The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson
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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,