The Company of Strangers by Robert Wilson Read Free Book Online

it might take a little time because of the shambolic state inside the Kessel. He avoided Weber and began to play against himself at chess without, curiously, ever being able to win.
    A week later there was a conference in the situation room with all the senior officers in the Wolfsschanze present. It was a meeting that would change Karl Voss. A captain had flown in from the front and Voss had heard that he had been primed to deliver a speech on the real situation on the ground. Voss slipped into the meeting in time to hear the captain deliver his vision of horror. Lice-ridden men living off water and shreds of horse meat, others jaundiced with their limbs swollen to twice the size, hundreds of men a day dying of starvation in the brutal cold, the wounded at the airstrip left out in the open, their blood congealed to ice, thedead stacked on the impenetrable ground. The Führer took it, shoulders rounded, lids weighed down.
    And then the moment.
    The captain moved on to a complete rundown of the decimated fighting strength of every unit within the Kessel and without. Hitler nodded. Slowly he turned to the map and squeezed his chin. As the Führer’s slightly shaking hand moved out from his side the captain faltered. Hitler stood a flag up which had fallen over and began to talk about an SS panzer division, which was three weeks from the action. The captain’s words still came out as he’d no doubt rehearsed again and again, but they had no meaning. It was as if all the conjunctions and prepositions had been stripped out, all the verbs had become their opposites, all nouns incomprehensible.
    Silence, as the captain’s boot squeak retreated. Hitler surveyed all his officers, his eyes beseeching, the terrible violence of red on the map below him flooding his face. Field Marshal Keitel, face trembling with emotion, stepped forward with a thunderous crack from his boot heel and roared over the deadly silence:
    ‘ Mein Führer , we will hold Stalingrad.’
    At breakfast the next day Voss ate properly for the first time in weeks. Afterwards, as he headed to the situation room, he was called to the Security Command post. He sat down in Weiss’s hard chair. Weiss leaned over and gave him an envelope. It contained his own letter to Julius unopened and with it a note.
The Kessel
    12th January 1943
    Dear Captain Voss,
    An officer arrived today saying that he had come topick up your brother. It is my sad duty to inform you that Major Julius Voss died on 10th January. We are his men and we would like you to know that he left this life with the same courage with which he endured it. His thoughts were never for himself but only ever for the men under his command…
    Voss couldn’t read on. He put the note and letter back in their envelope, saluted SS Colonel Weiss and went back to the main building where he found the toilets and emptied his first solid breakfast in weeks into the bowl.
    The news that afternoon, of the final assault on the abandoned Sixth Army, reached Voss from a strange distance, like words penetrating a sick child’s mind. Did it happen or not?
    There was nothing to be done and he finished work early. The sense of doom in the situation room was unbearable. The generals crowded the maps as if coffin-side at a vigil. He went back to his quarters and knocked on Weber’s door. A strange person answered it. Voss asked after Weber. The man didn’t know him. He went to the next door, found another captain sitting on his bed smoking.
    ‘Where’s Weber?’ he asked.
    The captain turned his mouth down, shook his head.
    ‘Security breach or something. He was taken away yesterday. I don’t know, don’t ask. Not in this…climate, anyway. If you know what I mean,’ said the captain, and Voss didn’t move, stared at him so that the man felt the need to say more. ‘Something about…well, it’s only rumour…don’t hold with it myself. You wouldn’t if you knew Weber.’
    Voss still said nothing and the captain was