"Watch on the Rhine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John, Kratman Tom)

Chapter 1

Fredericksburg, VA, 11 November 2004

Snow flecked the cheeks and eyebrows, falling softly to cover a scene of horror with a clean white blanket. White snow fell upon, melded into, the hair of a man gone white himself. He was stooped, that man. Bent over with the care of ages and the weight of his people resting on his old, worn back.

The Bundeskanzler[2] turned his eyes away from the gruesome spectacle even now being covered by snow. Bad enough to have seen a once vibrant and historical city scoured from the face of the earth as if it had never been. Worse to see the roll of casualties… such crippling casualties… from the army of a state in every way more powerful than his own. The Kanzler trembled with fear for his country, his culture and his people.

Yet, as badly and as plainly as he trembled, the nausea of his disgust was in every way worse.

Fearing to look at his aide, the Kanzler whispered, “It’s the bones, Günter. It’s the little piles of gnawed bones.”

Günter, the aide — though he was really rather more than that, heard the whisper and grimaced. “I know, mein Herr. It’s disgusting. We… we have done terrible things in the past. Horrible, awful, damnable things. But this? This goes beyond anything…”

“Do not fool yourself,” corrected the Kanzler. “We have been worse, Günter, far worse. We were worse because what we did, we did to our own. Cities burned away. Lampshades. Soap. Dental gold. Einsatzgruppen. Gas chambers and ovens. A whole gamut of horror visited upon the innocent by our ancestors… and ourselves.”

“And Dresden?” answered Günter, with a raised eyebrow and a sardonic air. “Hamburg? Damstadt?”

“I didn’t say, my young friend, that we were alone in our guilt.”

The Kanzler blinked away several snowflakes that had lodged themselves in his gray eyelashes. “And… after all, what is guilt of the past?” he sighed. “Do our own young people now need to be destroyed because of what their grandfathers did? Is it right for our children to be eaten, to be turned into little piles of bare, gnawed bones? How far does the sin of Adam and Eve go, Günter?”

Straightening that old and worn and overburdened back, the Kanzler announced, “In any case, it doesn’t matter. Whatever we have done, nothing deserves this… this abattoir. And whatever we can do to prevent it… that shall I do.”

Günter, the aide, scratched his chin, absently. “But what we can do, we have done. Production of everything we need for defense or evacuation is proceeding apace. The old soldiers of the Wehrmacht[3] have been remobilized, what there were of them, and are being rejuvenated. The conscription is in legal force, and exempts only those who conscience cannot abide military service. We are doing all we can.”

“No, my young friend,” answered the Kanzler, slowly and deliberately. “There is one resource yet we have not touched. One that I would never have touched, myself, before seeing this nightmare with my own eyes.”

One resource? One resource. What could the Kanzler mean? Suddenly Günter’s eyes widened with understanding. “Mein Herr, you can’t mean them.”

Tightening his overcoat about him in the cold, reaching up a hand to brush away yet more of the steadily falling snow, the Kanzler looked skyward as if asking for guidance. Not receiving any, still with eyes turned heavenward, he answered, definitively, “Them.”

The chancellor thought, but did not say, And anything else I must bring back to prevent this from happening to our cities, our people.