Only slowly did it begin to dawn on the executive officer that Kozak's responses, her attitude, and her refusal to acknowledge him were not meant as disrespect or evasion. They were the best that she could do. Kozak, like most of the rest of the soldiers in her company, was at the end of her physical and emotional tether. After two weeks of giving all she had to give and enduring more than any reasonable person could expect, Kozak had nothing more to give except her life. And at that moment if someone had come up to her, pointed a gun at her head, and threatened to shoot, odds were she would have done nothing. Sometimes the soul dies long before the body does.
But the battalion executive officer, now the commander of the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Infantry, wasn't finished with Kozak and her company. The battalion, now the rear guard for the 1st Brigade and in turn the 4th Armored Division, had another important mission to fulfill. Though the death of the battalion commander was regrettable, it was part of being a soldier. The battalion commander knew this. The executive officer knew this. Kozak knew this. Yes, soldiers had died, the executive officer thought, all of them, like the battalion commander, good men. But the Tenth Corps had escaped being crushed by the 2nd and 10th Panzer divisions and the march continued.
After looking at the soldiers going about their grim task one more time, the executive officer moved so that he now stood between Kozak and the grisly scene. Finally unable to watch her soldiers as they tended to the dead, Kozak looked up at the executive officer for the first time. When he had her attention, the young major began to issue his orders. "Nancy, I want to take your company up this road about two kilometers to a place called Weiterode just outside of Bebra. Set up a blocking position oriented to the southwest. We have been ordered to keep Highway 27, which runs through Bebra, open until midnight. A Company will pass through you and deploy to the north of Bebra blocking 27 as it comes in from the north. D Company will be following and deploy to the south. B Company, which got beat up pretty bad this morning, will be reconstituting in Bebra and serve as a reserve."
Though Kozak was looking him in the eye without blinking and nodded in acknowledgment, the executive officer wasn't sure she understood. Patiently he tried to explain to her the importance of what they were doing. "Listen, Nancy, it's important that we hold here. The whole corps is shifting its axis of advance. Instead of pushing through Kassel directly north to Hannover, we're shifting to the northwest in the direction of Paderborn. The corps commander feels that we can do better there than staying in the hill country. Is that clear?"
Again Kozak simply stared vacantly into his eyes and nodded, causing the executive officer to wonder how much longer Colonel Dixon thought that he could push the brigade. The executive officer knew that when officers like Kozak began to teeter on the edge of total collapse, the end was in sight. He couldn't allow that to happen. He was a commander now, charged with a mission. "Okay, Nancy, I want you to get your company mounted up and moving. I want you in place before it gets dark. Is that clear?"
As before, Kozak stared at him and nodded. Realizing that there was nothing more that he could do there, the executive officer shook his head, turned, and began to walk away. He was about to get into his humvee when Kozak called out, "Major."
Stopping, the executive officer turned around and faced Kozak. "Major, I'm all right really. It's just that it's been a bad few days. I… I don't think…"
After Kozak lapsed into silence, the two officers looked at each other. For the first time in several days the executive officer felt compassion for another human being. Nodding, he said nothing at first. Then he said, "I understand. We'll talk about it in Weiterode. Is that all right?"
"Yes, sir. That will be fine. Thank you."
The executive officer looked at Nancy Kozak for a moment and realized that what she needed was more than another mission. She needed a calm and reassuring voice to talk to her, to reach in and wrap itself about her troubled and fatigued mind and ease her burden. But he couldn't do that right now. Several kilometers down the road another company commander, like Kozak, waited to receive his orders. The executive officer doubted if he would be in any better shape than Kozak. Though the image of Kozak shaken like this was very disconcerting to the executive officer, there was nothing that he could do about that. The war went on and they had a mission, a very important one, to execute. He would have plenty of time later, after Kozak's company had settled into their new position, to talk to her. Plenty of time.
With that, he turned, climbed into his humvee, and went speeding down the road in search of B Company, where he would play out the same scene with a different company commander. The executive officer didn't know that his tenure as battalion commander had less than thirty minutes left. Like his battalion commander before him, the executive officer was scheduled by fate to become a statistic.
Each day General Lange found the afternoon briefings at Ruff's office more and more intolerable. Everything about the briefings and the people who attended them bothered him. It bothered him as a professional soldier, as a German, and as a human being.
To Lange's right sat Rudolf Lammers. As the chief of operations briefed, Lange carefully looked over to the man who as the Minister of Defense was supposed to be his immediate superior. In the past three days, however, Lammers had been nothing more than a messenger for Chancellor Ruff, and not a very good one at that. Though he gave the outside world the appearance of still being in control, he was out of his depth. Whenever Ruff demanded action or a decision had to be made, Lammers hurriedly sought out Lange and with wide eyes simply asked, "Well, what do you think?"
On the other side of Lammers was Bruno Rooks, the Foreign Minister. While Lammers at least gave the appearance of being in control of himself, Rooks couldn't even manage this. Everything about the man, including body odor from lack of bathing, told of a broken man. Among the world community it was he, Rooks, who the press held up as the man who had been dealing with the other nations of the world before the crisis. So now it was he who the press watched as nation after nation slammed their doors in his face. While Ruff could hide in his office surrounded by his loyal staff and military men, Rooks suffered in person the abuse of diplomats who had once called themselves his friends. This, coupled with Ruff's own attitude of ignoring a man who had become unnecessary to his purposes, was too much for Rooks to bear. Just when he needed a friend, a person to confide in, he had no one; and no one except Lange seemed to notice.
Of the inner circle, only Fellner, the Minister of the Interior, seemed to be holding up. That, Lange surmised, was probably due to the fact that, although considered a part of the inner circle, he was not one of Ruff's men. Of the lot, only Fellner continued to maintain his dignity and speak for the good of the German people. Though he supported Ruff, who was after all the duly elected Chancellor, Fellner left no doubt that he stood for Germany and all of its people.
Finally in the circle of men who were driving Germany into the dark abyss there was Chancellor Ruff himself. If Fellner stood for Germany and the German people, what did Ruff now stand for?
Everything, Lange had been able to convince himself, up to the first bloodletting had been justifiable. Everything could be explained. Ruff's indignation against the United States for not informing them of the Ukrainian operation, his seizure of the nuclear weapons brought into Germany against all treaties, even his use of the Army to blockade the American Tenth Corps in the Czech Republic were political maneuvers that could be defended. Those efforts, Lange had thought, had hoped, had all been bluffs. Now, however, after the battles in central Germany, Lange finally began to understand that Ruff had never been bluffing. Ruff had always been working for an armed confrontation with the Americans. But why? Why in the hell had this man who had earned an impeccable reputation as a man of reason, a strong unifying element in a troubled Germany, driven his people and his nation into a war that could only ruin decades of hard work, not to mention the lives of thousands of its people?