I had my eyes peeled, but I knew there was little real chance of seeing de Boudel in the crowds of people at the station. Vigée knew this, too. He was expecting us to have better luck when the POWs paraded back at the camp the next morning; it seemed that I was going to have to repeat my Le Vernet experience and inspect the men at close quarters. I was not looking forward to this and was hoping against hope that we might get lucky and spy de Boudel at the station—that I might see him before one of my old comrades saw me. To this improbable end, I went into the station and climbed the stairs to lean out of an upper-floor window in order to gain a better view of this mass of jubilant German soldiery. Vigée followed, then Grottsch, Wenger, and the detective.

I had not seen so many uniforms since the labor camp at Johannesgeorgenstadt. They swept across the platform like a sea of gray. Wearing his chain of office and dispensing schnapps from a double-sized earthenware bottle, the mayor of Friedland moved among the returnees like some Hamelin burgomaster surrounded by a plague of rats and mice. I could hear him shouting, “Your health!” and “To your freedom!” and “Welcome home!” at the top of his voice. Next to him a large Wehrmacht sergeant stood enfolding an old woman in his arms; both were weeping uncontrollably. His wife? His mother? It was hard to tell, the sergeant looked so old himself. They all did. It was hard to believe that these old men had once been the proud storm troopers who had carried Hitler’s mad Operation Barbarossa into Russia.

A woman standing next to me was throwing carnations onto the gray heads below. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day our boys finally came home. Germany’s heart beats in Friedland. They’re back. Back from the godless world of Bolshevism.”

I nodded politely but kept my eyes on the faces in the crowd below the window.

“This is chaos,” said the detective, whose name was Moeller. “How the hell are we supposed to find anyone in this? The next time we have prisoners arriving here, they’d do better to bring them on buses from the border station at Herleshausen. That way we might at least establish some kind of order. You’d think this was Italy, not Germany.”

“Let them have their chaos,” I said. “For fourteen years these men have endured discipline and order. They’ve had a belly full of it. So let them enjoy a moment of disorder. It might help to make them feel like human beings again.”