Resistance by Owen Sheers Read Free Book Online

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    Alex. Sergeant Alex Klepper. He wasn’t much older than Steiner but he may as well have been. One of the few, along with Albrecht, who’d been with the company since the Russian campaign. Albrecht looked for him now and saw him lying flat out, his head resting beside a flowerbed at the side of the cottage. Stretched out like that he covered the ground from the cottage wall to the picket fence so the other men had to step over him to pass round to the back of the house. Alex was a steady soldier. Big enough to carry the MG 42 for days on end if he had to. So, Steiner, Sebald, Klepper … He was making progress. Almost there.
    Who was he fooling? He knew he’d yet to make a real decision, a real choice. The first two had chosen themselves, and if he was honest with himself Albrecht always knew he was going to take Alex. Alex from Bavaria who had so often saved his skin, who had so often laid himself on the line for the sake of Albrecht and the company. Albrecht didn’t want Alex going into London. He’d do it again. Put himself in the line of fire. He wouldn’t survive that city, Albrecht was sure of it. And they were so close now. Let someone else take that bullet. Someone who hadn’t come all the way just to fall at the final fence.
    Time was running out. Any minute now they’d be on the move again, packing up and pulling back off the line. He must choose the five men now, let them know they wouldn’t be retiring with the rest of the company. Otherwise it would come as an even greater blow, once their bags were packed, once they’d set their minds on the idea of rest, even if only for a few days.
    Steiner, Sebald, Klepper …
    He looked over the faces of the men again. Filthy most of them. Bloodied. Eyes closed. There was hardly a wrinkle between them. He searched out the few older heads, but there was no point. These men would be needed in the company. And what counted as older now anyway? A man who had been with them a couple of months?A few weeks even? On this accelerated scale of maturity, Albrecht, at thirty-three, knew he was practically a geriatric. Lucky enough to have survived this far, but not enough of a Party man to have risen any further, away from the fighting units. No, Alex and Sebald would be his two experienced soldiers on the patrol. That would be enough.
    Then Albrecht saw Otto. Unlike most of the company he was still standing, rifle slung over his shoulder, holding his helmet against his stomach, his hands resting over it like a pregnant woman waiting at the bus stop. The dirt on his face stopped short of his hairline, just above his eyebrows where his helmet had previously sat; a sharply defined tidemark of battle, a festival mask of grime. His eyes showed in it like those of a blacked-up minstrel singer. Wide, unblinking. He was looking away from the marching infantry behind them, out towards the skyline where the rising columns of smoke met the descending clouds of an English autumn.
    As far as Albrecht knew Otto had not spoken for the past fortnight. Not a word since the defence of Normandy. They’d shared the same bunker on the beachhead. Otto had manned the machine gun. Albrecht seemed to remember this was a mistake. He’d only been covering for another man when the attack began. Otto was not usually the machine gunner. But once it started there was no chance for him to leave his post. The waves of men seemed endless. Most of the Allied tanks sank or were knocked out by their own camouflaged Panzer divisions, but the men kept coming. A desperate, ancient pulse of men. It was as if an entire generation was being emptied onto the beaches before them. And so Otto had fired that machine gun all day and into the night. Until both his hands were burnt on the metal handles. Until its barrel glowed orange like the end of Albrecht’s cigarette when he took another pull. Fired it constantly, sweeping it left and right, right and left. How many men had Otto killed that day? Five, six