Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

“And most importantly,” the general continued, “the Messerschmitt-262s are fully functional. A revolutionary power source, rocket jets, replacing the conventional engines. Those planes are flying now, Jaeger, the logical successor to the V-1 and V-2S. I had serious misgivings about these sorties — but Goering would have his way. He insisted the 262s, or V-4S as Der Führer prefers to call them, needed additional testings at low altitudes. His pilots are instructed not to engage the enemy, but can you trust hot-blooded young men with so much power in their hands?”

General Kroll turned and smiled at Jaeger. “In power dives the 262s are breaking through Mach One. They will make the American Flying Fortresses look like flying cows.”

Jaeger remembered the Messerschmitt test pilot who had first flown the Luftwaffe’s M-262 jet in July of 1942 — Fritz Wendel. Jaeger had been sent with a group of artillery officers to observe a demonstration at a field near Peenemünde and could remember how it looked, a streak of silver burning through the white skies. After the flight they had drunk a toast to Fritz Wendel, a slim young civilian who had been eager to explain the design and principle of the revolutionary new plane. They were not much older than Jaeger himself, these men of rockets and Peenemünde, but they had had a special look in their eyes. Almost obsessed, he had thought.

“The Führer trusts his instincts on Christrose and so do I,” Kroll was saying. “The operation has the four essential elements: secrecy, surprise, a massive concentration of strength against weakness and last but far from least, it has the element of terror in it. Yes, I trust Hitler in this area. Can you recognize his inspiration?”

The answer seemed obvious. “Vom Krieg?” Jaeger said.

“Yes, of course,” General Kroll nodded emphatically. “They can’t get away from him.”

Jaeger’s thoughts were again flooded with memories of Rudi Geldman.

General Kroll was saying, “I’m now fifty-seven, Jaeger. My father, Heinrich, was born in 1846. He married late. And my grandfather, Reinhard, was born in 1783. When he was of age, he attended the Berlin Military Academy with—” The general smiled. “You know this, of course, but my grandfather was a classmate of von Clausewitz...”

Christmas in Dresden and Rudi singing the old hymns with the Jaeger family, his smile mischievous at his own apostasy, and around them the candles and the animals at the manger and the smell of the roast goose his mother always made with chestnuts and apple pancakes...

“It is one of the small but justifiable conceits of our family that Grandfather Reinhard may have contributed in some small fashion to Vom Krieg when he and Clausewitz were at the Academy...”

They had hiked through the woods beyond Dresden, Hedy with them, and they had swum in cold lakes ringed with green trees...

“I’d planned like Rundstedt to be retired long before this. I would like to have a home in the country, close to a city with a good library...”

What a great, scholarly classroom a defeated Germany would be, Jaeger thought with a spasm of painful humor. Everyone at blackboards with leather patches on the elbows of old jackets. Smoking pipes, painting seascapes. “Der Henker” thoughtfully rehearsing the plays of Lorca and Lope de Vega, illuminating them with personal insights from Guernica. And General Kroll peddling his bicycle toward the local library, a white-haired figure in rough tweeds, to read about Bismarck and Frederick the Great and Hamilcar Barca...

“It gives me satisfaction, Jaeger, to know that my ancestors served with Clausewitz against Napoleon. In my grandfather’s time there were only professional armies. Military service was a career, like the law or the church. There was no talk of dying to the last man, less of God or king or country. Hopeless battles were not fought. The commanders with inferior forces simply withdrew from the field.

“Napoleon put an end to this tradition by raising an army of patriots. Imagine how this must have struck the professionals... to expect peasants, who knew only their meager farms and villages, to fight and die for the concept of a nation, an idea which could have had no more reality to them than distant stars, they thought. But Napoleon proved that such patriots would follow their flags into the mouths of cannons. And with them he burned to cinders all the known maps of Europe. And Napoleon said — and think, Jaeger, how many divisions this would be worth in the field today — ‘The boundaries of a nation’s greatness are marked only by the graves of her soldiers and heroes.’ ”

They drove in silence for several minutes through winding streets toward the center of the city.

Then General Kroll said quietly, “This is our last fling of the dice.”

Jaeger’s head felt heavy; blood pounded in his ears. He could hardly hear General Kroll now and his thoughts were becoming disturbingly erratic. The songs of Christmas and the blue sheen of lakes in summer, the cheese and coarse bread and young wine on the banks soft and shiny with moss and pine needles. A strange and lovely road to take to the camp at Weimar—

“How long since you’ve had leave, Jaeger?”

“Nineteen months, sir.”

“Not even a day with Hedy and the girls?”

“No, sir.”

The general was smiling. “Open your orders now.”

Karl Jaeger peeled back the flap of the sealed envelope and, when he recognized the priority orders for rail transport from Koblenz to Dresden, his tightly reined emotions almost betrayed him; he felt a sting of tears in his eyes.

“Twenty-four hours, Jaeger. It was all I could manage.”

Jaeger didn’t trust himself to speak, but he did allow himself a forbidden luxury. In the darkness of the speeding command car, with bitter winds in his face, he closed his eyes and permitted himself to think of his wife and children.

December 13, 1944. Lepont, Belgium. Wednesday, 1400 Hours.

In the gloom of an afternoon laced with snow, a boy named Alain ran along the cobblestone streets that twisted through the village of Lepont, a cluster of old stone houses on the banks of the River Salm.

The boy was fourteen but dwarflike in appearance; five years of wartime privation had checked his growth and pinched his features and the lack of fats in his diet had given him the lusterless skin and hair of an old man. As he hurried through the square, past the Church of the Holy Spirit, the clatter of his wooden shoes was almost lost in the sweep of wind off the river. At the edge of the town, where the village merged with the fields, he stopped at a house and knocked insistently on the schoolteacher’s door.

When Denise Francoeur opened it Alain gave her the message from his brother, Jocko. She nodded and turned quickly to collect her heavy cloak from a hall tree. The young woman and the boy then hurried toward the village square to Jacques Berthier’s café. Wind coming across the Salm filled her cloak like a sail and she almost lost her balance on the slick stones. She was breathing raggedly, hating the sick, familiar fear she had lived with for so many years. When the German garrison had pulled out of Lepont three months earlier her fears had gradually retreated with them, but now the terrors were alive again.

Denise Francoeur would be twenty-five on her next birthday. Four years before, her husband, Etienne, along with most of the young and able-bodied men of Lepont, had been sent off to slave labor camps in Germany. She had not heard from him in twenty-six months. The last letter had come from East Prussia...

Jocko Berthier waited for them in the shadows of the church. He was short and thick, with stocky legs, but with a back so crippled that his body was bent almost parallel to the ground and his neck was perpetually cramped from looking up to meet the eyes of everyone but the children of the village.