Robert Wilson - The Company of Strangers

The plane landed and taxied in a miasma of snow thrashed up into the darkness by its propellers. A coated figure, huddled against the icy blast, slipped into this chill world from a neat hole which had opened up in the belly of the aircraft. A car from the Führer’s personal pool waited just off the wing tip and the chauffeur, collar up to his hat, held the door open. Fifteen minutes later the guard at the gate of Restricted Area I admitted Albert Speer, architect, into the military compound of Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters for the first time. Speer went straight to the officers’ canteen and ate a large meal with appropriate wolfishness, which would have reminded his fellow diners, if they’d had room for empathy, just how difficult it was to keep the latest far-flung corner of the Third Reich supplied.

Two captains, Karl Voss and Hans Weber, intelligence officers in their mid twenties attached to the Army Chief of Staff, General Zeitzler, had been standing outside stamping their feet and smoking cigarettes when Speer arrived.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Voss.

‘I knew you’d ask that.’

‘You don’t think that’s a normal question when somebody you don’t know walks past?’

‘You forgot the word “important”. When somebody important walks past.’

‘Piss off, Weber.’

‘I’ve seen you.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s get back,’ said Weber, chucking his cigarette.

‘No, tell me.’

‘Your problem, Voss…is that you’re too intelligent. Heidelberg University and your fucking physics degree, you’re…’

‘Too intelligent to be an intelligence officer?’

‘You’re new, you don’t understand yet – the thing about intelligence is that it doesn’t do to be too inquisitive.’

‘Where does this rubbish come from, Weber?’ asked Voss, incredulous.

‘I tell you one thing,’ he said, ‘I know what powerful people see when they look at you and me…and it’s not two individuals with lives and families and all the rest.’

‘What then?’

‘They see opportunities,’ he said, and barged Voss through the door.

They went back to work in the situation room, up the silent corridor towards Hitler’s apartment where the Führer was still entertaining the Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, whose arrival had terminated the situation meeting of that afternoon. As the young captains resumed their seats the two older men were still just about talking. Food had been served to them earlier by an orderly grown accustomed to glacial silences, split only by the odd cracking of a wooden chair.

Voss and Weber worked, or rather Voss did. Weber’s head started toppling again almost as soon as they sat down in the airless room. Only the snap of his neck muscles jerked him awake and prevented him from flattening his face on the desk. Voss told him to go to bed. Weber’s eyes ground in their sockets.

‘Go on,’ said Voss. ‘This is nearly finished anyway.’

‘Those,’ said Weber, standing and pointing at four boxes of files, ‘have to go out on the first flight in the morning…to Berlin.’

‘You mean unless the Moscow flight is open by then.’

Weber grunted. ‘You’ll learn,’ he said. ‘Back to the monk’s cell for me. It’s going to be hard tomorrow. He’s always bad after Todt’s given his report.’

‘Why’s that?’ asked Voss, still keen, still capable of doing an all-nighter for the East Front.

‘The first place you lose a battle is up here,’ said Weber, leaning over Voss and tapping his head, ‘and Todt lost that one last June. He’s a good man and he’s a genius and that’s a bad combination for this war. Good night.’

Voss knew Fritz Todt, as everyone knew him, as the inventor of the autobahnen , but he was much more than that now. Not only was he running all arms and munitions production for the Third Reich, but he and his Organization Todt were the builders of the West Wall and the U-boat pens that would protect Europe from invasion. He was also in charge of building and repairing all roads and railways in the Occupied Territories. Todt was the greatest construction engineer in German history and this was the greatest programme of all time.

Voss surveyed the situation map. The front line stretched from Lake Onega, 500 kilometres south-west of Archangel on the White Sea, through Leningrad, the Moscow suburbs and down to Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, off the Black Sea. From Arctic to Caucasus was under German control.

‘And he thinks we’re losing this war?’ asked Voss out loud, shaking his head.

He worked for another hour or more and then went out for another cigarette and to wake himself up in the freezing air. On his way back he saw the good-looking man who’d arrived earlier, sitting on his own in the dining room and then, coming towards him outside the situation room, another figure, shuffling along with sagging shoulders as if they were under some penitential weight. The face was grey, soft and slack, falling away from its substructure. The eyes saw nothing beyond the immense calculation in his mind. Voss moved to avoid the man but at the last moment they seemed to veer into each other and their shoulders clashed. The man’s face was reanimated in shock and Voss recognized him now.

‘Forgive me, Herr Reichsminister.’

‘No, no, my fault,’ said Todt. ‘I wasn’t looking.’

‘Thinking too hard, sir,’ said Voss, dog-like.

Todt studied the slim, blond young man more carefully now.

‘Working late, Captain?’

‘Just finishing the orders, sir,’ said Voss, nodding at the open door of the situation room.

Todt lingered on the threshold of the room, his eyes roved the map and the flags of the armies and their divisions.

‘Nearly there, sir,’ said Voss.

‘Russia,’ said Todt, his eye swivelling on to Voss, ‘is a very large place.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Voss, after a long pause in which nothing more was forthcoming.

‘Maps of Russia should be room-sized,’ said Todt. ‘So that army generals have to walk to move their divisions, with the knowledge that each step they take is 500 kilometres of snow and ice, or rain and mud, and in the few months of the year when it’s neither of those things they should know that the steppe is shimmering in silent, brutal, dust-choked heat.’

Voss shut up, mesmerized by the thunderous roll of the older man’s voice. Todt backed out of the room. Voss wanted him to stay, to continue, but no questions came to mind other than the banal.

‘Are you on the first flight out tomorrow, sir?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘To Berlin?’

‘We’ll stop in Berlin on the way to Munich.’

‘These files need to go to Berlin.’

‘In that case they’d better be on my plane before seven thirty. Talk to the flight captain. Good night, er…Captain…’

‘Captain Voss, sir.’

‘Have you seen Speer, Captain Voss? I was told he’d arrived.’

‘There’s someone in the dining room. He arrived earlier.’

Todt moved away, shuffling again down the corridor. Before he turned left to the dining room he turned on Voss.

‘Don’t imagine for one second, Captain, that the Russians are doing nothing about…about your situation in there,’ he said, and disappeared.

No wonder the Führer was bad after Todt’s visits.

Another half-hour passed and Voss went to fetch coffee from the dining room. Speer and Todt sat on either side of a single glass of wine, which the older man sipped. The structural differences between the two men were marked. The one slumped with definite subsidence under the right foundation, the nineteenth century, Wilhelmine façade lined and cracked, the paint and masonry crumbling to scurf. The other cantilevered over at an impossible angle, his lines clean and defined, the modern Bauhaus front, dark, handsome, uncluttered and bright.