John Ringo: Watch on the Rhine

“Do not fool yourself,” corrected the Kanzler . “We have been worse, Günter, far worse. We were worse because what we did, we did to our own. Cities burned away. Lampshades. Soap. Dental gold. Einsatzgruppen . Gas chambers and ovens. A whole gamut of horror visited upon the innocent by our ancestors… and ourselves.”

“And Dresden?” answered Günter, with a raised eyebrow and a sardonic air. “Hamburg? Damstadt?”

“I didn’t say, my young friend, that we were alone in our guilt.”

The Kanzler blinked away several snowflakes that had lodged themselves in his gray eyelashes. “And… after all, what is guilt of the past?” he sighed. “Do our own young people now need to be destroyed because of what their grandfathers did? Is it right for our children to be eaten, to be turned into little piles of bare, gnawed bones? How far does the sin of Adam and Eve go, Günter?”

Straightening that old and worn and overburdened back, the Kanzler announced, “In any case, it doesn’t matter. Whatever we have done, nothing deserves this… this abattoir. And whatever we can do to prevent it… that shall I do.”

Günter, the aide, scratched his chin, absently. “But what we can do, we have done. Production of everything we need for defense or evacuation is proceeding apace. The old soldiers of the Wehrmacht[3] Germany’s World War II armed forces: Army, Navy and Air Force. have been remobilized, what there were of them, and are being rejuvenated. The conscription is in legal force, and exempts only those who conscience cannot abide military service. We are doing all we can.”

“No, my young friend,” answered the Kanzler , slowly and deliberately. “There is one resource yet we have not touched. One that I would never have touched, myself, before seeing this nightmare with my own eyes.”

One resource? One resource. What could the Kanzler mean? Suddenly Günter’s eyes widened with understanding. “ Mein Herr , you can’t mean them .”

Tightening his overcoat about him in the cold, reaching up a hand to brush away yet more of the steadily falling snow, the Kanzler looked skyward as if asking for guidance. Not receiving any, still with eyes turned heavenward, he answered, definitively, “ Them. ”

The chancellor thought, but did not say, And anything else I must bring back to prevent this from happening to our cities, our people.

The crowd was immense; its intensity, palpable. One among half a million protest marchers, Isabelle De Gaullejac felt as she had not since her happy and carefree days as a Socialist Youth.

Though past forty, Isabelle was yet a fine looking specimen of womanhood. Typically French, she had retained her slender shape. Her shoulder-length brown hair was untouched by gray. And if her face had a few more wrinkles than it had had as a young college student, the sidelong glances of men old and young told her she had not lost her appeal.

Then it had been the Americans she had protested; them, and the war they had inherited from France. Now it was France she protested against, France and the war it had seemingly inherited from the Americans.

She was sure, certain , that it was all the Americans’ fault. Had the aliens, these Posleen, attacked Earth first? No. Foolishly, at American behest, the French Army had gone to the stars, looking for trouble and becoming involved in a fruitless war, against a previously unknown alien civilization.

And for what? To save a crumbling federation of galactics?

France’s business was here, on Earth, looking after French people.

And now they were talking about increased taxes? To help the common people here? Again, no. It was to grease the wheels of the war machine that the money was needed. Isabelle shuddered with revulsion.

More revolting than higher taxes for lesser purposes, the talk was that universal conscription was about to be expanded. She looked at her two young sons, one held with each hand, and vowed she would never permit them to be dragged from her home to be turned into cannon fodder in a stupid and needless war.

Isabelle’s voice joined that of the thronging masses. “Peace, now… peace, now… PEACE, NOW!”

Word had spread; Günter had ensured it would spread.

As the chancellor entered the Bundestag , Germany’s upper legislative body, he saw a sea of mostly neutral faces, sprinkled with those more hostile or, in a very few cases, even eager. He wasn’t sure which group he feared more — the left that was going to raise a cry for his ouster, or the new right that might raise a cry for him to assume a title he loathed, “Führer.”

No matter. He could only persevere in his course and hope that the great mass of legislators would see things as he did. To help them see he knew he must show them.

As he took his seat the chancellor made a hand motion. Immediately the lights dimmed. Almost immediately thereafter a movie screen unrolled from the high ceiling.

For the past four days a specially selected team of newsmen and women had been assembling a documentary using mostly American but also some few other sources. It had been America, however, which sensed a need for Germany to continue as an ally, that had been most willing and able to provide the team of German journalists with everything needed to complete their mission.

Nothing had been censored, no holds had been barred. The German legislature was about to be kicked full in their collective teeth with the horror about to descend upon their country.

Annemarie Mai, Green and Socialist representative from Wiesbaden, had been among those unutterably hostile to the Kanzler ’s idea. As the film began to roll she was by no means displeased to see Washington, DC, in ruins. American policies, from their cowboyish adventures in imperialism to their wasteful and destructive energy and environmental policies to — most damning — their insistence on an outdated economic system that had the infuriating habit of making her own preferred statist system seem inefficient; all these made Washington a loathsome symbol of all she despised about America.

Like many in the world, however, Annemarie liked Americans, as people, just as much as she hated their country.

And so her reaction to much of the rest of the film was quite different. Little children gone catatonic with fright at having seen their parents butchered and eaten before their eyes made Annemarie weep. More horrid still were the children not gone into oblivion, the ones shown who screamed and cried continuously. These made the legislator quiver with terror.

And then there were the soldiers, with their sick, dirty and weary faces. They were white enough to seem no different from the boys and girls of Germany. The shrieks of the wounded, especially, tore at Annemarie’s heart.

And then came the piles of meat-stripped bones, human bones, along with separate piles of neatly split skulls, some of them very small indeed. These sent Annemarie running for the ladies’ room, unable even for a moment longer to keep down her gorge.

“You must think very little of the strength of the democratic spirit in German hearts to be so concerned about the dangers of rejuvenating twenty or twenty-five thousand old men,” the chancellor told a group of hecklers, shouting slogans from the gallery.

If his words had any effect on the hecklers it was something less than obvious. Their chants of “No more Nazis. No more Nazis,” even seemed to grow a bit in volume and ferocity.