The Ten Thousand (63 page)

But the battalion executive officer, now the commander of the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Infantry, wasn’t finished with Kozak and her company. The battalion, now the rear guard for the 1st Brigade and in turn the 4th Armored Division, had another important mission to fulfill. Though the death of the battalion commander was regrettable, it was part of being a soldier. The battalion commander knew this. The executive officer knew this. Kozak knew this. Yes, soldiers had died, the executive officer thought, all of them, like the battalion commander, good men. But the Tenth Corps had escaped being crushed by the 2nd and 10th Panzer divisions and the march continued.

After looking at the soldiers going about their grim task one more time, the executive officer moved so that he now stood between Kozak and the grisly scene. Finally unable to watch her soldiers as they tended to the dead, Kozak looked up at the executive officer for the first time. When he had her attention, the young major began to issue his orders. “Nancy, I want to take your company up this road about two kilometers to a place called Weiterode just outside of Bebra. Set up a blocking position oriented to the southwest. We have been ordered to keep Highway 27, which runs through Bebra, open until midnight. A Company will pass through you and deploy to the north of Bebra blocking 27 as it comes in from the north. D Company will be following and deploy to the south. B Company, which got beat up pretty bad this morning, will be reconstituting in Bebra and serve as a reserve.”

Though Kozak was looking him in the eye without blinking and nodded in acknowledgment, the executive officer wasn’t sure she understood. Patiently he tried to explain to her the importance of what they were doing. “Listen, Nancy, it’s important that we hold here. The whole corps is shifting its axis of advance. Instead of pushing through Kassel directly north to Hannover, we’re shifting to the northwest in the direction of Paderborn. The corps commander feels that we can do better there than staying in the hill country. Is that clear?”

Again Kozak simply stared vacantly into his eyes and nodded, causing the executive officer to wonder how much longer Colonel Dixon thought that he could push the brigade. The executive officer knew that when officers like Kozak began to teeter on the edge of total collapse, the end was in sight. He couldn’t allow that to happen. He was a commander now, charged with a mission. “Okay, Nancy, I want you to get your company mounted up and moving. I want you in place before it gets dark. Is that clear?”

As before, Kozak stared at him and nodded. Realizing that there was nothing more that he could do there, the executive officer shook his head, turned, and began to walk away. He was about to get into his humvee when Kozak called out, “Major.”

Stopping, the executive officer turned around and faced Kozak. “Major, I’m all right really. It’s just that it’s been a bad few days. I … I don’t think …”

After Kozak lapsed into silence, the two officers looked at each other. For the first time in several days the executive officer felt compassion for another human being. Nodding, he said nothing at first.

Then he said, “I understand. We’ll talk about it in Weiterode. Is that all right?”

“Yes, sir. That will be fine. Thank you.”

The executive officer looked at Nancy Kozak for a moment and realized that what she needed was more than another mission. She needed a calm and reassuring voice to talk to her, to reach in and wrap itself about her troubled and fatigued mind and ease her burden. But he couldn’t do that right now.

Several kilometers down the road another company commander, like Kozak, waited to receive his orders. The executive officer doubted if he would be in any better shape than Kozak. Though the image of Kozak shaken like this was very disconcerting to the executive officer, there was nothing that he could do about that. The war went on and they had a mission, a very important one, to execute. He would have plenty of time later, after Kozak’s company had settled into their new position, to talk to her. Plenty of time.

With that, he turned, climbed into his humvee, and went speeding down the road in search of B

Company, where he would play out the same scene with a different company commander. The executive officer didn’t know that his tenure as battalion commander had less than thirty minutes left. Like his battalion commander before him, the executive officer was scheduled by fate to become a statistic.

Each day General Lange found the afternoon briefings at Ruff’s office more and more intolerable.

Everything about the briefings and the people who attended them bothered him. It bothered him as a professional soldier, as a German, and as a human being.

To Lange’s right sat Rudolf Lammers. As the chief of operations briefed, Lange carefully looked over to the man who as the Minister of Defense was supposed to be his immediate superior. In the past three days, however, Lammers had been nothing more than a messenger for Chancellor Ruff, and not a very good one at that. Though he gave the outside world the appearance of still being in control, he was out of his depth. Whenever Ruff demanded action or a decision had to be made, Lammers hurriedly sought out Lange and with wide eyes simply asked, “Well, what do you think?”

On the other side of Lammers was Bruno Rooks, the Foreign Minister. While Lammers at least gave the appearance of being in control of himself, Rooks couldn’t even manage this. Everything about the man, including body odor from lack of bathing, told of a broken man. Among the world community it was he, Rooks, who the press held up as the man who had been dealing with the other nations of the world before the crisis. So now it was he who the press watched as nation after nation slammed their doors in his face. While Ruff could hide in his office surrounded by his loyal staff and military men, Rooks suffered in person the abuse of diplomats who had once called themselves his friends. This, coupled with Ruff’s own attitude of ignoring a man who had become unnecessary to his purposes, was too much for Rooks to bear. Just when he needed a friend, a person to confide in, he had no one; and no one except Lange seemed to notice.

Of the inner circle, only Fellner, the Minister of the Interior, seemed to be holding up. That, Lange surmised, was probably due to the fact that, although considered a part of the inner circle, he was not one of Ruff’s men. Of the lot, only Fellner continued to maintain his dignity and speak for the good of the German people. Though he supported Ruff, who was after all the duly elected Chancellor, Fellner left no doubt that he stood for Germany and all of its people.

Finally in the circle of men who were driving Germany into the dark abyss there was Chancellor Ruff himself. If Fellner stood for Germany and the German people, what did Ruff now stand for?

Everything, Lange had been able to convince himself, up to the first bloodletting had been justifiable.

Everything could be explained. Ruff’s indignation against the United States for not informing them of the Ukrainian operation, his seizure of the nuclear weapons brought into Germany against all treaties, even his use of the Army to blockade the American Tenth Corps in the Czech Republic were political maneuvers that could be defended. Those efforts, Lange had thought, had hoped, had all been bluffs. Now, however, after the battles in central Germany, Lange finally began to understand that Ruff had never been bluffing. Ruff had always been working for an armed confrontation with the Americans. But why? Why in the hell had this man who had earned an impeccable reputation as a man of reason, a strong unifying element in a troubled Germany, driven his people and his nation into a war that could only ruin decades of hard work, not to mention the lives of thousands of its people?

Leaning forward, Lange propped his chin on his hand. With a sly sideways glance he studied Ruff for several moments. There was something going on inside of that man’s head that no one, even his most trusted supporters, knew about. But what? What could drive a man to sacrifice his fellow countrymen in such a manner? Perhaps this same thought had troubled the General Staff officers of Nazi Germany.

Perhaps they too stared at their national leader and wondered what drove the man who drove their nation.

Lange’s reflection on his commander-in-chief was interrupted by a civilian aide from the Ministry of the Interior who, after gaining access to the briefing room, walked straight over to Fellner and handed him an envelope. Without regard for the briefing officer, Fellner ripped open the envelope, ruffled the thin sheets of paper as loudly as he could manage, and made a great show of reading them. Finished, he folded the papers and turned to face Ruff. Again acting as if the chief of operations didn’t exist, Fellner began to speak. “It would seem, gentlemen, that the stories about the destruction of a field hospital are quite true.”

There was a moment of silence before Fellner continued. “Early this morning the Americans escorted French and British news teams to the spot and allowed them to film the recovery of wounded and dead personnel, both male and female, from vehicles clearly marked with the International Red Cross symbol.

Those films are now playing on every news program around the free world. The British news team was the most charitable, referring to the incident as a massacre. The French preferred the word ‘murder.’ ”

Unable to stand Fellner’s gloating, Ruff slapped his hand on the table as he jumped to his feet.

“BASTARDS! Who do they think _they _ are?” The sudden outburst surprised everyone in the room except for Lange and Fellner.

As he looked about the room, red-faced and unable to conceal his anger, Ruff glared at everyone, who stared back until they averted their eyes. Only Fellner and Lange returned Ruff’s stare with a defiant, almost contemptuous look. When he was ready, Kurt turned to Fellner. “I want you to make sure that we have complete control of all foreign correspondents. All of them. We cannot afford to allow them to run about freely, spreading lies and aiding the American propaganda campaign against us.”

“But Herr Ruff,” Fellner hastened to remind him in a warm voice, “the correspondents who shot those videos were then behind American lines. We cannot, as the past few days have demonstrated, control what happens behind enemy lines.”

Turning about, Lange looked at Fellner. Was that last comment meant as an insult to the German Army? He was about to pass it off when Fellner added, “We could, of course, solve this problem by insisting that our Army refrain from committing atrocities except behind our lines.”

Now there was no doubt. Fellner had declared himself, though it took Ruff, still steaming with rage, several seconds to understand this. But Lange knew that from that moment on the German war cabinet would begin to crumble. It was the beginning of the end. But what would that end bring for them and for Germany? How long, he wondered, would Ruff continue to play out this insanity?

Like a tiger whose paw was stuck in a steel trap, Ruff began to lash out at Fellner. “
HOW
DARE

YOU?
HOW
DARE
YOU
SPEAK
TO ME, TO US,
LIKE
THAT!”

Fellner, standing erect and calm, looked Ruff in the eye. “And how dare you, Herr Chancellor, betray the German people.”

“BETRAY? You, Herr Fellner, are mad. If there be treason, you, and not I, are the traitor. There is no doubt, no doubt at all, that you have never fully supported this government during this crisis. You continue to work against our purposes.”

“And what,” Fellner shouted, _”are _ those purposes? To destroy Germany _again, _ for the third time in less than one hundred years? What in the hell are you doing?” Then looking about the room, Fellner asked everyone present, “What are we all doing? Have we gone mad, [_again? _] What are we doing dragging all of Germany and its people back to the gates of Armageddon? What?”

In the silence that followed, a captain of the operations section entered the room and began to head for Lange until he realized what was happening. Freezing in place, the captain looked at Lange, then back at the door. He was about to turn and flee when Lange caught his eye and signaled him to come over.

Though he did so with the same reluctance that a man jumps into a sea full of sharks, the captain inched toward Lange and handed him a dispatch. For a moment, while the silent standoff between Ruff and Fellner continued, Lange read the dispatch.

When he finished, he thanked the captain and dismissed him. While the captain was fleeing the room, Lange stood up, cleared his throat, and began to speak. The sarcasm he felt showed in every word he spoke. “Gentlemen, excuse me for disturbing your, ah, discussions. But I am afraid the situation in central Germany has changed somewhat. It seems the Americans have entered Paderborn and are moving west and northwest toward Münster and Osnabrück. The enemy has managed to break out of our encirclement.”

Dumbfounded, Ruff turned his attention away from Fellner and toward Lange. “How can that be? Just five minutes ago your chief of operations briefed us that the 7th Panzer Division had established blocking positions in front of Paderborn. What happened?”

Looking down at the message, Lange considered his response. When he spoke, he did so without looking at Ruff. “It seems the positions of the 7th Panzer Division were compromised.”

“Compromised? What in the hell do you mean, compromised?”

“It means, Herr Chancellor, that enemy actions and maneuvering compelled the commander of that division to withdraw.”

“And how many casualties,” Ruff demanded, “did the 7th Panzer inflict on the Americans before they retreated?”

“I do not know, Herr Chancellor. This dispatch doesn’t say.”

“All right, Herr General, how many casualties did the 7th Panzer Division suffer before yielding Paderborn?”

With a quick glance down, Lange found the appropriate passage and read it. “The 7th Panzer Division reports suffering three casualties, all wounded, when their truck was sideswiped by a Leopard tank while leaving Paderborn.”

“Three?”

“Yes, Herr Chancellor, three. It seems we were very, very lucky today.”