Last Man to Die by Michael Dobbs
‘What do you want from them?’
‘There are many things I expect of our American friends – ships, arms, food, money, materiel. But one thing above all they must give me, Willie.’ His blue eyes flared defiantly. ‘They must give me Berlin!’
The blackout curtains were drawn tight around the luxurious manor house adjacent to SHAEF forward military headquarters in newly-liberated France. It wouldn’t do to have the Supreme Allied Commander shot up by some Luftwaffe night-fighter, not when he was having dinner and, with growing agitation, giving forth of his own version of the previous day’s meeting.
‘Would you believe the man? He tried to scold me. Said I was smoking too much, that it was an unforgivable extravagance at a time of general shortage. Damn nerve!’ General Dwight Eisenhower started to chuckle in spite of himself. He regarded the PM, half-American on his mother’s side, as something of a father figure and so tolerated the older man’s bombastic and occasionally patronizing manner. He was no less a chain smoker than Churchill, yet even in his addiction he revealed his modest, less flamboyant character. Strictly a ‘Lucky Strikes’ man.
Eisenhower paused to indicate there was a serious point to his tale. ‘Extravagance! I told him I was willing to be extravagant with everything but men’s lives. Yet he still insists on taking the most outrageous risks …’ The general shook his head sadly, staring into the flame of the candles that lit the beautifully laid dinner table separating him from his companion. ‘The Brits are running out of time. They’ve been bled dry; Britannia with her wrists slashed. It’s making the Old Man impatient, rash.’
The genuine regret in Eisenhower’s voice was not lost on his companion, who was British, and who mistook neither the irony of sitting in a Europe only recently freed from German occupation while surrounded by seemingly endless supplies of vintage champagne, nor the absurdity that war seemed to be fought either from foxholes or from the luxury of liberated French chateaux. ‘So what did you tell him?’
‘Just that. He was being rash. So then he gets het up and says risks have to be taken, it’s the art of war. Art, for Chrissake! I told him that dying isn’t an art but a ruthless damn military science.’ He stubbed out his cigarette as if he were crushing bugs, grinding it to pulp in the crystal ashtray. ‘You see, he wants Berlin. A final master stroke to crown his war, so he can lead the victory parade through the captured German capital.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Oh, not a lot, except the military value of Berlin doesn’t amount to a row of beans and it’d cost at least one hundred thousand casualties – American casualties – to get there before the Russians. Christ, can you imagine how tough the Germans are going to be fighting for their own capital? !’
The telephone interrupted them for the fourth time since they had sat down to dine, and Eisenhower jumped to answer it. This proved to be a mistake for as he drew back his chair he seemed to double up and a flash of pain crossed his face. Chronic indigestion. When in England he had blamed it on the endless diet of Brussels sprouts and boiled cabbage which seemed to be standard fare in London, but in France he had run out of excuses. They didn’t eat boiled cabbage, and the pain was getting worse. The strains of war were plucking at him, demanding that he ease up. The point had been brought firmly home when he discovered a rat in one of the classrooms serving as his office. He had taken out his revolver and, from a distance of no more than a few feet, shot at it. He missed. Carefully he had put on his glasses and shot again. And missed again. The third shot succeeded only in blowing off its tail and a sergeant had used a chair to put both the rat and the Supreme Commander out of their misery. Eisenhower was tired, he had been losing weight and the patchwork quilt of lines beneath his eyes had sagged into whirlpools of fatigue. He needed to steady his hand and to get his mind off the war, but how could he? Even as he talked on the telephone his jaw was chomping with frustration.
‘OK-OK-OK, run up the white flag. If State insists it’s vital I see the Crown Prince – where’d you say he was from? – you’d better fit it in. Then you go and ask the State Department, very politely, if they’d mind putting a cork in their courtesy calls and letting us get on with winning this goddamned war!’ The grinding of his teeth could be heard across the room. ‘And one more thing. No more interruptions, eh?’
He hobbled back towards the table, massaging his bad knee. It always swelled when he was run down, and his habitually high blood pressure hit new peaks and he lost still more of his hair. And he could really do without this run-in with Churchill.
‘For Chrissake, he’s being preposterous. Even if we do take Berlin, we can’t hold it. We already agreed at Yalta that it’ll be in the Russian zone of occupation after the war. So five minutes to hold Mr Churchill’s victory parade and then we hand it back. That’s about twenty thousand US casualties for every godforsaken minute. A high price for an old man’s ambition, eh?’ He swirled the whisky around the glass, watching the candlelight catch the finely cut patterns in the French crystal, wondering what his troops in the field facing von Rundstedt had eaten that evening, and envying them their simple tasks of war. ‘I’ll not let the old men of Europe play their games with my troops,’ he said quietly. ‘My duty is clear. To win this war, and to win it with the minimum loss of Allied lives. If lives are to be lost, better they be Russian than American or British.’
There was no response from his companion. Perhaps he had gone too far. He felt the need to justify himself. ‘There’s something else. Something pretty scary. Our intelligence guys believe Hitler may be planning a retreat from Berlin to the mountains in Bavaria and Austria, a sort of Alpine redoubt. He moves everything he can in there and conducts endless guerrilla warfare. God, it would be tough rousting him out of there. The war might never end.’
‘But is that likely?’
‘He’s fighting for his life; he’s not going to roll over just to please Churchill.’
‘So …?’
‘So to hell with what the Old Man wants. We concentrate on cutting off any chance of Hitler’s retreat to the mountains.’ He drained the glass. ‘And if it means Stalin taking Berlin and half of Europe, it would be a pity. But not a great pity.’
‘What a way to run a war!’ Churchill exclaimed, more soapy water splashing over the side of the bath and dripping on to the carpet.
Cazolet looked despairingly at his suit, the razor-sharp creases of half an hour ago now a sorry tangle of damp wool.
‘Some intelligence men sitting on their backsides in a Zurich bar hear whispers about a mountain fortress, and Eisenhower wants to cast all our plans aside. For mere tittle-tattle and rumour!’
‘But surely there may be something in those reports,’ interjected Cazolet. He could always recognize when Churchill’s enthusiasm ran away with his prudence, particularly late at night.
‘Let us suppose, let us for one fraction of a moment suppose …’ Churchill responded, his jowls quivering with indignation and stabbing his cigar like some blunt bayonet in the direction of the younger man. ‘Let us suppose that the same American intelligence experts who just four months ago so lamentably failed to spot thirty-one Nazi divisions massing in the Ardennes to launch the Battle of the Bulge were, on this occasion and in spite of their track record, right. So what? What can Hitler do in the Alps? Let him have his caves, let him freeze in the winter snows just as he did on the Russian plains. He can do no real damage in the mountains. But Berlin …’ At the mention of the word, his voice lowered, the brimstone being replaced by an almost conspiratorial timbre. ‘Berlin is the key, William, the key. Without it, everything may be lost.’
The waters heaved and parted as Churchill raised his considerable girth out of the bath and gesticulated for Cazolet to hand him a tent-size cotton towel. ‘It is quite simple. Either we take Berlin, or the Russians will. Vienna, Budapest, Sofia, probably Prague, almost every one of the great capitals in Central Europe will soon be occupied by the Red Army. If he gains Berlin, too, Stalin will have hi
‘And behind us, here in London, I fear the worst, Willie. Defeat. Before the end of the year, at the election.’
Cazolet couldn’t help himself. The idea seemed too absurd. ‘Nonsense! How can you lose after all you’ve done? They must support you.’
‘I love them, with all my heart I love them, but I have little faith in their gratitude.’ He sat silent for a moment, drawing in his chin until it became lost in the loose folds of flesh. He tried to hide the misting in his eyes, but there was no mistaking the catch of emotion in his voice as he resumed. ‘My own father. One of the great statesmen of his age. Yet they threw him to one side. Broke his heart on the great anvil of politics …’ Tears were starting to roll down Churchill’s cheeks as he remembered the humiliation, even as Cazolet recognized the hyperbole and inexactitude. Churchill’s father had been a drunken womanizer, a disgraceful husband and even worse father, and had died at a young age of syphilis. Perhaps that was why the son had to work so hard to weave the legend and why he, at least, had to believe so passionately in it.
‘No. All triumphs are fleeting, Willie. One cannot expect gratitude. After the last war we promised them homes fit for heroes. They’re still waiting. And if Stalin and his acolytes are to rule from the Urals to the Atlantic, right up to our own doorstep, I’m not sure how long the electorate could resist inviting them in, even here. So you see, we need Berlin, to stop the disease spreading, Willie. If we lose. Berlin we shall lose the peace. The battle for Hitler’s capital is the most important contest of the war. Sadly, it seems we shall have to wage it against our American allies.’
There was a glint in his pale eyes, revealing the boyish enthusiasm of which he was so capable – or was it the desperation of an ageing, ailing leader? Cazolet was no longer sure.
‘If only we could be certain Hitler would never leave Berlin,’ Cazolet responded. ‘Then everything would fall into place.’
‘My thoughts precisely, Willie. If only.’
The tension in the general’s face had disappeared. As the flame had eaten away the candles and the warm wax had trickled on to the starched tablecloth, his mood had softened. Eisenhower was no longer a general on parade. The creases across his face dissolved and the muscles around his jaw stopped working overtime. ‘Have I been too hard on the Brits?’
‘We’ll survive,’ his companion responded, returning his smile.
‘I didn’t mean to be hard. Your Churchill’s a great guy, really. Just wrong on this one, I guess. I’m sorry.’ He looked coy as he tried to make amends. ‘You know I like the British.’
‘What, all of us?’
‘Some more than others, I guess.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ There was a slight pause. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
The general looked intently across the table at Kay Summersby, the woman seconded to Eisenhower’s headquarters early in the war as his driver, then secretary, now also his lover.
‘Would you obey a direct order to come to bed, or shall I have you taken out at dawn and shot for disobedience?’
She threw her napkin playfully across the table at him, and thought how boyish he could still look with his blue eyes and explosive smile, even with his hair in rapid retreat.
‘Well, if it would help further the cause of Anglo-American understanding …’
It was in their eyes that Hencke could see the change. Once they had been battle-hardened, men of steel, soldiers of the Wehrmacht who even in captivity would gather together for the strength and support they could give each other. They had crowded around the numerous kindling fires in noisy groups, finding tasks to fill their days and maintain their spirits, beating tin cans into exotic cigarette cases, moulding and whittling jewellery from scraps of clear plastic salvaged from the cockpits of crashed planes, while those with less dexterity played chess, exchanged stories or simply shared photographs and experiences. Even in defeat there had been defiance.
Now it was all gone. There was little conversation, only silent figures whiling away the hours huddled over the low flames, some using tin cans to cook the scraps of extra rations they had bribed out of the guards or wheedled from fellow prisoners through a crooked game of Skat, no longer sharing, gaunt faces blackened from squatting so close over the fires, heads bowed, eyes red rimmed and desperate, peering out of sooty masks like clowns at a circus of the damned. As Hencke walked around the camp they cast furtive glances to see who passed by before returning once more to stare into the flames, unable or unwilling to hold his gaze. Pilsudski had known what he was about, the bastard.
It wasn’t just the finger. God, if that had been all it would have been over and done with in a moment Less pain than a boot camp hypodermic, one good heave and a cold shower and it would have been nothing more than unpleasant history. No, it was the feeling of utter worthlessness with which they were left. Pilsudski had reduced them to objects without value, with no rights, no feelings, no dignity, scarcely men at all. They had stood in the rain, raging inside at the injustice and their impotence, sick with apprehension as the line of men shortened and their turn came ever closer. They were fighting men, yet in a minute Pilsudski’s guards with their harsh, slime-smeared gloves were going to reduce them to the level of castrated pigs, not physically, but inside, where the scars never heal. When it was over they had slunk around in their private worlds of shame, feeling dirty, guilty, no longer comrades but individuals, isolated and alone. And Hencke would need every one of them if he were to have any hope of success.
A lifetime ago he had been a teacher in a bustling provincial town where the children laughed, the coffee shops were washed with conversation and the trams ran on time. He had found happiness, for a while, helping his wards enjoy a childhood he had never known. His mother had died in childbirth, his father had failed to return from the gas-filled trenches of the First War and he had been entrusted to the care of a maiden aunt who had carried her enforced maternal duties and self-sacrifice like a donkey does a chafing saddle, intolerant and protesting, a burden which she used to impress her neighbours even while she oppressed the boy. She had offered love, of a sort – selfish, demanding, inflexible, but what the middle-aged spinster recognized as love, her entire knowledge of which had been gained one clumsy afternoon as a teenager in a hayrick. She had grown to maturity with the view that men were capable only of deception, that even her brother’s death at the front was an act of personal desertion and yet, to do her justice, she was determined that her young ward would prove the exception. All her attention was lavished on the boy whom she would raise in her own image, the one man in her life who would never descend into lust and betray her. It hadn’t worked, of course. She had kept him isolated and away from the corrupting influence of friends, forbidden even to touch the memory of his lost father, so that he grew up at first in awe and eventually in hate of her until the self-righteous demands and accusations of ingratitude she cast at him had broken their bonds completely and he had been left on his own. He had built himself a new life, living his lost childhood through his young pupils, recapturing the dreams that had been stolen from him and devoting himself to the tasks of teaching with an enthusiasm combined with a degree of sensitivity and understanding that surprised those who knew nothing of his background. And few did, for outside school Hencke was intensely private, a man who insisted on the right to build his own world into which others were not invited until they had earned his trust, and he had convinced himself they would not infect the wounds left unhealed by his aunt. At last, in the small Sudeten town of Asch with its laughing children and coffee shops and trams, he thought he had found happiness. Then the war forced its way across his doorstep and the world he had so painstakingly built for himself had been blaste
Yet he needed Pilsudski, with all his grotesque savagery. Hencke had stood in line, waiting his turn, feeling the harsh wind lash his back and the tightening of apprehension in his body as he drew closer to the table and its guards, but he had experienced neither fear nor outrage. Instead there was a sense of relief, of opportunity. The degradation itself left him empty, cold; he knew there were worse fates in war. Yet he also knew that stripping away their manhood had made the others malleable; it was precisely the effect Pilsudski wanted, but Hencke understood that he might turn it to his own advantage. Within each of the crouched and humbled figures around the prison camp burned a sense of outrage which, if harnessed, might turn them once more into a force of terrible retribution – his retribution. Hencke needed these men. There was little enough chance with them, none at all without them.
As he looked across the flickering glow of a dozen tiny campfires and the hunched shoulders of those he wanted for his own personal cause, Hencke understood that the inevitable price of failure in war, even a war so near its end, would be death. But he knew he would have to risk it, risk everything, if his mission were to succeed. Even if it meant his being the last man to die …
TWO