by Leo Kessler
‘Prost!’
Delicately, his little finger curled, as if he were drinking tea from a fragile piece of porcelain, Ox-Jo took a tiny sip of the bubbling wine and said out of the side of his mouth, ‘Make dust, owlshit, she’s mine.’
‘Make dust yersen,’ Jap snarled back, and beamed at the girl. ‘She’s just my collar size! How good of you to offer us a drink and your excellent company, my dear countess,’ he said without a trace of his normal thick Munich accent.
Ox-Jo’s mouth fell open stupidly.
‘Not countess, just a common-or-garden baroness,’ the woman replied, and filled her beer-mug with a mixture of champagne and cognac that would have felled an army mule. She downed half of it in one go.
‘For me, you are one of nature’s aristocrats,’ Jap replied, sipping delicately at his champagne.
The baroness did not seem to hear. ‘I hate summer, you know,’ she said, apropos of nothing. ‘It plays hell with your hair, and the damned sun makes one feel so guilty about staying in bed most of the day.’ She downed the rest of the potent mixture and didn’t even blink an eyelid. ‘You don’t think it is a sin to stay in bed, do you?’ She looked at them under fluttering lashes in mock innocence.
‘Oh, no,’ Ox-Jo cried excitedly, finding his tongue at last. ‘Bed’s always a good place to be.’
‘They say he who sleeps does not sin, my dear baroness,’ Jap said with his new-found gallantry, his wicked dark eyes darting a fast glance down the drunken woman’s startlingly low-cut gown.
‘Ah, but my dear little mountain-boy,’ she touched his wrinkled cheek in drunken affection, ‘I do love sin. It is the only thing which keeps one sane in this crazy world.’ Her eyes swept the brilliant assembly of Party members and military. ‘Don’t you think?’
Jap was beside himself with excitement; nobody needed to send him a telegram to tell he was being given an open invitation. ‘Of course, my dear baroness, if we are talking about it in a medical sense, I am forced to agree.’ He grasped her pale hand, tipped with red nails, as if it were dripping blood. ‘Would you like, gracious lady, to…to…sin with a poor common soldier?’ He gulped.
‘I have been waiting all this long dreary hot afternoon for someone to ask me that question. Come, my little mountaineer,’ she offered him her arm graciously. ‘I shall, show you some peaks that you have never seen before.’
And thus they swept out, leaving an astonished Meier staring after them open-mouthed wondering just how the little half-breed had pulled it off.
So the men of Stormtroop Edelweiss spent their day in the capital, not seeing the cracks in the facade of the National Socialist 1,000 Year Reich — the yellow, half-starved faces of the shabby workers, the bitter, limbless ex-soldiers everywhere on their crutches, the bombed buildings and piles of brick rubble, the amateur prostitutes in widow’s black at every street corner — not wanting to see the misery and the inevitable defeat; savouring greedily their time out of war in the drunken, whoring fashion of soldiers all over the world, knowing as they did so that the call to duty and violent, lethal action must come again soon enough.
Just how soon that would be, Colonel Stuermer, still sober in spite of his decision earlier in the day to get drunk, learned that night.
He had been unimpressed by the cheap neo-classic splendour of the new Reich Chancellory, where the dinner in their honour had been held; he had been unimpressed by the forced frugality of the evening — ‘We consume the same rations as the man at the front,’ the general, who was his table neighbour had whispered self-importantly, washing down his length of blood-sausage with a vintage burgundy; he had been unimpressed by the high-level talk on cosmic strategy, full of great armoured sweeps into the four corners of the earth, as if these were still the greatest days of May 1940 and not the autumn of 1942; and he had been unimpressed by the cheap, tawdry political designs of the ‘golden pheasants’3 which they hoped to build on victories that had still to be won.
But Colonel Stuermer was impressed by the plan that Adolf Hitler began to unfold to him and Greul in the sudden solitude of his study, once the guests had departed, full of drunken bonhomie, to return to their homes to eat a proper meal.
At first Hitler had indulged himself in one of his typical rambling monologues, which eventually turned to the recent murder of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich4. ‘Men of his kind must know that murderers are always about, with one idea only in their heads — assassination!’ Hitler said. ‘Although that crook Churchill is drunk most of the day, when he is sober he will stop at nothing. Human life means that much to him.’ He clicked his fingers together sharply and Stuermer glanced swiftly at an entranced Greul, as if asking him what the devil the Führer was leading up to. ‘But two can play that particular game. In ’39, the British Secret Service attempted to assassinate me; now they have succeeded with Heydrich. My patience is exhausted. It is their turn now.’ He paused, wiped the flecks of foam from the corners of his mouth and looked curiously at the two officers. ‘Meine Herren,’ he said, his voice suddenly very low, ‘the Abwehr5 has information that all three of them, that bloody murderer Stalin, the drunkard Churchill and the arch-Jew Roosevelt, are to meet together in the coming months, probably in the Persian capital Teheran.’ Adolf Hitler paused to let his words sink in. ‘Now, a handful of determined men could cover the thousands of kilometres over mountain and plain that separate the Persian capital from our lines in Russia and be waiting for these devils in human form, who are out to destroy our beloved Homeland, and then—’
‘Then, my Führer?’ Major Greul breathed, his eyes glittering fanatically.
‘Then there will be a reckoning, a great reckoning…’
Notes
1. The German national anthem.
2. The premier SS division, ‘the Adolf Hitler Bodyguard’.
3. High party officials.
4. Murdered by Czech paras from England in Prague in May, 1942.
5. German Intelligence.
Also by Leo Kessler and available as an ebook in The Dogs of War Series
No. 1 Forced March
No. 2 The Devil’s Shield
No. 3 SS Panzer Battalion
No. 4 Claws of Steel
No. 5 Blood Mountain
No. 6 Death’s Head
No. 8 The Sand Panthers
COPYRIGHT
First published in 1978
Reprinted in 2006
Spellmount is an imprint of
The History Press
The Mill, Brimscombe Port
Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
© Charles Whiting, 1978, 2006, 2012
The right of Charles Whiting, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 8888 2
MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 8887 5
Original typesetting by The History Press
Ebook compilation by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
scale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
