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“And what of you, Herr Hitler?” the same lieutenant asked. “I’ll lay low in someone’s apartment for a while. The Communists won’t be around for long, I assure you.” The lieutenant started to reply, but Halstead silenced him with an index perpendicular with his own lips. Four headlights had appeared at the edge of the Heath, and now a pair of low rumbles could be heard by those lying in ambush. The trucks stopped a hundred yards from the lantern-lit tents, then were emptied from their rears of two squads of Communist “policemen” sent to arrest Adolf Hitler for complicity in the murder of Kurt Eisner. It was Halstead who fired the first shot, at the sergeant leading the nearer of the two squads of twelve, and the bullet from Halstead’s rifle hit him squarely in the heart. After giving the signal for attack, Halstead allowed his torso to fall forward to the frozen ground as the Ordnertruppe’s rifles and single machine gun unleashed a hail of metal. The Communists, unprepared for the resolve of the Darbeitpartei troopers, fired only a handful of rounds in return before squirming back, along the frozen grass and snow, to the trucks that were disabled with bullets to the tires, headlights, and drivers. It was when the few unhit Communists reached the trucks that Halstead rose from his prostrate position, fired his rifle once more, and led a charge at the enemy. The dozen policemen retreated behind the trucks for protection from the continuing fire, and were surprised by the attackers who wheeled around the sides of the trucks to stop and train their guns on them. Halstead, his giddy hands shaking on the rifle he kept aimed at the chest of a terrified Communist sergeant, ordered all able-bodied prisoners bound and collected within one of the trucks, and ordered the wounded from both sides carried into tents for warmth and medical treatment. As dawn began to color the eastern edge of the field, Halstead withdrew inside his personal tent, which doubled as a headquarters, and received Putzi’s summary of the Battle of Froettmaninger Heath: two Darbeitpartei dead, three wounded, eight Communist dead, eight wounded, ten captured. The victorious leader of the Bavarian resistance to Communist rule ordered the dead laid out in a neat row in the snow, then stepped outside the tent to beg a cigarette off one of his subordinates. |