Hitler's war

Chapter 9

Alistair Walsh was alive and breathing and somewhere in France. He heartily approved of the first two. The last wasn’t so good. He couldn’t remember just when the BEF got driven back over the border. They gabbled away in French in the western part of Belgium, so he couldn’t tell by any shift in language. But this was France, all right, and the Germans were still doing their damnedest to break through.

They hadn’t managed yet. Walsh remembered the black days in the spring and early summer of 1918, when whole British regiments-Christ, divisions!-got swallowed up in the Kaiser’s last offensive. This was worse. Then storm troops with submachine guns had spearheaded the German attacks. They were right bastards, but they went at the speed of shank’s mare, like everybody else in the Great War.

Nowadays, the Nazis had tanks. They sliced through infantry like a hot knife through lard. The BEF and the French had tanks, too. Officers swore on a stack of Bibles-and swore profanely-that they had as many tanks as the Germans, maybe more. They sounded as if they knew what they were talking about. But whether they did or not, they never seemed to have enough of them at the places were it counted.

And so the bastards in field-gray-funny how the mere sight of that color, and the beetling shape of that helmet, could put your wind up-kept carving slices out of the Allies, forcing them to retreat if they didn’t want to get cut off and surrounded. The Nazis made it over the Dyle in rubber boats. Machine guns knocked out the first boats, but German tanks and antiaircraft guns on the far side of the river silenced the machine guns. As soon as the Germans won a bridgehead, they ran pontoon bridges over the Dyle and got their tanks across. Things went downhill from there.

“Hey, Puffin!” Walsh said. “Got a fag on you?”

“Sure, Sergeant.” Puffin Casper looked like hell. His greatcoat was filthy and torn. His tin hat sat at an anything but jaunty angle on his head. He hadn’t shaved since God only knew when, and he hadn’t bathed since a while before that. Walsh couldn’t very well gig him-he was no lovelier, and no cleaner, himself. And he’d smoked his last cigarette an hour earlier.

He took a couple from the packet Puffin held out. “Thanks,” he said, and cupped his hands in front of his mouth to get one lit in spite of the cold, nasty wind. It wasn’t raining right this minute, and it wasn’t snowing, either. Dirty gray clouds clotted the sky. Before long, it would be doing one or the other. Or maybe it would split the difference with sleet, which was worse than rain or snow.

Somebody not far away started cussing. The vile words held no special heat, as they might have if the swearer had mashed his thumb with a spanner. No, his fury was cold and disgusted. Walsh knew what that meant: he’d just heard bad news. If everyone around him was lucky, he’d found out his fiancee was having it on with the corner greengrocer. If not…

“What’s buggered up now?” Walsh asked. Knowing was better than not knowing-he supposed.

“Bloody Belgies have packed it in,” came the reply. “King Leopold’s asking Hitler for an armistice.”

“What? They can’t do that!” Under other circumstances, the outrage in Walsh’s voice would have set him laughing. True, the Allies had agreements not to seek separate peaces. But it wasn’t as if the Dutch hadn’t already done it. And it wasn’t as if everybody didn’t already know Leopold was a weak reed and halfway toward liking the Germans, either.

All the same, the news was a jolt. A corner of Belgium had stayed free all through the last war. The Belgian army had stayed in the field all through the last war, too. Now the whole country was spreading its legs for the Germans after three weeks.

“I know they can’t,” said the soldier with the news. “Sods are doing it anyway. And wherever they’re holding the line, the Nazis can pour right on through.”

“Christ!” Walsh hadn’t thought of that. “Sweet suffering Jesus Christ!” Sweet suffering Jesus Christ had had a birthday not long before, not that anyone let it get in the way of the serious business of slaughter. Walsh found a real question to ask: “What are we doing about it?”

“Chamberlain’s deplored it, the wireless said,” the other soldier answered.

“Oh, that’ll set Adolf’s mustache quivering, that will. Deplored it, has he? Bleeding hell!” Walsh could have gone on for some time, but what was the point? Chamberlain had survived two votes of confidence since the war broke out, by a diminishing margin. One more might sink him. That wouldn’t have broken Walsh’s heart. He also feared it wouldn’t have much effect on the way the BEF was fighting.

A British machine gun up ahead started barking. A moment later, another joined in. “Oh, bleeding hell,” Walsh muttered again. He’d hoped things would stay quiet for a while. The weather was bad enough to have made any push in the last war bog down in mud and slush. But there were many more paved roads for wheels to use now, while tracks could force a way where even men on foot had trouble going.

To his glad surprise, he heard engines coming up from the southwest. “Matildas!” somebody yelled. The British tanks waltzed up to the line a few minutes later. Waltz was about all they could do; they made eight miles an hour on roads, and were slower off. They had thick armor-German antitank shells mostly bounced off of them. But they carried only a single rifle-caliber machine gun. Walsh would have wished for French machines that had some hope of keeping up with German panzers…and of knocking them out in a stand-up fight.

Still and all, any tanks were better than none. If panzers came after you and you couldn’t hope to fight them, what choice did you have but to fall back? Walsh waved to the tank commanders, who rode head and shoulders out of their cramped turrets. “Give ‘em hell!” he shouted.

“That’s what we’re here for,” a tank commander answered in elegant Oxbridgian tones. Walsh’s own accent was decidedly below the salt. After mixing with men of every class in the last war and since, he could make sense of all kinds of accents, from Received Pronunciation to Cockney to broad Yorkshire to Scots burr. They reminded him the whole country was in the fight.

The Matilda’s rattled forward. Walsh dug his foxhole deeper and wider, and built up the earthwork in front of it. He also looked around to decide where he’d go if he had to get out in a hurry. You didn’t want to have to worry about that at the last minute. He who hesitated then was lost.

A cannon barked-one of the Germans’ 37mm antitank guns. They were small and light enough to keep up with advancing troops. A split second later, the shell whanged off a Matilda. The British tank’s machine gun never hesitated. Walsh grinned. Sure as hell, Matildas were tough old gals.

But then a bigger gun boomed. This time, the noise of the impact was Whang! Blam! That Matilda brewed up. So did another one a moment later. Hitler’s boys had an 88mm antiaircraft gun. In their thoroughness, they’d also seen fit to stock it with armor-piercing ammunition. Walsh didn’t think a tank in the world could keep out an 88mm shell.

Puffin knew that report for what it was, too. “Bad luck they’ve got an 88 here,” he said.

“Too fucking right it is,” Walsh agreed. He wondered if the German monster had taken out the tank commander with the posh accent. He hoped not, for whatever that was worth.

Another Matilda went up in flames. The rest of them started pulling back. They couldn’t even escape in a hurry. Whang! Blam! Another gout of flame, another column of smoke-another pyre.

And here came the German infantry. They loped forward in loose order, diving for cover whenever somebody fired at them. They shot back from their bellies. They had machine guns. Their air-cooled models were lighter and easier to lug along than most of the weapons the British used.

“Panzers!” The shout rang out from half a dozen throats at once.

The German machines were a hell of a lot faster than the poor Matildas. Most of their commanders also drove standing up in the turret. Walsh drew a bead on one. He pressed the trigger. The rifle bucked against his shoulder. The German threw up his hands, then slumped over sideways. It was a Panzer I-if the commander was wounded or dead, the driver couldn’t man the guns. (Well, he could, but then he couldn’t drive.) The machine turned around almost in its own length and got out of there.

Others came on. So did the foot soldiers they shepherded. Bullets thudded into the mud in front of Walsh. None got through. All the same, the neighborhood wasn’t healthy any more.

Walsh scrambled out of his hole and ran for the stone fence he’d spotted not far away. Out in the open, he felt worse than naked-he felt like a snail with its shell pulled off. Bullets cracked past him and stitched the mud near his feet.

With a gasp not far from a wail, he threw himself down behind the fence. Then he popped up and fired at the Germans. Four men threw themselves flat because of one bullet. They were out in the open, too, and knew how vulnerable they were. Walsh shot at one of them. The man twisted, grabbing his leg.

“Sorry, pal,” Walsh said. Most of the time, you didn’t see the enemy you hit. Here he’d done it twice in a few minutes. Instead of making him proud, it just made him hope the Germans wouldn’t do the same thing to him.

* * *

Huddling in a slit trench with half-frozen mud on the bottom wasn’t what Hans-Ulrich Rudel had had in mind when the war started. That didn’t mean he wasn’t doing it. His squadron’s latest airstrip lay a few kilometers west of Oostende, on the Strait of Dover. You could damn near spit from Belgium to England here.

And you could damn near spit from England to Belgium. The RAF had come over every night since Belgium threw in the towel. Night bombing wasn’t very accurate, but you didn’t want to stay in your nice, cozy sleeping bag when the bombs whistled down. A couple of intrepid souls had tried it. One of them was in the hospital, the other dead.

Fragments from a big one that hit much too close whined past overhead. “Those miserable pigdogs!” Hans-Ulrich said around a yawn. He was amazed at how little sleep he could get by with. “We ought to bomb them for a change, keep them up all night.”

“How do you know we aren’t?” somebody else said. There in the chilly darkness, Rudel couldn’t tell who it was.

“We’d hear about it on the radio if we were,” he answered. “They wouldn’t keep something like that quiet-they’d brag about it.”

“Er hat Recht,” another Luftwaffe man said. The rest of the shivering Germans must have thought Hans-Ulrich was right, too, because nobody contradicted him. The Reich boasted about what it did to its enemies. And why not? They deserved what they got for presuming to oppose it.

“And here, we really could do it,” Hans-Ulrich said musingly. He’d spent the war plastering positions on the Continent. That needed doing, of course, but if the English thought they could send bombers out from their island without getting any attention in return they had to be out of their minds.

Another big bomb burst nearby. The English were either good or lucky. “It’ll be a mess come morning,” someone said dolefully.

That proved all too true. The runways were cratered. One Ju-87 was a write-off in spite of the revetments in which the bombers hid. Another had taken enough damage to keep it out of the air for a while. A snorting steamroller and a pick-and-shovel crew started setting the strip to rights. Hans-Ulrich fumed. The day was bright and clear-perfect flying weather, no matter how cold it was-but here he sat, stuck on the ground.

Damn the English anyway!

Without the steamroller, setting things straight would have taken even longer than it did. Three days went by before the strip was flyable again. The British bombers came over by night twice more, but their aim wasn’t so good. The airstrip came away unscathed.

When the fourth morning also promised good weather, the squadron commander summoned his pilots and said, “Wir fahren gegen England.” He paused for a moment, then went on, “No, I’m not throwing a song title at you. We are going to go against England.” He eyed Rudel. “Maybe someone from the High Command was in the trench with you a few nights ago, because I got the order yesterday.”

“Yes, sir,” Hans-Ulrich said. He hoped the tune from “Wir fahren gegen England” wouldn’t get stuck in his head. It was catchy.

“There are airfields near Ramsgate,” Major Bleyle continued. “We are to hit them and the aircraft that use them. The English need to learn they can’t play these games with us. And with our Stukas, we can put our bombs where they do the most good.”

The pilots nodded. A dive-bomber was ever so much more precise than some machine flying five kilometers up in the middle of the night. On the other hand, a bomber five kilometers up was almost impossible to find and even harder to shoot down once found. A Ju-87, by contrast, was a low-flying, lumbering brute. The only way to make it more visible would be to paint it bright red.

“Will we have escorts?” Hans-Ulrich asked.

“Ja,” Bleyle said. “We’ll have some 109s with us. They should hold off the English fighters.” Hans-Ulrich nodded, satisfied. The Messerschmitts had done the job on the Continent. Why wouldn’t they over England, too?

An hour and a half later, he was in the air. Sergeant Dieselhorst sat in the rear-facing seat behind him. If the 109s failed, the sergeant’s machine gun could help keep the RAF away.

As usual, the 109s put Hans-Ulrich in mind of sharks. They were made for one purpose and one only: to go out and kill things. Their leader waggled his wings at the Ju-87s. The Messerschmitts formed up around the dive-bombers. They droned on toward the English coast, plainly visible through the Stuka’s armor-glass windshield.

A short flight: less than half an hour, even cruising. Rudel watched his instruments. Everything was green. The maintenance men did a hell of a job. His thoughts leaped ahead to what needed doing when he reached the target.

He could see Ramsgate not far ahead. The airstrips the Stukas were supposed to hit lay a little west and south of the town. The German air fleet would swing in that direction, and…

And British fighters jumped them. Hurricanes with red-white-and-blue roundels mixed it up with the Messerschmitts. The Luftwaffe had already seen that Hurricanes were at least as good as anything the French flew. Were they as good as 109s? If they weren’t, they came unpleasantly close.

While some of them engaged the German fighters, others bored in on the Ju-87s. One dive-bomber after another fell out of the sky. Hoarse shouts of fear and alarm dinned in Hans-Ulrich’s earphones. So did the shrieks of the dying. “Mother!” someone wailed. “I’m burning, Mother!” Rudel switched frequencies in a hurry. It didn’t help much.

Sergeant Dieselhorst fired at something. A couple of bullets had hit Hans-Ulrich’s Stuka, but only a couple. He feared that was nothing but luck.

He also feared the Germans had made a mistake with this attack. On the Continent, bombing targets close to their own lines, they could generally count on an advantage in numbers. Damaged planes didn’t have far to go to get back to friendly territory. Here, the deep blue sea lay between the raiders and friends. Only it wasn’t blue. It was grayish green, and looked cold.

“Drop your bombs anywhere!” The squadron commander’s voice cut through the din on the radio. “Drop them and get away! This is too hot for us!”

Hans-Ulrich wouldn’t have argued with that. He pulled the bomb-release lever. Ramsgate lay below. If hundreds of kilos of explosives came down on civilians’ heads instead of on the airstrip for which they were intended-well, too bad. Wasn’t it the RAF’s fault for interfering with the planned operation?

A British fighter flew right in front of him: a biplane, a Gloster Gladiator. It looked outdated, but the Czech Avias had proved even planes like that could be dangerous. He fired at it. The Gladiator, far more agile than his Stuka, spun away when the pilot saw his tracers.

Even though Rudel mashed the throttle against the instrument panel, he knew he wasn’t home free-nowhere near. A Hurricane could still catch him from behind. For that matter, so could a Gladiator. The Ju-87 was built for muscle, not for speed. He’d never felt the lack so much before.

“Anything on our tail, Albert?” he called through the speaking tube.

“Not right now, thank God,” Dieselhorst answered, which also summed up the way Hans-Ulrich felt.

He looked around for more Stukas and for Messerschmitts. Of course they wouldn’t go back in the neat formation they’d used to approach England. They’d be all over the sky. All the same, he saw far fewer German planes than he should have. When fighters came after them in swarms, Ju-87s were alarmingly vulnerable.

The 109s had held their own against the Hurricanes. He was sure they’d more than held their own against the Gladiators. Even that came with a price, though. If a Hurricane fighter bailed out of a shot-up fighter, he landed among friends. He could fly again as soon as he got another plane. A Messerschmitt pilot who bailed out over England was out of the war for good even if he came down unhurt.

There was the Belgian coast ahead. The RAF seemed content to have broken things up on their own ground. They weren’t pursuing hard. Hans-Ulrich eased back on the throttle. He’d never dreamt he could be so proud of nothing more than making it home from a mission in one piece.

* * *

Air-raid sirens woke Sarah Goldman out of a sound sleep. She needed a moment, or more than a moment, to realize what they were. Munster had tested them a few times before the war started, and a few more afterwards. But the luminous hands on the clock by her bed said it was two in the morning. Only a maniac would test the sirens at a time like this.

Sarah didn’t doubt that a lot of the Nazis running Munster were maniacs. But they weren’t the kind of maniacs who’d do something like this. Which meant…

Ice ran through her when she realized what it meant. This wasn’t a drill. This was a real air raid!

She threw off the covers, which made her realize how cold it was inside the house. Throwing a robe over her flannel nightgown, she ran for the stairs.

She bumped into somebody in the dark. The grunt made her realize it was her brother. “Where do we go, Saul? What do we do?”

“Find someplace low, I guess,” he answered. “What else can we do? We’re Jews. We can’t go to any of the regular shelters-they won’t let us in.”

Somehow, Sarah had forgotten that. She couldn’t imagine why. It wasn’t as if regulations didn’t spell it out. The Aryans in charge of things in the Reich made no bones about how they felt. If they saved their own kind and watched Jews get blown to ground round, they would go out and have a beer afterwards to celebrate.

Sarah didn’t think all the goyim in Munster felt that way. Life would have been impossible in that case. It wasn’t now-it was just difficult. As she hurried down the stairs, she realized she might have to change her mind about that. If a bomb hit them and they weren’t in a proper shelter, life would be impossible.

“Come on!” Saul said. “Under the dining-room table!”

“Will it hold up if the house comes down on it?” Sarah asked doubtfully.

“No, but it’s the best chance we’ve got,” he said. She decided he was right.

Their mother and father crowded under there with them. Samuel and Hanna Goldman took the outside places. When Saul tried to protest, his father spoke two harsh words: “Shut up!” The gentle classical scholar never talked like that. The front-line soldier of half a lifetime ago might have, though. And Saul did shut up, which would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along.

Airplane engines droned overhead. Antiaircraft guns began to thunder. “Will they shoot them down?” Sarah said.

“They’ll try,” her father answered: not a vote of confidence.

Through the roar of the guns, Sarah heard other noises-high, shrill, swelling whistles. The flat, harsh crump! s that followed made the guns seem whispers beside them. The windows rattled. The whole house shook. Is this what an earthquake feels like? she wondered. But how could she tell? She’d never been in an earthquake.

“We need to put masking-tape squares on our windows,” Samuel Goldman said, his voice eerily calm.

“Will that keep them from breaking?” Hanna asked.

“No. But it will help keep them from spraying glass all over the inside of the house if something comes down close to us-I hope,” he said.

After what might have been twenty minutes or twenty years, the bombs stopped falling. The airplane engines went away. The guns kept banging for several minutes more. Shrapnel pattered down on the roof like hail. At last, silence fell.

“Well, that wasn’t too bad,” Sarah said. She was so glad to be alive, so glad it was over, she straightened up too fast and banged her head on the bottom of the table. That was the only hurt any of the Goldmans took.

“It wasn’t too good, either,” her father said. “I don’t remember any raids that bad in the last war.”

“Neither do I,” her mother said.

A siren screamed-that was a fire engine, heading somewhere. The Goldmans made their slow, careful way to the front door and looked out. Munster was black as a tomb…except for two or three orange glows on the skyline, one of them only a few blocks away. By the sound, the fire engine was going there. It couldn’t go very fast, not unless it wanted to plow into something.

“This is terrible,” Sarah said. “The enemy never did anything like this before. Why would they start now?”

Saul nudged her. “The enemy is running Germany,” he whispered.

“So why did you try to join the Wehrmacht, then?” she whispered back. He turned away without answering. She knew what the answer was: her brother and her father still wanted to be Germans, but the Nazis wouldn’t let them.

If her father heard the whispers, he didn’t show it. “Let’s go back to bed,” he said. “We might as well try, anyhow. We can’t do anything else here.”

“Except thank God we came through in one piece,” her mother said.

Her father didn’t answer. He’d always been less religious than her mother-and even Sarah wondered whether God had His eyes on the Jews in Germany these days. She went upstairs doubting she’d be able to fall asleep again. But she did.

She came down to breakfast: black bread and ersatz coffee that tasted like and probably was burnt barley. Her father was reading the newspaper. AIR PIRATES SLAUGHTER INNOCENT CIVILIANS! the headline screamed.

“The British claim it’s retaliation for something our planes did over there,” her father said. “Dr. Goebbels says that’s a bunch of filthy lies, of course.”

“Of course,” Sarah echoed. In both what they said and how they said it, they sounded perfectly loyal. A message got passed even so. Just for a moment, Samuel Goldman’s eyes glinted behind his spectacles. Then he raised the newspaper, hiding his face.

Sarah felt herself smiling. She was still cold. She’d just discovered she was in danger of getting blasted off the face of the earth. In spite of everything, though, she was happy. She wondered why.

* * *

Ludwig Rothe swore as he guddled around, deep in the bowels of his Panzer II’s engine. “Hold that flashlight higher, Theo,” he said. “I can’t see what the hell I’m doing here.”

“Carburetor again, Sergeant?” Hossbach asked, moving the flashlight not quite enough.

“No, it’s the damn fuel pump. I’m sure of it. We’ve boiled the carb out so often, we could boil coffee in it.” If Rothe sounded disgusted, it was only because he was. “Damned engine still keeps missing. I’m going to fix that pump or steal a new one somewhere or go back to the Maybach works and bend a wrench on somebody’s head.”

“Sounds good to me, Sergeant,” Fritz Bittenfeld said. After pausing to light a cigarette, the driver went on, “Why the devil can’t they make an engine that does what it’s supposed to, for God’s sake?”

Part of the reason was overstrain. The engine only put out 135 horsepower. That wasn’t much when it was trying to haul nine tonnes around. Rothe was not inclined to feel charitable, especially not right after he cut his hand on a sharp metal edge in the engine compartment. “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because they’re back there and safe, that’s why,” he snarled. “They don’t have to worry about what happens when things go wrong. We do. Hold that goddamn light higher, Theo!”

“Sorry,” Theo said, and still didn’t move the light enough. He made a good radioman. Radio waves suited him-they were out there in the ether, and you couldn’t see them. When it came to things more closely connected to planet earth, he wasn’t so great.

Somehow, Ludwig got the fuel pump out anyway. Six or eight panzers had halted here, somewhere near the border between Belgium and France. Their crews worked on them, aided by a couple of mechanics. A few hundred meters away, two batteries of 105s sent death and destruction across kilometers toward the British and French troops battling to slow the Germans down.

As he tore the fuel pump apart, he wished his panzer could carry a gun like the ones artillerymen used. A gun like that and you’d have yourself a land dreadnought. The 20mm on the Panzer II was a doorknocker by comparison, and not much of a door-knocker at that. Even Panzer IIIs carried only a 37mm piece-and they were still rare birds.

Enemy panzers didn’t have much more. Some of the French machines mounted 47mm guns. But the French and the British didn’t seem to know how to make a fist. They used their panzers in penny packets. Individually, their machines were at least a match for anything the Reich made. But if Germany had swarms of panzers at the Schwerpunkt and the enemy didn’t, the German drive would go forward. And so matters had proved up till now. Would the Low Countries have fallen in less than a month otherwise?

Foot soldiers came forward through the little motor park. At first, Ludwig paid little attention. Then his eyes snapped from the legend on their cuff bands- Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler -to the SS runes on their collar tabs. Here was something out of the ordinary! He’d heard that some SS men were going to the front alongside Wehrmacht troops, but he’d never seen any before. And wasn’t the LAH…?

These fellows, all of them big and fair, carried submachine guns and looked either nervous or extremely alert. They were almost out of artillery range of the enemy, so Rothe thought they were being silly…till he saw the middle-aged man in their midst.

He kicked Theo in the ankle. “Achtung!” he hissed, and stiffened to attention himself.

“Are you out of your mind?” the radioman said-nobody paid attention to parade-ground formalities in the field.

“Achtung!” Ludwig repeated. He jerked his chin toward the gaggle of SS men and their charge.

Hossbach’s eyes followed that gesture. At attention or not, Rothe almost burst out laughing at the way they nearly bugged out of Theo’s head. Fritz was gaping, too. Well, hell-who wouldn’t?

Hitler came over to the Panzer II. Automatically, Ludwig saluted. The other crewmen echoed the gesture a beat later. The Fuhrer returned the salutes. “Is everything all right here?” he asked. Up close, his voice was even more resonant, even larger than life, than it was over a microphone in a stadium or on the radio.

“Y-Yes, sir,” Ludwig managed. “Just routine repairs. We’ll be at ‘em again soon.” He felt dizzy, half drunk. Talking to Adolf Hitler! He would remember this day for the rest of his life, even if he lived to 112. (Having seen what happened to front-line fighters here and in Czechoslovakia, he knew how unlikely that was. He knew, but he didn’t dwell on it. He tried not to, anyhow.)

“Your fuel pump giving you trouble?” the Fuhrer asked.

Theo’s eyes bugged out all over again. Ludwig Rothe’s did the same thing this time. “How the devil did you know that, sir?” he blurted.

One of the big SS men guarding Hitler growled like an angry Rottweiler. But the Fuhrer only chuckled. “I get reports. I read them. I remember them,” he answered. “That’s the most common failing on the Panzer II. I have had a few things to say to the Maybach people about it. An improved model is now in production.”

“Good. Very good.” Ludwig wondered what had happened to the people responsible for the current piece of junk. Maybe he was better off not knowing.

“We will use it to go on to victory,” Hitler continued. A lock of hair flopped down over his forehead. He brushed it back with a gesture so automatic, he must have used it thousands of times. “We will!” he insisted. “Victory may be coming a little more slowly than some of the poison dwarfs back in Berlin believe, but it is no less sure on account of that.”

Several of the LAH bodyguards growled this time. Wehrmacht men called the Waffen-SS asphalt soldiers, but Ludwig wouldn’t have wanted to mess with any of these guys. “I’m sure of it, mein Fuhrer,” he said, not because that was the thing to say but because he really believed it.

Maybe Hitler sensed as much. Or maybe, once the Fuhrer got rolling, he was no easier to stop than a river. “Victory is sure!” he thundered, as he might have on the radio. “And the mad mongrels and traitors who tried to stop the Reich from gaining it have got what they deserved. Oh, yes! That they have!” His eyes blazed.

The only trouble was, Ludwig didn’t know what he was talking about. “Sir?” the sergeant said.

One of the Leibstandarte men murmured warningly The fellow wore what would have been a major’s shoulder straps if he were in the Wehrmacht, but the SS had its own weird set of ranks. Major or whatever the hell he was, the Fuhrer ignored him. “Some of those pigdogs-fancy aristocrats and even a few military men, I’m sorry to say-thought they could run the country better than I am doing it. Well, the ones who are left alive are seeing how they like the arrangements at Dachau.”

“Mein Fuhrer-” the SS officer said urgently.

“ Ja, Jens, ja.” Hitler sounded-indulgent? He turned back to the panzer crew. “Do not gossip about this, bitte. We have not said anything in the papers or on the radio. We do not want the enemy to know there is even so much as a mustard seed’s worth of dissension in the Reich. You are good fellows-I can see that. I’m sure you won’t blab.”

“Of course not, mein Fuhrer,” Ludwig said quickly. Fritz and Theo also stammered out reassurances. Rothe had never imagined he would end up knowing a state secret. By the way that officer was looking at him, the Waffen-SS man thought he would be better off dead.

“That’s what I thought,” Hitler said. He caught the officer’s eye again. “Don’t give them any trouble-you hear me? They said they’d keep quiet, and I expect they meant it. Unless you’re sure-and I mean sure-they didn’t, leave them alone.”

“Jawohl, mein Fuhrer,” the LAH man said. The look he gave Rothe and the other panzer men shouted that he still wanted to dispose of them. But he didn’t look as if he had the nerve to go against Hitler’s direct order. Who in his right mind would?

“All right.” Hitler nodded to Ludwig, then to his driver and radioman. “I hope you stay safe, my friends. I know it’s warm work, but it needs doing. Fight hard!” He nodded again, then stumped away, his retinue all around him.

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” Fritz whispered.

“Somebody pinch me. I think I’m dreaming,” Theo said, also in a low voice. That amounted to about the same thing.

“He’s…something.” Ludwig heard the awe in his own voice. He tried to imagine why anyone would move against the Fuhrer. True, the war wasn’t won yet, but Germany was still moving forward, and a lot faster than she had the last time around. What was wrong with that?

Plainly, the traitors had paid for their folly. Dachau…Rothe’s shiver had nothing to do with the weather. If half what he’d heard was true, the plotters who’d got killed outright might have been the lucky ones.