The Boy at the Top of the Mountain by John Boyne

Author:John Boyne [Boyne, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448196821
Publisher: RHCP
Published: 2015-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

A Shoemaker, a Soldier and a King

By the time Pierrot was eight years old, the Führer had grown closer to him and was showing an interest in what the boy was reading, allowing him full access to his library and recommending authors and books that impressed him. He presented Pierrot with a biography of an eighteenth-century Prussian king, Frederick the Great, written by Thomas Carlyle; a volume so enormous and with such a small typeface that Pierrot doubted whether he would even be able to get past the first chapter.

‘A great warrior,’ explained Hitler, tapping the book’s jacket with his index finger. ‘A global visionary. And a patron of the arts. The perfect journey: we fight to achieve our goals, we purify the world and then we make it beautiful again.’

Pierrot even read the Führer’s own book, Mein Kampf, which was a little easier for him to comprehend than the Carlyle but still confusing. He was particularly interested in the sections relating to the Great War, for that, of course, was where his father, Wilhelm, had suffered so much. Walking Blondi one afternoon in the forest surrounding the mountain retreat, he asked the Führer about his own time as a soldier.

‘At first I was a dispatch runner on the Western Front,’ he told him, ‘passing messages between the armies stationed at the French and Belgian borders. But then I fought in the trenches at Ypres, in the Somme and at Passchendaele. Towards the end of the war I was almost blinded in a mustard-gas attack. Afterwards I sometimes thought that it would have been better to go blind than witness the indignities that the German people were made to suffer after their capitulation.’

‘My father fought in the Somme,’ said Pierrot. ‘My mother always said that although he didn’t die in the war, it was the war that killed him.’

The Führer brushed this comment away with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Your mother sounds like an ignorant person,’ he said. ‘Everyone should be proud to die for the greater glory of the Fatherland. Your father’s memory, Pieter, is one that you should honour.’

‘But when he came home,’ said Pierrot, ‘he was very ill. And he did some terrible things.’

‘Such as?’

Pierrot didn’t like to remember what his father had done, and when he began recounting some of the worst moments, he spoke quietly and looked down at the ground. The Führer listened without changing his expression, and when the boy finished he simply shook his head, as if none of that mattered. ‘We will reclaim what is ours,’ he said. ‘Our land, our dignity and our destiny. The struggle of the German people and our ultimate victory is the story that will define our generation.’

Pierrot nodded. He had stopped thinking of himself as French and, becoming taller at last and having recently received two new Deutsches Jungvolk uniforms to accommodate his growing limbs, had begun to identify himself as German. After all, as the Führer told him, one day all Europe would belong to Germany anyway, so national identities would no longer matter.

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