By the middle of the month Vienna had fallen and the battle-weary remnants of the Leibstandarte were in retreat again, hotly pursued by the Soviet 46th Army, stopping now and then in an attempt to slow the inevitable red tide that threatened to wash over them if they remained in one place too long.
Having been spared further Soviet attacks for some hours, once Johann had established his unit’s defensive positions, he began his inspection.
‘Obersturmführer?’ one of the young Schütze said.
Johann didn’t know the boy’s name, but he thought him no more than fifteen years old. ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘We don’t have much ammunition, Obersturmführer.’
‘Then use what you have sparingly. If ‘Ivan’ comes for us, make every bullet count.’
‘Jawohl, Obersturmführer.’
Those who could sleep would do so in shifts among the cover of the shrubs and trees by the roadside, while the rest of the troop kept watch. As an extra precaution, Johann had sent a small three-man reconnaissance squad half a mile back towards Vienna as an early warning measure. He would send three others to replace them at midnight. Johann shared the command watch with a Rottenführer called Protz. The squad leader had clearly seen little combat, but he had been all Johann could muster for his small troop in the chaos of their bloody retreat. The man instilled so little confidence in Johann that he sat awake through the first two hours of Protz’s watch, lying on a bank beside the shrubbery, listening to every sound the night had to offer while he counted the stars in the night sky to ward off his fatigue.
With an hour of Protz’s watch remaining, Johann finally began to drift, and thoughts of Ava came to him, as they often did. He had still received no word from her—no clue as to her whereabouts, or even whether she was alive or dead. He had sent a letter to Volker the previous year, as the young Untersturmführer he had briefly shared a billet with in Normandy had suggested. Volker had later replied to say that he had visited Ava’s uncle in Gilching, but that her uncle had seen nothing of the Bauer family in recent months. Ava and her parents had not then gone to stay with her uncle to escape the Munich bombings.
So where was she?
Volker had said he would look into Ava’s whereabouts further, but that was now months ago, and Johann had received no further news. As his eyelids became too heavy to keep open, his thoughts drifted to his parents and the news that his home city of Dresden had been all but flattened by ceaseless bombing raids that February. He had been denied leave to return home, and he had later heard that the area where his parents lived had been among the worst hit. Soon after that he received news that their bodies had been recovered from the debris. Johann shed no tears for his father, but for his mother, whom he had seen so little of in recent years, and who had endured more hardship than any wife deserved from her husband, he wept in phases for several days.
Thinking about the bombing of Dresden again made Johann wonder where Ava had been when the bombs fell on Munich the previous year, and whether she and her parents had been buried somewhere beneath the rubble and the devastation that typically followed such random destruction. His last waking thought was that Munich was only two hundred miles west of his current position. And how he wished he was there, where he knew the answers to these questions that tormented him must lie.
‘Nachthexen!’
Johann had no idea how long he’d been asleep, but it felt as if only a matter of seconds had passed before his eyes shot open again. At hearing the cry, his first instinct was to roll closer to the bush beside him. His Luger was drawn in seconds. Then he heard the familiar sound of the wind whistling through the bracing-wires of one or more Soviet Polikarpov U-2 biplanes and he holstered his sidearm again, knowing it would prove useless against the attack.
The biplanes had been nicknamed N?hmaschinen—sewing machines—because of the rattling sound their engines made. But their engines were now switched off to facilitate a stealthy approach to their target. Flown by the all-women pilots of the Soviet 588th Night-Bomber Regiment, who were referred to as Nachthexen or night witches, their chief objective was to disrupt and to deny the enemy sleep.
The first fragmentation bombs took out one of the machine-gun placements, and Johann could only hope that the men operating it had managed to leap clear in time. The hitherto still night air suddenly erupted with the sound of the explosions and the quick return of machine-gun fire, and cries went out in all directions as members of the Leibstandarte ran for cover.