Oberst Karl Brandt
The chateau had been requisitioned eight months earlier from a French family who had, by every indication, left in considerable haste — half-packed trunks still in the upstairs hallway, a child's drawing left pinned to the nursery wall that none of the staff had quite found the nerve to take down. I had grown rather fond of the place in the time since. The dining room made an excellent map room. High windows, good light that fell across the long table in the mornings in a way I'd come to appreciate more than I probably should have, given the purpose the table now served. Three kilometres behind the front line, which was, in my professional judgement, precisely the correct distance. Close enough to receive reports within the hour. Far enough that the artillery rarely troubled us beyond an occasional distant tremor that rattled the good crystal in the cabinet and gave the kitchen staff something new to complain about over breakfast.
I'll be honest in this account, in a way I was rarely permitted to be honest in any official capacity during the war. I liked it here. I'm not ashamed of that, though I understand a certain kind of reader will expect me to be. I did my time in forward positions during the first year — I carry the hearing loss in my left ear to prove it, courtesy of a shell that landed close enough to remind me, permanently, that proximity to one's duty is not the same thing as virtue, regardless of what the recruiting posters back home implied. I had earned this chateau. This good light. This distance. I felt no particular need to apologise for it, least of all to myself.
The report from the previous week's action at Sector Four reached me just after breakfast, while I was still finishing the chateau's coffee, which had grown thin and bitter as supply lines tightened but which I drank anyway out of a stubbornness I couldn't fully account for.
Vogt brought it in without his usual composure fully intact, which told me something before I'd even opened the folder.
Three thousand one hundred and forty men. Dead, wounded, or missing, in an assault that had gained, according to the same report, approximately two hundred metres of contested ground before being thrown back to its original position by a French counter-attack that our own intelligence had assured us was unlikely. I read the number twice. I want to record, honestly, that the second reading did not strike me any differently than the first. That is perhaps the most damning sentence I will write in this entire account, and I am including it anyway, because I promised myself when I began this record that I would not soften the parts that reflect badly on me, since softening them would defeat the entire purpose of writing it.
Three thousand men. I tried, for a moment, sitting at that long table with the morning light falling pleasantly across the map, to make the number mean something the way it should have meant something. I pictured, briefly, what three thousand men actually looked like assembled in one place — more than the population of the village outside these gates, several times over. I held that image for perhaps four seconds before my mind, with the particular efficiency it had developed over four years of this work, converted the number back into what it functionally was to me: a single line in a casualty report, a percentage against projected losses, a data point informing whether Sector Four would receive reinforcement or simply be written off as a failed initiative and folded into the next plan instead.
I am not proud of how quickly that conversion happened. I am recording that it happened, because I think the truth of it matters more than my comfort in admitting it.
---
Sector Seven was next. The map showed it clearly enough — a stretch of French line near a village whose actual name I will omit, since by this point in the war village names had become, to me, mostly a means of locating a problem rather than a place where people had once lived ordinary lives. Our intelligence, and I use that word with the considerable scepticism it deserved by this stage of the conflict, suggested the position was weakly held, the French having apparently redeployed strength south to meet pressure elsewhere.
I did not believe it. I want that recorded plainly, set down beside the three thousand from Sector Four so that the two facts sit next to each other the way they sat next to each other on my table that morning. I had read enough confident assessments by now to recognise the particular shape of wishful thinking dressed up as analysis, and Sector Seven had the unmistakable smell of a position that would prove considerably better defended than anyone currently estimated — because that had been true, with grim consistency, of nearly every sector we'd attacked on the strength of similarly confident assessments over the preceding fourteen months.
High command wanted a push regardless. Something to report upward, something to offset the morale cost of Sector Four's failure with a fresh initiative elsewhere, as if a second roll of the dice somehow erased the first. I understood the political logic of it even as I privately doubted the military logic, and I want to be honest that understanding the politics did not stop me from giving the order. It simply made giving it easier, in the specific and unflattering sense that having someone else's logic to stand behind requires less of a man than generating the justification entirely on his own.
"Sixth Regiment," I told Vogt, setting Sector Four's casualty report face-down on the table, as if turning the page might also turn off whatever part of me had briefly, four seconds' worth, actually pictured three thousand men standing in a field. "They'll lead at Sector Seven. Tell Hauptmann Ludwig Reinhardt to prepare his company for an assault at dawn. Standard preparatory bombardment, ninety minutes, then they go over."
"Yes, Herr Oberst." Vogt's pen moved across his notepad with the same flat efficiency it always did. I had come to rely on that efficiency. I had also, on quieter evenings with the chateau's dwindling wine, occasionally wondered what it cost him, privately, to maintain it.
I did not know Ludwig Reinhardt personally. I knew him from a personnel file — a competent service record, a citation from an action near Verdun the previous spring, a note indicating his men trusted him, which struck me, reading it, as either a genuine compliment or simply the kind of thing personnel files always say about officers who haven't yet been killed in a way that would force a revision. This was, in the particular arithmetic governing my decision, almost entirely beside the point. Sixth Regiment was simply the unit currently positioned to execute the order, the way a specific cog happens to be the one currently engaged with the gear that needs turning next.
I do not write this to excuse myself. I write it because it is true, and because I have come to believe that the honest mechanics of how these decisions actually get made — by men in good light, three kilometres back, doing arithmetic with regiments instead of names, turning casualty reports face-down rather than sitting with them — matter more than any of the more comfortable explanations I could offer in their place.
I poured a glass of the chateau's wine, which I had been working through steadily for eight months and intended to finish before the war inevitably required me to relocate somewhere else entirely, and I looked at the map of Sector Seven for a while, and I did not allow myself to think very hard about what ninety minutes of bombardment followed by an assault against a position I privately suspected was well-defended would actually look like from inside it.
I had learned, by Sector Four if not before, not to think about that. It was, I had found, the only sustainable way to keep doing this job for as long as the job apparently still required doing.
---
Hauptmann Ludwig Reinhardt
The order reached me just after midnight, passed down through three different men before it arrived at my position, acquiring along the way the flattened, abstract quality that orders always seemed to gather by the time they finally reached the place where someone actually had to act on them. Assault at dawn. Sector Seven. Preparatory bombardment to soften the position. Sixth Regiment to lead.
My company. A hundred and forty men on paper, though I'd stopped trusting the paper months ago and knew, from walking the trench in the dark to check positions myself, that the real number sat closer to a hundred and ten once you accounted for the sick, the lightly wounded who hadn't been formally pulled from the line, and two men I strongly suspected had quietly arranged to be elsewhere when the company roll was last called — a suspicion I had chosen not to investigate too closely, because I understood, by this point in the war, exactly what I would find if I did, and I no longer had it in me to punish men for wanting, briefly, to simply not die that particular week.
I want to write honestly about what my men were like by this stage, because the recruitment posters back home had long since stopped resembling anything true about this trench. These were not, for the most part, the eager volunteers of 1914, marching off singing songs about a swift victory none of us believed in privately anymore, if we ever had. Most of my original company was dead, wounded, or transferred elsewhere. The men under me now were a patchwork — boys barely old enough for the uniform they were wearing, older reservists pulled from categories that should, by any reasonable accounting, have exempted them, and a handful of genuine veterans who had simply, through some unearned combination of luck and instinct, not yet been killed.
They were not motivated. I want that recorded plainly, because the histories that will eventually get written about wars like this one tend to flatten everyone into either zealots or victims, and the truth in my company, by this stage, was neither. My men followed orders because the alternative to following orders was a firing squad, and because years of trench life had worn away whatever capacity any of them might once have carried for genuine enthusiasm, replacing it with a flat, exhausted compliance that got the work done without ever once pretending to enjoy it.
I made my rounds in the dark before the bombardment started, checking each position, offering what encouragement I had left to give, which by now amounted to very little beyond simple presence — the fact that I was there, walking the line myself rather than directing things from somewhere safer, seemed to matter to the men in a way no speech could have replicated.
Private Hoffmann — nineteen, six weeks with the company — asked me directly, in the blunt way new men sometimes managed before the trenches taught them not to ask questions whose answers nobody wanted to give aloud: "Will it work, Herr Hauptmann? The attack?"
I looked at him for a moment in the dark.
"I don't know, Hoffmann." I had decided, somewhere in the previous two years, that lying to my men about their odds was a cruelty I was no longer willing to commit, even though the truth offered no comfort whatsoever in its place. "I genuinely don't know. We'll find out together at dawn."
He nodded, the particular nod of a man hearing confirmed something he'd already privately expected.
---
The bombardment began at half past four, our guns opening up behind us in a continuous, earth-shaking roar I'd stopped finding remarkable somewhere around the second year of the war, the way a man eventually stops noticing rain on a roof he's lived under long enough. Ninety minutes, the order specified, and ninety minutes it ran, shells screaming overhead toward the French position we couldn't yet see clearly through dark and smoke, the ground itself flexing and shuddering under the cumulative weight of it.
I did not believe the bombardment would accomplish what it was meant to. I had seen enough preparatory barrages by now to understand their limits — the deepest enemy dugouts generally survived them intact, machine-gun crews simply waiting it out below ground and re-emerging the moment the shelling lifted, fresh and ready for precisely the assault the barrage was theoretically supposed to have prevented. I did not say any of this aloud to my men. There was no version of saying it that would have improved our circumstances, only the certainty with which we walked into them.
At six, the bombardment lifted.
The silence afterward carried its own particular weight — the kind every man in that trench understood wasn't peace at all, just the brief, terrible pause before the part that actually required something of us personally.
I checked my watch. I checked my pistol. I looked down the line at my company — Hoffmann, pale but steady; a veteran sergeant named Brandt, no relation, so far as either of us would ever learn, to the Oberst three kilometres behind us who had signed the order that produced this particular morning; men I'd commanded for months and men I'd met for the first time three days earlier, all of them now waiting on the same whistle, about to do the same thing regardless of which category they fell into.
I thought, briefly, of my sister in Munich. Of my father, who had been proud of my commission in a way that had long since stopped feeling like pride and started feeling like an obligation I owed him, regardless of what it continued to cost me to keep paying it.
I thought of the men whose names I would, by evening, either still know or no longer need to.
The whistle came.
"Sixth Regiment — advance!"
I went up the ladder first, because that was the kind of officer I had decided to be a long time ago and saw no reason to reconsider in what might well be my final hour of needing to be any kind of officer at all. Behind me, in good order, exhausted and unconvinced and entirely without enthusiasm, my company followed me up and over into the grey morning light — toward a French position that the man three kilometres behind us had privately suspected, all along, sitting over a casualty report he'd turned face-down on his table, was considerably better defended than anyone had told us.