to drink the schnapps.
‘Yes, sir. Of course I shall have a glass of schnapps with you. Happy birthday, Colonel.’
The colonel smiled and drank the glass down in one. Ringler followed suit and managed to stop himself from coughing as the fiery, colourless liquid burned its way down his throat. Now he remembered why he didn’t drink the stuff.
The colonel was beaming now. ‘Very colourful, Ringler.’ He clapped Ringler on the back and turned away laughing.
The adjutant came up: ‘Well done, Ralf. The colonel will have his little jokes. You don’t care much for schnapps I think?’
‘Not as a rule, sir, no.’
‘Here, have a glass of beer. It’s good stuff and liberated too.’
Ringler took a bottle of the warmish beer and drained it, quenching the burning in his throat.
In a corner of the huge tent, one of the enlisted men, Lance-Corporal Kaspar, a talented musician from Bohemia, began to play on his harmonica. Inevitably the tune was Lili Marlene. Nevertheless, however many times Ringler heard it it always brought a lump to his throat. The colonel, hearing the tune despite his deafness, smiled and raised his glass.
‘A toast, gentlemen. To the Deutsche Afrika Korps and its unstoppable victory in the desert. On to Cairo and Suez.’
As one the officers echoed the colonel’s words: ‘On to Cairo and Suez.’ They raised their own glasses and drained them before resuming drinking at a more steady pace.
Ringler was standing inside the tent by the entrance next to a fellow lieutenant, Werner Adler, from Number Eight company, a blond, tall Aryan from Potsdam who had been an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth before joining the army, leading his local NSDAP boys’ group.
Ringler took another swig of beer and turned to Adler: ‘D’you really think we’ll get there?’
‘Where?’
‘Cairo of course. D’you think it’s really possible?’
‘Don’t you? You heard Colonel Karl. We’ll get there.’
‘Werner, how long have you been out here?’
‘A year exactly.’
‘And what have you seen in that time?’
‘Victory in our grasp. We’ve almost beaten them. We took Tobruk didn’t we? Then Alam Halfa. Perhaps this time we’ll get them. We just sit here and wait for them to throw themselves at us and then when they’re spent we counter-attack with everything we’ve got.’
Ringler smiled: ‘But do you think they’ll be spent? And what do we really have?’
‘We still have the panzers. Two divisions of them and the Italians too. Some of them aren’t half bad. The paras…’
Ringler cut in: ‘How many tanks do you think we’ve actually got, Adler? Real tanks I mean, German tanks?’
‘I don’t know. Four hundred. Maybe more?’
Ringler laughed: ‘My dear Werner. I was talking to this boy from Panzerarmee HQ and he told me that the last intelligence was that we had no more than two hundred and forty serviceable panzers. And there’s worse. We’ve no fuel. Well, not enough for more than a few days. Certainly not enough to punch through the Brits and get to Cairo.’
Adler stared at the ground and shrugged his shoulders.
‘That’s just hearsay, Ringler. I believe we can do it. And you must too. As officers we have a duty to believe in our victory. We owe it to the men, and to ourselves. You know that’s defeatist talk. You should be careful what you say to people.’
Ringler walked outside for a moment. His head had suddenly begun to ache and he felt weary. The schnapps, he supposed. An eerie silence hung over the desert. It was a beautiful evening and extraordinarily peaceful. He took another sip of beer and re-entered the tent.
As he did so Monier, the battalion sergeant-major and also its finest singer, coughed to clear his throat and began to sing. It was a familiar folk song from the Rhine. Soon the battalion officers and their guests were in full voice.
The song finished but just as it did Adler stared at Ringler and smiled. Then he began to sing. A very different song this time and of a more recent vintage, but one with which they were all familiar.
Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen!
SA marschiert mit mutig-festem Schritt.
Kam’raden, die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen,
Marschier’n im Geist in uns’ren Reihen mit.
Raise high the flag! Ranks close tight!
The stormtroopers march with bold, firm step.
Their comrades shot by the Reds and Reactionaries,
They march in spirit within our ranks.
The Horst Wessel song, the marching song of the Nazi party. The song which had carried Hitler to power. In the off beats when in a band cymbals would have crashed out the officers stamped their feet as hard as they could. The colonel for all his deafness had the loudest voice and, thought Ringler, it really wasn’t bad. He had never much cared for that song, named after its composer, a Nazi party activist assassinated by a Communist in 1930 and used as an excuse for a massacre.
But he still joined in. It was a symbol of their unity, their determination, their victory. And what was more once you were singing it it did something to the soul. Lifted the spirits from the depths of despair to some higher plane where the Aryan race really was invincible:
Zum letzten Mal wird nun Appell geblasen!
Zum Kampfe steh’n wir alle schon bereit!
Bald flattern Hitlerfahnen über Barrikaden.
Die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit!
For the last time now the call is sounded!
Already we stand all ready to fight!
Soon the Hitler banners will flutter over the barricades.
Our time in bondage won’t last much longer!
Ringler looked at Adler across the tent. He was smiling now. Full of pride and confident with the certainty imbued by the music. Ringler too felt the better for it. He left the tent and found himself in the company of Sergeant-Major Monier who had come out for a smoke. Ringler liked the man. He was honest and simple but utterly loyal. He came from farming stock in the Rhineland and had joined the Wehrmacht shortly after the annexation of the Sudetenland. He seemed older than his thirty years and acted as a sort of uncle to the younger men in the battalion. Somehow he had always seemed to be at Ringler’s side throughout the African campaign, since the early days of 1941. At Mersa, when they had pushed the Allies back for the first time. At Benghazi when they had left it again to be taken by the British. At Tobruk, when they had gone in through the warren of stinking caves that the Allies had held for so long, Monier had been at his side joking about the ‘desert rats’. At Alam Halfa when they had seemed almost at the gates of Alexandria. And now here, near the little village of Alamein where they had attacked and failed so recently. Monier had always been there, offering support and advice.
Yet for all his apparent confidence there had always been, it seemed to Ringler, a curious air of insecurity about the man and as they walked back to their trenches on this chilly night with its bright moon and eerie stillness, Monier spoke: ‘Cigarette, sir?’
As Ringler accepted and lit up Monier continued: ‘Did I ever tell you, sir, about my home in the Palatinate? You know that area, sir?’
Ringler,