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the fringes of what they were told was a thousand-year Reich, men were standing like them, watching, looking, feeling the edges of the times they were in fold up and around them, feeling the iron weight of things still to come shifting closer and closer.
    â€œIndian country, then,” said the officer. Reinhardt looked at him strangely. “You never watched those Westerns? Before the war?” Reinhardt shook his head. “Best get your men in. It’ll be dark soon.”
    â€œA moment,” said Reinhardt. “In the last day or so, who has been up this road?”
    â€œChrist knows,” the commander said. “Pretty much everyone. Up and down.”
    â€œUstaÅ¡e?”
    The commander considered a moment, then nodded. “Yesterday,” he said. “And today. A small group of them. They came back in a roaring good mood.”
    â€œAnything else you remember?”
    â€œI remember a lot of things, Captain, but I’m not sure I know what you’re getting at.”
    â€œThere was a massacre of civilians up there,” said Reinhardt, pointing back up the mountain.
    â€œSo what else’s new?”
    Reinhardt was about to answer when he saw the futility of it, the man’s disinterest, and so he said nothing, motioning his thanks and instructing the driver to carry on. The
kubelwagen
wound slowly through the lines, past a squad of laborers—from the look of them, men from a penal battalion under the guard of a Feldgendarme with his hands scrunched deep into the pockets of his coat—past the last of the barbed-wire entanglements, and then the slow lurching drive down the mountain continued. It rained shortly, the cars driving through sleet that angled out of the dim gray light as if aimed at each man. The weather-beaten span of the old Goat Bridge went by, down in its cleft, and then, atop a cliff of cracked rock blasted the color of bone, the white walls of the Ottoman fortress up on Vratnik loomed above them. Reinhardt stared at them, tension rising in him—as it had been all day—at the thought of seeing Sarajevo again.
    He had been close enough, but the Feldjaeger had stayed out of the city, up behind the crumbling front lines, these past few weeks as the army retreated, slowly at first, now a rabble, and always the indiscipline to deal with. Soldiers who ran amok, soldiers who refused to obey orders, and those who melted away and formed organized bands, terrorizing the countryside when they did not simply vanish or go over to the Partisans. It was a band such as that which Reinhardt and his men had been chasing rumors of for the past few days, which had led them to that forest clearing, and of all the things he saw there, that memory of a man with a goatee beard and a girl in the arms of her father would not leave him be, and so he was again caught off guard by the sudden squeal of brakes as the car lurched to a stop, and he looked up at a stopped column of trucks.
    Faintly, beneath the rumble of engines, he could hear something, and it sent a shiver down his back. It was the sound of a crowd. It was the sound of frightened women, he corrected himself. Nothing else made quite that high-pitched note, that shrill of fear or despair. Reinhardt climbed out of the car, his feet cold and stiff. With a shouted order to Priller to watch their rear, he and Benfeld began to slide down past the trucks, each one filled with men slumped bone-tired into the trucks’ stiff canvas coverings, such that the sides of the vehicles made a series of humps. The road opened up a little and he could see that all traffic was stopped at the last curve into the city. Three more trucks stood swaybacked farther down the road, surrounded by a milling mass of soldiers and, here and there, clutches of civilians.
    A gunshot cracked across the morning, and the crowd of people shuddered, shifted in the strange way crowds do. Another shot followed it, flatter, sharper, a pistol shot.