Hauptmann Ludwig Reinhardt
The first men didn't even make it off the ladders.
I went up first, the way I'd promised myself I always would, and the moment my head cleared the parapet I understood, with a clarity that offered no comfort whatsoever, exactly how wrong the intelligence had been. The French line wasn't weakened. It was waiting, fully manned, machine-gun positions tracking with a patience that told me they'd watched our entire bombardment from somewhere deep enough to survive it. Muzzle flashes stitched the grey dawn in long, deliberate bursts. The man directly behind me on the ladder took a round through the throat before his boots had even cleared the top rung and fell backward into the trench without a sound that I heard over everything else already happening.
I went over the top anyway, because going back down was no longer a choice that existed for either of us.
The field between our line and theirs was perhaps four hundred metres of churned mud and old wire, and I understood within the first thirty of those metres that we were going to lose most of the company crossing it. Men went down on either side of me in a rhythm that had nothing arbitrary about it — the machine guns walked their fire back and forth with mechanical precision, and where that fire passed, men simply weren't there anymore in the same upright way they had been a half-second before. I heard rounds crack past my own head close enough to feel the disturbed air, and somewhere in the noise and the running I found myself thinking, with a strange detached clarity that I have never been able to fully explain, where are the mages.
It was not a complaint, exactly. It was closer to genuine confusion. I had fought beside mage support twice before, watched enchanted fire flatten a defensive position before infantry ever needed to cross open ground under fire, and some part of me, going across that field with bullets finding men to my left and right in a steady, unbroken rhythm, simply could not understand why this assault — against a position our own command had assessed as lightly held, which made the absence stranger rather than more sensible — had been sent forward with nothing overhead at all. Just us. Just rifles and legs and four hundred metres of open ground.
I did not have time to finish the thought. Nobody who was thinking that thought that morning had time to finish it.
Sergeant Brandt went down twenty metres to my right, caught across the chest by a burst that folded him backward into the mud without any of the drama that men imagine death has from a safe distance. Hoffmann — I confirmed afterward it had been Hoffmann on the ladder, though I didn't know it yet in this moment — was simply gone from wherever he'd been running, the gap where he should have been the only evidence that he'd existed at all.
I kept running because stopping killed you faster than running did, which was the only mathematics available to any of us in that field.
---
I reached their trench and went down immediately — a round caught me high in the shoulder, the impact spinning me half around before I hit the lip of the parapet and rolled in rather than fell, which I have since decided was the only reason I survived the next several seconds rather than the first one. I came up firing from the ground, my pistol finding a French soldier at close range before he'd fully registered that I'd made it across, and then my magazine was empty and there was no time to reload and my knife was already in my other hand without my fully remembering drawing it.
What followed in that section of trench was not fighting in any sense that the word usually carries. It was something closer to a collision between two groups of exhausted, terrified men who had each been told, by people considerably safer than either of us, that today was the day this particular four hundred metres of ground needed to change hands.
I drove my knife into a Republic soldier's side and felt him grip my wrist with a strength that told me the wound hadn't been immediately fatal, and we grappled in the narrow space of the trench floor until I worked the blade free and used it again, and he stopped gripping.
Around me, what remained of my company — perhaps thirty men, by my own rough count, out of the hundred and ten who'd gone up the ladders — were doing the same thing in their own small patches of trench, bayonets and knives and rifle butts, the fighting too close now for anything resembling formation or order. For a stretch of perhaps ten minutes, brutal and total, it genuinely looked as though we might hold what we'd taken. The French resistance in our immediate section thinned, fell back, regrouped further down the trench line.
But the trench itself stretched on, segment after segment, further than my eye could follow in the smoke, and we did not have enough men left to hold more than the small length we'd already paid for. I understood this with the same flat clarity I'd felt asking myself, uselessly, where the mages were. We had taken a piece of ground we could not keep, with fewer men than the ground required, and the only question remaining was how long it would take the French to organise the counter-attack that would take it back.
It did not take them long.
---
I was reloading when the next wave hit our section — fresh French troops, not the exhausted defenders we'd already fought through, moving with the coordinated violence of men who hadn't yet spent themselves on this particular stretch of trench. I got one round off before a young soldier — I want to record that he looked young, younger than Hoffmann had been, with the wide, uncoordinated movements of someone who had clearly not yet learned the economy of motion that kept veteran soldiers alive in close work — came at me with his bayonet in a thrust that had more panic in it than training.
I parried it. I want that recorded, because it matters to me, even now, that I did not simply stand there and let it happen. I parried the first thrust and the second, and I believe, if he had been a more experienced soldier, that exchange might have ended differently.
He was not a more experienced soldier. He was someone's son who had been handed a rifle and a bayonet and approximately the same amount of training I'd given Hoffmann, and in his panic and inexperience he abandoned anything resembling proper form and simply drove the blade into me again, and then, when I didn't immediately go down, again, his technique entirely gone, just raw repeated motion born out of a fear I recognised completely because I had been carrying an identical fear in my own chest since the whistle blew that morning.
I felt each one separately. I want that recorded too, for whatever it's worth to anyone who reads this account afterward. There is a particular and specific horror in being killed badly, inexpertly, by someone too frightened to do it cleanly, and I experienced the whole of it with a clarity I had not expected death to offer.
I thought, in the very last clear moment available to me, of Hoffmann's question in the dark before dawn. Will it work, Herr Hauptmann?
I had told him the truth. I found some small, cold comfort in that, even now, even here, even as the trench floor came up to meet me and the noise of the fighting around me began, very gradually, to recede into something distant and no longer entirely my concern.
---
Oberst Karl Brandt
The report reached the chateau a little after nine, considerably faster than I'd expected, which I understood immediately as its own kind of bad news — quick reports from the front were rarely the kind that took time to compose carefully.
Vogt read it to me rather than simply handing it across, which had become, I'd noticed, his particular method of softening news he judged would land badly. Sixth Regiment's assault had reached the French trench. Had held a section of it, briefly. Had been thrown back by a counter-attack within the hour. Of the company that went over, current estimates placed survivors at under twenty men, with the company commander, Hauptmann Reinhardt, listed among the confirmed dead.
I sat with that for a moment longer than I typically permitted myself to sit with any single report, though I could not, even now, entirely tell you why this one earned the extra few seconds when Sector Four's three thousand had not.
"Mage support," I said. "Why wasn't there mage support on this assault."
Vogt consulted a separate file, the one that tracked deployment rather than casualties. "Most companies are committed elsewhere currently, Herr Oberst. The eastern push has priority allocation this month. What remains in this sector is held in reserve for a larger coordinated action — Colonel Hess's office was explicit that Sector Seven didn't meet the threshold for diverting assets."
"I see."
I did, in fact, see, with a clarity I found I would have preferred not to have. We had sent a hundred and ten men across four hundred metres of open ground against a fully manned defensive position with nothing overhead to support them, not because the mages were unavailable in any absolute sense, but because someone in an office further back than my own had decided this particular sector did not meet a particular threshold. I thought, briefly, of Reinhardt's personnel file — the citation from Verdun, the note about his men trusting him — and then I did what I had trained myself to do with thoughts of that particular shape, which was to set them aside in favour of the only question that remained operationally relevant.
"Sector Seven still needs taking," I said. "Prepare a second wave."
Vogt's pen paused, very briefly, over his notepad — the smallest possible hesitation, the kind I'd learned to recognise in him over the months we'd worked together, though he never once let it become anything more than that. "Yes, Herr Oberst. Which regiment?"
"Sixth again, once it's reinforced. We'll need a new company commander." I stood, finishing the last of the wine in my glass, and crossed to the tall cabinet against the far wall where the personnel files were kept in neat, alphabetised rows that the chateau's previous owners had presumably once used for something considerably more pleasant. "Reinhardt's replacement."
I opened the cabinet and ran my fingers along the folders, reading names in the good morning light that fell through the tall windows exactly the way it had fallen the previous morning, and the morning before that, and would, I had no doubt, continue falling tomorrow regardless of whatever I decided in the next several minutes.
I found a file. A young Hauptmann, recently promoted, solid record, no particular distinction either for or against him beyond simple competence and survival, which by this point in the war had become its own kind of distinction.
"This one," I said, setting the folder on the table beside Sector Four's report, which I noticed, only now, I had still not turned face-up since the previous morning.
I did not turn it over now either.
"Tell him to prepare his company," I said. "Same objective. We'll adjust the bombardment timing this time — perhaps that's where the previous plan went wrong."
I did not, in that moment, allow myself to consider whether the bombardment timing had been the actual problem, or whether I already knew, with the same clarity I'd brought to every assault since Sector Four, that it had not been.
Vogt wrote down the name. The morning light continued falling through the tall windows. Somewhere three kilometres away, in a trench that I had never seen and would, in all likelihood, never see, men I would not learn the names of until they had already stopped needing names were being told to prepare for dawn.