‘When I run, follow after me,’ he told his men.
Another shell erupted, and it was so close that the sound rang in Johann’s ears. It was to his right. He waited. Then another shell screamed overhead.
‘Ready!’
It thumped down and exploded barely more than fifty metres ahead. Johann ran towards it, limping most of the way. He was quickly overtaken by his Kameraden.
‘Keep going!’ he called. ‘Don’t stop until you’re clear of the trees.’
He reached the site of the last shell and was slowed further by sharp and ragged splinters of wood where several trees had fallen over themselves. The pain in his leg was agonising, but he tried to shut it out. Pain is in the brain . . . Pain is in the brain . . .
The last sound he wanted to hear at that moment reached his ears then and he glanced up just as the whistling stopped. He knew that was bad. A second later the shell burst ahead of him and he felt something thump into his chest with such force that it spun him round, stopping him in his tracks. He felt suddenly dizzy. He sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree and tried to make out the scene before him, but his vision was blurred. For a moment he had no idea where he was. Then his arms were raised and two of his Kameraden were beside him, propping him up onto his feet, which they began to drag through the debris.
‘It’s Schütze Hartmann, Obersturmführer. Can you hear me?’
The voice sounded distant and eerily hollow. ‘Hartmann?’
Johann recalled that he had ordered the young Schütze and the rest of his unit to retreat to the cover of the farmhouse they had passed. He imagined that he had chosen to remain at the edge of the woodland to provide cover for their return. He had disobeyed an order, but Johann was glad. He had to admire the young Schütze’s initiative and bravery.
‘We’ve seen the main division, Obersturmführer. They’re close.’
As his men continued to drag him along, Johann felt so light-headed that it was as if he were being borne on wings that would carry him home. No, not home. To Ava. He felt himself trying to smile as he saw her face—her blonde hair pinned up as it had been when he first saw her, her pale complexion and her button nose, and the warmth in her blue-grey eyes that he hoped he would someday see again.
He began to drift, seeing only shadows around him, and the soft green light of the woodland canopy, which every so often seemed to pass over his eyes and close them. He had been such a fool about Ava. He knew that now. The last time he had seen her—when he had met her at the Park Cafe in Munich over a year ago now—he had intended to ask her to marry him. But his courage, which had since been proven time and time again on the battlefield, had abandoned him that day. They had talked, and they had even held hands once or twice, but the ring his friend had given him—the ring he had so many times imagined slipping onto Ava’s finger—had remained in his pocket all the while they were together, and it was still there now.
Johann thought about the ring again—Volker’s ring—and was suddenly overcome with worry. In her letters, Ava had told Johann that Volker had been visiting her, not just that once to apologise for his behaviour the evening they had dined at the Osteria Bavaria, but several times since. Had Volker taken his failure to act as a sign that he no longer desired to marry Ava?
Johann feared he had, but it was a matter he was unable to dwell on. The shadows around him suddenly grew darker until all thought and sensation left him, and he was aware of nothing more.
Chapter Fourteen
Vienna, Austria. September 1941.
Johann Langner awoke to the familiar sights and smells of the hospital ward that, as for several of his Waffen-SS Kameraden, had been his home for the past few weeks. His bed, the most comfortable he had known in many months, was in a corner of the ward beside a sunlit window that looked down over a busy street and out across the city rooftops towards the Danube. In the bed next to his was a Scharführer from SS-Wiking Division called Ernst K?hler. The Sergeant Major was an older man, close to thirty, and he had become Johann’s jovial companion since he’d been brought in—jovial, despite losing both of his legs during a Soviet mortar bombardment near the Ukrainian city of Tarnopol in one of his Division’s early engagements on the Ostfront.