Servants helped Hitler and Ingersoll on with their wraps. Hitler wore a heavy greatcoat. The chancellor wrapped a thick muffler around his neck and, flexing his shoulders, smiled at Ingersoll.
“Sure you’re up to a walk in this weather?” Hitler asked.
“Looking forward to it.”
The wind sliced up the mountainside with an edge as sharp as a knife. Hitler was hunched down in the thick greatcoat, its tall collar wrapped around his ears. His gloved hands were tucked under his armpits. Two armed guards followed twenty or so feet behind them, just out of earshot. As they approached the overlook, the entire valley spread below them. Snow glistened in the noonday sun.
Ingersoll stopped at the overlook halfway to the tea house and pointed out over the mountains. “That’s where you were born, isn’t it? Over the mountains there in the Waldviertel?”
“Yes. Braunau. A terrible place. Not as bad as Vienna but a terrible place.”
“What’s so terrible about it?”
“It’s known as the wooded place. Very harsh,” Hitler said, not hiding the bitterness in his voice. “Harsh land, harsh people, dreary, medieval. For centuries it was prey to every marauding army that invaded southern Germany. Sacked by the Huns, by the Bohemian Ottakar II. By the Swedes during the Thirty Years’ War. Even Napoleon marched through it in 1805 on the way to Vienna. The fools in the Waldviertel have a legacy of defeat. Defeatists all.”
Hitler’s voice began to rise as anger took the place of bitterness.
“We have too many people in Germany today who feel the same way,” he went on, slashing his fists against his thighs. “That’s why I must throw that damnable Versailles treaty back in the Allies’ faces. Pride, pride, Herr Ingersoll, that’s what I will give back to all my people. I must make defeat an alien word to all Germans.”
“You have already started, sir,” Ingersoll said.
“What do they call you? Johann? John?”
“Hans, actually,” Ingersoll said.
“Ah, your proper name.” And Hitler smiled.
He dispelled the notion as paranoia.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Hitler said. “It’s Himmler and his SS. They’re overly cautious. Security, you know.”
“Ah yes, security.”
Hitler’s breath swirled from the folds of the collar.
“I don’t like the winter, Hans,” he said. “When I first went to Vienna to study it was an endlessly bitter time . . . for two years my only mistress was sorrow and my only companion was hunger. But the thing I remember most - was how cold it was.”
He stopped and shivered, huddling deeper into his great coat before going on.
“In the winter I was never warm. It is beautiful here, looking out at the snow on the mountains, listening to it crunch underfoot, but the cold cuts me like a saber.”
“Should we go back to the chalet?”
“Not as bad as in the trenches where it rained,” Ingersoll said. “My greatest fear was drowning in mud. When the rains came I was terrified the trench would slide in on me. After dark I would crawl out and sleep with the dead ones. And then in the morning I’d crawl back in the ditch. To prefer sleeping with the dead, now that’s fear.”
“You were a good soldier,” Hitler said.
“So were you.”
“We still are, Hans. The war is just beginning.” “The sooner the better.”
“Spoken like a true Nazi.”
“1 have read
“My God,” Hitler said, surprised, “I wrote that, let’s see, that was in
“Nineteen-twelve.”
