Chapter III: Part XIV
Chapter III: The Lion’s Den
Part XIV
August 21, 1936
The daylight was fast fading as Jost Schleifer crouched behind a thick tree stump. A low whistle from above forced him even closer to the ground. He heard the heavy artillery round pass overhead and impact on the mountainside above him with a shattering explosion. Several seconds later, small shards of gneiss and granite began to rain down upon him. Schleifer poked his head above ragged top of the stump. Some 200 meters upslope, he could see a large crater that was still smoking. Just beyond it, at the crest of the pine-covered ridge, the dark gray outline of an ancient tower was visible against the deepening blue of the sky. A second round was coming in. Schleifer plugged his fingers in his ears and pressed himself against the pine needle-covered earth.
“Schleifer!”
He took his fingers out of his ears to hear the hoarse voice of Hauptmann Emrich, just as a shower of branches and pine cones began to fall from the sky.
“Schleifer!”
“Yes, Herr Hauptmann?”
He too was sheltering behind a tree stump -- to Shleifer’s left and just out of his field of vision.
“What can you see from where you are?”
Peering upslope again, he saw a second crater, and the remnants of at least twenty strong trees that had been snapped like kindling. He heard yet another shell coming in -- too late to duck. It was as if a giant fist had come from the sky and smashed the tower. The majority of its stonework was simply pulverized, bursting out in all directions from the point of impact. Schleifer had time only to close his eyes before the larger pieces raked the mountainside, throwing up puffs of earth as they impacted. He felt them rush through the air all around him, one hitting his helmet obliquely, as loud in his own ear as a gunshot.
Schleifer swallowed and tasted blood. Time was moving slowly. It seemed that the entire mountainside had become very quiet. Here and there, chunks of masonry were still falling from the sky; each threw up a spray of rocky soil before rolling downslope and out of sight. Checking his wristwatch, he tried to steady his perception of time. Thirty seconds passed in almost total silence. A minute. No more shells had come.
And then, far below but carrying on the wind, the sound of whistles. In a moment, the whistles were repeated, echoing from several directions at once. The infantry at the base of the base of the mountain were on the move.
“Up!”
Schleifer turned to see that Hauptmann Emrich was standing atop his tree stump, waving a revolver.
“Up! Up! That’s the general assault beginning. Stand up and follow me, at the double!”
Rising to his feet, Schleifer saw the other dozen Feldgendarmes emerging from their places of shelter. When he had counted them, Emrich leapt from the tree stump and charged up the steep mountainside, the others following as best they could. The air was chilly, biting into Schleifer’s lungs as he began to breathe faster.
At dawn, the final assault on the surviving French in the High Black Forest had begun. After a punishing artillery barrage, German infantry units had begun the arduous fight up the area’s mountain slopes. Under intense machine gun fire, the Germans had picked their way higher, meter by meter. By noon, two of the area’s intersecting ridge lines had been overrun, but more than two hundred Germans lay dead. In the hours since, they had closed the net on the remaining French soldiers -- now perhaps less than three companies’ worth -- who were centering their resistance on a series of three thickly-forested mountains. The time had come for the final assault of the final assault. Feldgendarmerie-Trupp 11 had been attached to Infanterie-Regiment 17, which was charged with leading the southern portion of the attack.
After assisting the regiment in clearing a strongpoint on the southwestern flank of the mountain, the Feldgendarmes had been leading a train of prisoners down the slope when Hauptmann Emrich had spoken in passing to one of the artillery officers. Thanking the officer, he had sent part of Trupp 11 down the mountain with the captured Frenchmen, leading the rest, Schleifer included, off the main path into a secluded glade. Emrich had informed them that he had learned the exact time at which an artillery barrage would commence, preparatory to a final assault on the tower at the mountain’s top.
They would climb partway up the slope and wait some distance below the area targeted by the artillery. When the attack commenced, they would be far ahead of the other troops, and in position to quickly climb the rest of the way and subdue any surviving enemies.
Schleifer knew the order absurdly foolish: even if they were not all killed by a short artillery round, they were simply not trained or equipped for offensive action. Emrich had dismissed his concerns, proclaiming to the men that, “The man who kills the last fighting Frenchman in Europe shall have the Knight’s Cross, as surely as anything.”
Just the previous day, the Feldgendarmes of Trupp 11 had been directing traffic around the headquarters of Generalmajor Hans-Karl Freiherr von Esebeck.
In several minutes the squad was strung out panting in the two dozen meters below the smoldering ruins of the tower. Emrich signaled for the others to raise their rifles to the ready. He called out in German: “If anyone is there, surrender at once!” He was answered only by silence and the fading echoes of his own voice as they glanced down the mountain. Emrich repeated the demand. Hearing no reply, he ordered his men into a large crater just behind him. Schleifer jumped in, crawled to the crater’s lip and readied his weapon.
“Scharf!”
The tanned corporal turned. “Yes, Herr Hauptmann?”
“Run up there and take a look around. Do as I say!”
Obediently, Gefreiter Scharf made his way up the final meters of the slope, and stood surveying the ruins of the tower.
“How many dead can you see?”
Scharf turned and cupped his hands to his mouth to shout a reply. He opened his lips to speak, and from them sprayed a jet of pink liquid. He fell limply forward, landing with a crash.
In an instant, all the others began firing their rifles indiscriminately at the stonework, drowning out Emrich’s vicious swearing. Schleifer had spent eight bullets before he noticed the others’ shooting trailing off.
As soon as there was again silence on the slope, Hauptmann Emrich bellowed an order for everyone to advance.
They climbed out of the crater and formed a long line, walking slowly toward the crest of the ridge. Coming upon the body of Gefreiter Scharf, a private knelt and retrieved his Erkennungsmarke for later identification. Hauptmann Emrich was leading his men in a strange stiff walk, half at a crouch, with his revolver pointed forward. As the Feldgendarmes reached the flat ground at the top of the ridge, they saw the full extent of the devastation visited upon the medieval tower. It had once been three stories tall -- round and sturdily built. Now, only a single pillar of heavy stones rose to the structure’s original height, and a thick pile of rubble rose five meters off the ground. Wisps of white smoke still curled lazily from under a rotting wooden beam that had probably once supported one of the ceilings. Schleifer’s stomach turned. Pinned under the beam was the body of a French officer with binoculars still around his neck. The position had been used to spot French gunfire. Subconsciously adopting a cautious crouch like Emrich’s, he climbed onto the pile of pulverized stone and stepped over the beam. The French soldier’s eyes were wide and staring. He could the hands and boots of several other soldiers who had been buried.
“Cellar!”
Schleifer whipped his head around to see the captain on the near side of the rubble, standing over what looked like a wooden trapdoor that had been partially obscured by debris. He was pointing the revolver at the closed door, motioning frantically with the other hand for assistance. Schleifer was the first to his side.
Sure enough there was a cellar door, large enough to allow a full staircase into the depths below. German infantry doctrine called for the use of hand grenades, but the Feldgendarmes carried none.
Photo taken by German forces looking down from the destroyed tower into the western valley below.
“Shouldn’t we just block the door and wait for the infantry, Herr Hauptmann?” Schleifer asked, reading Emrich’s mind.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I -- they -- they can get out through another door.” His face glistening with perspiration, Emrich signaled for the others to train their rifles on the cellar door. Schleifer held his finger on the trigger. Faint voices could be heard from behind the door.
Hauptmann Emrich held three fingers up in the air for his men to see, dropping them one by one. Three... Two...
Moving quickly as though to grasp a very hot object, Emrich bent down and grabbed the handle to the cellar door, flinging it open.
Gunfire immediately crackled from inside, and the Feldgendarmes responded in kind. A raft of bullets -- Schleifer wasn’t sure whose -- tore up the ground all around the cellar entrance. Then, almost casually, a hand grenade tumbled out of the cellar, landing at Emrich’s feet.
Schleifer and his captain traded an agonizingly long look that lasted no more than half a second. Emrich stood over the live grenade, frozen. “Kick it!” Schleifer screamed, as he dove for cover. As he hit the ground, he felt a flicker of satisfaction. Emrich had always been a vain and abusive officer, and today had hazarded the lives of all of his men needlessly. They were policemen and jailers, not assault troopers. He had even argued as much to Emrich that morning, but had been callously overruled. The pursuit of personal glory and advancement had blinded his judgment, as it seemed to do to quite a few of the Wehrmacht’s junior officers. At least from Schleifer’s experience, those who had been old enough to command men in the Great War -- by now the majors and above -- had seen enough of the horror of war to be more temperate. The younger men, Emrich among them, were often driven by glamorized visions of war which were not compatible with success on a real battlefield. There were some truly decent lieutenants that Schleifer had encountered in his career, but he now felt that Emrich was representative of something larger in the national military character. Lacking a 1914 Iron Cross, or scars from Verdun, Emrich instead felt the need to impress his superiority on others by belligerence. The sudden overpressure hurt Schleifer’s ears keenly. He didn’t even notice a sound. Tiny fragments of metal and stone tore through his pants and burrowed into the flesh in the back of his legs. Taking three steadying breaths, he rolled over supine, at last rising to his feet.
There was a smoking hole in the ground in front of the open cellar door, which had been blown off its hinges. Emrich was nowhere in sight.
It struck Schleifer that as an over-sergeant, he was now the leader of the remaining eleven Feldgendarmes. Fighting panic, he pulled back the bolt on his rifle to chamber another round and lifted the iron sights to eye level. He could see the end of a pistol poking out just over the lip of the cellar. Holding his breath, he steadied and fired at it. The gun went flying, and Schleifer charged forward to find a filthy little soldier, no taller than his shoulder, standing dazed with his hands in the air. Gefreiter Bittmann raced forward and jabbed barrel of his rifle into the Frenchman’s chin. “
Vous devez vous rendre!”
The little soldier nodded, raising his hands higher in the air.
Schleifer heard the clatter of weapons hitting a stone floor and four other French soldiers emerged into the orange light of dusk. He ordered five of the Feldgendarmes to form a perimeter around the rubble to make sure the area was secure while the others secured the prisoners.
Bittmann followed Schleifer down into the unlit cellar. In the gloom, they could make out a radio, a crate of food, a stack of maps and several tools in the room’s far corner.
“Oberfeldwebel! Look at this...”
“What is it?”
Bittmann held up a French revolver and spun the chambers. “Empty. All of them. Look.” He bent down and picked up a another weapon. “Empty. By God they fought to very last bullet.”
Schleifer bowed his head, feeling the distance that Emrich must have felt from the men. “Remarkable, Bittmann. Now go back up and make sure that everyone has white cloth to wave. We don’t want anyone to be shot by our own infantry as they come up the mountain.”
At once, Bittmann raced back up the cellar stairs to follow the order, leaving Jost Schleifer to his thoughts.
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