The Kaiser's Last Kiss

by Alan Judd

  ‘The visit goes well, I think,’ said the Kaiser. ‘Herr Hitler’s Reich appears to wish us well and Hermine is pleased, which is perhaps the most important thing, eh?’ He considered his cigar. ‘In one sense. In another, of course,’ – his words trailed off as he watched the smoke curling and dissolving – ‘there are aspects we cannot ignore. Herr Himmler’s account of how they will solve the problem of hungry mouths and unproductive hands was most enlightening, very instructive. They mean business, these people of yours. Your Reichsführer has the happy knack of reducing complex problems to simple terms. Stark terms, one might say.’

  ‘He is famed for that, your Highness.’

  ‘A mind that sees straight through to the essentials and a temperament that is not afraid to face up to what he sees, and take appropriate action.’

  ‘His resolve is said to be formidable.’

  ‘A man who sees both the wider picture and the details, every one of them.’

  Krebbs nodded. The Kaiser’s manner appeared neither ironic nor mocking but it made him feel as if he were being played with.

  ‘It is very important to face up to these difficult questions and achieve a final solution, once and for all. Do you agree?’ The Kaiser’s watery old eyes stared challengingly, as if Krebbs had been arguing.

  ‘Yes, your Highness.’

  ‘The Jews of Europe have to be expelled, extinguished, expunged, eradicated. I have said so myself, have I not?’

  ‘Yes, your Highness.’

  ‘Good boy, you will go far.’

  There was a pause. The atmosphere seemed heavy with something, as if there had been a fundamental disagreement. Krebbs wondered whether he should leave.

  ‘Tell me,’ the Kaiser continued quietly, ‘you have been fortunate enough to have seen action in France, as well as here in Holland a little –’

  ‘And in Poland.’

  ‘– and in Poland. What is the bravest thing you have seen done in the SS?’ His tone was more thoughtful now and he contemplated his smoke again.

  Krebbs thought. There were many brave things done in front-line fighting, mostly unnoticed by any except possibly a man’s immediate comrades, and they did not always survive. Indeed, it was brave enough simply to stay and fight, and not run away. He remembered the day he had first come under sustained shell and mortar fire when an English brigade had counter-attacked south of Arras, driving into their flanks. It was the first time he had seen SS troopers retreat, some in panic. St Venant, which they had just taken, had to be abandoned and their neighbouring Panzer division had lost tanks and transport. It was the noise, as much as anything, that was so terrifying, the overwhelming, numbing, enveloping, disorientating noise. All you wanted to do was bury yourself or run, and it was all he could do to remain in position, to keep his men there and to keep them firing back through gaps in the smoke. They hadn’t done anything spectacular that day, nothing worthy of notice, just held their ground, but each man, he knew, had found it more testing than anything else. There was nothing heroic about lying there and being shelled, your mouth dry as dust and your buttocks quivering every time you heard the whine and roar of approaching shells. Some of his men had shit themselves in their trousers. That was not a disgrace; you couldn’t help it, it was like trembling, you simply couldn’t control your bodily reactions. He was just grateful it hadn’t happened to him.

  A more obvious heroism was that of the dozen or so poor devils who had stayed to confront the English tanks when twenty broke through two fields away from his own position. With no anti-tank weapons, they had fought point-blank, some of them even jumping on the tanks to try to drop grenades down the hatches. They’d all been killed, crushed or shot to pieces every one, with no survivors to pin pretty medals on their corpses. The tanks had been comprehensively dealt with later, fortunately.

  But he preferred not to talk about that, or anything else he’d actually seen; at least, not to anyone who had not been there. ‘There’s something I didn’t witness but heard about first-hand,’ he said, eventually. ‘It was an officer called Kurt Meyer, who commanded a recce battalion. He was leading an advance party along a road in a valley when some rocks above were detonated by explosive charges and sent tumbling down on to the road, blocking progress. At the same time, they came under machine-gun fire from farther along the valley. They couldn’t go back and they couldn’t go forward. Yet if they stayed they would be killed. Meyer decided the only thing was to turn their advance into an attack. Some of them would probably be killed but if they didn’t do something, all of them would be. When he ordered his men to attack, though, no one moved. It was not simply a refusal of orders, but a breakdown of comprehension. The bullets were smacking into the rocks immediately before them. He could see from their eyes when he ordered them forwards that they could not comprehend what he meant. It seemed to them like pointless suicide. So he took a grenade and shouted at everyone so that they could see him waving it. Then he pulled the pin and rolled it behind the last man.’ Krebbs smiled. ‘He said he had never seen such a concerted leap forwards. They all jumped as if bitten by tarantulas. They made it to the next cover, and the next, and so on. The spell was broken. They were grinning and laughing at each other now. Most of them survived.’

  The Kaiser nodded. ‘That must be the epitome of your Waffen SS culture, what you all aspire to. It is the kind of action that wrests victory from the impossible and the effect on the morale of your enemies spreads wider than any individual action. They believe they have lost before they meet you. But it is also wasteful. Your best troops pay a high price in butchers’ bills, which could become difficult if this war lasts as long as the last. Remember 1916. The French holding Verdun, and our holding the British on the Somme, was a cost – in NCOs particularly – from which we never recovered. And you train with live ammunition, don’t you? That is wasteful, too.’

  Relaxing now into the kind of conversation he liked, Krebbs sat back in his chair and even crossed his legs. ‘It is true, there are losses. But it is done so that we in the SS are more accustomed to using our weapons under adverse conditions and to being within fifty to seventy metres of the explosions of our own artillery fire than any other troops. So the shock of battle is not so great for us.’ Yet it had been shock enough, that day when they were held up outside Dunkirk by the English Guard regiments who had, in the words of his division’s battle report, ‘fought magnificently and grimly to the death’. His division had lost a hundred and fifty men dead on that day alone. They had fought bravely, however, overcoming the English, which would have been harder without such demanding training. ‘The Reichsführer himself has acknowledged the costliness of this training and regrets the loss of each soldier but he pointed out that every drop of blood spilled in training saves streams of blood in battle.’

  ‘Very possibly. But it is easy to say that sort of thing. We are persuaded by our own rhetoric. Has he seen action himself, your Reichsführer?’

  ‘Not yet.’ It was a weak, foolish reply and he was angry with himself for it. He had said the first thing to come to mind in order to avoid the obvious response, which was – have you? Or – he has seen as much action as you, your Highness. It angered him that he should so easily make himself look foolish in order to spare the feelings of this preposterous old man.

  But the Kaiser puffed on his cigar and said nothing, staring at the tea-tray on the drum table. The pause lasted so long that Krebbs wondered whether the Kaiser had forgotten his presence. His own two last words seemed to hang in the smoky air between them.

  ‘And what is the worst thing you have seen?’ the Kaiser asked. The expression in his eyes was hard to make out. ‘I mean, the worst thing that you have seen done by men of the SS?’

  ‘Nothing,’ was what Krebbs wanted to say, but he held his tongue. It was not easy, it depended what was meant, how you defined it, whether you made allowances for war. In Poland, certainly, he had witnessed arbitrary brutalities, casual killings of civilians, the clumsy bayoneting by t
wo guards of a limping prisoner-of-war who was holding up the column, though he had committed none himself. He had been surprised by these things but had not permitted them to affect him, had not dwelt on them. It was his first taste of war and he had not known what to expect; it was not clear what was normal and his desire, as always, was to find the norm and conform to it. So he had waited to see. Since then he had seen more fighting. Things happened, as soon as they had they were in the past and, once they were, there was nothing you could do. Days and nights followed in a seamless phantasmagoria of action and inaction, of weariness, privation, duty, routine and waiting, always so much waiting. What had happened yesterday might have been in another life, as remote from today as the unknowable events of tomorrow.

  Krebbs did not want to answer the Kaiser’s question directly; doing so would entail a detachment that belied how events were experienced, that ignored their overwhelming pressure, the irresistible current that swept you along among them. It would be to pretend he could somehow detach himself from his own life, while the flow of his life continued. The truth was, there was no worst, only different bad things at different times and places, for different reasons, in different circumstances. He supposed the Kaiser was going to go on about the proposed two hundred and forty-three executions in revenge for the bullets in Rauter’s car. Well, that was SS security police business, nothing to do with the fighting soldiers of the Waffen SS.

  ‘Were you at Le Paradis?’ asked the Kaiser.

  The question opened up the feeling beneath Krebbs’s thoughts like the welling-up of blood behind a surgeon’s knife.

  ‘You may wonder how I know about it,’ continued the Kaiser. ‘It is surprising what I hear. People tell me things simply because I am Kaiser. They think I should know, or do know, and they want to tell somebody, especially something like that. It was in France, of course, not here, but nevertheless I heard about it because the SS did it and the Wehrmacht discovered it, and they talk about it, and some of those Wehrmacht officers have relatives who visit me. Two of the English soldiers survived, you see, and were found by the Wehrmacht and taken to hospital. One day the world will know. Were you there?’

  ‘I was there afterwards.’ That was why he had not counted it the worst thing he had seen. He had not seen it done. It was a reasonable argument so long as he did not think too much about it.

  ‘What did you think when you saw it?’ The Kaiser spoke gently, almost kindly.

  ‘At first I couldn’t make out what had happened.’ The mere acknowledgement made Krebbs feel freer. The little farm near Paradis was more vivid to him now than in the confused state in which he had first come across it, towards dusk that evening when bringing his company out of the line. Their new commander, Obersturmführer Fest, had been blinded during the fighting against the English Guard regiments. They had been in action for thirty-six hours and were exhausted, barely able to put one foot before another, and he kept having to stop, not only to rest but to refresh his failing memory from the map. He had the grid reference of battalion headquarters but had to concentrate even to grasp the numbers, let alone envisage the route. He was dazed with tiredness and the map symbols moved while he stared at them. In fact, they were off their route in coming to the farm but he thought there might be water there. They could rest for ten minutes, set a new route and still make HQ by dusk.

  The British 4th Brigade had made a stubborn final stand to permit the remnants of the English army to escape from Dunkirk. They had achieved their objective, at great cost to themselves. Now their survivors, exhausted like their attackers, nearly all of them wounded and virtually out of ammunition, had surrendered. From a few bodies they passed on the way to the farm, Krebbs saw that this regiment was called Royal Norfolk. The bodies, heaps and bundles of brown rags carelessly discarded by hedges, half in, half out of ditches, hunched and sprawling, gaping and peaceful, often incomplete or strangely broken, were numerous enough to suggest a serious engagement. They were interspersed, in upsetting numbers, by similar bodies in field grey, bearing the regimental flashes of the 2nd SS Totenkopf Infantry Regiment. There was nothing more moving than the sight of one’s own dead, nothing more capable of lighting anger even in the ashes of spent men. It was not a demonstrative anger but a quiet, sullen determination to avenge, if necessary to annihilate. As they entered the farmyard the blanket of exhaustion that all but smothered each man was lifted a fraction.

  Nothing much was happening. A few soldiers were moving lethargically about, presumably on non-urgent tasks, there was a field ambulance near the house, a lorry and light field gun beyond it. The lorry engine was on tick-over and some medics were collecting German bodies on stretchers and laying them in a row on the ground before a large barn. Krebbs could not help counting; seven so far, another added while he halted his men, two more coming in. In the yard, before the open doors of the great barn, was a heap of British rifles and other weapons, with boots and bits and pieces of their equipment lying nearby. He asked a corporal he recognised, one of Obersturmführer Fritz Knochlein’s 4th company, if there was any water, and was directed to a trough around the corner of the barn.

  Nothing had prepared him for what they found there, not the weary indifference of the soldiers moving about the quiet farmyard nor the brown cow and her calf drinking slowly and deeply from the stone trough, water dripping from their mouths when they raised their heads to gaze passively at the newcomers. At the foot of the barn wall lay a long, untidy heap of bodies in brown, some in startling, spread-eagled attitudes, open-mouthed and open-eyed at the sky, others hunched or curled, hands and boots protruding at odd angles, one muddied and bloodied leg across another’s face here, the head of a pale, fair-haired boy sticking out under somebody’s arm there. About thirty metres away and ten metres apart were two small piles of spent cartridge cases, lent a dull shine by the setting sun. Spandau machine-guns, Krebbs could tell. The old red brick of the barn wall was spattered and pock-marked at about chest height.

  Someone revved the lorry engine, someone else shouted and they heard it pull grindingly away. The cow left the trough and picked her way around the edge of the heap with ungainly precision, avoiding outstretched limbs and upturned helmets, followed by her calf. Before she was quite away from the bodies, she stopped, humped her back and urinated in a great splashing arc, wetting several of them. House martins darted in and out of the eaves of the barn. When Krebbs looked round he saw his entire company gathered in silence behind him.

  ‘I thought it was bad,’ he continued eventually. ‘We all did, in my company. It was not – not soldier-like. Not proper work for soldiers. That’s what we thought.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ said the Kaiser, still gently. ‘A truly terrible thing. So unnecessary. As for shooting and bayoneting the survivors, no one likes that. Except that they missed the two I mentioned and they were found by the Wehrmacht unit that came by that evening. That is how we know what happened, that these one hundred men of Norfolk – I have been there, of course, my uncle had a house there – surrendered when they had held the line for as long as they were ordered and their ammunition had run out. They were disarmed, marched around the corner of the barn, lined up and machine-gunned. All on the orders of the officer commanding that company. That is not, I imagine, how the SS likes other armies to remember it, eh? Not the kind of battle honour that you, Untersturmführer, are proud of, eh?’

  The old man put his cigar to his lips and made it glow. Krebbs realised that his own had gone out. ‘Knochlein, the officer commanding that company, is not popular,’ he said. ‘Some have talked of challenging him to a duel and some soldiers have complained of unsoldierly practices and have requested transfers. But he is still there.’ He sounded to himself as if he were speaking loudly and forcefully. ‘I am glad I was not there to see it,’ he said, with deliberate slowness. ‘We are not proud of it. It is not what we would like to be known for.’

  ‘So, an aberration, then?’ asked the Kaiser, softly.

  ‘Yes, your High
ness. An aberration.’

  ‘That is what you really think, eh? An exception, not part of SS culture? Something different, nothing to do with you, just as what your Reichsführer was saying about the little children was also nothing to do with you? That is what you think, eh?’ As the Kaiser spoke his voice gathered energy. He put his cigar in his mouth, leaned forward and, gripping the arm of his chair with his right hand, pushed himself upright. His face reddened with the effort but when Krebbs got up to help he motioned him brusquely away. ‘Save your energy for your struggle,’ he muttered, and hobbled from the room.

  Krebbs listened to the old man shuffling along the carpet in the corridor. ‘Do not get old,’ he remembered his grandfather saying. ‘Old age is not for sissies.’ He smoked his cigar for some minutes after he could hear no more, then stubbed it. The smell, if he had taken it with him, would have permeated the attic. It would probably cling to him anyway, but no matter. He made his way to the attic stairs, treading carefully past the closed door leading to the Reichsführer’s apartment. It provoked in him an unwanted image of the Reichsführer’s profile, his chin receded so much that the entire lower half of his face appeared to retreat, leaving the upper half bulbous and top-heavy. An unsatisfactory profile.

  He paused to listen at the bottom of the stairs. There were no lights and no sounds. He trod slowly on each uncarpeted stair, conscious of every creak of his boots. At the top he paused again. He had unusually good night vision, though his eyes were still adapting. SS trainers reckoned it took about thirty minutes to adapt fully. There was, anyway, a slither of light showing beneath her door, though not from any of the others. That was encouraging. Holding his breath and moving on the balls of his feet, he stepped across and felt for the handle. A knock, even a soft knock, might awaken others. He turned it slowly and stepped in.