The Doomsday Testament

8 May 1945, noon. I pushed them hard and they hated me for it. The way began steeply, at first in the trees where we were all plagued with buzzing black flies and the sweat coursed from their faces in streams, then for a short while in the open. Brohm complained until he ran out of wind. Klosse cursed me under his breath. Strasser looked as if he was on the verge of a heart attack. I took pity on them when we reached a runnel that flowed through a clearing beside a steep ravine, and they gratefully sat down to drink from the water bottles and eat the last of the bread. The intelligence briefing I’d been given indicated that this was one of the quietest sectors of the German — Swiss border. The line wanders erratically and with no apparent reason from the point where it dissects the Untersee, the western part of Lake Constance, as far as Klettgau, where it turns back on itself and takes a huge bite out of Swiss territory, making it entirely arbitrary whether a farm or a hamlet is German or Swiss. From what we’d seen there was no doubt who had the best part of the bargain. Even though they were better off than the people in Germany’s bombed-out cities, the inhabitants of southern Bavaria had been on starvation rations for the best part of two years. This was smuggling country and I had no doubt that some food and drink got past the border guards in exchange for gold and valuables, but it must have been galling for a farmer on one side of the valley unable to feed his starving beasts to look across at the untouched land of milk and honey over the way. There would be mines, of course, but only on the Swiss side, and that wasn’t my problem. The guards who patrolled the German side of the ten-foot border fences had been low-grade foreign conscripts and in any case were long gone. The Americans would make sure there was no interference from the Swiss.

‘Another hour,’ Brohm said cheerfully, ‘and no more war. Warm sheets and clean American women. And you, Leutnant Matt, you will return to your home and your family?’ I didn’t answer. How could I tell him I no longer had a home or a family?