by Terry Mahoney

Created on: July 27, 2009

"Due to your valor in Norway, we will let you take the course of honor."

The fat colonel had smirked as he placed the pistol and one round carefully on the bedside table.

The condemned man sat at the edge of his bed, still in his nightshirt. His left foot and leg looked like something out of a nightmare. Most of the foot was gone where shrapnel from a landmine had punched through it, and the skin of the leg was puffed and foul-looking, like some kind of glazed pastry, where his uniform had burned onto his leg in the close confines of the disabled armored car.

His reward for crawling out of the flaming wreck and turning the machine gun of his fallen comrades on the British ambushers was an Iron Cross and a post behind a desk at the General Staff building; those things, and now, the opportunity to spare his mother and the Reich the embarrassment of a court martial for treason.

The colonel and his two grim-looking aides waited in the small apartment's only other room, murmuring quietly. He looked again at the pistol and the single round, and then picked both up. The familiar weight brought back the memory of battle; not a specific memory, but a mad rush of longing, rage, adrenaline and despair that packed his head, and a flickering progression of faces, from his boyhood friend, whose skull had been atomized in Belleau Wood, to his wife, no doubt still buried beneath the rubble and cinders of his old house.

He wept bitterly and openly, sobs shaking his entire body. He clutched the cool bullet like an old friend and welcomed the end, almost kissing it.

"Herr Oberst, I don't think the Generalmajor will be capable," said one of the two troopers.

The colonel laughed, the medals on his chest shaking like charms on a bracelet. The two other men smiled a little, but did not join his laughter. They all relaxed a bit, listening to the sobs from the bedroom.

"He will, or one of you will help him."

The man on the bead heard the laughter, and it shook him out of his torment. He looked up out of the dark room and through his tears saw the three men in his sitting room sharing some joke.

He pulled the magazine out of the pistol and pushed in the single round. The business end was dull, and the casing looked substandard, like much of the ammunition now, but he supposed it would fire.

As he slid the clip home and racked the slide to chamber the round, he inadvertently put some of his weight down on his bad foot. The pain shot up his leg and seemed to hover

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