Berlin or Bust

^{CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR} BATTLE CIRCLE

The Belle-Alliance-Platz was a circular treed plaza named after the Battle of La Belle Alliance, what the Prussians called the Battle of Waterloo. Large derelict tenements overlooked the 100-meter-wide plaza, some of them heavily damaged by bombs, one of them smoking from a dying fire.

Three major avenues fed into the plaza from the north. Another road wrapped around the buildings’ southern side. That made four entrances and exits, all of which the Fallschirmjäger barricaded with furniture plundered from apartments. Overall, it wasn’t a bad defensive position for the regiment to regroup and hole up until Eagle Company arrived with the serum.

Oberfeldwebel Wolff looked around and wondered how quickly they could move out. He’d only arrived minutes ago, but the sporadic gunfire had become a constant chatter at the entry roads. He was here with the Overman serum safe in its canister looped over his shoulder; the regiment should leave now while it could.

He did a quick count and estimated the 3FJR only had around 200 men left. They faced a hard fight getting to the airport.

Some of the men wore bandages. They were wounded. Worse, bitten. As good as a death sentence. Their ammunition had been taken away. They carried spades and bayonets. Before they became ghouls, they were resolved to die fighting for their comrades.

Leutnant Reiser returned glowing. “The oberst is very pleased with us, Herr Wolff.”

As long as he had the serum, the regiment could accomplish its mission. “That is good, Herr Leutnant.”

“Very pleased. You understand what this means.”

“Verstanden, Herr Leutnant.” Even now, the lieutenant was gunning for an Iron Cross, though medals no longer meant anything.

“Ja, we are moving out now to the airport. You will have your own honor guard.” A special squad that would protect him. “As a hero of the Reich.”

“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant.”

The paratroopers packed up their gear and formed up for the march. Snow fell in big flakes. They fluttered like moths onto Wolff’s uniform and left gray smudges. It wasn’t snow. It was ash from some distant fire. The ash of the Reich.

There was no more Reich, only the Fallschirmjäger. Only his duty.

He added, “Any word from Eagle, Herr Leutnant?”

“Nein,” Reiser said, still strangely cheerful. “We will hope for the best but assume they did not survive.”

Wolff had lost half his squad in the pell-mell flight from the Reichstag. More good men he’d trained and mothered and led to their deaths.

“Maybe they didn’t have any Englishman to put out as bait,” he said.

The lieutenant cackled. “Herr Wilkins is a hero of the Reich as well, in his own way.”

Wolff glowered. “Sometimes, Herr Leutnant, you really are a pig.”

He instantly regretted saying it, especially with Beck, Weber, Braun, and Engel within earshot. As a paratrooper, his training placed supreme value on obedience and respect for superior officers.

Reiser only chuckled. “And you are too sentimental, like an old woman. If the company is dead, they died for a good cause. Look around you. We can stop this nightmare and rebuild the German nation. There is no greater cause to die for.”

Wolff could think of one, which was dying for the men who fought at his side, this type of self-sacrifice being the only noble act left in this war. But the point was taken. Eagle had died for something, not just a hill or a crossing.

They’d died to save the human race.

He was just tired of it all. The war’s endless degradation, waste, and horrors. A part of him longed for his own warrior’s death. His own self-sacrifice.

“There isn’t a greater cause,” he agreed as the first of the planes hummed overhead.

The paratroopers looked up as the Skytroopers reached for the sky. The giant winged beasts climbed the air, gaining altitude as they headed northwest.

Back to the North Sea. Back to the United Kingdom.

One by one, the paratroopers lowered their gaze to the ground. The Americans had already evacuated. Now the British were leaving.

The Fallschirmjäger weren’t going anywhere.

“They’re coming back for us, right, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Beck said. “Right?”

Wolff spat and said nothing. The English, it seemed, themselves weren’t above cruel pragmatism.

The paratroopers buzzed with this realization. Officers hurried to the regimental headquarters for information and orders. The buzz rose to shouts of anger and panic.

“Betrayed,” Reiser snarled. His hand twitched near the Luger in its holster, but there was nobody to shoot this time, nobody to punish.

“That means Steiner or Muller made it,” Wolff said. “Or one of the other squads carrying the serum. Somebody in our platoon survived.”

No greater cause, he wanted to tell the lieutenant. Now it’s your turn to die for it. Expendable, used up, and thrown away like so many others since this war began.

He looked around at the paratroopers. The wave of anger and panic that rippled through the regiment’s survivors had spent itself. The men’s faces hardened. They were on their own, but it wasn’t the first time.

And Wolff’s cause still existed. It was right here, with these men.

“I expected this all along,” Weber said. “It’s all a global plot—”

“Silence!” Reiser fumed. “There is nothing we can do except wait for the oberst to issue new orders.”

The gunfire at the barricades intensified. There was nobody else in the entire city for the draugr to fight. The separate actions by the Allied invasion force had drawn the ghouls to different flashpoints, and now they were consolidating.

Here, at the Platz.

“We will hold,” Reiser said. “We’ll butcher the lot of them and take the city.”

The riflemen grinned at their lieutenant’s pluck. Wolff nodded dutifully, thought he knew the truth. They’d be dead by the end of the day.

Pluck they had. What they didn’t have was enough ammunition.

The splashes of gunfire at the barricades escalated to a steady rolling thunder. Through the plaza’s bare trees, Wolff spotted a special weapons platoon setting up KURZ 81-mm mortars. The first shells whumped out of their tubes.

More shooting at the rear. They were now surrounded. The battle had become what the soldiers called a kessel. A cauldron battle. Encirclement. Like at Stalingrad.

The survivors of Eagle Company tensed as the shooting went on. The gunfire slackened as units replaced others on the line.

Soon, Wolff thought. Either they’ll stop coming, or we’ll run out of bullets.

“Permission to go to the front,” he said.

“Go,” Reiser said with disgust.

Wolff wasn’t a hero of the Reich anymore. He dropped the canister of Overman serum on the ground and made his way through the milling paratroopers to reach the nearest barricade. Fallschirmjäger sat on the ground writing farewell letters, sharing their provisions, enjoying a final Ami cigarette before they took their turn on the line. An entire platoon passed bottles they’d plundered, singing the Horst Wessel like their lives depended on it.

The fighting at the barricade was intense and deafening. The paratroopers crouched behind their stacks of household furniture, pouring lead into the lurching hordes that filled the avenue.

And beyond them came the red banners, eagles and the hooked crosses of swastikas. The SS were coming. Hitler’s bodyguard. Past the shambling throng, they marched in neat formation in their black uniforms, rank after rank bristling with bayonets, grunting their chant.

Sie, sie, sie—

No, he realized, it wasn’t sie they were chanting, the word for you.

It was sieg.

Victory.

Taking his time, Wolff found a place on the line behind a beautiful old writing desk and propped his FG42’s bipod on it. The draugr continued their inexorable advance, dying by the dozen but steadily gaining ground. A mortar round landed in their midst, sending bodies cartwheeling through the air.

The most unnerving thing about them was they didn’t know fear.

That and their blazing white eyes.

He lined up his first shot using the barrel’s iron sights and squeezed the trigger. The semi-automatic rifle fired a single round that obliterated a ghoul’s face.

Wolff fired again, again. One by one, he and his comrades thinned the draugr ranks, only to face another eager wave.

The SS were close now.

“SIEG! SIEG! SIEG! SIEG!”

They broke into a run as they charged under their eagles and swastikas. The front ranks went down. The rest swarmed over the barricades.

“Fall back!” an officer howled.

Wolff stepped back, FG42 barking at his shoulder as he drained the twenty-round magazine. He popped in a fresh mag and kept retreating, firing as he went.

Behind him, tenement windows burst along the plaza. Hundreds of draugr poured out of them like maggots boiling from wounds. They were burrowing through the buildings to spill out into the plaza. Soldiers and civilians, old and young, men and women and children with glowing white eyes.

All of them consumed by rage and hungry.

Officers screamed orders to fall back. Wolff retreated, still firing, while the platoons formed up in a battle circle at the center of the plaza. Out of ammunition, many paratroopers had already fixed bayonets.

Wolff jogged to his squad, where Reiser stood fuming at the coming horde. “Now what, Herr Leutnant?”

“Now we die for nothing,” the lieutenant snarled.

On the other side of the battle circle, the Fallschirmjäger fought hand to hand.

Not for nothing, Wolff thought as the last plane roared overhead, returning to England. If he died today, he’d die knowing he did it to save the world.

Atone for what Germany had done to it.

And for the men next to him.

Officers barked commands at their men. The orders passed along the line. The regiment would strike south and fight their way out of the kessel.

“Gehen,” Reiser shrieked. “Los, los, los!”

“Glück ab!” Wolff roared and charged with the rest.