The Defeated Aristocrat (4 page)

‘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 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 forgotten your wife?’ Wolf teased.

Peter had been a police officer in Konigsberg before the war. Only twenty-five, he’d been promoted to third grade Kriminaloberassistent entirely on merit. Not, as some jealous colleagues had said, due to his father-in-law, Kriminaldirektor Georg Hafen’s, influence. But in 1914 Peter had turned down an offer to ‘protect’ his post, which would have kept him out of the army.

Wolf had never understood why Peter wanted to enlist. He and his wife Waltrode – Pippi to everyone who knew her – had been besotted with one another after five years of marriage. They’d lived in a fine apartment in her father’s house near the castle lake, one of the most picturesque and exclusive areas of Konigsberg. Two months after they left for the front, Pippi gave birth to Peter’s daughter and moved in with her mother-in-law, Martha, in Lichtenhagen, so Martha could help with the children.

Pippi had proved a more assiduous correspondent than his wife. It had been over a year since he’d received anything from Gretel. He treasured her last letter because of the postscript from his son.

Viele liebe fur Papa von Heinrich.

Much love to Papa from Heinrich
. He’d left a baby and was returning to a schoolboy. Had the boy with the toboggan been his son?

The von Mau family castle, Waldschloss, came into view. Coated with snow as pristine as sugar icing on a cake, it looked beautiful and unchanged, peculiarly so after the destruction in France. Five stories high, surrounded by a moat, it had been built in the sixteenth century by one of his namesakes.

The boy with the toboggan should have reached it by now. Had Gretel displayed a photograph of him as she’d promised, so their son would recognise him when he returned?

‘Heini said soldiers were coming. I didn’t believe him until I looked out of the window. I sent him and the boys to get Martha. She took some soup to old Mrs Schmidt.’ Pippi, a little stouter but still as blonde, blue-eyed, and beautiful as Wolf remembered, hurtled from the Post Office and flung herself into Peter’s arms.

Peter wrapped himself around her, held her tight, and closed his eyes.

Feeling like a voyeur, Wolf turned back to the castle expecting Gretel to appear. His younger brother Franz opened the door. His face was paler than skimmed milk, his hands shaking as if he’d received battle orders.

Wolf crunched towards Franz over the snow but his brother remained frozen. As motionless as the icicles hanging from the stone porch.

‘I know I’ve lost weight and there are a few silver hairs among the dark but I didn’t think I’d changed that much.’

‘Wolf.’ Franz’s voice was strangulated. ‘We had a telegram last May. They said you were dead.’

‘As you see, they made a mistake, but that explains the lack of letters.’

Gretel stepped into the doorway alongside Franz. Wolf was aware of Peter and Pippi moving supportively behind him. Franz slipped his hand around Gretel’s waist – or where her waist would have been if she hadn’t been in an advanced state of pregnancy. It was the kind of protective gesture a husband makes towards his wife. Wolf knew, because he’d done it himself before Heinrich had been born.

Sobs tore from Gretel’s throat. She trembled as though a bucket of ice water had been thrown over her.

Still Wolf felt nothing.

‘Wolf, you’re freezing, please, come into my house.’ Martha appeared surrounded by small boys. She took his arm.

Wolf turned, kissed Martha’s cheek, and went with her.

CHAPTER FOUR

Lichtenhagen, Friday January 10th 1919

Wolf followed Martha into the Post Office. There was no living room and the kitchen was too small to hold four adults and three children and allow for privacy.

‘Go in the office, Wolf. I keep the stove lit in there and we won’t be disturbed as I’ve closed for the day.’

He joined Martha behind the counter. She moved piles of forms from a bench and they sat, side by side. More for the sake of being occupied than any craving, Wolf reached for his cigarette papers and tobacco pouch. Before the war he’d only smoked cigars. He hadn’t seen one in two years.

In 1914 he’d been as close to Martha as any son to the woman who had borne him. His own mother had died giving birth to his youngest sister Liesl when he was seven, but his few memories of her owed more to photographs than reality. Dogged by ill-health exacerbated by five difficult pregnancies that included two sets of twins, his mother had spent the last years of her life in bed or ‘resting’ on a chaise in the drawing room he’d rarely visited, because he preferred the cold outdoors to the freezing stone rooms of the castle. Left with a newborn and six children under nine, his father had offered widowed Martha Plewe a home and position as housekeeper. She accepted on condition she could bring her nine-year-old son Peter into the household.

Martha had cared for baby Liesl, Wolf, his crippled twin, Martin, three-year-old Franz, two-year-old twins Wilhelm and Paul and nine-year-old Charlotte as if they’d been her own. Given Charlotte’s propensity to alternately bully, tease, or ‘baby’ him along with their younger siblings, Wolf had been grateful for the advent of Peter. When his father died in 1912, leaving him the von Mau estate with the proviso he care financially for his siblings, Martha had stayed on.

Six months after his father’s funeral, Wolf married Gretel von Poldi. Eighteen months later, when war broke out, he accepted a commission in the army. Martha had tried to talk him out of both decisions. He’d refused to listen.

He leaned against the wall, rolled and lit a cigarette and waited for Martha to say, ‘I told you not to marry Gretel.’ She didn’t.

‘I’m sorry, Wolf.’

He found Martha’s sympathy hard to take after her warnings. ‘Are they married?’

‘As much as they can be given you’re alive. It happened last August. Gretel was pregnant.’

‘When did my wife start sleeping with my brother?’

‘I don’t know, and that’s God’s truth. They were living in the same house.’

‘As were you, Pippi, and the children. When did you move in here?’

‘January 1915.’

‘So they began sleeping together a few months after I left.’

‘How do you know?’ There was resignation in her voice.

‘Because it would have taken something serious to have driven you, Pippi, and the children out of your comfortable apartment in the castle to this poky little place.’

‘You’re insulting my home.’ She softened her rebuke with a smile.

‘It’s a tight squeeze for two adults and three children.’

‘You and Gretel were too young to marry. You’re still young. You have your entire life to look forward to. You’re only twenty-six …’

‘I feel like an old man.’

‘That’s only what war’s done to you. Given time, you’ll recover. I prayed you’d return and not just for your own sake. Your son’s.’

‘Isn’t Heinrich Franz’s son now?’

‘Franz hates Heini because he looks like you.’

‘Franz ill-treats Heinrich?’

‘Not when I’m around and I make sure Heini spends more time here than in the castle.’

‘Doesn’t Gretel take care of the boy?’

‘She’s pregnant.’

He recalled Martha’s reaction when he and Gretel returned from their honeymoon in Venice. ‘You never could conceal your dislike of her.’

Martha left the bench, and paced to the counter. ‘I don’t hate Gretel. If it hadn’t been for her, you wouldn’t have Heini. I’ll invite him to supper so you can get to know him. He’s a good boy, Wolf, but he could do with a little more of the devilment all boys have, and Franz has knocked that out of him.’

He felt unequal to meeting his son so soon after seeing Franz with Gretel. ‘You don’t think it would upset Heinrich to see me?’

‘You’re his father. How can you upset him? You do realise Franz has taken over the estate and is lording it in the castle? He countermands every decision Gunther Jablonowski makes. If Franz would only listen to Gunther …’

Gunther Jablonowski had been Wolf’s father’s steward, an appointment Wolf had endorsed when he’d inherited Waldschloss.

‘Franz could never resist meddling in things he knows nothing about.’

‘If you’re to have anything left to hand over to your son when the time comes, you’d better order Franz to leave the running of the estate to Gunther.’

‘I don’t understand. How has Franz taken charge of the castle and the estate?’

‘He made an application to the courts in Gretel’s name that challenged your will.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘You didn’t leave your widow enough money to live on.’

‘That’s rubbish. I left Gretel well provided for and the estate in trust to Heinrich. Besides, even if I hadn’t, Franz isn’t next in line. Where’s Martin?’

‘In Konigsberg.’

‘He didn’t want the castle and estate?’

‘He wasn’t asked whether he wanted them or not. As I understand the situation, by using Gretel’s name and arguing that she should have inherited the estate, not your brothers and sisters, Franz effectively prevented your family from mounting a legal case until Gretel’s claim was settled.’