“And Dresden?” answered Günter, with a raised eyebrow and a sardonic air. “Hamburg? Damstadt?”

“I didn’t say, my young friend, that we were alone in our guilt.”

The Kanzler blinked away several snowflakes that had lodged themselves in his gray eyelashes. “And… after all, what is guilt of the past?” he sighed. “Do our own young people now need to be destroyed because of what their grandfathers did? Is it right for our children to be eaten, to be turned into little piles of bare, gnawed bones? How far does the sin of Adam and Eve go, Günter?”

Straightening that old and worn and overburdened back, the Kanzler announced, “In any case, it doesn’t matter. Whatever we have done, nothing deserves this… this abattoir. And whatever we can do to prevent it… that shall I do.”

Günter, the aide, scratched his chin, absently. “But what we can do, we have done. Production of everything we need for defense or evacuation is proceeding apace. The old soldiers of the Wehrmacht

“No, my young friend,” answered the Kanzler, slowly and deliberately. “There is one resource yet we have not touched. One that I would never have touched, myself, before seeing this nightmare with my own eyes.”

One resource? One resource. What could the Kanzler mean? Suddenly Günter’s eyes widened with understanding. “Mein Herr, you can’t mean them.”

Tightening his overcoat about him in the cold, reaching up a hand to brush away yet more of the steadily falling snow, the Kanzler looked skyward as if asking for guidance. Not receiving any, still with eyes turned heavenward, he answered, definitively, “Them.”

The chancellor thought, but did not say, And anything else I must bring back to prevent this from happening to our cities, our people.

Paris, France, 13 November 2004