Resistance Read Online Free PDF Page B

Any private purchases by individual soldiers are to be paid for in cash. Any wastefulness is harmful to the unit.
    6. Unnecessary interference with the economic life of the country is to be avoided. Factories, workshops, and offices are not to be disturbed; except where operationally necessary, such places may only be entered by soldi use of stocks of petrol, oil, machiner operational area exceptions ma unit commanders from batt
    7. Goods of all kind
    The print ended in a ragged sepia burn mark, like an aerial photograph of a coastline. Captain Albrecht Wolfram of the 14th Panzergrenadier Division let the Wehrmacht pamphlet fall from his hand. Its owner wouldn’t have any use for it now, not if the state of the book was anything to go by. He watched it land in the mud at his feet, then, rubbing the bridge of his nose under his glasses, he lifted his head to look about him. There’d been heavy fighting here as there had been all along the southern coast. The smells of cordite, burnt flesh, wood smoke, and petrol still hung heavy in the air, while the sky over the Channel was dark with the thick plumes of the oil slicks the British had lit to slow the progress of their landings. The charred invasion pamphlet was just one of thousands of pieces of debris that scattered the ground; boots, a burnt-out armoured car, empty cans of food, a child’s bicycle, its rear tyre melted by the heat of a recently extinguished fire. Inside the house behind him one of his men had found a letter and wedding ring pinned to the wall with a knife. The writer lay beneath them, his pistol still in his hand, a band of white skin around one of his dirty fingers.
    Albrecht leant back against the picket fence and drew a packet of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his tunic. A couple of Stukas passed low overhead, their engines screaming. He glanced up at their crooked wings, acknowledging them with the slightest of twitches about his right eye.
    Albrecht was patting his other pockets for some matches, the cigarette balanced on his lower lip, when he saw the dust trail of the dispatch rider rise along the road ahead. As the motorbike got closer he recognised the uniform of the Waffen SS. He took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and pushed himself away from the fence.
    “Captain Wolfram?” the dispatch rider asked him, removing his goggles, leaving his face a clown’s mask of grime, pale circles about his eyes.
    “Yes.”
    “Telegram from regional headquarters.” He handed Albrecht an envelope bearing the SS stamp, saluted, and turned on his heel. Albrechtreturned his salute and watched him kick the bike into life before racing back up the road, the growl of its exhaust another seam in the montage of engine noises all around him.
    Albrecht felt his stomach turn as he opened the envelope and pulled out the thin sheet of telegram paper. He’d been expecting something like this, hoping he might be called back to Intelligence, but from his own commanding officers perhaps, or the staff at Southern Headquarters, the Gestapo even, not from the SS. Why would they be contacting him? They had their own translators just as they had their own everything. When he’d registered as a fluent English speaker before the invasion, he’d hoped for an easy position with the liaison units or, even better, safely behind a desk at HQ. But he couldn’t expect something like that from the SS. Nothing was ever easy with them. He unfolded the telegram slowly, as if it contained something that might bite him.
    He read the order twice. The typewriter ribbon needed replacing. The letters were chipped and bitten, every “R” faded, ghosts among crowds of the living. Like every order he’d ever read, it was dry and direct. Report to Southern Headquarters immediately. He’d expected that. It was always immediately, even here on the fringes of the front line. Even here where the smell of burnt flesh still thickened the air.
REPORT TO SOUTHERN HEADQUARTERS IMMEDIATELY