The Defeated Aristocrat Read Online Free PDF Page A

reach had made him irritable.
    As one-time senior officer, Wolf knew he should intervene but he was tired of adjudicating petty squabbles. Besides, the chimneys of Hochbaum Farm were coming into view. They were five minutes from journey’s end for him and Peter. He left his seat and lifted down his thin POW issue canvas kit bag from the overhead rack. As he did, he saw their reflections in the window.
    Josef, tall, thin, gypsy-dark, slightly built with eyes that seemed to look inward to a spiritual world denied to common men. Ralf, the tall dark handsome suitor of every woman’s dream, and didn’t he know it. Peter, blond, blue-eyed, with open, honest features and the stocky peasant figure he’d inherited from his ancestors, incapable of telling an untruth or comprehending the need to lie. Helmut, fair-haired and grey-eyed, his face marred by a habitual sneer.
    And he, six feet eight inches, with the heavy build and muscular figure he’d inherited from his Teutonic Knight forbears. Only his dark hair, at odds with his blue eyes, betrayed the southern blood that had found its way into the von Mau bloodline.
    ‘Don’t forget – a week tomorrow, all of you in my father’s inn, the Green Stork, Wasser Strasse. We’ll drink the place dry.’ Ralf rose and hugged Wolf and Peter. ‘Not one of us would have survived without you, Colonel.’
    ‘The war’s over. It’s Wolf, and our survival is down to good fortune, nothing more.’ Wolf saw unshed tears in Ralf’s, Josef’s, and even Helmut’s eyes. Overcome by emotion he could no longer conceal, Peter was already at the carriage door. Wolf envied his friends’ capacity to feel. Even grief would have been preferable to the numbing sense of indifference that had infected him since he’d seen his school and university friends blown to pieces at Ypres in 1914. Five subsequent years spent living with death, pain, and misery had only served to inure him even more to suffering. Including his own.
    He knew he should be relieved his soldiering days were over. The Kaiser who’d started the whole bloody affair had been driven into luxurious exile in the Netherlands so he wasn’t in a position to start another war. All he and the other defeated veterans could do was pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. At that moment it seemed a bleaker prospect than facing an artillery barrage.
    ‘See you in a week.’ Wolf hugged Ralf and Josef again, and shook hands with Helmut who’d always been more tolerated than loved in the group. He pulled on his gloves, turned up the collar of his greatcoat, wrapped his scarf around his nose and mouth, and joined Peter.
    Lichtenhagen, a village outside Konigsberg, East Prussia, Friday January 10th 1919
    The train stopped. Wolf and Peter jumped down alongside the tracks into snow that reached the top of their thighs. Wolf heaved himself on to the icy path and held out a hand to Peter.
    The moment he’d been dreading and anticipating in equal measure had arrived. The pre-war life he’d used as a yardstick of sanity for five years seemed like a dream, and another man’s dream at that. He was terrified of not recognising, let alone loving, his wife Gretel and son Heinrich after the chaos and carnage he’d seen. What could the future hold for him, Peter, and the others now they’d been tagged with the shame of ‘POW’? Would it have been better to have died fighting alongside their comrades than being taken like sheep to England?
    Peter’s voice intruded. ‘I suppose it was too much to hope we’d be able to arrive unannounced.’
    A small boy with blond hair and blue eyes was standing in the snow. He saw them watching him and ran, pulling the toboggan he’d been playing with behind him.
    ‘Too big to be my son or yours,’ Peter added.
    ‘When we left your boys were two and three, mine a year old. Babies have a habit of growing. That boy could be mine or yours.’
    ‘I can’t wait to see them and my daughter.’
    ‘Have you