The Haigerloch Project

The staff car had made its way across the tracks. The two soldiers jumped back into the moving vehicle.

It shot after the ambulance in close pursuit….

5

The powerful headlight beams of the ambulance rushed ahead of them into the gloom, searching out a path through the ruins. Stuttgart was a mere shell of a city, a sea of rubble.

Dirk stuck to the main thoroughfare. He dared not attempt to lose his pursuers by darting through the smaller side streets. He might easily end up in a cul-de-sac. At least the main street had been cleared. Blackened hulks of gutted buildings lined it, their empty, soot-ringed windows like dead eye sockets, as the ambulance roared past below. Mounds of shattered bricks and crushed concrete piled up against the house walls looked like coarse, miniature alluvial fans.

As they neared the Altstadt — the old part of town at the city center, surrounding the main railroad station — the devastation grew worse. They still had not been able to shake their pursuers.

Sig sat tensely in the cab. Instinctively he pressed his feet down into the floor. Flash impressions of the ravaged city hammered on his mind….

Skeletons of buildings crazily askew, threatening to topple at their very passing….

The single defiantly standing wall in a heap of debris, its white-painted propaganda slogan a mockery: “AM ENDE STEHT DER SIEG! — At the End Stands Victory!”

A church, its gutted interior starkly laid open, the large crucifix at the altar standing alone amid the rubble, the cross and the left arm of Christ sheared away, leaving the scarred right arm raised in a macabre Nazi salute…

Dirk was forced to slow his headlong rush. The street was fast becoming impassable. They were racing into the target area of the last attack….

Fires were raging, flames shooting from buildings showered with incendiaries, acrid smoke billowing from the intense magnesium incandescence. Rescue workers, firemen and civilians were desperately fighting to quell the holocaust. Trucks and fire engines blocked the rubble-strewn street.

Dirk sent the ambulance flying into the havoc. He hit the Klaxon horn. Its wail was hardly audible in the din. He glanced in the rearview mirror.

The staff car was catching up.

He skidded around a fire engine. A bomb had blasted the sidewalk open. Water from a broken main was gushing out into the street to form a shallow, muddy stream. Dirk hit the slippery muck at full speed. The ambulance slid and began to spin. He fought the wheel. The vehicle slammed against the paint-blistered hulk of a burned-out truck lying overturned in the gutter. Metal crunched and screeched against metal. The ambulance caromed off, out of control. Dirk struggled to straighten it as it plunged forward directly toward a gaping, still smoking bomb crater. He stomped on the brake. He tore at the wheel, swinging it about. The ambulance slewed. Grating and grinding in protest, it reared over on two wheels before crashing down to fling itself around a pile of rubble and careen down the street.

They were bearing down on a large apartment building blazing with incendiary fires. Several injured people were lying on the sidewalk. A man wearing the green armband of the Hilfspolizei, the auxiliary police, ran into the street, frantically trying to flag them down. Veering crazily, they shot by him. Outraged, he shook his fist after them, barely managing to scramble out of the way of the staff car roaring after….

The ambulance barreled wildly into a park area. Huge mounds of debris. Broken tree trunks, their splintered tips pointing accusingly into the night sky, their crushed and withered crowns lying scattered on the rubble-covered ground…

Ahead, bathed by the fire from several blazing houses, loomed two large buildings, one squat and stark, the other ornate and baroque. With a strangely unattached part of his mind, Sig recognized them. The Altes Schloss and the Neues Schloss — The Old and the New Castle. The middle of the broad avenue between them had been cleared, and it snaked between piles of broken masonry. They raced past. From the decorated façade of the New Castle, rows of mutilated stone figures kept a ghastly vigil. Armless, legless, headless they stood, grotesquely guarding windows gaping on gutted emptiness within.

The Old Castle squatted in a nest of rubble. Goethe had once panned the building, Sig remembered irrelevantly. “Hardly fit even to be a stage set,” he'd written. It was now. It would make a splendid medieval ruin….

Dirk braked violently. The street ahead was completely blocked. A building hit by a bomb had collapsed across the roadway. Along the ground, gasoline from a wrecked fire truck flowed in a river of flame.

Quickly he made a sharp right turn, tires squealing, and careened into a narrow path that had been cleared through piles of rubble.