[While not a Catholic himself, Philip Adler has joined the throngs of visitors to the pope’s wartime refuge. “My wife is Bavarian,” he explains in the bar of our hotel. “She had to make the pilgrimage to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.”

But we don’t get an interview with the wife, because she is a female and being interviewed is for men!!!

The guy is actually German and our narrator explains it’s pure chance they met.

Hamburg was heavily infested. They were in the streets, in the buildings, pouring out of the Neuer Elbtunnel. We’d tried to blockade it with civilian vehicles, but they were squirming through any open space like bloated, bloody worms. Refugees were also all over. They’d come from as far away as Saxony, thinking they could escape by sea. The ships were long gone, the port was a mess. We had over a thousand trapped at the Reynolds Aluminiumwerk and at least triple that at the Eurokai terminal. No food, no clean water, just waiting to be rescued with the dead swarming outside, and I don’t know how many infected inside.
The harbor was choked with corpses, but corpses that were still moving. We’d blasted them into the harbor with antiriot water cannons; it saved ammo and it helped to keep the streets clear. It was a good idea, until the pressure in the hydrants died.

Once again, the book delivers quality scenes. This sounds like it’d fit well into Left4Dead or something – massive numbers of people turning too fast and ending up overwhelming everything by sheer numbers.

How this happened with the whole bite and wait several days to turn business in this book is far less clear.

He then explains he’d just come into command after the guy who was supposed to be leading them got attacked by a zombie and when they shot it the bullet went through to hit him too. He describes this as a freak accident but you’d think it’d be happening all the time given zombies seem to have every bit of their flesh carrying the virus and it’s magic so there’s no concern about minimum viral load, a single virus gets hits your blood and you’re instantly infected over your whole body.

He spends his time trying to fortify buildings, collect survivors because he’s not stupid and can see that all the ways out are blocked by zombies, and scavenge for converted hand-to-hand weapons which I assume means knives, and then he gets the familiar order to retreat – but this time it’s different!!!

Up until then they had simply used civilian designations on an open channel; this was so refugees could know where to assemble. Now it was a coded transmission from a map we hadn’t used since the end of the cold war. I had to check the coordinates three times to confirm. They put us at Schafstedt, just north of the Nord-Ostsee Kanal. Might as well be fucking Denmark!
We were also under strict orders not to move the civilians. Even worse, we were ordered not to inform them of our departure! This didn’t make any sense.

So my best guess here is either that Germany feels so bad about the whole Holocaust thing that soldiers are now almost incapable of even imagining doing mean things or just that this guy hasn’t slept in four or five days and he’s spent all that time trying to keep these people alive, so even though it’s really obvious what’s going on he just can’t process it.

This, I suppose, gets into the meta aspect of it. How reliable are we to take these narrators? The thing about trauma is even afterward it’s often hard for people to process rationally. His emotions at the time would likely still define the memory, so when retelling it, the fact he felt at that moment completely baffled, because all he could think was MAKE CIVILIANS SAFE and here was a thing NOT ABOUT CIVILIANS what does it have to do with MAKE CIVILIANS SAFE???, that overwhelms his recounting of actual events and so it still seems totally reasonable, even now, to find the actual things he was told baffling.

But if this isn’t supposed to be a look into a man going mad under the stress to the point it colors his life even now, then it’s the usual thing of this book where the author does something incredibly obvious but has the characters act like it’s a mystery because either he’s stupid or he thinks this little of his readers.

Anyway, he can’t believe this is true, so he calls up to ask if they messed up the map coordinates despite the fact the map coordinates are really the least of it.

I suddenly found myself speaking to General Lang, commander of the entire Northern Front. His voice was shaking. I could hear it even over the shooting. He told me the orders were not a mistake, that I was to rally what was left of the Hamburg Garrison and proceed immediately north.

Super dramatic except this is the moment they’re enacting the whole leave civilians to die thing, so you’d think a lot of people would have called in at the same time and the general would have other things to do than take each and every call.

He then explains that he’s not one of those fascist-lovers from East Germany but has a healthy insane West German guilt complex about the whole Hitler business and will not obey orders he thinks are bad. By the way, here’s a link talking about the division from people who aren’t Max Brooks, since it is interesting.

He told me that I would carry out my instructions or I, and, more importantly, my men, would be charged with treason and prosecuted with “Russian efficiency.” And this is what we’ve come to, I thought. We’d all heard of what was happening in Russia…the mutinies, the crackdowns, the decimations.

You may have missed it when it was happening in Russia, because Russia, but when the author had the soldier saying it was a brilliant idea and worked, it was because the author actually seems to view this concept with creepy approval and it’s going to come up repeatedly as if it’s actually a good idea and it’s just that in the current world we’re all pussies and not REAL MEN making HARD CHOICES.

I mean, even ignoring the idea someone would actually be able to charge and execute people for not killing civilians, there’s that he already said they’re not going to be able to move these people, which means their only option now is to try to dig in. We can try to say that this is a bluff on the general’s part, but it shouldn’t work as a bluff for the same reason it doesn’t work as an actual action, it’s blindingly obvious the rest of the army can’t get to them to do anything to them. If they had the forces to go arrest them and drag them off for trials and killing, they’d be able to move the civilians in the first place.

I looked around at all these boys, eighteen, nineteen years old, all tired and scared and fighting for their lives. I couldn’t do that to them.

While I wouldn’t normally yell at people for not wanting to die, I do have to say that I think a German guy would not miss the fact that this is literally a reason Nazis used. Also, this guy has actually shown signs of a human level of intelligence, so he must have been able to understand that retreating and leaving the civilians would save his fellow soldiers and staying would likely condemn them. Seconds ago, he was willing to stay and risk his group’s death because it was the right thing to do, now he’s willing to kill all the civilians because he doesn’t want to risk his group’s death.

If the distinction was actually that he meant to insist the rest of the army couldn’t abandon these people and his group would stay until they did what was right and showed up, the general could’ve responded by saying that either his group leaves and the civilians die or they all die, because no one is coming. At that point looking around and finding he couldn’t bring himself to condemn the soldiers under his command would make sense.

But no, DECIMATION LIKE IN RUSSIA BECAUSE RUSSIA IS REAL MEN.

And none of the soldiers say anything about their orders either although he can tell they’re not happy. Not one deserts, or tells other people, because soldiers are a binary of obey every order exactly or full rebellion.

Indeed, on his way out the guy goes out of his way to tell the people he’s leaving that it’s totally not abandoning them because once he committed to following orders, he’s willing to go above and beyond and actually lie rather than just not telling them what he’s doing.

As he leaves, he passes another unit.

I didn’t know it at the time, but they were one of those units classified as expendable. They were detailed to cover our retreat, to prevent too many zombies, or refugees, from following us. They were ordered to hold to the end.

What do you mean, you didn’t know?

See this is why I think we’re to read his obtuseness about the order as if that’s just normal because the author’s plot is so clever.

He was told to retreat and abandon everyone. He sees another unit not abandoning everyone. Either these people are disobeying orders or they were ordered to stay. If you were struggling to guess which it is (despite the leader of this being your friend so you should be able to guess)you could just ask and find out that way.

We locked eyes, traded salutes.

But he doesn’t because real men don’t use their words any more than they show their emotions.

I ducked back into the APC, and pretended to study my map so the driver wouldn’t see my tears.

And he is a real man.

He explains that instead of staying he’s decided to leave but go murder the general and as much of the general’s staff as he could.

all the other little stooges who were “just following orders.” I’d get them all before they took me! It would be perfect. I wasn’t going to just goose-step my way into hell like some good little Hitler Jugend. I’d show him, and everyone else, what it meant to be a real Deutsche Soldat.

Because we all know the most important part of not being a Nazi is knowing grand gestures are more important than actually helping anyone.

But he was cruelly cheated in his heroic assholrey because as soon as his guys, the last group, got there, the general shoots himself and that just makes our interviewee even angrier.

Because I now understand why we did what we did, the details of the Prochnow Plan.

That’s the plan Germany made. Everybody seems to have a plan that’s the same as the special awesome Israeli plan.

Wouldn’t this revelation engender sympathy for him
Are you kidding? That’s exactly why I hate him! He knew that this was just the first step of a long war and we were going to need men like him to help win it. Fucking coward. Remember what I said about being beholden to your conscience? You can’t blame anyone else, not the plan’s architect, not your commanding officer, no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices. He knew this. That’s why he deserted us like we deserted those civilians.

As part of a necessary sacrifice to defeat the zombies?

Like I’ve said at other chapters, this one works on an emotional level very well. Somehow, zombies everywhere oh noes! Then, an order! A terrible order!!! But there is no other choice!!!!!!!!

It’s in execution that it falls apart.

Imagine this in a Romero zombie universe. So many reanimating bodies have torn apart whole cities and that’s washing over this one. The military’s out of bullets and the most they can do is push the zombies back while the water pressure lasts. The people are crammed into small areas with dwindling food and water, knowing any death will mean there’s a zombie in there with them. And the order is given to withdraw and leave them.

And what do you do? Is it the right thing to do or not?