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Ebert laughed the laugh of a man who had watched his world fall completely apart in the space of less than twenty-four hours, laughed even as he cut off a piece of meat and forked it directly into his mouth. “Ah, the true colors of the madman come to light with true power,” he observed around the morsel. Those members of his Cabinet who had fled from Berlin with him in the predawn gloom that morning now glared as one at their leader. “I am not a ‘mad’ man, Herr Reichspraesident, merely a practical one.” Halstead now began to pace the room, as Ebert ate furiously and his Cabinet shifted their stares from one leader to the other. “Germany will not be able to make those outrageous reparation payments. What is needed is passive resistance. How will the Allies be able to collect money and goods that won’t be delivered?” “Tell me something that I don’t already know, Herr Hitler.” Ebert reached for a glass of wine that had been poured by a storm trooper waiter, and drank liberally. “What you don’t already know, Herr Reichspraesident, is that you and your government must be turned out. You signed the Treaty of Versailles, and, in so doing, you signed the death warrant of the Republic before it even began.” Ebert swallowed hard and shot up from his seat to shout for the first time that day. “I had no choice, Herr Hitler! Armed resistance was impossible!” Ebert wiped a dribble from his mouth and flung the used napkin in Halstead’s direction. “General Groener told me so himself!” “I want to believe you, Herr Reichspraesident, but I do not. You are a criminal, along with your entire government, and you shall be made to pay for your crimes.” Ebert swallowed a second time, dry, his fists dangling at his sides. “If I and my fellows are to be tried for crimes we did not commit, again it was the army that said we had not a fighting chance—” |