Paris, France, 27 March 2007
It was snowing outside when the phone rang.
Her husband had had time to make one call, and that very brief. “I love you, Isabelle. Always remember that. But it turns out that this threat you denied is real, after all. And it looks like it is concentrating on us and the Poles. My unit will be in action soon. You, however, must get yourself and the boys ready to flee. I cannot tell you where to go to or how to get there. But watch the news carefully. Do not trust everything the government says. And when it is time to move, move you must… and quickly.”
Then, as if her answering that she understood were some kind of signal, the husband had said again, “Remember I love you,” just before the phone went dead.
The next hours were filled with frantic packing of long unused camping equipment, food, and some minimum essential winter clothing. Why had she not packed sooner? Isabelle cursed herself. With each new series of meteorlike, incoming flashes of death from space the conviction had grown that she had made a terrible mistake.
She couldn’t stop blaming the Americans, though, for needlessly bringing on this war.
As Isabelle packed one bag after another, her elder son, Thomas, had taken them down to the family automobile and carefully stowed them.
Once the car was packed, Isabelle strapped into its usual place the restraining seat for the baby of the family. Then she and Thomas cleared away the accumulated snow from the windows.
Wäller Kaserne, Westerburg, Germany, 27 March 2007
Outside the headquarters snow fell, driven by the wind and collecting in drifts chaotically. Inside, paper and words flew in an equal blizzard. But inside, the will of one man reigned over the chaos of the frightful news.
“Major landings at Ingolstadt, Tübingen, Aschaffenburg, Meissen, Schwerin, Nienburg, and Guemmersbach, Herr Generalleutnant,” announced the aide de camp, Rolf, finger stabbing down at each fresh Posleen infestation marked on the table-borne map. “Minor ones all over the map.”
The phone rang. Neither Posleen invasion nor four years of steady allied bombing during the Second World War had ever quite succeeded in inconveniencing the Bundespost, the German telephone system.
“Generalleutnant, it is the chancellor for you.”
Mühlenkampf took the phone, announcing himself.
He listened for several minutes before answering, “Yes, Herr Kanzler, I understand. You can count on the 47th Panzer Korps.”
The general replaced the phone on its cradle, exhaling forcefully. To his staff he explained, “The infantry is folding and running almost everywhere. Some of the towns are holding though. Aschaffenburg has fallen, but Würzburg and Schweinfurt are holding out. We are going to move south, relieve those towns, and destroy the invaders utterly.”
The aide listened for the remaining words. Those words remained unspoken. Finally, he asked, “What about our left and right units, Herr General?”
Mühlenkampf shook his head. “The other twelve heavy Korps are already committed. The only infantry in range to have any effect is crushed… they were crushed in a matter of hours. We’re on our own in this.”
The autobahn was a steady-moving river of vehicles, both soft and armored. Civilians moved north in two streams to either side. Their faces were haggard, drawn, frightened.
Mixed in among the civilians, mostly weaponless, trudged soldiers in the thousands. These were broken men, from broken formations. Leaderless, these men were also demoralized, dispirited and disheveled.
Off from the autobahn, at a distance, Brasche stood in the turret of Anna, watching the mixed crowd pass. Their eyes filled briefly with hope at the Tiger’s imposing heft and incredibly vicious-looking gun. Then, one and all, the refugees would glance behind them, remember what they had seen, the horrors of Posleen on a feeding frenzy, and hopelessly trudge on.
Hans understood. He had seen it before. He had been a part of it before.
It was a warm spring afternoon. Winter was past now, fully past. It had been a long one… and bitter.
So had the march to escape Soviet captivity and near certain death been a bitter one. Brasche remembered it in all too much detaiclass="underline" the burning of the standards, the surrender of the other soldiers, the massacre of prisoners he had witnessed from nearby. Then came the wet cold nights racing through Austria to outrun the Reds’ inexorable advance.
Amidst the debris of war and defeat, Brasche had searched for a uniform to fit him, finally finding one on the corpse of a dead Wehrmacht sergeant. Still, while he could burn his SS garb, he could not so easily remove the tattoo on his left side that marked him indelibly as a member.
So west he headed, ever west into the setting sun. France was his goal, as it had become the goal of many of those who survived the surrender of the Wiking Division. The Legion was to become home for as many as could find shelter within it. The Legion asked no questions of a man who preferred, for the sake of his life, not to answer any.
At length, Brasche came upon another group of German soldiers, sitting quietly in an open field by a road. Near Stuttgart this was. A noncom wearing a funny-looking, coffee can cap with a bill stood among the Germans nonchalantly taking names and writing them into a ledger.
Hans recognized the cap, recognized too the calm and contentment of the German soldiers. Amidst the trash of defeat, Hans Brasche had found the Legion.
Hammelburg, Germany, 27 March 2007
The roadside was littered with everything from abandoned baby carriages to mattresses to cars that, out of gas, had been pushed aside to make room for the advancing Korps. Already drifting snow was beginning to cover the debris. It was also covering some bodies of those too faint of heart or weak in the will to live to go on.
This is defeat, an old voice in Hans’ head reminded him. Avoid it.
From somewhere behind his Tiger came the sound of artillery, lots of it, firing. The shells’ passage rattled the air with the racket of one hundred freight trains. In Brasche’s ears, the radio crackled with reports from the Korps’ forward reconnaissance unit, the Panzeraufklärungsbrigade, Florian Geyer.[34] The enemy was near at hand.
Up just past the autobahn bridge over the river south of the town the lead panzer division, Hohenstauffen, sprang to more active life. Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles pivot steered to get off of the road and into a semblance of order. Panicked civilians did their best to dodge the metal flood, though that best was not always good enough. The Hohenstauffen drivers did their best to avoid killing any of their own. That best was likewise not always good enough.
Once clear of the autobahn and the refugees the tanks and infantry carriers raced forward to take up positions behind a low ridge, infantry moving closer in to hug the dead ground behind the military crest, tanks taking position further back to rake the area between the military crest and the top of the ridge.