John Ringo: Watch on the Rhine

Dieter and the rest knew, absolutely knew , that that song, in particular, was against the law, against the rules. Soon the polizei would come and break up this had-to-be illegal gathering. Soon, minutes at most, these damned refugees-from-the-grave Nazis would all be arrested and shortly thereafter the reluctant recruits would be sent home to mama. They knew.

Mühlenkampf tapped his left boot toe unconsciously as the column of thousands of old-young veterans even now split to envelop the boys in their charge. The music and the song changed, the veterans singing in voices and tones designed to knock birds dead at a mile:

Mühlenkampf, suddenly conscious of the tapping boot, forced it to a stop. “Ah, I’ve always liked that one, I confess, Hansi. Why I remember…” yet the thought was lost, uncompleted.

With a ruffle of drums and a flourish of horns the song ended. Still, the marching feet beat out a tattoo on the icy pavement: crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. Sparks were struck by hobnails grating on bare stone. The sparks clustered about the men’s feet, adding a surreal air to the proceedings.

Brasche stepped forward to the microphone. “Men of the SS Korps … halt .” The marching feet took one more step, then slammed to a simultaneous halt. “ Links und rechts… Um .” [18] Center, face The enveloping pincers turned inward as though they were parts of a single, sentient, beast. “ Generalleutnant Mühlenkampf sprache. ” [19] Lieutenant General Mühlenkampf speaks.

Hans Brasche stepped back from the microphone, sharply, as the black-leather-clad Mühlenkampf walked forward.

Mühlenkampf’s head twisted back and cocked proudly, arrogantly. “I speak first to my old comrades, who need no speeches. Well met, my friends, well met. We have shaken a world before, together. We shall shake several more worlds before we are done.”

The proud head looked down its straight, aristocratic nose at the new recruits. “I speak next to those who are here to join us. Filth! You are nothing and less than nothing. Unfit, weak, malingering, decadent… Refuse of a society turned to garbage. Spoiled rotten little huddlers at apron strings.

“You make me ill. You make your trainers, my cadre, ill. You are a disgrace to your species, a disgrace to your culture… a disgrace to our nation and traditions.”

Mühlenkampf’s face creased with the smallest of smiles. “And yet we, we old fighters, have another tradition. We are, to paraphrase an English poet, charms ‘for making riflemen from mud.’

“Regimental commanders, take charge of your regiments.”

On cue, the band struck up Beethoven’s “ Yorkische Marsch .” The icy field rang with crisp commands. Units faced and wheeled. Even the new recruits, smarting under a brief and contemptuous tongue lashing, could not help but be forced into step by the march’s heavy, ponderous refrain. As a long and twisting snake, the column marched out from under the tent of light to enter the world of darkness.

As the last companies were disappearing into the dark, Brasche asked, “So you think this will work, Herr General ?”

Mühlenkampf snorted as if the very thought struck him as ridiculous. “This speech? Some lights? A little insulting language? A little showmanship? Do I think these will work ? Hansi, spare me. Nothing ‘works’ in that sense. The easy transformation, like the nonsensically — impossibly — successful spontaneous mass uprising, are bugaboos of the left, of the liberals and of the Reds and the Greens.

“Ah, but Hansi, they forget something, those Reds and Greens. Several things, really. Germany was no less decadent, divided and weak in the 1920s. I was there. I remember. Yet we shook the world in the ’40s. Why? Because transformations like that are as superficial and shallow as they are easy. Those boys down there are Germans, Hansi — lemmings, in other words.

“Lemmings, they are, Hansi. Germans: mindless herd animals, at best.” The brief and indulgent smile was replaced in turn by a feral grin. Mühlenkampf slapped Brasche heartily on the shoulder, adding, “But they’d rather be in a pack than a herd, my friend… a pack of wolves.”

The boarding hordes snarled and snapped at each other as their God Kings herded them from the lighters and down into the storage bowels of the still forming globe. From one or another of the confused and frightened normals crocodilian teeth lashed out whenever followers of a different Kessentai came in range. Sometimes the needle-sharp rows of teeth drew yellowish blood and scraps of reptilian flesh before their wielders were lashed back to passive obedience.

Not for the first time, Ro’moloristen felt his own bile rise, his crest expand. Half of this was the result of dim, presentient memories of his own time in the breeding pens, a time of constant struggle and fear of being eaten alive by his siblings. The other half was more pungent.

The normals tended to lose control when upset or frightened. The crude loading and unloading, coupled with the strangeness of space flight, was more than sufficient to upset most of them and to actually frighten many, even as dull as they were. The result of that fear was a stench of carelessly dropped Posleen feces wafting up from the depths of the lighters to fill the air. In that section of the globe the loading of which it was the young God King’s task to supervise, the stench was overpowering to the extent of being sickening. Still , he thought, normals are so cute, so desirable. But they are so untidy.

Somewhat less bothered by the stench they lived with daily, the cosslain — the superior normals — flanked the procession, keeping a modicum of order. Keeping order among the normals was half the reason for the flanking procession. The other half was to carry and load aboard ship individual weapons with which the normals could not be trusted entirely, aboard ship, given the stresses those normals were under.

A Kenstain [20] A Kessentai who has forsaken, or for cowardice been driven from, The Path of Fury . appeared at Ro’moloristen’s shoulder.

The God King gestured and a hologram of the globe appeared in midair. He gestured, again, with a claw and a section of the hologram, plus a route leading to that section, suddenly glowed brighter than the rest. “Guide this group down to here and get them into the stasis tanks,” he ordered.

Athenalras held fiefs on nine worlds. The first, despite a major evacuation of the People, was already plunging itself into Orna’adar, the Posleen Ragnarok. This was the last to be loaded. From here the People would move to the new world, the one they called “Aradeen,” though the locals called it “Earth.”

Schultz is too clean , thought Krueger. In an exercise in mud crawling intended for little higher purpose than to accustom the boys to getting dirty — well, that and simple toughening to overcome their civilized sensibilities, the boy remained too clean.

Krueger bent over and picked up a clod of half-frozen mud. This he smeared into Schultz’s face snarling, “You little pussy. You smelly little fur-hole filled with nothing. You are nothing so good as a Jew-bitch camp whore. At least she would have known her job.”