George drank his brandy down quickly and got out a cigarette. The learned judge, whose secretary he had been, had once said that it was impossible to practise law for very many years without learning that no case, however matter-of-fact it might seem, could be considered entirely proof against the regrettable tendency of reality to assume the shape and proportions of melodrama. At the time, George had smiled politely and wondered if he would be given to making such half-baked generalizations when he became a judge. Now he remembered.
The door opened.
The man who came into the room was fair and deep-chested, with heavy shoulders and big hands. He might have been any age between thirty and forty. The face was strong, with muscular cheeks, a determined mouth, and cool, watchful eyes. He held himself very erect and the bush-shirt he wore stretched tightly across his chest. With the revolver belt at his waist he looked almost as if he were in uniform.
He glanced swiftly from George to Miss Kolin as Arthur, who had followed him in, shut the door and bustled forward.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Arthur said. “Mr. Carey, this is my chief. He speaks a bit of English-I taught him-but go easy on the long words. He knows who you are.”
The newcomer clicked his heels and gave the slightest of bows.
“Schirmer,” he said curtly, “Franz Schirmer. I think you wish to speak with me.”
10
The German forces which withdrew from Greece in October 1944 were very different in both numbers and quality from the field army which had invaded the country just over three years earlier. If the Twelfth Army of General von List, with its crack panzer divisions and its record of success in the Polish campaign, had epitomized the irresistible strength of the Wehrmacht, the occupation forces, setting out to make their way home while there was still a road home left open to them, epitomized no less strikingly the Wehrmacht’s ultimate exhaustion. The earlier practice of resting troops from the fighting fronts by giving them tours of occupation duty had long been abandoned as a luxury. The Lines of Communication Division which garrisoned the Salonika area in 1944 was, for the most part, made up of men who, for one reason or another, were considered unfit for combatant duty: debilitated survivors from the Russian front, the older men, the weaklings, and those who, because of either wounds or sickness, were of low medical categories.
For Sergeant Schirmer, the war had ended on that day in Italy when he had obeyed the order of an inexperienced officer to make a parachute jump over a wood. The comradeship of fighting men in a corps d’élite has meant a great deal to a great many men. To Sergeant Schirmer it had given something that his upbringing had always denied him-his belief in himself as a man. The months in the hospital which had followed the accident, the court of inquiry, the rehabilitation centre, the medical examinations, and the posting to Greece had been a bitter epilogue to the only period of his life in which he felt he had known happiness. Many times he had wished that the tree branch which had merely broken his hip had pierced his breast and killed him.