LITMIR.BIZ

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father. He was propped up on an armchair in the drawing room of his parents’ house in Berlin. His dark-blue naval officer’s tunic was resewn where it had been ripped, and the gold was missing from one sleeve of it. His left leg was in splints and his face badly bruised. ‘The damned war’s not over and perhaps never will be.’

      ‘They signed the armistice nearly two months ago,’ said his father gently. His son was in pain and frustrated by his immobility.

      ‘The British navy is still blockading us. Our people are starving. The warships of the High Seas Fleet have red flags flying from their mastheads. There are bands of armed ruffians in the streets shooting at each other. That traitor Liebknecht has been carried shoulder-high through the streets by soldiers wearing the Iron Cross – and has made a speech from the balcony of the Royal Palace. The army has disintegrated. The Kaiser has run away to Holland. How can we negotiate a peace treaty? We have nothing to bargain with.’ It was a cry of pain. The defeat seemed to have affected Peter more deeply than any of the rest of the Winter family. Attacked in the street by a group of Spartacists, he’d been knocked to his knees by clubs and rifle butts. There is little doubt that this drunken, vicious little mob would have killed him, but for another mob that came along and started a brawl, during which Peter escaped. Since then he’d been confined to the house and had done nothing but stare out the window and brood on the consequences of the chaos in the streets below.

      Pauli Winter got up from the armchair. He was wearing the better of his two army uniforms. It was far from the elegant costumes in which Prussia had sent officers to war. Its motley stains had not been removed by scrubbing and cleaning, and its shape not been improved by regular baking in the delousing ovens. The fine leather boots he’d gone to war wearing were long since lost and he wore simple boots and grey puttees like the ones worn by the storm troops. ‘I must get back to Battalion Headquarters,’ said Pauli. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Peter.’ He was in fact on a twenty-four-hour pass, but Pauli found that a couple of hours in the gloomy house near Ku-damm was all he could endure. He’d bought a few cheap presents from a department store in Leipziger Strasse, and now he placed them carefully under the Christmas tree in the corner. One of the servants had found a few logs, and today, with Christmas so near, a fire was burning in the stove. On the sideboard he noticed that all the family photos were arrayed, their silver frames gleaming. There they were in 1913, the happiest of happy families: two smiling children and Mama and Papa standing proudly behind them. How long ago it seemed. The family had changed dramatically since then. Now – with riots in the streets and Bolsheviks occupying Winter’s factories – even a log on the fire was a treat to be relished. Harald Winter was stunned by the sudden change in his fortunes, and Peter had become a crusty invalid. Now it was Mama who held them all together, ventured onto the streets, coaxed food from the shopkeepers, and persuaded the servants to keep working.

      ‘Battalion Headquarters! With that ridiculous little Captain Graf in command,’ said Peter scornfully. ‘You still go on pretending, do you? Your Freikorps battalions are just a lot of uniformed gangsters, and Graf is no more than a brigand.’

      ‘That’s not true,’ said Pauli. It was because they were so close that Peter knew where to put the knife. ‘The Freikorps is a fine organization and the army fully approves. There are thousands of us: disciplined and armed. And not just in Berlin – they are being formed all over Germany. Every one of our soldiers is a volunteer signed on month by month. In the East they will be defending our borders now that the army are withdrawing. The Poles, and the rest of them, would have been looting Berlin by now if it wasn’t for the Freikorps units out there.’

      ‘Then why don’t you march eastwards?’ said Peter.

      ‘Because, like you, we are temporarily immobilized. When the transport and our orders arrive, perhaps we’ll go.’ Pauli’s tone was mild, not just because he remembered the good times they’d shared, but because he was frightened that Peter might thoughtlessly blurt out something about the court-martial and Pauli’s assignment to a punishment battalion. He’d do almost anything to prevent his parents from finding out about that.

      ‘An under-strength battalion commanded by a captain?’ said Peter sarcastically. ‘Four machine guns, an antique tank, and two armoured cars? What sort of battalion is that?’

      ‘The next time the Reds try to take over Berlin, you’ll see,’ said Pauli. He put on his field-grey overcoat and steel helmet and tightened the strap under his chin before reaching for his belt and pistol.

      ‘What’s that crooked cross sign you’ve painted on your helmet?’ his father asked.

      ‘It’s called a swastika. Many of the Freikorps units wear it to distinguish us from the regular army.’

      ‘Be very careful, Pauli. Remember what happened to your brother.’

      Pauli did remember. Peter had been beaten up just because of the ‘imperial insignia’ on his officer’s uniform. Many army and navy officers had been similarly beaten – and several murdered – by jeering and catcalling thugs who were determined to blame the officer class for the war and its outcome.

      ‘I wear a private’s greatcoat and no badges,’ said Pauli.

      ‘But you have an officer’s sidearm,’ said his father.

      ‘And I’ll use it, too,’ said Pauli. ‘I’d be grateful for a chance to pick off a few of the bastards who tried to kill Peter.’

      ‘Don’t say goodbye to your mother: she’ll only worry until you telephone.’

      ‘I’ll telephone if I can, but the telephone lines are sometimes cut.’

      ‘Take care of yourself, Pauli,’ said his father. ‘Those mutinous swine are holding the Chancellor to ransom…. My God, who could have guessed it would come to this? The Chancellor held prisoner by Marxist hooligans.’ They embraced, and as he grasped him in his arms Pauli was struck by the slight, frail frame of his father. Although not yet fifty years old, Winter had grown old and tired and apprehensive. Perhaps it was only temporary, but it was a sad transformation in a man the boys always remembered as dynamic and rather frightening.

      Harald Winter regarded his son with equal sorrow. The war had made Pauli into a ruffian. He was brusque and dismissive of all the values that Harald Winter revered. This new Pauli who’d come back from the war was someone his father found difficult to cope with. As much as he’d disliked the dependence that Pauli had demonstrated as a child, he preferred that to the new rough-spoken man he’d become. In other words, like many fathers, Harald Winter hated to see that his son had grown up.

      Pauli took the S-Bahn to Alexanderplatz. The trains were running normally but as Pauli walked towards the palace he kept a wary eye open for marauding bands of troublemakers. He saw a small procession of factory workers – women, too – going over the Schlossbrücke. They were not armed but they carried red banners and chanted slogans, so he remained in the shadows until they passed. It was as well to be cautious. Schinkel’s beautiful little guardroom – designed like a Greek temple – was brightly lit and he could see soldiers inside, some of them huddled in blankets on the stone floor. Were they loyal soldiers assigned to duty by the High Command, or Bolshevik renegades? There was no way to know. He hurried past.

      The Royal Palace, or what was usually called just the Schloss, was lit only by light from the cathedral across the road, but against the darkening sky he could see the red blanket that mutinous sailors had hoisted up. The palace had had no official residents ever since the Kaiser abdicated and ran away to Holland. It was at present the home of about three thousand bellicose revolutionary sailors of the self-styled ‘People’s Naval Division’ who were now holding the head of government for ransom.

      Pauli kept walking along Unter den Linden. The streetcleaners were not in evidence, and in places Pauli had to clamber over piles of snow. Only the streetcar tracks had been systematically cleared of it. Despite the occasional sounds of rifle fire – and sometimes even the explosion of a grenade – the shops were open, and some taxicabs, buses and streetcars were still running. But the shortage of fuel meant that there were more horses: ancient Droschken

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