Free Field Gray by Philip Kerr Page A

all the explanation that was needed. “I’ve been ordered to kill as many Jews as I can, and that’s what I’m doing.”
    “Whose orders? Who’s your field commander and where is he?”
    “Major Weis.” Becker pointed at a long wooden building behind a white picket fence about thirty yards down the road. “He’s in there. Having his lunch.”
    I walked toward the building, and Becker called after me: “Don’t think I want to do this. But orders are orders, yes?”
    As I reached the hut, I heard another volley of shots. One of the doors was open and an SS major was sitting on a chair with his tunic off. In one hand he held a half-eaten loaf of bread and in the other a bottle of wine and a cigarette. He heard me out with a look of weary amusement on his face.
    “Look, none of this is my idea,” he said. “It’s a waste of time and ammunition, if you ask me. But I do what I’m told, right? That’s how an army works. A superior officer gives me an order and I obey. Chapter closed.” He pointed at a field telephone that was on the floor. “Take it up with headquarters if you like. They’ll just tell you what they told me. To get on with it.” He shook his head. “You’re not the only one who thinks this is madness, Captain.”
    “You mean you’ve already asked for the orders to be confirmed?”
    “Of course I have. Field HQ told me to take it up with Division HQ.”
    “And what did they say?”
    Major Weis shook his head. “Questioning an order with Division? Are you mad? I won’t stay a major for very long if I do that. They’ll have my pips and my balls, and not necessarily in that order.” He laughed. “But be my guest. Go on, call them. Just make sure you leave my name out of it.”
    Outside there was another volley of shots. I picked up the field telephone and cranked the handle furiously. Thirty seconds later, I was arguing with someone at Division HQ. The major got up and put his ear to the other side of the telephone. When I started to swear, he grinned and walked away.
    “You’ve upset them now,” he said.
    I slammed the phone down and stood there trembling with anger.
    “I’m to report to Division, in Minsk,” I said. “Immediately.”
    “Told you.” He handed me his bottle, and I took a swig of what turned out to be not wine but vodka. “They’ll have your rank, for sure. I hope you think it was worth it. From what I hear, this”—he pointed at the door—“this is just the smoke at the end of the gun. Someone else is pulling the trigger. That’s what you have to hold on to, my friend. Try to remember what Goethe said. He said the greatest happiness for us Germans is to understand what we can understand and then, having done so, to do what we’re fucking told.”
    I went outside and told the men I’d brought with me in a Panzer wagon and a Puma armored car that we were going into Minsk, to make a report on the morning’s antipartisan action. As we drove along I was in a melancholy frame of mind, but this was only partly to do the fate of a few hundred innocent Jews. Mostly I was concerned for the reputation of Germans and the Germany army. Where would this end? I asked myself. I certainly never conceived that thousands of Jews were already being slaughtered in a similar fashion.
    Minsk was easy to find. All you had to do was drive down a long straight road—quite a good road, even by German standards—and follow the gray plume of smoke on the horizon. The Luftwaffe had bombed the city a few days before and destroyed most of the city center. Even so, all of the German vehicles moving along the road kept their distance from one another in case of a Russian air attack. Otherwise, the Red Army was gone and Wehrmacht intelligence indicated that the population of three hundred thousand would have left the city, too, but for the fact that our bombing of the road east out of Minsk—to Mogilev and Moscow—had forced as many as eighty thousand to turn back to the city, or at