The Defeated Aristocrat Read Online Free Page B

Ralf used his marks as a stake in a card game and won enough to treat them all to midday meals in a restaurant for the duration of their stay in the city. Wolf knew Ralf had cheated but that didn’t stop him or the others from enjoying the best food they’d eaten since they’d been captured in Flanders on Tuesday April 16th 1918. Helmut bought a single bag of biscuits from an old woman in the street for fifty pennies, and hid the rest of his money. The biscuits were stale.
    Josef saved two marks and spent three buying bread for their breakfasts. He kept two back because ‘none of us know what we’ll find at home’, for which he earned considerable ribbing. As his family owned three department stores and a chain of haberdashery shops in East Prussia they felt he had more than most to return to – if he or any of them ever got there. ‘I can’t believe I’ll sleep at home tonight.’ Peter looked out of the window for familiar landmarks.
    ‘Don’t speak too soon,’ Ralf warned. ‘We could still be held up.’
    ‘You tempted fate,’ Helmut grumbled when the train stopped.
    ‘We’re at Mehlsack,’ Peter announced. ‘Next stop Lichtenhagen Halt, Wolf.’
    Wolf avoided Peter’s eye. Now the moment he’d been waiting for was imminent, he wished he could keep travelling. It had been over a year since he’d received a letter from home. Anything could have happened to his wife and son in that time. Everywhere they’d stopped since they’d crossed the border into Germany they’d seen homeless malnourished men, women and children who were clearly starving, yet long trains of carriages loaded with agricultural produce had snaked past them, bearing signs that read ‘WAR REPARATION AND COMPENSATION’. The Allies were taking the phrase ‘to the victor the spoils’ literally. Everything Germany possessed down to the food needed to feed its children was being exacted and paid to France, Belgium, and Britain.
    Would he find Konigsberg, like Berlin, full of queues of the disinherited, homeless, and desperate – at soup kitchens, hospitals, hostels, orphanages? Were his wife, child, brothers, and sisters alive? Had Lichtenhagen survived unscathed by the tragedy of war?
    ‘I don’t know why you’re grinning like a clown, Peter,’ Helmut sniped. ‘No soldier will be welcomed home although it wasn’t the military who surrendered but the damned cowardly government who signed away the respect we paid for in blood. The victory would have been ours in another month. We should be marching home with honour, instead of slinking back like rats …’
    ‘Mention victory once more, Helmut and, so help me, I will have one when I dance on your corpse,’ Ralf threatened.
    ‘The government surrendered because, unlike the generals, they realised we had nothing left to fight with. No bullets for the men’s rifles or our Lugers. No artillery, but most importantly, no more appetite for fighting,’ Josef the logical, philosophical, eternal peacemaker reminded him.
    ‘If nothing else we should have held out for better terms. Look what the Allies have stolen – our land, our food, our goods. They’ve allowed Woodrow Wilson – an American who has no right to stick his nose in German affairs – to separate Prussia from the rest of Germany with a “Polish corridor” that’s given Poland access to the Baltic Sea by granting Poland our German territory. The damned Poles are evicting us from our own land …’
    ‘What do you suggest we do?’ Start another war?’ Peter scratched his legs.
    ‘For God’s sake, stop doing that!’ Helmut vented his anger with Ralf and Josef on Peter.
    ‘They’re biting,’ Peter retorted.
    ‘In your imagination. Nothing could have lived through that steam bath in Berlin.’
    ‘Lice can live through anything, look at you.’ Usually Peter was the last to rise to Helmut’s bait, but the strain of delays coupled with the knowledge that his wife and children were almost within