He got up and walked across the small room to the washbasin. As he ran the water, he looked at himself in the foxed mirror. A face much older than his twenty-seven years looked back. The blue eyes looked baggy and tired and the complexion was an off-gray. He had looked healthier at the front, where he had sustained the small scar on his right cheek. A Russian shell had hit a nearby field gun, the shrapnel killing two of his NCOs. Strasser had been lucky—those men had taken the brunt of the blast, sheltering him from the worst of it. He had also taken a few pieces in his right leg, but they had been dug out successfully, leaving him with a slight numbness. After the explosion, he had lain in shock, looking down at his uniform, trying to work out whether the pieces of flesh and bone splattered on his tunic were his.

He felt to see if the water was getting hot. It wasn’t. Ever since the air raids had started, hot water was scarce. Strasser knew that it was the small things that would drain the morale from his fellow Berliners, no matter what the Führer or their gauleiter, Dr. Goebbels, might say. Last week, he had tried to get a new bulb for his bedside light, but old Karl in the stores had said there weren’t any. In the end he took a bulb from an unused lamp at headquarters. It was ridiculous. Every day, Strasser was organizing the shipment of vast quantities of ordnance from the factories and labor camps to the front line and he couldn’t even get a new bulb. And he was an officer in the SS—how much harder was it for ordinary people? He began to doubt whether all those armaments on all those sheets of paper even existed, and whether he wasn’t part of some vast game involving imaginary armies.

It had been a bad year for the Reich, thought Strasser. In January, von Paulus had capitulated at Stalingrad, and in the spring the war in North Africa had been lost. The treacherous Italians had signed an armistice with the Allies in August, and then there had been another defeat at the hands of the Russians at Kursk. And now there was the bombing, although last night they had been spared. The weather must have been too bad, even for the Lancasters.

After he had shaved, Strasser splashed some freezing water over his chest and under his arms. That made him feel a little fresher. He opened his door, and hanging up in the corridor was a clean undershirt, left there by his mann—his private—who had also polished his boots overnight. The mann was a lad of eighteen called Heinrich, whom Strasser shared with another hauptsturmführer. Heinrich had been injured when he was training—shot in the foot—and to his great shame he would never be able to fight. He was a true believer in National Socialism, and he looked Aryan through and through. His Heil Hitlers were so earnest that they had at first caused Strasser to laugh. Heinrich had looked worried—was he doing it wrong, Hauptsturmführer? Not at all, not at all, Strasser had replied, telling the young mann that maybe he was a bit too loud for that early in the morning.