The first shot I fired from that window I don't remember taking. One moment I was pressed against the wall, stock to my shoulder, hands still shaking from the barrage — and then the rifle kicked and the sound filled the parlor and there was a man in the street below clutching his leg, going down hard on the cobblestones, and I understood distantly that I had done that.
I ducked below the sill as the return fire came, rounds punching through the window frame above me, sending splinters spinning past my ear like thrown needles. The wall plaster pocked and crumbled. I pressed my back against the stone, fumbling the bolt, chambering another round, breathing through my nose the way the sergeant had drilled us — slow, slow, you're no good to anyone dead — and then I was up again, firing at shapes in the smoke.
The square below was a nightmare of movement and noise. The Sarb infantry came in waves, gray and muddied, faces set with the particular grim focus of men who'd already decided they were willing to die for this street. Our machine guns in the church tower answered them — the familiar stutter and chatter, tracers arcing orange through the haze — and the first wave faltered, men going down in clusters, and then the wave broke and what was left of it pulled back into the smoke.
The silence afterward was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.
I lowered my rifle and looked at what the square had become.
Our men lay among theirs, olive drab mixed with gray, the blood between them the same color as everyone's blood always is. But it was the civilians that my eyes kept finding, the ones you couldn't look away from no matter how hard you tried.
The shopkeeper had died in his doorway. He was a heavyset man, the kind with thick forearms and a permanent squint from years behind a counter, and he'd caught shrapnel across the stomach and chest. He'd made it as far as the door frame before he couldn't go any further, and that's where he'd stayed, one hand still gripping the wood, the other pressed to a wound that had long since stopped bleeding. His apron had his name embroidered on it in red thread. I could read it from the window. I won't write it down.
The old woman was worse in a different way. She was face-down in the middle of the square, her shopping bag split open around her, vegetables scattered across the cobblestones — potatoes, a bunch of carrots, something dark and leafy. She'd been on her way somewhere. That was the thing that got me. She'd been on her way somewhere with her shopping and the world had ended in the middle of it. Her shoes had come off in the blast and were sitting upright a metre away, side by side, as if she'd placed them there neatly before lying down.
And then there was the child.
A boy, maybe six or seven, in a grey wool coat that had probably been his Sunday best. He was sitting against the base of the fountain in the center of the square, which at first made me think he was alive — the sitting position fooled me for a moment, the way he was leaning with his hands in his lap. But his head was tilted at the wrong angle and his eyes were open and he had been dead for some time. There was very little blood. That was the strange part. Whatever had killed him had been concussive rather than penetrating, the shockwave from a nearby blast doing internally what shrapnel does on the surface, and he looked almost peaceful except for the angle of his head and the absolute stillness.
I stared at him for longer than I should have.
The Sarb guns had done this. Shelling their own town, their own people, to flush us from the buildings. I understood the logic of it — the cold arithmetic of war, the calculation that says ten dead civilians is acceptable if it dislodges forty soldiers — and I hated that I understood it. We were all just pieces being moved across a board by men who would never stand in this square and see what the moving cost. I wiped the sweat from my eyes and pushed the thought down. Survival first. Philosophy later, if later ever came.
---
In the lull between assaults I realised I hadn't seen Karl since the barrage ended. The thought arrived quietly and then became urgent all at once. I scanned the square through the shattered window — bodies, smoke, rubble — and then I saw it across the street: a two-story house with its upper floor collapsed inward, timbers and roof tiles heaped in a jagged pile over what had been the entrance.
And from somewhere underneath it, a low groan.
I didn't decide to go. I just went — out the door, low, moving fast across the rubble-strewn street, leaping a crater that hadn't been there this morning, rounds kicking up dust at my heels close enough that I felt the disturbance in the air. I dropped to my knees at the pile and started pulling at the debris with my bare hands, splinters opening cuts across my palms that I didn't feel yet.
"Karl."
A hand shot out from between two fallen beams — filthy, knuckles white, grabbing my wrist with a grip that told me he was alive and frightened and determined to stay that way.
"Franz." His voice was rough with dust. "Took you long enough."
"I was busy," I said, and kept pulling.
He emerged piece by piece — first the arm, then the shoulder, then the rest of him, coughing up grey dust in long wracking spasms. His left leg was wrong, bent at an angle that made my stomach lurch to look at, the trouser leg torn and dark with blood from thigh to knee. But he was breathing. His face, when it came clear of the debris, was the colour of old chalk, smeared with grime — and he was grinning. That same grin. I could have hit him for it.
"Knew you'd come," he rasped. "Stubborn bastard."
"Save it," I said, getting his arm over my shoulders. "Can you stand?"
He couldn't, not really, but he tried, which was Karl all over. I took his weight and we moved, hobbling back through alleys choked with fallen masonry, the sound of sporadic fire keeping us pressed close to walls. Every step jarred his leg and I felt him absorb the pain in silence — a held breath, a tightened jaw — the way men do when they've decided not to give it the satisfaction of a sound.
We found what remained of the battalion in the ruins of a bakery. The smell of bread was still there, ghost-faint beneath the gunpowder and blood, the way a scent clings to a room long after the thing that made it is gone. Lieutenant Hauser stood over a map spread on a splintered counter, his mustache grey with plaster dust, his voice low and precise.
I caught the shape of it without needing to hear every word. Casualties too high. Supplies exhausted. Sarbs reinforcing on the eastern roads. The conclusion was written in the set of Hauser's jaw before he said it.
"We pull back across the river. Tonight. Use the dark."
---
Night came down hard, the sky sealed with smoke so that not even the stars got through. We moved out in small groups, abandoning what we couldn't carry — machine guns spiked with bayonets so they'd be useless to whoever found them, ammunition crates left behind like gifts we couldn't afford to give. The streets of Šabac were unrecognisable now, the town we'd taken twelve days ago reduced to a maze of rubble and shadow, fires dying in the ruins of buildings that had been homes and shops and a church where someone had been married last spring, probably.
Karl limped beside me, one arm around my shoulders, jaw set. He'd stopped making jokes somewhere around the third alley. That told me more about his pain than anything he might have said.
We passed a row of half-collapsed houses, and from behind a warped door came the sound of a child crying — not loudly, the muffled exhausted kind of crying that happens when someone has been at it for a long time and has no expectation of being heard. A girl, young by the pitch of it.
I slowed without meaning to. My hand went to the door latch.
My sister had cried like that once, near the end, when the fever had its grip on her and there was nothing anyone could do but sit with her through it. She was seven years old. I was fourteen and useless and I have never forgiven myself for how useless I was.
"Keep moving." The sergeant's voice behind me, flat and final.
I took my hand off the latch and kept moving. Whether she survived the night I never found out. I have thought about that door almost as often as I have thought about Mueller on the bridge.
---
The artillery found us in the dark.
Of course it did. We were a column of men moving through fire-lit streets, silhouetted against our own burning, and the Sarb gunners weren't blind. The first shell came in without warning and took four men from the middle of the column — not wounding them, not killing them cleanly, just removing them from the world in a single detonation that left a crater and a ringing absence where they had been. The men on either side of the gap stood for a moment looking at the space as if expecting them to reappear.
Then everyone ran.
The discipline we'd been drilled into dissolved in about thirty seconds. Shells walking up the street behind us, each one closer, buildings groaning and tipping into the road in slow avalanches of stone and timber that buried men beneath them. You could hear them sometimes, underneath, muffled voices calling out from under the rubble — one man was screaming a woman's name over and over, his wife's or his mother's, the sound getting weaker and then stopping — and there was nothing to do and we all knew it and we kept moving anyway because stopping meant joining them.
We passed a family in the street. A man and a woman and two small children, all four of them dead, arranged by the blast in a grotesque tableau — the father face-down in the gutter, the mother on her back with her arms spread wide, the two children crumpled together against a doorstep as if they'd tried to shelter one another at the end. They hadn't been soldiers. They'd just been trying to leave. Perhaps they'd waited too long, or perhaps there had never been a good time to leave, or perhaps they'd simply run out of luck in the middle of a street in a town that had stopped belonging to anyone.
I looked at them as I ran past and kept running. There was nothing else to do. That's what I told myself and it was true and it wasn't enough.
Then the bugles.
Sarb infantry pouring in from the outskirts, using our chaos against us, channelling us down streets that funnelled into killing grounds. It became something that stopped being a battle and started being something else — every man for himself in the most literal sense, fighting for the next ten feet of street, the next doorway, the next breath.
We backed into an alley, Karl and I, barricaded behind an overturned cart. The wood was damp and smelled of old vegetables. I fired at shapes at the alley mouth, hit one, lost count of how many rounds I had left. Karl had his pistol out, firing one-handed, but his breathing had gone wrong — shallow and fast, a sound I didn't like.
Three Sarbs came around the corner together.
The one in front went for Karl.
I saw it happening and I was not fast enough. The bayonet was already moving — a short practiced thrust, the kind of movement that has been reduced to muscle memory — and Karl was turning to meet it but his bad leg buckled and the blade went in just below the collarbone, punching through with a sound I will carry with me for the rest of my life however long or short that turns out to be. The tip of it emerged from his back, dark and slick, and caught the firelight for just a moment before the Sarb pulled it free.
Karl's eyes went wide. He looked down at his own chest with an expression I can only describe as disbelief — the expression of a man who has always been lucky discovering all at once that luck has a limit. His hands came up to the wound and couldn't do anything about it, pressing flat against his tunic as if he could hold himself together through sheer stubbornness, blood welling up dark and fast between his fingers, bubbling at his lips when he tried to speak, running down his chin in thin rivulets. He slid down the alley wall and sat in the mud looking up at me with those pale freckled features going slack, the grin he'd carried all the way from Vienna finally gone from his face, and the absence of it was the worst thing I had seen in a day full of terrible things.
I shot the Sarb in the face. Point-blank, no thought, pure reflex. The other two ran.
I dropped to my knees beside Karl. His hand found my arm, grip barely there.
"Burns," he said. A pause while he worked to breathe. Then: "Tell my ma."
"Karl—"
"Go." His grip tightened for just a moment, one last effort. "Franz. Go."
The shouts were closing in from both ends of the alley. I looked at his face — that ridiculous freckled face, the face of the man who had made twelve-hour factory shifts bearable for three years, who had told me war would be an adventure, who had been right beside me on the bridge and wrong about almost everything that mattered — and I memorised it the way you memorise things you know you're about to lose.
Then I squeezed his hand once, and I stood up, and I ran.
I am not proud of it. I am alive because of it. I have not yet decided how to feel about that and I suspect I never will.
---
The Sava appeared at the end of a burning street, black and wide and indifferent. The pontoons were chaos — men crowding the bridges, the wood groaning under the weight, some men going into the water and trying to wade across chest-deep with their rifles above their heads. The current was stronger than it looked. Most of the waders didn't make it, swept off their feet and taken downstream, heads going under in the dark, rifles still held up above the surface for a few seconds after, as if the men beneath them were still trying to do the right thing even while drowning.
And then our own machine guns on the north bank opened up.
Someone had mistaken us for the enemy — a reasonable mistake in the dark and the smoke, which did not make it any less of a catastrophe. Tracers cut across the water in flat bright lines. Men on the bridge went down, some pitching sideways into the river, some simply collapsing onto the planks, some standing for a moment with a puzzled expression before their legs gave. Hauser was screaming across the gap, waving a lantern in great furious arcs, his voice cracking with a kind of rage that had nothing left to lose: Cease fire, it's us, CEASE FIRE — and the guns went quiet, eventually, but the river had already taken what it was going to take.
Corporal Stein had been three men ahead of me on the bridge. I'd eaten breakfast with him that morning — hard bread and cold coffee, complaining about both. The friendly fire caught him in the back and came out through his chest and he went off the bridge without a sound, face first, and the current had him before anyone could reach. I watched him go under and kept moving because the men behind me were pushing and there was nowhere to go but forward.
I got onto the north bank and immediately fell.
The burn in my neck had arrived somewhere on the bridge without my noticing — I'd been too focused on moving to register it, which is a thing the body does under sufficient terror, filing information away for later. What I felt now was a white-hot line opened across the right side of my neck, deep enough that I felt it in my jaw and my shoulder simultaneously, and then the blood coming fast and warm, soaking my collar, running down inside my tunic. I got my hand to it. The blood pulsed between my fingers in a rhythm I recognised as my own heartbeat, which told me the artery was close but intact, which was the only good news I had.
My legs decided they were done. I went down on the riverbank mud and the sky above me was the colour of smoke and from somewhere close someone was calling my name and I thought, absurdly, of the engine factory — the smell of machine oil and hot metal, the particular clang of a drive shaft going home, the view from the loading dock on a winter morning when the river back in Vienna was icing at the edges and the light came off it sideways and made everything briefly look like it might be worth the trouble of being alive to see.
Hands grabbed me. Dragged me into the reeds. Cold mud against my cheek.
The darkness came in from the edges the way the river had come in around the pontoons — steady, patient, taking its time — and I let it come, because there was nothing else to do and nowhere left to run.