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why it might be used. According to German friends, Udet had been more responsible than anyone for the highly successful Stuka dive bomber, and Russell hardly felt inclined to mourn his passing. Paul would though, and Russell could see why. Only the U-boat aces could compare with the fighter pilots when it came to the sort of lone wolf heroics that young boys of all ages loved to celebrate.
    A state funeral was planned for the coming Saturday. And unless he was very much mistaken, Paul would want to go.
    Russell went through the rest of the paper, secure in the knowledge that all the other papers would be carrying the same stories. Some, like the Frankfurter Zeitung , would be better written, others, like the Deutsche Allegemeine Zeitung , would be tailored to a particular class sensibility, but the political and military facts would not vary. What one paper said, they all said, and all were equally disbelieved. The German people had finally woken up to the fact that the claimed tally of Russian prisoners now exceeded the stated number of Russians in uniform, all of which chimed rather badly with the sense that those same Russians were fighting the German army to a virtual standstill. Each week another pincer movement was given the honour of being the most gigantic of all time, until it seemed as if the whole wide East was barely large enough to accommodate another battle. But still the enemy fought on.
    And yet, despite themselves, the German newspapers did offer their readers a mirror to the real situation. It was merely a matter of learning to read between the lines. Over recent weeks, for example, there had been many articles stressing the inherent difficulties of the war in the East: the inhuman strength of the primitive Russian soldier, the extremes of climate and conditions. Prepare yourself for possible setbacks, the subtext read, we may have bitten off more than we can chew.
    Russell devoutly hoped so. He drank the last of his coffee with a suitable grimace, and got up to leave. He had twenty minutes to reach the Foreign Ministry, which hosted the first of the two daily press conferences, beginning at noon. The second, which was held at the Propaganda Ministry, began five hours later.
    Outside the sun was still shining, but the chill easterly wind was funnelling down the Unter den Linden with some force. He turned into it, thinking to check out the window of the closed American Express office on Charlottenstrasse, which someone had told Effi about. The reported poster was still in pride of place, inviting passers-by to 'Visit Medieval Germany.' Either the authorities had missed the joke, or they were too busy trying to catch people listening to the BBC.
    Russell laughed, and received an admonitory glance from a passing soldier. Further down the street he encountered two women dressed in black, with five sombre-looking children in tow. Their soldiers wouldn't be coming back.
    At the Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse he climbed the two flights of bare steps to the Bismarck Room, took one of the remaining seats at the long conference table and nodded greetings to several of his colleagues. As ever, a pristine writing pad sat waiting on the green felt, a sight which never ceased to please Russell, knowing as he did where the pads actually came from. They were manufactured at the Schade printing works in Treptow, a business owned and run by his friend and former brother-in-law Thomas, and mostly staffed by Jews.
    The Berlin Congress had been held in this room in 1878, and the furnishings seemed suitably Bismarckian, with dark green curtains, wood-panelled walls and more Prussian eagles than Goering had paintings. An enormous and very up-to-date globe sat on one side of the room; a large map of the western Soviet Union was pinned to a display stand on the other. The arrows seemed perilously close to Moscow, but that had been the case for several weeks now.
    At noon precisely, Braun von Stumm strode in through the far doors