The Company of Strangers Read online

  In mid December an attempt was made to relieve the army from the south. The Russians stalled the attack and proceeded to smash the Italian army and decimate the air transport fleet. Still the Führer refused permission for the Sixth Army to retreat; his eyes seared the situation maps demanding deliverance.

  Voss listened, first to the quality of the silence in the situation conferences, which were black, crushing and hideous, and then to the boot-licking apostles of the High Command who would pledge the impossible for one look of love from the Führer. He asked for a transfer to the front. Zeitzler refused him and, perhaps after seeing the bones appearing through the skin of Voss’s face, went on Stalingrad rations himself. They became known as ‘the cadavers’.

  There had been no improvement in the German Sixth Army’s position by the beginning of January 1943 and Voss, pale with his facial skin drawn tightly over his skull, found himself on his bed in his room smoking and sipping some of Weber’s violent schnapps. He had two letters in front of him on the seat of a chair where he used to keep the chess games he played with his father. There’d been no chess since his resignation back in November. The two letters, both short, one from his father and the other from his brother, had presented him with a problem whose only solution involved calling on SS Colonel Bruno Weiss.

  The Kessel, Stalingrad

  1st January 1943

  Dear Karl,

  You know better than anyone our situation out here. I can only thank you for trying to send us the sausages and ham for Christmas but it was a lost cause. They probably never got off the airstrip. Real meat has not been seen for weeks. Krebs and Stahlschuss came up with some shreds of dried mule so that we managed to have some kind of celebration for the New Year. It wasn’t as good as Christmas which, whatever happens to me now, will have been one of the greatest military experiences of my short career. It’s difficult to believe in this unbearable environment that men can find (I’ve thought about this a long time to try to find the right word) such sweetness in themselves. They gave each other things which were their last and most important possessions and if they had nothing they made something from bits of metal or carved bone retrieved from the steppe. It was remarkable to find the human spirit so undaunted. Glaser has tried to have me taken to the hospital again (I’m yellow, and the legs are still badly swollen so that I can’t move about) but I’ve refused. I never want to see that vision of hell again. I won’t tell you. You must have heard by now.

  I listen to the men and there’s been a change in their mood now. Before the New Year they would say that the Führer will rescue them. Now, if they still think that, they don’t say it. We are resigned to our fate and you might be surprised to hear that we are cheerful because, and I know this will sound absurd in the circumstances, we are free.

  I think of you and am always your brother,

  Julius

  Karl read this letter over and over. His brother had never been one for the examination of the soul and his discovery of the nobility of man in these desperate circumstances was a revelation. Karl was sickened by the thought of playing on Weiss’s side of the fence to get what he wanted.

  Berlin

  2nd January 1943

  Dear Karl,

  We have had another letter from Julius. His are not censored like some of the junior officers’. Your mother cannot read them even though he makes light of the terrible things around him. He seems so inured to the desperate circumstances that he doesn’t see that what he considers normal is, to people in Berlin, unimaginable horror. I do not ask this of you lightly. I only ask this of you because I saw some of this pointlessness in the Great War. It goes against every military instinct I have but I would like you to do everything you can to get your brother out of that place. I know it is forbidden. I know it is impossible but I must ask this of you on behalf of your mother and for myself.

  Your father

  Voss lay back on the bed, his boots up on the metal bar at his feet, the two letters on his chest resting against his protruding ribs. He lit another cigarette from the one he’d been smoking. He knew that if anything happened to Julius it could potentially destroy his family. Since his father had been ‘retired’, he’d invested all his hopes and aspirations in his first-born son. He thought it possible that his father might be able to bear Julius’s death in glorious victory but not, definitely not, in miserable defeat.

  Voss swung his feet off the bed and slapped a sheet of paper on to the chair. He would have preferred to ask this favour of General Zeitzler but knew that he could not possibly grant him the request. SS Colonel Weiss was the only man with whom he had any leverage, if that was a word he could use when it came to the SS.

  He began writing in his horrible, cramped scrawl, handwriting that had developed because his brain always worked faster than his fingers. He balled his first attempt and tried again. He screwed that one up, too. He didn’t know what he wanted for his brother. He wanted to save him, of course, but on what terms? Julius, his state of mind heightened to rare acuity, would not be easily duped.

  Rastenburg

  5th January 1943

  Dear Julius,

  The officer who will give you this letter will be able to get you out of your predicament, fly you out of the Kessel and eventually into hospital back in Berlin. You have a stark and terrible decision to make. If you stay, our mother and, you know this to be true, more especially our father will be heartbroken. You, his eldest son, have always been his lodestone, the one to whom he is naturally drawn, from whom he derives his energy and now, since his retirement, in who he has invested all his hope. He would be a broken man without you in his life.

  If you leave, your men will not despise you but you will despise yourself. You will bear the guilt of the survivor, the guilt of the chosen one. This is possibly, and only you can answer this question, reparable damage. Whatever happens in our father’s mind will not be.

  I cannot believe I am having to deliver the burden of this choice to you in your desperate circumstances. In earlier attempts I tried to dress it up nicely, a temptation for Julius, but it refused to be pretty. It is an ugly choice. For my part, all I can say is that, whatever you decide, you are always my brother and I have never felt that there’s any better man living.

  Karl

  Voss buttoned his tunic, put on his coat and went out under the icicle fringes of his hut into the frozen air. His boots rang on the hard, snow-packed ground. He entered Restricted Area I and went straight to the Security Command post from where he knew SS Colonel Weiss would be running his brutal régime. The other soldiers looked at him as he entered. Nobody came willingly into the Security Command post. Nobody ever wanted to talk to SS Colonel Weiss. He was shown straight in. Weiss sat behind his desk in a state of livid surprise, his white skin even whiter against the deep black of his uniform, his crimson stepped scar from his eye to cheek redder. Voss’s nerve ricocheted around his stomach looking for a way out.

  ‘What can I do for you, Captain Voss?’

  ‘A personal matter, sir.’

  ‘Personal?’ Weiss asked himself; he didn’t normally deal with the personal.

  ‘I believe we reached a very special understanding between each other last February and that is why I have come to you with this personal matter.’

  ‘Sit,’ said Weiss, as if he was a dog. ‘You look ill, Captain.’

  ‘Lost my appetite, sir,’ said Voss, lowering himself into a chair on shaky thighs. ‘You know…the situation with the Sixth Army…is traumatic for everybody.’

  ‘The Führer will resolve the problem. We will win the day, Captain. You will see,’ said Weiss, giving him a wary look, already at work on the subtext of the words.

  ‘My brother is in the Kessel, sir. He is extremely sick.’

  ‘Haven’t his men taken him to the hospital for treatment?’

  ‘They have, but his condition did not respond to the treatment they have available in the field hospital there. He asked to be taken back to his divisi
on. I believe his condition is only treatable outside the Kessel.’

  Weiss said nothing. The fingers he ran over his scarred cheek had well-cared for nails, glossy, packed with protein but tinged blue from underneath.

  ‘Where are you quartered, Captain?’ asked Weiss after a long pause.

  It caught him off guard. He wasn’t sure where he was quartered any more. Numbers tinkered in his brain.

  ‘Area III, C4,’ he said.

  ‘Ah yes, you’re next to Captain Weber,’ said Weiss, so quickly that it was clear that his question hadn’t been necessary.

  The chair back cut into Voss’s newly exposed ribs. You didn’t build up any credit in Weiss’s world, you always had to pay.

  ‘Captain Weber is not a careful individual, is he, Captain Voss?’

  ‘In what respect, sir?’

  ‘Drunken, loose-tongued, curious.’

  ‘Curious?’

  ‘Inquisitive,’ said Weiss. ‘And I notice you don’t disagree with my first two observations.’

  ‘Forgive me for saying so, sir, but in my opinion Weber is the least inquisitive man I know, very concentrated on his task,’ said Voss. ‘And as for drinking…who doesn’t?’

  ‘Loose-tongued?’ asked Weiss.

  ‘Who’s there to be loose-tongued with?’

  ‘Have you been with Captain Weber on any of his trips to town?’

  Voss blinked. He didn’t know anything about Weber’s trips to town.

  Weiss played the edge of his desk one-handed, a tremolo finished with a rapped flourish.

  ‘He has a very sensitive position right in the heart of the matter,’ said Weiss. ‘What do you two talk about when you’re drinking together?’

  Voss shouldn’t have been shocked, but he was, at Weiss’s apparent omniscience. A squirt of adrenalin slithered through his veins, panic tightened his neck glands.

  ‘Nothing of importance.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He’s asked me to explain things to him.’

  ‘Like what? Chess?’

  ‘He hates chess.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Physics. He knew I went to Heidelberg before I was called up.’

  ‘Physics?’ repeated Weiss, eyes glazing.

  Voss thought he sensed a nonchalance that made him think that this was perhaps dangerous ground, mine-sown.

  ‘The evenings are long here in Rastenburg,’ said Voss to cover himself. ‘He teases me. He says I should be thinking of things more physical. You know, women.’

  ‘Women,’ said Weiss, laughing with so little mirth it became something else.

  ‘He’s more frustrated than he is inquisitive,’ said Voss, aware that Weiss wasn’t listening any more.

  ‘So you would like to get your brother out of the Kessel,’ said Weiss, opting for an alarming change of direction which left Voss thinking he’d said things he hadn’t. ‘Yes, in view of our earlier understanding I think that could be arranged. Do you have his details?’

  Voss handed over his letter, wondering if the tiny morsel about Weber he’d offered was as good as a whole carcass to Weiss’s paranoia.

  ‘Rest assured,’ said Weiss, ‘we will get him out. I look forward to continuing our special understanding, Captain Voss.’

  Voss heard nothing more from Weiss and he didn’t put himself in the man’s way. He wrote a note to his father saying that he’d put the process of getting Julius away from Stalingrad in motion, he was waiting for news and 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, the dead 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 to pick 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 sufficiently uncomfortable to get off his chair and come to the door.

  ‘I know Weber,’ said Voss, with the certainty of someone who was about to be proven wrong.

  ‘They found him in bed with a butcher’s delivery boy in town.’

  Voss went to his room and wrote to his mother and father. It was a letter which left him exhausted, drained of everything so that his arms hung hopeless and unliftable at his sides. He went to bed early and slept, waking twice in the night to find tears on his face. In the morning he was woken up by an orderly and told to report to General Zeitzler’s office.

  Zeitzler sat him down and didn’t stand behind his desk but leaned against the front of it. He looked
avuncular, not his usual military self. He gave Voss permission to smoke.

  ‘I have some bad news,’ he said, his fingers pattering his thigh. ‘Your father died last night…’

  Voss fixed his eyes on Zeitzler’s left epaulette. The only words to reach him were ‘compassionate leave’. By lunchtime he found himself in the half-dead light, standing away from the edge of the dark pine trees alongside the railway track, a grey sack of clothes on one side and a small brown suitcase on the other. The Berlin train left at 1.00 p.m. and although he was heading into his mother’s grief he could only feel that this was a new beginning and that greater possibilities existed away from this place, this hidden kingdom – the Wolfsschanze.

  Chapter 5

  17th January 1943, Voss family home, Berlin-Schlachtensee.

  ‘No, no, they sent somebody to see us,’ said Frau Voss. ‘They sent Colonel Linge, you remember him, an old friend of your father’s, retired, a good man, not too stiff like the rest of them, he has something, a sensitivity, he’s not a man that assumes everybody’s the same as himself, he can differentiate, a rare trait in military circles. Of course, as soon as your father saw him he knew what it was about. But you see…’ She blinked but the tears fattened too quickly and rolled down her cheeks before she could get the clutched, lace-edged handkerchief to her face.

  Karl Voss leaned over and took his mother’s free hand, a hand that he remembered differently, not so bony, frail and blue-veined. How fast grief sucks out the marrow – some days off food, three nights without sleep, the mind spiralling its dark gyre, in and out, but always around and around the same terrible, hard point. It was a force more destructive than a ravaging illness where the body’s instinct is to fight. Grief provides all the symptoms but no fight. There’s nothing to fight for. It’s already gone. Stripped of purpose the mind turns on the body and reduces it. He squeezed her hand, trying to inject some of his youth into her, his sense of a future.