Page 33

This could be deliberate. If the rumours are true, this really could be what happens everywhere.

Pascal had hit that possibility more than once since he’d understood what was about to take place, but he couldn’t accept it. The beard cutting and boot licking he’d witnessed in Russia had been unkind; it had been designed to humiliate. But this? It was a mistake – it had to be. If it wasn’t…

No. I won’t allow that to be true. Teyber’s a decent man; he’s a good soldier. He can’t have realised there’s nobody left in the village except women and children and old men. He’ll be glad I intervened and stopped this.

Pascal was exhausted; they all were, including the divisional commander, General Teyber.

The brief magic of conquering Mount Elbrus felt like a lifetime away.

In the ten months since then, the mountain brigade had been redeployed to the Balkans – a place most of them could barely find on a map – and another battlefront which had drained their strength and their spirits.

And produced levels of savagery I never thought we were capable of.

Pascal took a deep breath. He was a captain now with greater responsibilities.

He couldn’t afford to be clouded by what men who were less loyal than him might say was evidence that inhumanity could indeed be a deliberate act.

The Balkans was a complex place. They’d all been fooled and misled.

The local Yugoslavian partisans weren’t the disorganised rabble the Germans had been told to expect.

They were a ferocious opponent, highly disciplined and possessed of a knowledge of guerilla warfare the mountain men had struggled to match.

It had taken weeks and terrible casualties on both sides to make a breakthrough against them.

They’d all had to take the kind of snap decisions in the field no classroom could prepare an officer to make.

Which is why Teyber must have miscalculated the village’s importance, and why it’s more essential than ever that I keep a clear head.

Pascal pulled himself up straight, even though every inch of his body was desperate to curl up and sleep.

He screened out the other officers gathered in the spartan house which the division had commandeered as its headquarters, without realising how misguided that decision was.

That what he should have done instead was gauge the mood before he’d jumped in with his request for a hearing.

Then he might have noticed how sour that mood was.

Even when he paused for a moment and sensed it, he wasn’t surprised at the frowns.

He imagined the others were all as surprised as he was by how easily the situation could have run out of control.

Their reaction simply underlined the need for his intervention.

‘I do appreciate how a mistake could have happened, sir, and I don’t mean any offence.

On paper, the fighting should be all but over, but these partisans don’t know when to stop, and they’re getting reinforcements from somewhere.

They’re pinned down in that canyon by the Sutjeska River and hemmed in by the high mountains like sheep in a pen.

They’re being bombarded on a daily basis by German planes screaming across their camp at frighteningly low levels.

Everyone but them can see it’s hopeless.

Anyone but them would surrender. And that stubbornness has forced us into reprisals that have been… Well, fierce I suppose you would say.’

Pascal had found them horrific, although he wasn’t naive enough to admit that.

The order to take no prisoners had been followed to the letter.

Dogs had been sent after the fighters who escaped the German raiding parties, and the dogs weren’t called off once their quarry was caught.

Two compounds, including one with a hospital inside it, had been burned to the ground.

Any concept of glory and honour had dissolved into kill or be killed.

And Pascal had fought in the hand-to-hand battles alongside the best – and the worst – of them.

He covered his momentary hesitation with a cough and continued.

‘Obviously, we’re soldiers and we signed up for that, and the same could be said for the partisans. But surely not for the villagers. So that’s why I wonder if, with respect, there might have been a mistake?’

He stopped. Nobody spoke. Teyber hadn’t looked happy when Pascal had asked for permission to speak and pulled his attention away from the maps spread out across the top of the rough wooden table.

He didn’t look any happier when Pascal finished.

He didn’t react; he didn’t rescind the order.

But his face grew more not less thunderous in the silence which followed Pascal’s speech.

And then he spoke, and Pascal’s stomach somersaulted.

‘You keep saying that word, Captain Lindiger, but who’s made this mistake, you or me? I thought my order was perfectly clear, and yet you’re not happy with it? What am I missing here?’

Pascal wanted to say, All of it . The words were on the tip of his tongue.

He wanted to say, What is it you don’t understand ?

That surely the state of the village spoke for itself.

All the hamlets and small towns they’d passed through on the approach to the canyon had been shockingly impoverished by German standards, and Doli Pivski was no exception.

The house they were currently using had barely a stick of furniture in it and only the lowest-grade lamp oil for lighting, and it was judged as the village’s best home.

But that was too blunt. And perhaps the general had been too busy with his battle plans to properly notice his surroundings, so Pascal resolved to try again and gestured to its emptiness as he answered.

‘Forgive me, sir, but this place and these people, they have nothing, and there’s no fighting men here.

A quarter of the population appears to be children.

As I said, I don’t see that we have any quarrel with them.

And so – and I say this again with respect – I wondered if, perhaps, the order to destroy the whole village was based on the wrong information. ’

If you want to be part of Hitler’s glorious new world, you have to accept all the cruelty that goes with it. You can’t pick and choose.

Noemi’s words – the warning he’d so easily ignored – suddenly roared through his head.

The general’s face darkened again, but Pascal had come too far to stop.

He’d forgotten his rank in the heat of the moment; he’d forgotten he wasn’t Teyber’s equal, and he hadn’t noticed himself doing it.

I’ve got this all wrong was written all over the general’s face, but Pascal misread that too and jumped onto I’ve misjudged this instead .

He cleared his throat as it gradually dawned on him that he should perhaps have requested a private meeting and not spoken so candidly in front of the other officers gathered round the map table.

As he finally realised that what had sounded perfectly respectful and reasonable in his head had landed like a slur, and that needed correcting.

‘Forgive me, sir, I’m sorry. I haven’t handled this well.’

‘That’s true. But it’s not what you should be apologising for.’ The general’s voice had dropped below his usual bark and became twice as menacing. ‘Tell me, you did read the conduct guidelines that were issued before this campaign started, didn’t you, Captain?’

The question wrong-footed him. The only answer Pascal could give and not face punishment or derision was, ‘Of course.’ He certainly couldn’t admit that, once he’d read the first few paragraphs, he’d skimmed through the rest. The sentences packed with references to Bolsheviks and Jews as the embodiment of the infernal and the revolt of the subhuman had struck him as yet more rabble-rousing rhetoric that wasn’t worth his time.

Teyber nodded, although Pascal had an uncomfortable feeling that he’d seen right through him.

‘So you do understand the war we’re fighting. That’s good. And you understand then that these people, in this village you’re suddenly so keen to protect, aren’t like us. That they are probably communists and Jews, and certainly contaminated and a long way beneath our contempt.’

Contaminated . Pascal knew with that word his battle was lost. That deliberate had been the right word all along .

His stomach flipped again; his throat ran dry.

He couldn’t give up, but he couldn’t control his fear of what was coming, and that wiped all considerations of rank and protocol – the pillars Pascal had built his career on – away.

His words fell over each other. He was so desperate to make Teyber understand, he almost fell to his knees.

‘Yes, I mean in theory, I do. I understand we’d say that, or about the partisans anyway, to give the men a sense of purpose, to stir them up and make the…

whole business of battle easier on them.

But, sir, I beg you – we’re not talking about fighting men here.

The people we’ve rounded up outside are innocent women and children.

And doesn’t their innocence matter more than any of the other labels we stick on them? ’

The look of contempt on the general’s face was the same one Noemi had worn when he’d talked about good and bad Jews. When she’d asked him how anyone would be able to tell the difference.

Where does all this hatred end?

Pascal rubbed his hands over his face as if he could wipe her away. He didn’t want her or her questions in his head. Not now, when he finally knew the answer. When he finally knew how badly he’d failed.

I was sure my view of the world was the right one – that’s why I ignored her. And because acknowledging the truth of what she could see would have led me here, to this darkness I refused to look into.