relocation to I/LG3 north of Paris for conversion training to a new type of aircraft. The rest of the wing was to be considered stood down from any active service and on R&R until they too could be transferred to Paris for similar training.
Although the orders had come through the proper channels – from Fliegerkorps, via Luftflotte offices – they’d been authorised by the OKW directly…signed by Reichsmarschall Kurt Reuters himself. That fact intrigued the officers greatly.
“So what do we know of these new planes, Carl?” Meier inquired as they walked without jackets, ignoring the freshness of the night. “What’s the story on these ‘Lion’ fighter-bombers?”
“Well they’re not classifying them as ‘fighter-bombers’ for a start: they’re instead being listed as ‘attack aircraft’.”
“Is that going to affect our designation as a zerstörergeschwader…?”
“There’s no implication ‘Horst Wessel’ will lose its name or designation…but I think our mission statement will change. It looks certain we’ll be called on more in an attack role from now on than as a heavy-fighter unit, although I hear these new planes are wonderful to fly. Fast as an RAF Hurricane and almost as manoeuvrable when flying ‘clean’ – and they can carry nearly four thousand kilograms of ordnance over short ranges.”
“Viertausend kilogramm…?” Meier was impressed. “That’s as much as a Junkers or a Heinkel! Will they be replacing the…?” He was cut off in mid-sentence as the first pistol shot rang out in the distance. They halted for a moment, staring pointedly off in the direction from which the sound had come. A few seconds later, two more shots roused them from momentary inaction.
“The farmhouse…?” Meier ventured, a frown crossing his features “…and that SS troop went through here not long ago…!”
“Too close to my airfield for my liking! Let’s find out what’s going on, yes?” Ritter snapped curtly, knowing which farmhouse his XO was referring to, and for some inexplicable reason he felt the stab of a sharp, icy feeling at the pit of his stomach. “Get a squad from the guardhouse and meet me there!” He ordered, breaking into a run toward the manned gate opening onto the southern termination of the Route de Wisques beyond the far end of the hangars. “Make sure they’re armed…!”
Kransky took a deep breath, held it halfway through release and gently squeezed the trigger. It broke cleanly, the weapon pushing firmly against his shoulder as a single brass shell case spiralled away into the air to his left. He didn’t stop to watch what happened next: he knew his shot had been true and that was all that mattered. Now was the time to make good his escape before the furore died down and logic took over. Slinging the rifle once more as he disappeared into the bushes, he again took the machine pistol in hand and loped off across the fields as indiscriminate firing broke out from the area of the farmhouse.
Wisch and Schmidt and the rest of his crew had dismounted their panzer the moment the area had been secured and they were no longer required. They stood about awaiting official dismissal, sharing a cigarette with a few of the 3rd SS frontschwein and talking shop. Only Schmidt even bothered to carry his machine pistol with him, the others leaving theirs clamped in the rack within the vehicle’s hull.
It was a few moments before the hushed whisper started spreading about what was going on inside the house: a rumour that spread faster as the shouting of Captain Stahl inside was suddenly joined by the cries of a woman and screams of a young girl. Wisch and Schmidt tried to reassure themselves that what the troopers were claiming – what the officer and NCO were doing in there – surely couldn’t be possible. They weren’t just talking about a woman, after all – there were young children in there as well – but the expressions on the faces of the troopers that’d stepped quickly from the house following screamed orders to “Get out!” were a tale in themselves, and not a pleasant one. The shots had caused them all to flinch; particularly the way the last two had silenced the woman’s final scream, although the terrible crying of the baby continued unabated.
Only the sudden appearance of the boy at the door roused them from their horror. He’d darted past a few of the men before a pair of riflemen standing beside the panzer crew caught him, holding firm against his unintelligible screams and cries. The boy was terrorised and distraught, no rationality showing in his face as he struggled. When they caught sight of Stahl leaving the front door of the house, still doing up his pants, Schmidt finally decided he’d had enough. As the only other officer present, even as one junior to Stahl in rank, it lay upon his shoulders to do something to put a stop to it all. With a reassuring nod to Wisch to stay where he was, the lieutenant took a step toward the other, approaching officer.
In that instant it seemed to Milo Wisch that the helmet of one of the men holding the boy suddenly flew off as if taken by a savage gust of wind. Only as the sound of the rifle shot followed it did anyone register that half the man’s head had been blown away inside. The offending slug, its course diverted in the impact with the man’s head and stahlhelm, still carried enough energy to strike Schmidt in the upper right arm and tear out a chunk of flesh the size of a golf ball. The panzer commander cried out in agony as he fell, clutching at the vicious wound while everyone else reacted in reflex to the shot and threw themselves to the ground around him, seeking cover. One of the men manning a heavy machine gun mounted at the rear of one of the APCs let fly into the darkness with a few bursts in panic before his NCO gathered himself together enough to bark a command to cease fire.
Ritter was a fit man and his breathing was barely laboured as his long strides took him at full speed across the open fields between the base and the farm buildings. As he ran, boots sinking a little into the soft grass of the fields, he saw everything in the lights of the vehicles. He saw the men fall and heard the shot as he was reaching the stone wall at the near boundary to the farm, hurdling it in his stride and drawing his own sidearm – an old Luger that had once been his father’s. He was very nearly shot down himself in the panic and confusion as a spotlight suddenly turned his way, finally bringing him to a halt as he was temporarily blinded. Once his eyes had adjusted, Ritter took in the scene before him. Men were regaining their feet while several were tending to the wounded junior SS officer lying near the centre of the yard area. Two more spent a few seconds confirming what was already obvious from a distance: that the first man hit was indeed dead with a dark and terrible crater over his lifeless left eye where his temple had once been.
As no further shots came out of the darkness and reason began to once more wrest control from shock and panic, the commanding SS officer reappeared from the door into the farmhouse where he’d sought cover. He began issuing orders and organising two squads to begin searching the general area where they believed the shot to have come while searchlights mounted on the APCs swept the road and bushes beyond it. Ritter went initially unnoticed by the SS officer in charge and he deliberately made no attempt at drawing attention to himself, striding purposefully across the yard out of the man’s field of vision. Luger still held tightly by his right hip, he steeled his mind against what unknown horrors he feared he might find and stepped inside.
The door led directly into the kitchen and in the far corner near a small, wood stove, a Frenchman lay in a crumpled heap on the stone floor in what seemed quite a large pool of his own blood, He was obviously dead, his ashen face contorted in a final rictus of agony as hands clutched futilely over a terrible wound in his stomach. The kitchen table was overturned beside him on the floor along with the shattered remains of a radio transmitter and Morse key set.
Ritter was momentarily shocked and sickened by the sight de
spite his military experience; as a pilot it wasn’t often the lieutenant-colonel encountered death at such close proximity. Yet still the sound of a screaming baby resonated through the house, galvanising him into action. Face grim and thin-lipped, he turned and pushed open a side door that he presumed lead to the rest of the house.
In the short hallway beyond he halted once more, again momentarily immobilised by what he found there. The body of the children’s mother lay on the floor against one wall. Tattered shreds of her flimsy summer dress hung moistly about her, stained darkly with fresh blood. One arm was outstretched and lay across the floor of the hallway. Her face was bruised and badly cut, her lip shattered and one eye so badly swollen it was entirely closed. The other eye stared skyward with a lifelessness only possible in death. From where Ritter stood he could see at least a dozen individual cuts on her body from some type of blade.
He dropped to one knee before her, not able to accept the unmistakeable. Reaching out with his free left hand, he shook her lightly in the vain hope of eliciting some kind of lifelike response. Instead, the body unbalanced and rolled onto its face with all the properties of a broken doll, causing him to rise to his feet once more and quickly take a step backward with a sharp intake of breath. Two large, ragged bullet holes showed in the middle of her back: bloody exit wounds.
Gagging but resisting the urge to vomit, Ritter felt a rage rising within him: it was obvious from the slightness of her figure that the woman would’ve been unable to provide any physical resistance whatsoever. His features hardened as he reached down with his left hand and worked the cocking piece of his Luger – a weapon his father had originally carried in the Great War. He felt the reassuringly solid click as a round slid into the chamber and the mechanism snapped shut behind it, and with a deep breath he moved on to the rooms at the other end of the hallway.
He found what he was both seeking and dreading in the first room on the left – perhaps once the dead woman’s bedroom considering the size of the feather bed within. In the cot beside it, the baby’s cries continued unabated, and from his vantage point in the doorway, Ritter could see the child’s tiny hands clutching in the air as it sought solace from a mother who’d never again hold it in her arms. That image itself would’ve been enough to bring the Luftwaffe officer to his knees had his complete attention not been consumed by the sight of the feather bed itself and the devastation that lay upon it.
Ritter forced himself forward into the room, his body beginning to shake involuntarily as his eyes took in what he couldn’t bare to see. Blood…so much blood: more than Ritter had ever seen at one time in his life or so it seemed. Blood in torrents staining the stark whiteness of the sheets and yet there was still enough to spill down onto the stones of the cold floor below on either side of the bed.
That afternoon, an innocent girl had held his Knight’s Cross in her hands and stared in awe. Less than twelve hours later she now stared lifelessly at the ceiling of that room, the crimson essence of her body lost to the floor and the sheets around her. There were no gunshot wounds this time: instead her delicate throat had instead been crudely cut from ear to ear. He stared on in silence, slowly shaking his head as if unable to believe what he was seeing. Her body was bruised and battered, and her thin nightdress was torn and hung in bloody tatters about her waist and thighs: it required no medical qualification to determine what else they’d done to her.
“May I ask what you’re doing here, Herr Oberstleutnant?” The soft voice behind him caused the pilot to stiffen visibly, a hard and emotionless expression crossing his features as he turned slowly toward them. Two of them stood there in the doorway, just inside the room. It was the captain who’d spoken the question, a man barely in his twenties it seemed to Ritter, with ice-blue eyes and straw-blond hair beneath his peaked SS officer’s cap.
“What am I doing here?” Ritter hissed slowly, his rage building quickly now. “What have you done?” Nothing in all his years could’ve prepared the pilot for what he’d seen there that night.
“What exactly do you mean?” The voice was calm and laced with confident contempt. “I’m doing my job, Herr Oberstleutnant…are you doing yours?” As he locked eyes with Ritter, his expression solid and unfazed, he added: “I suggest you put that weapon away and tend to your own affairs.” He placed both hands on his hips. “Go back to your planes and your airfield – what’s going on here has nothing to do with you.”
“‘Nothing to do with me’…?” Ritter repeated in sickened disbelief, an involuntary shudder coursing through his body. “‘…Nothing to do with me’…?” A wild and righteous fury was evident in his eyes now as he bellowed the words a second time, the force of it causing the SS officer’s smug demeanour to waver slightly. “You dare to tell me my job, hauptmann?” In his fury, Ritter used the Wehrmacht equivalent of the man’s SS rank as an intentional insult and display of distaste. The vile creature might be an officer of the Waffen-SS but he was nevertheless still a junior officer. That the fact might be completely irrelevant under such bizarre circumstances didn’t even occur to Ritter as he raised his pistol at arm’s length before either man could react, pointing it directly at the officer’s face.
“Herr Oberstleutnant…” The captain began, his tone one of warning but also containing some personal fear for the first time. It was quickly becoming apparent he’d misread the situation and underestimated the pilot’s resolve.
“You’re both under arrest!” Ritter continued coldly, cutting him off completely. “Take your weapon from its holster and place it on the floor…carefully, I warn you!” There was the flash of movement from one side as the senior NCO who’d accompanied the SS officer began to move forward, right arm rising with great speed. Ritter was faster and was far too nervous and pumped up to react with anything but pure reflex. His own right arm pivoted slightly and the Luger bucked in his hand, the report painfully loud within the confined space of the bedroom. The staff-sergeant fell backward under the impact of the 9mm slug, flesh and skull fragments spraying against the wall behind and out into the hall through the doorway as the bullet punched into the far wall.
There was a moment of stunned silence during which a trio of SS troopers with sturmgewehrs (assault rifles) arrived in the hallway, drawn by the sound of the shot.
“You’ve signed your own death warrant, Herr Oberstleutnant!” The officer snarled as the troopers appeared. “Place this man in custody for the murder of your oberscharführer!”
“This man is under arrest for the atrocities committed here tonight!” Ritter bellowed in return, riveting them to the spot with a wild look in eyes that stared at them over the iron sights of his pistol. “That NCO tried to kill me!” The long-bladed stiletto that had fallen out of the dead man’s hand was lying in the middle of the floor beside the body for all to see, and the expressions on the soldiers’ faces suggested to Ritter that they were as sickened by what was happening there as he was. “I suggest none of you do anything to implicate yourselves in this.”
“I am your commanding officer!” Stahl screamed hysterically. “Do as I say!”
Had there been any inclination to obey those orders, and it appeared that there wasn’t, the chance to act in any case came and passed quickly as Willi Meier appeared in the hallway behind them, a troop of armed Luftwaffe guards in tow.
“You’re all right, sir?” Meier inquired with concern, pushing his way into the room.
“Yes, Willi – I’m all right…” Ritter replied, the croaking quality of his voice suggesting otherwise. “Have your men clear the hallway please…” With a word from Meier, the air force troopers began moving the others out of the hallway and back into the kitchen.
“Take a look, Willi…” Ritter snarled, his eyes and pistol never leaving the SS officer. “Take a look at the courageous war efforts of our esteemed Schutzstaffeln!” There was a short pause, during which Ritter heard his XO draw a sharp breath as he had earlier.
“Mein Gott!” Meier groaned finally, equally revolt
ed.
“I’ve placed this ‘man’ under formal arrest for the crimes committed here. Take his weapon if you would, Willi.” As Meier stepped in to take the man’s service pistol from the holster at his belt, Ritter added: “You! Your name?”
“Hauptsurmführer Pieter Stahl, Third SS Division.” Stahl hissed vehemently in return.
“Outside…!” Ritter growled, gesturing with the Luger. “…And move carefully…I’d be more than happy for you to give me an excuse to fire this weapon a second time tonight!” Turning slowly, Stahl moved out into the hallway and headed for the kitchen with barely controlled fury showing on his features.
“Remember my name, pilot!” The man spat with distaste and contempt as they crossed the kitchen floor, heading for the front door and the open air. “I have powerful friends. You’ll be lucky if you end up before a firing squad!”
“You think I’m afraid of you?” Ritter’s smile was thin and entirely without humour. “I was flying fighters in Spain while you were still in the school yard, pulling the wings off your first fly! You and your depraved lot think you can take over the military? We’ll see who the ‘lucky’ one here is: I’ll see you hanged for this travesty!”
“‘Travesty’…?” The SS captain’s tone was one of genuine incredulity as he whirled to face Ritter in the doorway of the house, the headlights and searchlights of the vehicles outside throwing the man into stark silhouette. “‘Travesty’, you say? They were working for the resistance, you fool! What do you think the fucking radio was for – BBC Home Service? There’s a war on here! Who do you think will court-martial an officer of the SS over the death of some French whore and her bastard children?”
All control finally left Ritter in that instant and he lashed out, his right hand slashing across in a forward arc. The backhanded blow slammed into Stahl’s face, the butt of the pistol he still held tearing open the man’s right cheek with a spray of blood. The man cried out, dazed and in pain, and stumbled backward, sprawling on the hard earth outside as gasps of shock rose from the watching SS troopers. Not one made any move to assist their commanding officer.
England Expects (Empires Lost) Page 11
