The Perfect Horse by Elizabeth Letts

Author:Elizabeth Letts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

18.

CHANGE OF HEART

HOSTAU, CZECHOSLOVAKIA,

APRIL 27, 1945, TWO A.M.

No Americans! Lessing quickly heeded Wolfgang Kroll’s whispered warning: He pushed Stewart through the door of his apartment, alerting his wife in hushed tones to keep the American captain well hidden. Lessing’s wife did not ask questions but immediately filled her husband in on what had transpired in his absence, whispering so as not to wake their sleeping girls. Then she quickly busied herself making hot coffee for the bone-chilled and saddle-weary Stewart while Lessing headed back to the barn to put up the horses.

Kroll accompanied Lessing, relating further details. Colonel Rudofsky had been in favor of this secret negotiation with the Americans, but in Lessing’s absence, militia leader General Schulze had come into town in a big Mercedes, accompanied by his Volkssturm troops—a ragtag band of citizen soldiers consisting mostly of teenage boys. Schulze planned to set up a last-ditch German defense using Hostau as his base, and he was now the ranking officer.

Lessing wondered how to interpret Kroll’s news. His fellow veterinarian was not formally a part of the Hostau staff. He had arrived just six weeks earlier, accompanying the White Russian refugees; he had a dramatic air and a reputation for telling tall tales—of his exploits fighting with partisans in Yugoslavia and training camels in the desert in North Africa. But this time, Lessing could see that he was deadly serious. In a few short hours, the situation had deteriorated from fragile to downright precarious.

—

AS SOON AS LESSING had settled the horses, he rushed off to the big house to find Rudofsky. Although it was the middle of the night, the stud farm director was waiting for him. Rudofsky confirmed that General Schulze was now the highest-ranking officer at Hostau and was dead set against surrender.

Lessing looked at his commandant in disbelief. Unspoken between the two men was the obvious fact that any attempt at defense against either the Russians or the Americans would end in a brutal defeat and would put the horses directly in the line of fire.

“My hands are tied,” Rudofsky said. “If I try to negotiate with the Americans, or let on that one of them is here, then all three of us risk being shot for treason.”

In the past twelve hours, Lessing had ridden more than thirty miles, been held at gunpoint by the Americans, escorted an American captain through woods studded with pockets of SS snipers, and now here he stood at a complete impasse. Weary but not daunted, he tried to keep his head.

As the two men talked urgently, neither could know exactly how close they were to the end. On Hitler’s birthday just a week earlier, the entire town had come out in the pouring rain to “celebrate,” lining the streets to watch the Lipizzaner in their fine harnesses on parade. On that day, in his speech to the party faithful, Hitler’s Reich minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, had made a clear case for how Germans were supposed to face impending defeat: “Our misfortune has made us mature, but not robbed us of our character.

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