A Man Without Breath

‘And if it did? What then? What if I were to suggest that whatever you have in mind might also cause trouble for me and my friends? In the same way that you believed Corporal Quidde might cause trouble?’

‘Are you threatening me, colonel?’

‘Not at all, Gunther. You mistake me. I’m just trying to point out that there are times when you need a very steady arm when you’re taking aim at something. Or someone. Someone like Hitler, for example. And it helps if someone isn’t rocking the boat while you’re doing it.’

‘That’s a good point. And I’ll certainly bear it in mind the next time you’re taking aim at him.’ I made a face. ‘Whenever that might be.’

*

After Von Gersdorff left, I walked on my own for a while and smoked another cigarette in the encroaching darkness. I was tempted to go and knock on Ines’s door, only I didn’t want her to think I couldn’t handle a whole evening without her. And I was just about ready to concede that I couldn’t handle a whole evening without her when I heard two shots in the distance; there was a short interval and then a large splinter from the birch tree next to my head flew into the air as a split second later, I heard a third shot. I dropped to the ground and extinguished my cigarette. Someone was trying to kill me. It was a while since anyone had fired a gun at me, but absence had not made the experience feel any less personal or unpleasant. Bullets don’t care who they hit.

I kept my head down for several minutes and then glanced nervously around. All I could see were trees and more trees. My own hut and the officers’ mess were on the other side of the health resort; Ines’s front door was two or three hundred metres away, but without knowing where the shots had come from, there was no point in making a run for it. I could as easily have run towards the shooter as away from him.

Another minute passed and then another. Two wood pigeons settled on a branch above me and a gust of wind rose and then died away. All was silence now, apart from the beating of my heart. Ignoring the sharp pain in my ribs – I had fallen onto the root of an upturned tree stump – I tried once again to estimate where the shots had come from, but without success, and deciding that caution was the better part of valour, I scrambled behind the rest of the stump and tried to get as much of my body underneath it as possible. Then I took out my gun, worked the slide quietly, and waited for something to happen. Four long years in the trenches had taught me the wisdom of staying put and doing nothing under fire until it’s possible to make out a target. I lay very still, hardly daring to breathe, staring up at the treetops and the twilight sky, assuring myself that one of the guards at Krasny Bor would surely have heard the shots, and asking myself who wanted me dead enough to try to make that happen sooner than later. I could think of any number of people, of course, but mostly they were in Berlin, and gradually, instead of questioning the identity of my assailant, I started questioning the wisdom of the plan I had been reluctant to tell Von Gersdorff.

In truth, there wasn’t much to it; conceived in the office of the Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda, it certainly wasn’t heroic and didn’t compare to the bravery of Von Gersdorff’s attempt on Hitler’s life. You might say it was nothing less than an attempt to restore the value of truth in a world that had debased it; because the minute I’d mentioned to Goebbels the idea of inviting foreign journalists to Katyn Wood, I’d realized that the proper thing to do with the military intelligence report I’d found in the frozen boot of Captain Max Schottlander was simply to try to give it to the journalists. If I couldn’t destroy the Nazis, I could perhaps acutely embarrass them.

Eight correspondents had arrived from Berlin. Of course the majority were Nazi stooges from Spain, Norway, France, Holland, Belgium, Hungary and Serbia, and none of these was likely to print a story that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the criminality of the present German government; but the correspondents from the neutral countries – Jaederlund from Stockholms Tidningen and Schnetzer from the Swiss newspaper Der Bund – looked like they were still interested in truth: a truth that exposed the most egregious lie of the Second World War – how the war had started.