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‘Listen up, you lot – it’s time to move out. The advance troops have finally managed to clear the route into the Caucasus Mountains, and now it’s over to us to secure them. This is it. This is the moment we’ve been training for.’

Pascal shared his men’s frustration. The first eighteen months of his war had not been what he’d imagined they’d be when he’d sat in the classroom at Sonthofen studying military tactics.

After the initial burst of almost entirely uncontested action in Poland, he’d been sent to France to train in cliff-climbing techniques in preparation for the invasion of Britain and Gibraltar.

Neither of those campaigns – which he’d been desperate to lead – had come to fruition.

Instead, he’d been sent into Russia, which was at least back to the war, but the battlefields he’d encountered there hadn’t been a birthplace for heroes and giants.

And the doubts he’d encountered still plagued him.

The Russian campaign had dissolved into an endless slog of grinding marches which had left his men swaying and sleepwalking.

It had led them along roads lined with burning trucks and burning bodies and a smell that haunted his dreams. Into a world of chaos and carnage, where soldiers didn’t advance in orderly rows but ran and crawled to stay alive while bullets ricocheted around them and grenades blew the earth into craters.

Into a cold so intense, men could lose fingers and toes they hadn’t even noticed were frozen.

And into days which – when they weren’t filled with brutality – were filled with boredom.

That was the other thing Pascal hadn’t understood about war.

How much time was spent sitting and waiting.

This latest campaign had been no different.

He’d stopped counting how long they’d been stuck in the damp and heavily fortified hinterland of the Mius River, waiting for the advance troops to secure their forward path when the number of the days grew too high.

He’d almost forgotten how terrible fighting could be, he was so desperate to get back out into it and put his real skills to the test.

Especially in these mountains and on this mission, where we can finally be the best we can be.

Pascal let the men quieten down before he shared that nugget with them.

He rarely raised his voice off the battlefield; he rarely had to.

His troops were not, as he’d once imagined they would be, his closest friends.

This wasn’t the Hitler Youth anymore, and the incident in the Russian village – which had been pushed aside by the battle that followed – had forced him to accept that high ideals weren’t always the glue between soldiers he’d believed them to be.

But the men respected his track record, and they listened to him.

Once the nudges and shouts of, ‘Shush, he’s got more,’ finally stopped, he smiled and began again.

‘The part we’ve been given to play is a huge honour; I want you to understand that.

If this offensive succeeds – which it will – Germany will take control of the vast deposits of silver and lead and oil and timber in these regions that Russia has been helping itself to.

When we do that, when we secure those resources for the German war effort, victory will be ours all the sooner.

’ He laughed as the cheers shook the roof again.

‘And if that isn’t honour enough, there could be more to follow.

During the ascent, there will be an opportunity to conquer the summit of Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in the range, and claim that glory for Germany too.

But that mission is only open to the strongest and the fittest men across both mountain battalions, so I don’t imagine many of you will be interested. ’

This time the cheers were cut through with catcalls from one mountaineer to another as they competed for Pascal’s attention.

He left them to their drinking after that, promising to put all their names into the wider ballot.

There was no other way to select the final team: every man in the room could scale Elbrus with the confidence of a mountain goat.

But he knew how much being chosen mattered because he’d already been selected, and he’d been walking a head taller for days.

Pascal had used the word honour twice in his speech.

It was a word he used a lot, despite what the Russian campaign had shown him was the real face of war.

It had been a daily struggle to hold fast to the ideals he wished more of his men shared when he couldn’t keep his own troops fed and warm, never mind the prisoners they’d initially taken.

And after he’d let the incident in the village go unreported and unexamined, it was easier for others to go the same way.

Pascal had had to subdue his conscience more than once in the interests of winning the war, although he’d refused to countenance cruelty.

He’d told himself that the firing squads he’d finally been ordered to deploy were more humane than leaving their Russian captives to starve or freeze to death.

But he’d court-martialled the field officer he’d caught spraying his victims with bullets and laughing, even though that punishment almost turned his men mutinous.

He’d struggled, but he’d kept his doubts at bay and his men in line, and he’d kept honour and comradeship – the two principles he’d associated with life in the military for as long as he could remember – to the fore of every action he took.

Unfortunately, the first was a challenge and the last seemed to be failing him.

His men trusted his orders, but his determination not to ignore or condone what he called acts of barbarism, and his troops called ‘teaching Ivan a lesson’ had set up barriers between them.

He refused to accept that the women they encountered in the overrun villages and towns were the collateral of war and fair game.

He refused to permit discussion of some of the brutal behaviour towards suspected partisans that was apparently commonplace among the other mountain units.

In return, his men called him ‘The Monk’ and rolled their eyes when he began one of his honour-filled lectures.

But not today. They remembered what German soldiers stand for today. And I’ll make sure they don’t lose sight of it, whoever we encounter.

He began to check over his kit. Laying out his white camouflage jacket and trousers.

Running his fingers through his thick woollen socks, searching for the holes that could let in the frost which would cripple him.

Enjoying the sense of preparing for a mission that was worthy of his men.

And refusing to listen to the voice nipping like a draught at his ear, reminding him that the one person who would truly understand the beauty in scaling Mount Elbrus would never know he’d done it – and wouldn’t care if she did.

The journey took them through fields thick with sunflowers and orchards bursting with sweet honey-scented apples and plums, and villages where Pascal ensured nobody was mistreated.

The troops followed his lead and kept their focus on the horizon and their energies for the mountains whose beauty reduced them to silence.

Pascal stared up at the green foothills dotted with sheep, and the pine forests which ringed them, and imagined himself back in Bavaria.

It was an idyllic moment, almost a homecoming. Until he began the climb.

The ridges towering above them were jagged enough to tear holes in the sky.

These weren’t mountains which welcomed summer tourists and guides.

They were wild and untamed and had no patience with the men trying to conquer them.

Tree trunks served for bridges; animal tracks stood in for paths.

The wind blew great drifts of snow across the rock faces the moment the troops climbed out of the valley and whipped their sense of direction away.

Fog fell without warning; ice turned their bodies numb.

The Caucasus Mountains were as dangerous as the Russian armies they’d faced, but the men were finally in their natural element, and every challenge they faced – in the early days at least, before the peaks swallowed their strength and the partisans found them – was met with bright, willing eyes.

‘This is where we leave the porters and the rest of the army behind. From there we go on alone and carry everything we need ourselves.’

From there was the mountain hut perched above them which would act as the Elbrus ascent team’s base for the climb.

It was the strangest building Pascal had ever seen.

It had the elongated and rounded shape of a Zeppelin airship on the outside and looked as if it was perched to slide off the slope.

It was even more extraordinary inside. The men were greeted with polished parquet flooring and hot showers, a stock of mountaineering equipment that was in far better shape than the supplies they’d hauled with them, and more food than a battalion ten times their size would need.

The building, which they later discovered had once been the world’s highest weather station, would have been better designated as a luxury hotel.

And being in it brought the Karwendelhaus and Noemi back to Pascal with a speed that almost jack-knifed him.

It’s like standing inside a negative. It’s so…