The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson

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 division. 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?’