men whom he might have to send to their deaths.
On the same training course had been Gottfried von Kessel, Walter’s old rival from the German embassy in London. Despite his poor eyesight, Gottfried was a captain in Walter’s battalion. War had done little to reduce his know-all pomposity.
Walter surveyed the surrounding countryside through his field glasses. It was a bright, cold day and he could see clearly. To the south the wide river Oise passed slowly through marshes. Northward, fertile land was dotted with hamlets, farmhouses, bridges, orchards, and small areas of woodland. A mile to the west was the network of German trenches, and beyond that the battleground. Here the same agricultural landscape had been devastated by war. Barren wheat fields were cratered like the moon; every village was a heap of stones; the orchards had been blasted and the bridges blown up. If he focused his binoculars carefully, he could see the rotting corpses of men and horses and the steel shells of burned-out tanks.
On the far side of this wasteland were the British.
A loud rumbling caused Walter to look eastward. The vehicle approaching was one he had never seen before, though he had heard talk. It was a self-propelled gun, with giant barrel and firing mechanism mounted on a chassis with its own one-hundred-horsepower engine. It was closely followed by a heavy-duty truck loaded, presumably, with proportionately huge ammunition. A second and a third gun came after. The artillery crews riding on the vehicles waved their caps as they passed by, as if they were on a victory parade.
Walter felt bucked. Such guns could be repositioned rapidly once the offensive got under way. They would give much better support to advancing infantry.
Walter had heard that an even bigger gun was shelling Paris from a distance of sixty miles. It hardly seemed possible.
The guns were followed by a Mercedes 37/95 Double Phaeton that looked distinctly familiar. It turned off the road and parked in the square in front of the church, and Walter’s father got out.
What was he doing here?
Walter passed through the low doorway into the tower and hurried down the narrow spiral staircase to the ground. The nave of the disused church had become a dormitory. He picked his way through bedrolls and the upturned crates that served the men as tables and chairs.
Outside, the graveyard was packed with trench bridges, prefabricated wooden platforms that would enable artillery and supply trucks to cross captured British trenches in the wake of the storm troopers. They were stashed amid the tombstones so as not to be easily visible from the air.
The stream of men and vehicles passing through the village from east to west had now slowed to a trickle. Something was up.
Otto was in uniform, and saluted formally. Walter could see that his father was bursting with excitement. “A special visitor is coming!” Otto said immediately.
So that was it. “Who?”
“You’ll see.”
Walter guessed it was General Ludendorff, who was now in effect supreme commander. “What does he want to do?”
“Address the soldiers, of course. Please assemble the men in front of the church.”
“How soon?”
“He’s not far behind me.”
“Right.” Walter looked around the square. “Sergeant Schwab! Come here. You and Corporal Grunwald-and you men, come here.” He dispatched messengers to the church, the canteen that had been set up in a large barn, and the tent village on the rise to the north. “I want every man in front of the church, properly dressed, in fifteen minutes. Quick!” They ran off.
Walter hurried around the village, informing the officers, ordering the men to the square, keeping an eye on the road from the east. He found his commanding officer, Generalmajor Schwarzkopf, in a cheese-smelling former dairy on the edge of the village, finishing a late breakfast of bread and tinned sardines.
Within a quarter of an hour two thousand men were assembled, and ten minutes later they looked respectable, uniforms buttoned and caps on straight. Walter brought up a flatbed truck and backed it up in front of the men. He improvised steps up to the back of the truck using ammunition crates.
Otto produced a length of red carpet from the Mercedes and placed it on the ground leading to the steps.
Walter took Grunwald out of the line. The corporal was a tall man with big hands and feet. Walter sent him up onto the church roof with his field glasses and a whistle.
Then they waited.
Half an hour went by, then an hour. The men fidgeted, the lines became ragged, and conversation broke out.
After another hour, Grunwald blew his whistle.
“Get ready!” Otto barked. “Here he comes!”
A cacophony of shouted orders burst out. The men came quickly to attention. A motorcade swept into the square.
The door of an armored car opened, and a man in a general’s uniform got out. However, it was not the balding, bullet-headed Ludendorff. The special visitor moved awkwardly, holding his left hand in the pocket of his tunic as if his arm were injured.
After a moment, Walter saw that it was the kaiser himself.
Generalmajor Schwarzkopf approached him and saluted.
As the men realized who their visitor was, there was a rumble of reaction that grew rapidly into an explosion of cheering. The generalmajor at first looked angry at the indiscipline, but the kaiser smiled benignly and Schwarzkopf quickly recomposed his face into an expression of approval.
The kaiser mounted the steps, stood on the bed of the truck, and acknowledged the cheers. When the noise at last died down, he began to speak. “Germans!” he said. “This is the hour of victory!”
They cheered all over again, and this time Walter cheered with them.
At one o’clock in the morning on Thursday, March 21, the brigade was disposed in its forward positions, ready for the attack. Walter and his battalion officers sat in a dugout in the frontline trench. They were talking to relieve the strain of waiting to go into battle.
Gottfried von Kessel was expounding Ludendorff’s strategy. “This westward thrust will drive a wedge between the British and the French,” he said, with all the ignorant confidence he used to display when they worked together at the German embassy in London. “Then we will swing north, turning the British right flank, and drive them into the English Channel.”
“No, no,” said Lieutenant von Braun, an older man. “The smart thing to do, once we’ve broken through their front line, will be to go all the way to the Atlantic coast. Imagine that-a German line stretching all the way across the middle of France, separating the French army from their allies.”
Von Kessel protested: “But then we would have enemies to our north and south!”
A third man, Captain Kellerman, joined in. “Ludendorff will swing south,” he predicted. “We need to take Paris. That’s all that counts.”
“Paris is just symbolic!” von Kessel said scornfully.
They were speculating-no one knew. Walter felt too tense to listen to pointless conversation, so he went outside. The men were sitting on the ground in the trench, still and calm. The few hours before battle were a time of reflection and prayer. There had been beef in their barley stew yesterday evening, a rare treat. Morale was good-they all felt the end of the war was coming.
It was a bright starry night. Field kitchens were giving out breakfast: black bread and a thin coffee that tasted of yellow turnips. There had been some rain, but that had passed, and the wind had dropped to almost nothing. This meant poison gas shells could be fired. Both sides used gas, but Walter had heard that this time the Germans would be using a new mixture: deadly phosgene plus tear gas. The tear gas was not lethal, but it could penetrate the standard-issue British gas mask. The theory was that the irritation of tear gas would cause enemy soldiers to pull off their masks in order to rub their eyes, whereupon they would inhale the phosgene and die.
