Chapter 7 ~ Death Warrant
A Tale of Two Times: Volume 4, Reign of the War Queen
~ 1 ~ Evening had fallen, but Gretchen’s sweetheart, Willy, had been assigned on short notice to border patrol duty. Left without her usual ride home on his motorcycle, the young barmaid gratefully accepted Max’s kind offer to take her in his automobile to her family’s farmhouse on the road leading to Pilsen. On the way, she talked with Max about various patrons of the tavern, about the war and how long it might last, and about the possibility of her earning more money by working in Switzerland. Max pointed out that in Switzerland she would have to pay for her lodging.
The day’s light was fading fast as they neared the Birchwood through which they would pass, and Max turned on the car’s headlights as they entered the greater darkness under the trees. Almost at once, a man in a Border Patrol uniform staggered out onto the road before them, waving his rifle like a flag in the headlights’ glare. His face was bloody. Max stopped the car and stepped out cautiously, looking about and listening. He heard neither gunfire nor shouting, but a cry of dismay came from inside his car. Gretchen stumbled out and ran to her wounded sweetheart, and Willy collapsed in her embracing arms. She gently lowered him to the roadway and sat there supporting him in her arms with his head lying in her lap. Max quickly determined that the blood on Willy’s face had been smeared on it by Willy’s own hand, and had come from a bleeding bullet wound in his left side. Quickly, Max took out his pocket knife and cut a long section from Gretchen’s skirt, then bound the makeshift bandage firmly around Willy’s body to stop his loss of blood.
Before losing consciousness, Willy managed to moan, “The others…”
Max and Gretchen looked at each other; Gretchen said, “I will stay here with Willy while you see if the others need help. They are his friends, and mine too.” Max quickly opened the car’s trunk and removed his flashlight and some flares. After setting the flares on the highway he cautiously entered the darkness of the Birchwood. Here in the Birchwood was the place of the love tryst between Emil Ottokar and Max’s daughter Judith. Here, Judith had experienced a Vision of Emil dying from bullet wounds.
With the aid of his flashlight’s beam, Max followed the path made by the bleeding border patrolman. Periodically he stopped and listened for sounds, then shouted into the silence, “I am a friend; do you need help?” In this manner he moved on slowly, going farther and farther from the road and deeper into the wood.
The Birchwood was a favorite picnic site for residents of the region, and even a few tourists had discovered it. There was a large meadow a little higher on the slope, and the birch trees around it had been thinned so that the flickering sunlight among them was delightfully inviting, but now the wood’s darkness felt ominous to Max, and Judith’s Vision of death came to his mind.
He did not see the large, soft object over which he stumbled; with dread he shifted the beam of light. It was a large, dead german shepherd dog. Kneeling, he saw that it had been recently shot just behind the ear, and that it was lying in a pool of its own blood. Max stood up and closed his eyes, recalling that in Reyna’s account of Judith’s Vision, such a dog had been the first of the enemies shot by Emil before he himself was shot dead. If the Vision were true, he thought, Emil would be dead.
Max was thinking that the shooter must be upslope, when he heard the engines of Border Patrol motorcycles. Then he heard shouts, and the sounds of men running fast in his direction. He turned his flashlight beam in their direction shouting, “Over here!”
Max had been living a strange twilight life for the past several years. At first, he had regarded himself as a man pretending to be a friend to his foes, and a foe to his friends, in order to thwart the one and help the other. Now, the distinctions seemed not so clear-cut.
Then, the friends whom he had been helping had been people like Reyna’s family, whose race had put their lives in danger from people directing intense malice toward them. Max’s foes had been those malicious people.
Now, more and more of the people whom he was helping to flee the Nazis—risking his own life—were Germans fleeing simply because their ambitions had been foiled by the Nazis. They were using one or another credible tale of woe to gain the same advantages as those whose lives had been threatened.
And now, Germany was engaged in a general war against enemies who could do her great harm. Ordinary Germans—those who were enduring the greatest suffering—were united against a common enemy who saw all Germans as their enemy, unmindful of the many who had no part in the evils cultivated in their fatherland. To whom was Max now a friend, and to whom was he now a foe?
Two soldiers appeared in the beam of light. They were wearing Border Patrol uniforms, and the brief flash of light on their faces identified them as Willy’s comrades-in-arms. Max exclaimed, “Thank goodness you are alive! When Willy said, ‘the others’, we thought you were wounded, too. Was this your dog?”
“Yes. We were following two spies. Willy was following the men through the woods, and we were following slowly along the road in case the spies turned onto it. We knew that if they didn’t go out onto the road they would have to come here to the Birchwood.”
“Willy was brave to follow them alone.”
“We drew straws. He took the dog.”
“How did you know they were only two men?”
“We saw them clearly. To tell the truth, when there are women and children in a group, we look the other way because they are not combatants, and not everything is done right in wartime. In this case, a farmer saw them first: two armed men alone on the edge of his field. He was frightened, so he pretended not to see them and then came to us. He told us he had watched them take some sort of radio device out of their packs, and use it, and he said one of them had a carbine and both had pistols.”
Max snapped off his light. “It was making us a target,” he explained. All of them crouched down, and they began whispering.
“Nobody has shot at us.”
“Are they gone, or do they want us to think they are gone?”
“Let us work our way back to the road,” suggested Max. “We can find out how Willy is doing, and then we can make our plans there.” The two young men agreed, and they moved stealthily back along the dirt road. They found Willy cradled in Gretchen’s lap, lighted by the headlights of Max’s idling automobile. One of Willy’s buddies dropped to his side and looked into his face; then he gently probed the wound. “I have had some medical training, and to me Willy does not look like he is dying yet, but we should take him immediately to the village doctor.”
Max turned off the car’s lights, leaving only the dying light of the sputtering flares. “When I was a boy,” he said, “there was a tunnel under the ridge. Rocks and dirt would slide down and block up its entrance, but we boys would clear it out and crawl through to the other side. Is it open now?”
“Last week it was not, but there is a hiking trail on the ridge. It skirts the Abbey lands and runs along generally parallel to the highway for many miles.”
“That is new. How far does it go?”
“I have hiked nearly to Greystone Castle on that trail. I turned around where a guarded path to the castle splits off from it, but several more days of hard trekking can get you to the Swiss border.”
“Is it possible to hike the trail at night?”
“Maybe, for someone who is familiar with it and who uses a lantern.”
“So, our friends may yet be near to us here.”
“That is what I think, sir.”
While they had been whispering, the flares had nearly burned out.
Max said, “A patrol should be sent along that trail. Gretchen and I can transport Willy to the doctor, and I will immediately report to headquarters what has happened. I was told that Commandant Sebastian arrived yesterday for a visit; I will try to persuade him to place a patrol at the other end of the trail.”
“We will keep watch from the road on our motorcycles.”
“Gretchen, it will take us only a minute to get Willy to the car, if we both support him.”
“Thank you, Herr Schroeder.” Tears shook loose from their perches on Gretchen’s eyelashes, as she and Max helped Willy, staggering, into the car.
Earlier that day, Max had found several of Sebastian’s staff members in the tavern. He had learned from them that on the previous day they had been ordered, on short notice, to accompany Sebastian to the village. There, Commandant Sebastian had been greeted almost at once by a special courier whose message had put him into a sour mood. The staff did not know the contents of the message, but they had come to the tavern feeling that something had miscarried and that their unexpected vacation would be over very soon.
