Robert Collard

Robert Collard is a Walloon volunteer in Berlin whose decision to desert exposes the distance between fighting for a collapsing Reich and wanting to survive. A companion of Adrián Gallardo in the defenders’ final days, he recognizes the danger of their position and leaves Gallardo with an invitation to escape alongside him—a choice that makes their friendship, rather than military duty, the decisive bond of the scene.

Identity and Background

Collard serves with a Walloon unit, the 28th Walloon Grenadier Division, an equivalent to the Flemish Legion founded by Léon Degrelle in southern Belgium. His route to the Berlin front parallels that of the man he knows as Alfonso Navarro: in March 1944, when Francisco Franco dissolved the Blue Legion, Degrelle urged Spaniards who wished to keep fighting to remain in the war rather than return home. Navarro stayed and joined the Walloon Legion, just as Gallardo had ended up in the Flemish Legion. The two men’s paths thus converge through the same choice—to continue fighting after their compatriots could go home—even though they served in different formations.

The parallel initially appears to Gallardo to be chance. That impression will change when he meets Agneta Müller, but Collard’s place in the Berlin group is established before that later revelation: he is a Walloon among Germans and Spaniards, and an intermediary in a circle where nationality, language, and assumed identities complicate trust. In the group, he speaks French with Navarro, while Navarro answers in Spanish. Their language exchange makes the front’s improvised fellowship audible, without erasing the differences between the men.

Berlin and the Cost of Staying

The defenders’ position is a bomb crater about five metres in diameter, where Gallardo and his companions work to fortify the opposite side from Navarro and his men. The setting offers little of the scale or security of a conventional stronghold. As the Russians advance, the men understand that they may die in the crater; Gallardo imagines that he and Navarro might settle their last account by fighting one another before the advancing enemy kills them both. Collard belongs to this compressed world of rubble, watches, and dwindling time.

By 27 April, the danger has become inseparable from the group’s daily losses. Returning to Wilhelmstrasse, the men find Michael Schneider dead, shot through the chest. His empty wallet lies beside him, with letters and a photograph of a girl scattered around it. They cannot tell whether Schneider was trying to desert, merely stepped out for air, or was killed by a vigilante soldier or a thief. The uncertainty leaves the body without an immediate burial: the men hardly knew Schneider, and do not decide to bury him until after discussing it with their companions.

Collard and Hidalgo receive news of Schneider’s death in a bad mood, exhausted after dividing the watches between them. Neither seems especially grieved. Collard states the practical limit of what can be done for the dead; Navarro answers in Spanish that he is going to sleep, bringing a mourning that has barely begun to a close. Collard’s response does not make him a loyal defender of every man in the position. It shows how exhaustion and the expectation of further deaths have narrowed the group’s capacity for grief.

Desertion and Friendship

The next day, the men at the Adlon learn that the Russians are already fighting inside Berlin. Their lives become a countdown that culminates on 30 April, when Collard gathers his few belongings and announces that he will desert. At twenty-six, he says, he does not want to die. He knows survival is unlikely, but wants the chance and sees desertion as his only remaining option.

His announcement is not a quiet departure. Standing in the crater, he looks at each of the others and tells them they may kill him if they choose. He is sure that Navarro will not, because Navarro is his friend, but reminds Schmitt and Gallardo that they have the opportunity to stop him. He counts to five while they watch, smiles when no one acts, and leaves with a farewell and a wish of good luck. The counted pause turns desertion into a direct test: the others have the power to enforce the group’s last loyalty to the Reich, but Collard’s willingness to face them gives that loyalty no final claim over his life.

When Navarro translates Collard’s declaration for the others, he reduces it to its essential fact: Collard wants to survive. Neither Schmitt nor Gallardo replies. Agneta, who understands French, does not move either. Collard’s departure therefore meets silence rather than a speech about duty or betrayal. The scene’s force lies in what the men do not do: they neither kill him nor call him back.

The Offer to Gallardo

After eating, Collard takes Gallardo aside, away from the crater. He tells him that he loves him and explains that Agneta wants to return home, so he will go with her. He invites Gallardo to come too. The appeal draws on the history they share: they had come to Berlin prepared to die and defend the Reich to the end, but Collard says everything has changed now that Agneta has entered their lives.

Collard knows the offer puts their friendship under strain. He acknowledges that Gallardo saw Agneta first and loves her too, and says that Gallardo deserves her; at the same time, he insists that Agneta is free to choose. The invitation is therefore neither a claim on her nor a demand that Gallardo surrender his feelings. Collard asks his friend to leave with them while conceding the very attachment that could make the request painful. The decision to survive becomes an intimate choice as well as a political and military break.

Narrative Significance

Collard’s arc is brief but sharply defined by a reversal: he reaches Berlin as a volunteer committed to continuing the fight, then refuses to make death the price of that commitment. His announcement, his counted invitation to stop him, and his private appeal to Gallardo make the change legible through action rather than a general recantation. The evidence establishes that he leaves the crater and plans to go with Agneta; it does not state what ultimately happens to him after that departure.

His choice also throws Gallardo’s precarious identity into relief. Collard knows him through the name and history of Navarro, and treats him as the friend who will not kill a deserter. Yet Collard’s final request assumes a closeness that the group’s shared readiness to die had kept suspended: he asks Gallardo to choose a possible life with him and Agneta over the role they had accepted in the Reich’s last defence. In the ruined Berlin, survival is not presented as a grand victory. It begins with a small collection of belongings, a decision not to shoot, and a friend willing to walk away.