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Flight from Terror

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Flight from Terror FLIGHT FROM TERROR by OTTO STRASSER and MICHAEL STERN NATIONAL TRAVEL CLUB New York 1943 Chapter I THE THIRD FLOOR of Garnison Hospital, in Munich, was reserved for the leg-wound cases from the Western Front, and I lay in the ward there, hearing the groans of the men in the long rows of beds on either side of me, smelling the sick-sweet odor of antiseptic. For though they called this red brick building located near the Max II Barracks a hospital, it was little more than a butcher shop - a dark, dirty, overcrowded way station for the broken, flesh-torn soldiers of the German Fatherland. In this hospital we knew only suffering. Even the food supplied to rebuild the weakened bodies of the wounded was awful beyond description. Coffee made from acorns - which we called "swine coffee"; butter, made from carrots - which we called Helden-butter or "hero butter," because only heroes could eat it; small chunks of tough black bread, made from potatoes; and meat twice a week, served with "barbed wire" soup. That was Garnison Hospital, a place of huddled misery, filth and lean, desperate want. Everywhere in the third-floor ward - as in all the wards - there was pain; each of us was tortured by a wound eating away at the flesh of his body - and today there had come another wound, a deeper, more deadly one that ate away at the spirit. For today we had heard that the war was over, that von Hindenburg had admitted the defeat all Germans had known was inevitable after the United States had entered the conflict. A premonition of disaster had been whispered to us only ten days before. On October 28, 1918 the Imperial Navy had mutinied at its base in Kiel. There had been arrests, shootings, the raising of red flags; the workers of Kiel had been seized {p. with the spirit of the navy's revolt, had formed revolutionary councils and demanded the abdication of the Hohenzollerns, amnesty for the leaders of earlier mutinies, and the right of equal suffrage; and these uprisings against established despotism had been duplicated in other cities as a result. Despite the eforts of the government to keep these acts from the people, underground intelligence had informed us - but we could not guess that the Kiel movement had been growing meantime, that it would reach its climax today in Munich. We could not guess that the dateline, "Munich, November 7, 1918" would become part of recorded history - a written period, a full stop, after I1565 days of blood, pain and hell. And I'm glad we did not know that the date promised no surcease of the horror we'd all been through, soldier and civilian alike. Thinking men, of course, had seen it coming - the surrender and its aftermath. That the Imperial arms could not prevail was apparent toward the end; the aftermath, the reckoning, was just as fearsomely certain as it was unpredictable. It would come, this harvest for the vanquished; we knew that. How, or in what form, was what could not be foretold. During the war 65,000,000 men had been mobilized and forced to participate; of them, 9,000,000 - about one in seven - had been killed in action; about 22,000,000 had been wounded, with a third permanently disabled, many soon to die; and there was still that ghostly 5,000,000 "missing in action." Such a cataclysm must be paid for through bitter years. We had seen the reckoning coming for Germany in those angry days before the armistice. General Ludendorff had been forced to resign his command only two days before the Imperial Navy mutinied at Kiel; the rumbling of a separatist movement could be heard in Bavaria; the Emperor and the Crown Prince were about to flee to the Netherlands; Prince Max of Baden was being ousted from the chancellorship, and within two days a group of socialists led by Friedrich Ebert was to take over the destiny of a new German Republic. What thinking man could have failed to have seen it coming? But the future of Germany was more of a personal problem to me, I believe, than to anyone else in the ward at Garnison. I was only twenty-one years old, but even then - seemingly as much as today - the solution of Germany's future was my own enormous task. During all of Armistice Day I lay in bed filled with an impotent rage at the men and the forces that had brought the German people and myself to this modern Armageddon, with its promise of a harsh tomorrow. Why did all this happen ? Ceaselessly that question sounded through my head. Once when the ward's single nurse - a mouselike creature who shuddered at the sight of blood even now - bent over my bed, I voiced my thoughts aloud. "Why did we have to go to war?" I asked wildly. "Nobody gained by it - not even those we fought. Certainly not the Prussian Junkers who wanted it, nor even the profiteering indutrialists who - Her urgent gesture stopped my words, and her expression of pained surprise gave way to one of nervous fear. She glanced from side to side to see if I had been overheard, then said stiffly, tensely, "You mustn't speak like that, Herr Le utnantl Why, you sound like one of those Communists!" I was bitter at her lack of understanding, tried to explain that I was not a Communist, not a Monarchist, not anything just a man without hope, in a country that had no hope. But she couldn't comprehend; she couldn't see that, if my dislike of the Monarchist Party was strong, my dislike grew to hate where the Communists were concerned. Toward evening I ceased my wild wondering, closed my eyes and tried to sleep. Street sounds drifted in through the open window; and slowly, in my drowsy state, that confusion of far-of sound seemed the chaotic rumble of an approaching mob. I could almost hear someone singing the "Internationale," the marching song of the Communists. Then other voices took up the song and it seemed to sweep down the street like a tidal wave of madness. A second later I was bolt upright in bed, wide awake now. The men around me, too, were staring at each other in surprise, for to all of us the sounds coming in the window meant that a mob was on the march, that in the dead world of Germany outside some group had had the spirit to rise and act. The ward of almost dead men came to life. Several patients shouted for the nurse at the same time; those in neighboring beds asked each other excited questions; in the confusion some just lay there and cursed impotently. The mouselike nurse, bewildered in the face of this disorder in the ward, terrified by the street's pandemonium, stood between the rows of beds with her hands fluttering ineffectually. At that moment she was not far from the foot of my bed. "What's happening?" I shouted to her excitedly. Even in her fear and confusion, there was a look of distrust in her eyes as she turned to me. "Don't you know, Herr Leutnant?" "Of course not!" I answered sharply, anger rising within me at her expression and the implication of her words. "If I did know, would I be asking you, fraulein ?" "It's the Communist revolution!" "You mean - they've won?" There was an incredulous note in my voice, but inside me an insistent sense of the truth forced me to accept the hateful knowledge. Not trusting her voice, the nurse's head bobbed up and down, the very violence of her movement showing the tension of her fear. But her answer wasn't necessary; I already knew. Was this, then, the reason we had bled and suffered ? Was this why we were led like docile cattle to the slaughter pen, or a wage for the throbbing agony of the wounds of the Western Front ? ... It was not for this I had of ered my flesh - so that the Communists could impose their own peculiar brand of government on us I had fought and sufered for an ideal, for a Fatherland that was mine, and in which I believed. That song I heard through the window was the chant of something alien. I hated one as violently as I loved the other. It did not seem possible that the province of Bavaria could have fallen into Communist control; that fact just didn't seem to have substance. Yet here in the streets of the capital city of Bavaria hundreds of voices chanted to the blood-stirring tempo of hundreds of shuffling feet; and the song those voices chanted was the "Internationale," here in the streets of Munich - in Catholic Bavaria. I could not lie in a hospital bed and let final destruction overtake my country. Somewhere were men who believed as I did. Somewhere were those who would fight and die to turn back this tide of red terror. Pretending to lie quietly, I watched the nurse out of halfclosed eyes as she scurried about the ward and attempted to quiet her patients. Then, after some minutes, she was called away briefly. I had my chance. Struggling upright, I pivoted my legs over the side of the bed, surprised at the weakness of my body. Although shrapnel wounds in my leg were almost healed now, my weeks in the hospital had taken a toll of my strength that could not soon be repaired.
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