Secret Honor (Honor Bound 3)

“And what would happen to you?”

“What will probably happen to me anyway.”

“Alicia understands why I can’t go to Brazil,” Peter said.

“My feeling, Hansel, presuming you find yourself back in Argentina, is to tell you to go to Brazil. That way, you will survive. The von Wachtstein family would survive. And so would our money. After the war, you could deal with the problems of our people here.”

“I can’t do that, Poppa.”

“If things go wrong, unless you go to Brazil, it will be the end of the von Wachtsteins. It is a question of obligation, Hansel.”

“I can’t do that, Poppa.”

“Our assets would be safe with your friends?”

“Of course.”

“And if neither of us is around when this is over, then what?”

“Alicia knows how I feel about the estate, and our people. And so does Cletus. They would—”

“It would be better if you went to Brazil,” the Graf interrupted.

“If I went to Brazil, you would go to Sachsenhausen or Dachau,” Peter said. “How could you help deal with the problem of our Führer from a concentration camp?”

The Graf met his eyes for a moment. “That, of course, is a consideration,” he said, finally.

Frau Brüner came into the dining room with another china tureen, this one full of pork and sauerkraut.

“We will talk more on the way to Munich,” the Graf announced. “This is the time for us to think and pray over our possible courses of action.”

“I am not going to Brazil, Poppa,” Peter said.

The Graf looked at his son, and after a moment nodded. “There are a number of problems here that I will have to deal with tomorrow,” he said. “And there will be time to think.”

After spending most of the next day dealing with the problems of the estate, the Graf, in the late afternoon, announced that he was “going to visit with the men in the hospital.”

“You don’t have to join me, Hansel,” the Graf said. “You weren’t responsible for sending them to war.”

“Neither were you, Poppa,” Peter protested. “You were simply doing your duty.”

“The whole point of this, Hansel, is that I forgot my duty is to God first, and then to Germany. Like the others, I put my duty to the state—to Hitler—first, ignoring that it contradicted the laws of God and was bad for Germany.” He met Peter’s eyes. “The men in here, Peter, did their duty to Germany as they saw it. I didn’t. I can’t tell these men I’m sorry, obviously, but perhaps if I visit them, they will at least think that a German officer appreciates what they have done and that they are not forgotten.”

“I’ll go with you, Poppa.”

“Where is your Knight’s Cross?”

“In my luggage.”

“Wear it, please.”

Peter nodded.

The wards were as depressing as Peter thought they would be.

The three, enormous, high-ceilinged rooms on the lower floor of the Schloss had at other times been party rooms. Not something out of a Franz Lehar operetta, with elegantly uniformed Hussars and elegantly gowned and bejeweled women waltzing to The Blue Danube, but parties for the people in the village.

There they had celebrated “the-harvest-is-in,” the birthdays of his father and mother, the weddings of villagers, birthday parties for octogenarians, and sometimes, in the cas