Bauer took a deep breath to calm himself.
“For pity’s sake, Messner. What have you done?”
Like a lawyer, Messner laid out his case. “The prisoners were slowing our advance, perhaps intentionally. Some of them even tried to get away into the forest.” He turned to the soldier with the sniper rifle. “Isn’t that so, Dietzel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s done is done,” Bauer said. “Just make sure that there are no survivors.”
“There were none. I think you saw me make sure of it.” By way of emphasis, Messner patted the pistol at his belt. Then he commenced to pull his black leather gloves back on.
“Good. Because if the Americans find out what you have done, none of us will survive, either, if we are captured. No German will.”
Bauer turned away, his one consolation being the look of realization crossing Messner’s face.
A die had been cast; a line had been crossed.
Also, none of them knew it yet, but Messner had been wrong about killing all the prisoners.
There had been one survivor.
Hidden under the corpse of one of his buddies, a GI named Charlie Knuth held himself very still to avoid receiving a coup de grâce at the hands of the German officer. He held his breath until his lungs felt ready to burst, although he wanted to cry out in pain from the bullets that had torn through his body. Lucky for him, before the German officer had made a closer inspection, attention had turned to the GI trying to escape through the woods.
The man would survive to tell the bloody tale of what had happened on that road through the forest.
And there would be hell to pay.
On the morning of December 19, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, officially the Supreme Allied Commander in the European Theater but known to the common soldier and the public simply as Ike, summoned his command staff to Verdun.
His mood and those of his high-ranking officers were just as gloomy as the surroundings. The town was gray and drab, the streets filled with slush, offering little sign that it was the Christmas season. There were a few wreaths and swags of greenery tied with ribbon, but they appeared dried out by the winter wind, the ribbons faded.
He had made his temporary headquarters in that French town, in an old stone barracks that dated to at least the seventeenth century. Ivy clung to the mortar along with an air of history repeating itself.
After all, it was near this spot that one of the bloodiest battles of World War I had taken place against German forces, resulting in more than three hundred thousand men killed on both sides. Some of his generals had been young officers back then. Now, twenty-eight years later, the Germans had once again upset the applecart by refusing to be beaten and launching an offensive through the rugged Ardennes region.
The German offensive had taken everyone by surprise. Since coming ashore on June 6, 1944, Allied forces had been making mostly steady progress against the Germans, pushing them across France and back toward their fatherland. There had even been optimistic predictions that the war would be over by Christmas. However, Hitler’s offensive had blindsided the Allies.
The inability to detect any signs of the German plan was a complete failure of military intelligence and downright embarrassing to Eisenhower. The intelligence failure was partly due to the overall assumption that the Germans were on the ropes and incapable of an offensive operation. The complete secrecy with which Hitler’s generals had carried out their plan put it on par with the secrecy surrounding the D-Day invasion itself.
To make matters worse, there were rumors flying that none other than Otto Skorzeny, the daring SS commando, had hatched a plan to kidnap or kill Eisenhower. Perhaps the rumor was far-fetched, but it wouldn’t have been the first time that the Nazis had attempted something so outlandish. Consequently, Ike had been slinking around Verdun, coming and going through side doors, while a double rode around in his staff car.
To say that Ike wasn’t happy might have been an understatement.
“Do you think we can get some fresh coffee around here?” he grumped.
“Right away, sir,” replied no less than a full-bird colonel, who went hurrying out of the meeting room to fetch a fresh pot of coffee.
Ike had looked like hell since the planning for D-Day began, thanks to the stress that weighed upon his shoulders and a lack of sleep. The bad news of the last few hours hadn’t done much to improve his condition.
It also didn’t help that the fifty-four-year-old survived mainly on a diet of cigarettes, black coffee, hot dogs, and two fingers of bourbon nightly. He preferred not to waste time on food and was well aware that his troops in the field didn’t eat any better.
A haze of stale cigarette smoke already filled the room. A couple of the British officers smoked pipes, which only added to the fug, along with the smell of wool uniforms, damp from the rain and releasing the smell of stale perspiration.
