Last Man to Die by Michael Dobbs Read Free Book Online Page A

want to send a reply.’
    Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith and the stenographer scuttled in without a word and perched in front of Eisenhower. There they sat, pencils poised, for several long moments while Eisenhower remained lost in thought. Ice seemed to have taken the place of the fires within him. Eventually Bedell Smith could stand the uncertainty no longer.
    ‘Changed your mind?’
    Eisenhower raised his head from his thoughts and looked at him with piercing blue eyes.
    ‘Beetle, how do I say “Fuck You” in British?’
    The commander tapped his stick against the chair to demand silence. In the darkness of the night the entire prisoner complement of Transit Camp 174B huddled together on the exercise square in search of companionship and warmth, forming a human amphitheatre around the flames of an open fire. Their faces stared gaunt and drained of colour in the flickering light like ghosts gathered around a grave. They expected no comfort from the commander’s words. An Ehrenrat had been called, a ‘Council of Elders’, and that only happened when there was a real mess.
    The commander sat at their head, with his twosenior officers on either side and several others standing behind. He was leaning on his stick even while seated, his face a lurid mask as some player in a tragedy.
    ‘My friends,’ the commander began. A few of them noticed that he had forsaken his customary formal greeting – ‘Men of the Wehrmacht!’; there was no suggestion of command in his voice. ‘My friends, I have gathered you all together to share with you the news I was given today. I can find no words to lessen the pain, and so I …’ He lowered his head, struggling for composure and fresh strength. He cleared his throat, as if the words were sticking in his gullet like phlegm.
    ‘The Russians are fighting on German soil. They are already well advanced into Pomerania, and have crossed the Oder. They are less than a hundred miles from the Hauptstadt , Berlin.’
    The words carved like a razor through their midst as damp wood spat on the burning pyre, cremating their last hope of salvation. No one bothered to contest the news, to pretend it was enemy propaganda. Such bravado belonged to the days when they had bombers in the air and food in their bellies, and those days were long since gone. They all understood what the news meant. Many of them had fought on the Russian Front, had seen the bestiality with which the Russian peasant soldiers treated captured Wehrmacht and civilians alike. They had found the mass graves of butchered officers, shot in the back of the head, of the women raped and mutilated, of the children slaughtered for no reason other than they had got in the way. The Russians knew only one method of fighting war, to the bitter end, and that end was now in sight. Cossacks swarming through theirhomeland, penetrating their villages and their women, pillaging everything and everyone in their path. They, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, had failed, leaving their loved ones to pay the price.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ was all the commander could find to say. He fell into silence until it became oppressive and he had to find something else to break it. ‘My only satisfaction is that you have survived. You are brave men, I have fought and served with many of you. We have survived . That, at least, is something. Perhaps we may yet have the opportunity of rebuilding our country …’
    He trailed off in a savage fit. of coughing. There was shrapnel in his lungs and in other vital parts of his body, and to a man they knew that whatever might lie in store for the rest of them, the commander would not be part of it. They had all seen the tell-tale translucence of the skin clinging to his skull, the glaze across his eyes and the bloodstains on his handkerchief; only his pride and sense of duty had kept him going this far. In sympathy and silent embarrassment they watched as the commander brought up a little more of his rapidly fading