The darkness that followed the extinguishing of the candle was not merely an absence of light; it was a physical weight. It pressed against Peter's eyelids, heavy and suffocating, smelling of the ancient stone of the crypts below and the fresh, metallic scent of fear.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of breathing—twelve men inhaling the freezing air of Saxony and exhaling white plumes of vapor into the black void. And beneath that, the terrestrial vibration. The ground hummed. It was a low-frequency tremor that traveled up through the soles of Peter's boots, vibrating in his shins, his knees, settling finally in the pit of his stomach.
Late April, 1945. Midnight.
"Wait for the flare," Vogel had hissed.
Peter lay flat on his stomach on the flagstones, the cold seeping through his tunic. He crawled forward, inch by inch, until he was beside the machine gunner at the breach in the western wall. The stone here was pulverized, a jagged lip of masonry that looked out over the sloping vineyard and the road beyond.
"Do you hear them?" Vogel whispered. He was a veteran of the siege of Breslau, a man who could distinguish the caliber of a shell by its whistle. But his voice now was thin, brittle as dry leaves.
"I hear them," Peter replied.
It wasn't just the engines anymore. It was the tracks. The distinctive, high-pitched squeal of ungreased steel pins grinding against steel links. It was a sound like a thousand rusted hinges opening at once, a mechanical scream that tore through the silence of the night. The T-34s were known for it—wide tracks designed to float over the Russian mud, loose and noisy.
"They are not on the road," Vogel said. "They are in the field. They are climbing the terrace."
"Get ready," Peter murmured. "Don't fire until you see the infantry. The bullets will just bounce off the tanks."
Snap. Hiss.
A flare gun popped in the distance, fired from the Russian lines. A magnesium star ascended rapidly, trailing a ribbon of white smoke, and hung suspended in the sky.
The world was ripped out of the darkness.
The landscape was bathed in a stark, blinding white light. It was a cruel illumination, stripping away the mercy of the shadows. The birch trees became skeletal fingers pointing accusingly at the sky. The craters in the mud looked like open sores.
And there they were.
Monsters.
Three T-34/85 tanks were crawling out of the treeline, their turrets traversing with robotic slowness. They were painted in a rough, whitewash winter camouflage that was streaked with brown mud, making them look diseased, like great leprous beasts rising from the earth. The red stars on their turrets were faded, barely visible under the grime.
They were close. Much closer than Peter had anticipated. Perhaps four hundred meters.
Riding on their backs were clusters of Soviet infantry, dark shapes huddled against the engine vents for warmth. They looked like barnacles clinging to the hide of a whale. They were motionless, rifles held across their chests, their faces turned toward the hill—faceless masks under round helmets.
"Mother of God," Vogel whispered.
"Steady," Peter cautioned, placing a hand on the gunner's shoulder. He could feel the man trembling. "They haven't seen us yet."
As if to answer him, the lead tank's turret stopped its rotation. The long barrel of the 85mm gun, darker than the night, lowered slightly. It stared directly at the breach. It stared at Peter.
The flare sputtered and died, plunging the world back into a purple blindness that was somehow worse than before because now, the image of the tanks was burned into their retinas—greenish ghosts drifting in the afterimage.
"They know we're here," Hanke said from the darkness behind them.
"They know this is the only high ground," Peter corrected. "They don't know we are here. Not yet. They are fishing."
The vibration grew stronger. The tanks were climbing the gradient now, crushing the vines of the vineyard, flattening the ancient stone walls that had stood for centuries.
Peter crawled back from the wall. He needed to think. He needed to command. But the part of his brain that issued orders—Establish fields of fire. Check grenade pins. Set the range.—was operating on autopilot. The rest of him, the core of him, was spiraling inward.
He retreated to the altar. The sanctuary was an illusion, he knew that. Stone did not stop high-explosive shells. But it was the center of his universe, the only place where he could find the stillness to finish what he had started.
He huddled inside the hollow cavity of the altar itself, using the marble casing to shield himself from the wind and the eyes of his men. He struck another match. The flame was small, fragile, dancing wildly in the draft.
He pulled out the manifest again. He looked at the first letter. My silence was a shield. It was true, but it was the truth of the past. He needed to speak to the future—the future that was being cancelled, minute by minute, by the grinding of the tracks outside.
He smoothed the paper. He licked the tip of the pencil.
The Second Letter: The Ghost
April 21, 1945. The Hour of the Wolf.
My Dolce,
The light has gone out again, and the monsters are at the door. I am writing this by the light of a match that burns my fingers, just as the memory of you burns my heart.
Do you remember the day we walked by the Adige, and you asked me about the future? It was a Tuesday. I remember because the church bells were ringing for Vespers. You asked me if I wanted a house with a red roof, or a blue one. We argued about it for an hour, laughing until our sides ached. I wanted red, like the tiles of Dresden, like the home of my father. You wanted blue, like the sky over Lake Garda, endless and deep.
I am writing to apologize for the house we will never build. I am apologizing for the garden I will never plant, where you wanted lemon trees that would surely die in the German winter, and I promised to build a greenhouse to keep them safe.
I am apologizing for the children I will never father. I had names for them, you know. I never told you because I was superstitious, afraid that naming a dream would make it shatter. But now, with the tanks four hundred meters away, there is nothing left to break. Marco for a boy. Elena for a girl. I can see them, Dolce. I can see them running through the piazza, chasing the pigeons, with your dark eyes and my stubborn chin.
Peter stopped. The match burned down to his fingertips. He dropped it with a hiss and immediately struck another. He couldn't stop. If he stopped, the vision of the children would fade, replaced by the faces of the terrified boys in the platoon.
There is a terrible irony in my name. You used to laugh at it. Polemos. "War." You said it was too heavy a name for a baker's son, for a boy who liked poetry and fresh bread. You were right. But the universe has a cruel sense of humor.
I have become my name. I am no longer Peter. I am Polemos. The war has eaten everything else. It has consumed the baker's son. It has consumed the dreamer.
He looked at his hand holding the pencil. It was caked in dirt, trembling with adrenaline. It was a claw.
I need you to understand something, so you do not wait for a ghost. The Peter you loved died two years ago in a trench near Kiev. He died when the frost took his toes, and the shrapnel took his friends. He died when he learned to look at a burning village and feel nothing but gratitude for the warmth.
The man writing this is just a remnant. A soldier. A creature made of reflex and adrenaline and fear. If I were to come back to you now, by some miracle, I would not be the man who kissed you by the fountain. I would be a stranger who wakes up screaming in the night, reaching for a rifle that isn't there. I would be a man who cannot look at a plowed field without seeing graves. I have lost the capacity for softness, Dolce. And you deserve softness. You deserve a man whose soul is not made of scar tissue.
I mourn him too, the boy you loved. I miss him. He was a good boy. He loved you very much.
But he is gone. And soon, the soldier who took his place will be gone too.
A noise outside broke his concentration. A metallic clank—the sound of a hatch slamming shut.
Peter blew out the match.
He sat in the dark, the afterimage of the words floating before him. I have become my name. It was the ultimate defeat. The Nazis had promised them a thousand-year Reich, a new world order. Instead, they had given them a legacy of ash. They had turned a generation of boys into weapons, fired them at the world, and now left them to rust in the mud.
"Sergeant?"
It was Schultz again. The boy was crawling toward the altar.
"Stay down, Schultz."
"I heard a hatch, Sergeant. They are buttoning up."
"That means they are ready to fire," Peter said, his voice void of emotion. "They are sealing themselves in."
"What do we do?"
Peter put the pencil in his pocket. He didn't put the paper away yet. He held it in his hand, feeling the texture of the grain.
"We wait," Peter said. "We wait for them to make a mistake."
"They have tanks," Schultz whispered, a note of hysteria creeping into his voice. "We have rifles. What mistake can they make?"
"They can come too close," Peter said. "Tanks are blind, Schultz. Especially at night. If they come into the ruins, into the rocks, they are just big metal coffins. We can get on top of them. We can blind them with mud. We can jam logs in their tracks."
It was a lie. Or at least, a desperate half-truth. It was the kind of thing they taught in the Hitlerjugend manuals, heroic diagrams of boys defeating steel monsters. In reality, the T-34s would just stand off and blow the chapel to pieces with high-explosive rounds, then machine-gun the rubble.
But Schultz needed the lie. He needed to believe there was a mechanic to survival.
"Okay," Schultz breathed. "Okay. We wait."
Peter looked at the boy in the gloom. Schultz was shivering so hard his helmet was rattling against his collarbone.
"Schultz," Peter asked softly. "How old are you?"
"Eighteen, Sergeant. Next month."
"Did you have a girl? Back home?"
Schultz hesitated. "A girl? No, Sergeant. I... I talked to Helga Muller once. At the cinema. But she liked Hans. Hans had a motorcycle."
Peter smiled in the dark. A motorcycle. It seemed like such a trivial, beautiful thing to hinge a life on.
"When this is over," Peter said, "you will get a motorcycle. A Zündapp. Big and loud. And Helga Muller will not look at Hans."
Schultz didn't answer. He just stared at the breach in the wall.
Suddenly, the air pressure in the chapel changed. It wasn't a sound. It was a suck. The atmosphere seemed to be pulled out of the nave, rushing toward the valley.
WHUMP.
A flash of light from the treeline, yellow and angry.
"Down!" Peter threw his arm over Schultz's head, forcing the boy into the stone floor.
The shell arrived a fraction of a second later. It didn't hit the church. It hit the retaining wall outside.
CRACK.
The sound was deafening. It was not a rumble; it was a snap, like a dry branch the size of a redwood tree breaking. The ground bucked. A wave of shrapnel and stone chips sprayed through the breach, clattering against the interior walls like hail on a tin roof.
Dust exploded from the ceiling, thick and choking.
"Report!" Peter yelled, his ears ringing. "Report!"
"Missed us!" Vogel shouted from the wall. "Short! They are ranging!"
"They won't be short next time," Hanke yelled.
Peter pushed himself up. He was covered in grit. He tasted the limestone on his tongue. It tasted like the grave.
The shelling had begun. The overture was over.
He checked his watch. The radium dial glowed green in the dust-choked darkness. 00:14.
He had perhaps minutes. Maybe less.
He looked at the manifest in his hand. He had written the apology for the silence. He had written the apology for the lost future. But there was one more thing. The hardest thing.
He had to apologize for the end.
He struck a match. The flame wavered violently in the turbulent air of the nave. The shadows of the headless saints danced on the walls, mocking him.
He turned the paper to the last empty space.
The T-34s fired again. WHUMP. WHUMP. Two shots this time.
Peter didn't flinch. He focused on the paper. He focused on Dolce. He focused on the only act of love left to him.
He had to tell her that his death was not a tragedy for her. It was a release.
He began to write.