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When did I become this ancient? When did twenty-four years turn into a hundred?

Pascal hadn’t returned to Dachau, despite the promise he’d made to himself that he would as he’d weaved in and out of consciousness in the Munich hospital.

The illness had hollowed him out and left him bedridden in Unterwald – where he’d been sent to convalesce after the overstretched hospital ran out of room – for a month.

By the time he stumbled out of that, he was barely able to recognise the sunken face staring back at him from the bathroom mirror.

Or believe that it was the middle of April and the war had only weeks, perhaps days, left to run.

The Russians were almost at Berlin. The British had liberated another death camp at Bergen-Belsen, the Americans had uncovered another at Buchenwald and they were marching towards Dachau.

The horror stories were multiplying faster than rats.

Thousands of emaciated bodies stacked up like straw bales.

Thousands of starved and disease-racked prisoners clinging desperately to life.

Thousands more marched out of one hellhole to the next and the dead lying thick as fallen leaves by the roads.

And countless numbers consigned to the flames.

Germany had become a country of corpses and shame.

Its soldiers were the monsters of Europe; its flag was a symbol of hate.

Its leader was the devil incarnate. Except to the men and women refusing to let go of the myth. Like Viktor.

‘The Allies can’t beat us. They might not understand that yet, but Goebbels and the Führer do.

They know our best weapon isn’t our tanks or our rockets; it’s our people and their unbreakable determination.

That’s the real Germany, the one they’ve not conquered yet and won’t, not the lies the Allies and the Russians keep spreading about us. ’

Pascal had been forced to endure the same lecture night after night while he was bedridden at the farm. Nothing could stop Viktor when he was in full drunken flow, not even an audience who despised both him and his rhetoric.

‘We’re unbreakable – that’s the key. We’ll fight with our fists if we have to.

We’ll defend every town and village down to the last man and to the last drop of blood because that’s what our Führer expects us to do.

Once the enemy gets a taste of that determination, they’ll withdraw their armies and admit defeat – you see if they don’t. ’

Viktor had always been a believer; war had turned him into a fanatic.

And he was determined that Unterwald would continue to take its cues from him, that it would prepare itself for a glorious battle he had no intention of physically fighting in.

Pascal wasn’t the only one he insisted had to listen to his views.

He issued proclamations through the town’s loudspeakers.

He called public meetings and covered the market square with posters carrying Goebbels’ approved slogans.

Nobody would be allowed to misunderstand the message.

‘Germany is fighting a war it intends to win; everybody has a part to play in this. Everybody is to remain vigilant.’

‘Deserters are traitors – they are fighting against us, trying to weaken our spirit. They – and anyone caught harbouring them – will be executed without trial.’

‘We must stand together to prevail, whatever the challenge. Anyone displaying a white flag in the event of enemy armies arriving, or engaging in resistance activities to aid those enemies, will also be executed.’

Every speech Viktor gave and every slogan he proclaimed started with an appeal for unity and ended the same way: with the threat of a bullet or a noose and no right to a hearing.

And no one dares to dismiss Viktor’s call to arms, not when he’s got Goebbels’ speeches behind him and his own private army to make sure his orders are followed, who will follow him like lemmings off a cliff.

Pascal sat on a stone bench on the edge of the market square, watching another patriotic Sunday morning march circle around him as if he was caught in an endless loop of past and present.

The town had produced a new breed of soldiers since he’d been taken ill: the Volkssturm , a ‘people’s army’ of the old and the young who the Führer and his mouthpieces had declared were coming together to fight a holy war.

They were a sorry sight. They were a long way from a German army founded on high ideals.

They’re the same as the orders to destroy evidence. The last desperate gasp of a dying regime.

Pascal kept his mouth shut as he watched the mismatched ranks trying to march in time together.

Young boys and old men, kitted out in whatever remnants of Hitler Youth and Great War and dead sons’ uniforms they could find.

Carrying guns more suitable for shooting rabbits than defeating the well-armed and well-trained soldiers they were about to face.

Most of the cohort he was looking at were going to Munich to thicken the city’s defences.

Some – the younger ones, who Viktor had hand-picked – would remain behind with their pistols and their fists to defend Unterwald from American machine guns and tanks.

All of them were facing an almost certain death.

‘I can’t bear it. I can’t lose another one; I can’t go through the horror of this twice.’

Pascal hadn’t noticed the woman who’d sat down beside him as the motley brigade marched on.

He’d been focusing on keeping his face blank as the ranks saluted him – a courtesy offered to serving officers that he didn’t know Viktor had arranged to be extended to him.

When he turned towards her, the first thing he saw was her patchily dyed black dress and the fingers twisted into knots in her lap.

Her eyes filled with tears as she realised she’d spoken her thoughts aloud.

The tears fell when Pascal tried to comfort her.

‘Nobody should go through it at all. My condolences on your loss, madam. Do you mind me asking if it was your husband or your son?’

The woman stared past him as the Volkssturm members took a final turn and began to disperse. She was clearly battling to sound proud of the men she loved, but all Pascal could hear was her pain.

‘My husband fought in the first war and was wounded; he’s not a well man but he survived.

It was my eldest boy, Alfred, this one took.

He was killed at Stalingrad. and his body was never returned to us.

Losing him was harder than I thought I could bear, but at least I had my Pauli, and he was meant to be safe.

’ She stopped and glanced around her before she went on.

Nobody was looking their way. ‘But that’s all gone now, and that’s what I can’t face.

Everyone knows the war is almost over, even if we’re not supposed to admit it in public, and yet they’ve called my boy up to fight, and they don’t care he’s only twelve years old. ’

‘What did you say?’

The square was noisy – Pascal thought he must have misheard.

He stared at the boys pushing and shoving each other and laughing as they compared their weapons, trying – and failing – to work out their ages.

‘Twelve? That can’t be right; that’s years too young.

Did he lie about his age because his friends are older and he wanted to stay with them? If he did, that can be sorted out.’

Desolation swept over her face and settled deep into its lines.

‘No, he didn’t and it can’t. Don’t you know they’re taking children now as well as the old men?

They’re sending them to the front regardless of how young they are, although not my Pauli, thank God.

Herr Lindiger has chosen him as one of the group who’ll stay and defend the town, which is something to be grateful for I suppose. ’

The toy soldiers burst into a rousing song.

The woman wiped her face, jumped to her feet and began clapping as quickly as if Viktor had pulled on her strings.

Pascal stayed where he was, not trusting his legs to hold him or his temper to stay in check.

He knew why his father had chosen the children to lead the town’s last stand, and she had no reason to be glad about it.

They’ll be as blind and deaf to reality as I was at their age, which is exactly what he remembers and wants.

They’ll have had their heads filled with heroes and glory for years; they’ll believe their destiny is to die for the Führer.

They don’t know anything about war, or massacres, or murder on an industrial scale.

Pascal stared around the market square as the sun broke through the clouds and the war unfolded its last sickening chapter.

At his father standing on a swastika-draped platform, wearing a uniform which had never seen action and never would, beaming at the boys whose lives held no meaning for him.

At another generation of dead-eyed women who would live out their years wearing black and weeping over photographs because they had no graves to lay flowers by.

At the grey hair and the weather-beaten faces of men dressed in faded jackets they’d last put on thirty years ago, who thought they’d fought – and somehow survived – their last battle.

And at the bright-eyed children who were about to be sacrificed in the name of a cause that wasn’t only evil, it was lost.

They are cannon fodder. Their deaths have already been written.