The Grave of Truth Read Online Free Page A

air-raid sirens howled continuously and the thud of explosions from Allied air attacks was competing with the crash of high-velocity shells.
    Berliners had forgotten how to sleep; they dozed between air attacks, risked a forage into the shattered streets for the meagre rations which were still being supplied, and huddled underground, waiting for the final assault upon the city. In the heart of Berlin the Führer stayed on in the Bunker below the Chancellory, directing a war which had been lost months before. Berlin, the centre of the Third Reich, its buildings designed by Albert Speer as a monument to the New Order which was to last a thousand years, burned and crumbled under the attacks of the enemies who had so nearly been defeated.
    The city lived on rumours; nobody believed the lies broadcast by Goebbels’ radio, or its hysterical admonitions to fight on to the last and victory could still be won. The war was lost: Himmler and Goering had left Berlin; only Hitler and his few fanatics—Bormann, Goebbels and his personal SS guards—remained to fight on and die with the people and the city. German troops, exhausted and hopeless, were entrenched in the ruins, with orders to fight the Russians street by street.
    No surrender. Fight to the death. Those were Hitler’s orders, and the veterans and old men of the Volksturm and schoolboys of the Hitler Jugend joined what was left of the army and prepared to defend Berlin and the Führer to the last man.
    Max Steiner was sixteen; his platoon was due to take up position in the Pichelsdorf district, where savage fighting was holding the encircling Russian troops from driving through the centre. They had been issued with uniforms, ill-fitting olive green, with forage caps and belts, the insignia of the Hitler Jugend on their collars. Max, being the eldest, was the platoon commander; unlike the younger boys he carried a revolver. The others carried rifles and shoulder packs, with grenades. There were stories of children, even younger than the fourteens and fifteens in this group, who had thrown themselves and their grenades under Red Army tanks. Max’s platoon had been ordered to the Bunker for the supreme honour accorded those who were about to die for the Fatherland.
    Adolf Hitler himself was to review his boy soldiers; he would exhort them to hold back the invader. They had been waiting since dawn, crouching half asleep in little groups, the tumult of the bombardment muffled below ground. Max’s mother was still in her house on the Albrechtstrasse; the adjoining buildings had been wrecked by a bomb but their house still stood and she and his grandmother lived in the cellars and refused to leave. There were no false heroics about Marthe Steiner or her mother-in-law who was seventy-eight years old. Only the quiet logic that countered Max’s frantic pleas to join the refugees with the answer that he was all the two women had left, and they weren’t leaving Berlin without him. There was no suggestion that he should run away. His father had been killed during an air raid on the Luftwaffe station at Brest, and his elder brothers shot down during the Battle of Britain.
    It was his duty to fight for his country, and theirs to stay and give what help they could. His mother helped with the street kitchens and his grandmother sewed bandages for the Red Cross. None of them expected to survive the fall of their city. Max had kissed them good-bye when the order came to report for active duty; his mother was not a demonstrative woman but she had held out her arms and he had run into them, and they were both in tears.
    He thought of her, and looked round anxiously in the dull light to make certain no one was awake and watching him cry. The others were silent, some sleeping, some with their eyes closed but awake. He was the platoon commander; he wiped his eyes with his sleeve and tried not to think of his family. Not of his father, or his two brothers who had seemed