The train died with a long, shuddering exhalation of steam, the brakes shrieking against the rails, and then there was silence of a kind I hadn't heard before — not the comfortable silence of a quiet room but the silence of a place where noise had been so total and so recent that the air hadn't recovered yet.
I stepped off onto what passed for a platform — three planks thrown across churned earth — and my boot went straight into mud past the ankle. Not the clean mud of a building site or a rainy street. This was something else entirely. It had a smell, thick and organic and wrong, the kind of smell that gets into the back of your throat and stays there. Gunpowder and blood and rot and something underneath all of it that I couldn't name and didn't want to.
Pierre landed beside me and immediately sank to the shin. He looked down at his boot with an expression of such pure offence that under any other circumstances I would have laughed.
"This is a crime against leather," he said.
Marcel dropped off the carriage steps behind us, pack across his shoulders like it weighed nothing, and surveyed the landscape ahead with the expression of a man assessing a difficult job. "I've worked in worse," he said, which was almost certainly not true.
Jacques came last, spectacles fogged from the mist rolling off the river somewhere to our left. He cleaned them on his sleeve, put them back on, looked at what lay ahead, and cleaned them again as if the problem might be his vision rather than the landscape.
It wasn't his vision.
What had been farmland — you could still tell, faintly, from the way the ground had once been organised into fields, the ghost of old furrows under the devastation — had been worked over by weeks of shelling into something that looked like the surface of the moon if the moon were made of brown clay and misery. Shell craters everywhere, some shallow, some deep enough to swallow a man, all of them brimming with stagnant water the colour of old rust. The tree line to the east was stumps, every one of them, broken off at irregular heights like a mouth of rotten teeth. Coils of barbed wire caught the grey light. Somewhere in the distance, artillery rumbled with the patient, indifferent rhythm of weather.
Sergeant Leclerc materialised from somewhere, a wiry man with a scar along his jaw that pulled one corner of his mouth into a permanent expression of contempt. He looked at our uniforms — still relatively clean, the khaki not yet the universal grey-brown of front-line service — and his contempt deepened.
"Move out. Double time. The front needed you yesterday." He turned and walked, apparently confident we'd follow, which we did, because there was nowhere else to go.
---
The march was a kilometre of concentrated misery. The mud had a personality. It grabbed each boot on the way down and held it on the way up, a rhythmic sucking resistance that started burning in your calves after about thirty seconds and didn't stop. Pierre muttered a continuous low-level commentary of curses under his breath — inventive, specific, addressing the mud directly as if it could be reasoned with. Marcel powered ahead, jaw set, doing what Marcel always did when faced with something unpleasant which was simply refuse to acknowledge that it was unpleasant. Jacques slipped in the first hundred metres and went down face-first into the slime, and we hauled him up and he stood dripping grey mud from his chin and his spectacles and the pages of the notebook he'd somehow kept in his hand the whole time, and we laughed because it was that or the alternative.
The laughter didn't last.
The sky changed first. I noticed it the way you notice something wrong in a room before you can identify what it is — a quality of the air, a shadow that wasn't cast by clouds. I looked up and saw them.
They didn't look like aeroplanes. I'd seen aeroplanes, the clunky experimental things the Republic's engineers had been testing outside Paris, canvas and wire and noise. These were nothing like that. They were constructs of light and energy more than matter, shaped vaguely like great birds, wings that pulsed with a cold luminescence as they banked and wheeled above us. The mages who rode them were small figures at this distance but I could see the glow at their hands, the way they moved with the machines rather than just sitting inside them, part of the thing they were flying.
There were six of them.
"Ambush!" Leclerc's voice, raw with fury.
Then the first enchanted round came in.
It didn't travel like a normal bullet. A normal bullet you don't see — it's just suddenly in something, or it's missed. These left a trace in the air, a line of disturbed light, and hit the ground ten metres to our left with a crack that wasn't a sound so much as a physical event — a compression of air, a concussion that hit your chest and your ears simultaneously, and then the earth where it struck erupted upward in a column of fire and soil and what had been, a moment before, two men from the company behind ours.
One of them simply ceased. There is no better word for it. The blast was at his feet and the overpressure and shrapnel did their work in a fraction of a second and what remained of him was distributed across a radius of several metres in pieces that were too small and too many and I looked away before my mind could finish cataloguing them.
The other man lived for a little while longer, which was worse. He'd been far enough from the centre of the blast to survive the initial detonation but close enough that the shrapnel had opened him across the torso — a diagonal line from his left shoulder to his right hip, deep, through the jacket and through what was underneath. He was standing when I first saw him after the blast. Then he was sitting. Then he was on his back and he was making a sound that was less a scream than a sustained exhalation of pure animal agony, and he was looking down at himself with his hands pressing at the wounds and his fingers disappearing into them, and he was calling for his mother in a voice that got quieter and quieter and then stopped.
The field erupted. Men scattering, shouting, some running back toward the train in pure instinct, and that was when I understood what the veteran back in Paris had meant about the tracking rounds.
I watched one curve. That's the only word for it. A man from our company — I knew his face from the carriage, had shared cigarettes with him, didn't know his name — broke left and ran for a crater, and the round that had been heading somewhere else simply bent in the air and followed him. It caught him in the back between the shoulder blades and what the enchanted detonation did to his torso from the inside I can only describe by what I saw from the outside, which was that he came apart at the seams. The force of the internal explosion had nowhere to go but outward and it went outward through his ribs and his chest cavity and the man who hit the ground was not the shape a man is supposed to be.
A group of three had clustered together behind a low mound of earth, which was the right instinct against conventional fire and the wrong one against enchanted rounds. A single tracking bullet found them, detonated in the centre of the group, and the mound of earth was simply redistributed and what had been three men was now a problem of arithmetic that I refused to perform.
I was flat on the ground behind a rise of earth, hands over my head in the way that does nothing but feels like something. Pierre was two metres to my left, face pressed into the mud, both hands locked behind his neck. I could see his shoulders shaking and I couldn't tell if he was praying or crying and it didn't matter.
Then Marcel screamed.
Marcel didn't scream. That was the thing — Marcel was the kind of man who'd once caught his hand in a press at the garage and wrapped it himself and finished the job before going to the doctor. Marcel didn't make sounds like this. The sound he was making now had no relationship to the man I knew.
I turned.
A tracking round had grazed his right forearm — just grazed, the enchantment doing its work even from a partial contact — and detonated against his hand. What was left of it from the wrist down was a ruin of blackened meat and white bone fragments and something dark and wet spreading into the mud beneath him. The blast had cauterised some of it and left other parts bleeding freely and the combination of those two things in close proximity was obscene in a way that still comes back to me in the dark. He was clutching the stump with his remaining hand and the blood was coming between his fingers in pulses and he was looking at the place where his hand had been with eyes that had gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere behind the shock where the pain hadn't fully reached him yet.
"My hand," he kept saying. "My hand. Merde. My hand."
As if saying it might change what he was seeing.
The mages banked away as quickly as they'd come, their constructs tilting and rising into the overcast sky, the light fading from their wings as they climbed. I thought I heard something carried on the wind behind them — laughter, or something light and indifferent, the sound of people who had done a piece of work and were satisfied with it. Perhaps I imagined it. I have never decided.
The field behind us was a slaughterhouse. Men sprawled in the mud at wrong angles, some moving, some not. The ones who were moving were sometimes making sounds and sometimes moving silently, which was almost worse. Medics appeared from somewhere, sliding into the mud beside the wounded, working with the particular focused calm of people who have learned to narrow their attention to the immediate problem or lose their minds entirely. They got to Marcel, got morphine into him, wrapped the stump with practiced hands. His screaming reduced to a low, continuous sound like something running down. His eyes found mine briefly and I looked back and didn't know what to put in my expression so I just looked back, which was the only thing I had to offer.
Leclerc was back on his feet, covered in mud, his scar livid against his pale face.
"On your feet. Forward. Medics handle casualties — we march."
We marched.
---
You stop thinking, eventually. That's the thing nobody tells you. The mind has a threshold past which it stops processing and starts simply recording, and somewhere between the ambush and the trenches I crossed that threshold and the last hour of the march exists in my memory as a series of images without the emotional content that was supposed to go with them. Mud. Barbed wire catching the grey light. The stumps of trees. The back of Marcel's coat ahead of me before they took him to the aid station. The sound of my own breathing.
The trenches appeared gradually out of the landscape — at first just an irregularity in the ground, then a parapet of sandbags, then the full reality of them, stretching left and right as far as I could see in either direction, a wound cut into Europa's skin that apparently had no end. Revetted walls of timber and earth. Duckboards floating on the mud at the bottom. Coils of wire above and beyond. The smell was extraordinary — not the open-air rot of the battlefield but something more concentrated and domestic, the smell of many men in a confined space with nowhere to wash and nothing to burn the waste.
We dropped into them one by one, finding footholds in the mud of the walls. Veterans watched us arrive with the particular expressionless attention of men who had seen drafts of new arrivals before and had formed accurate expectations about how many of them they'd be watching leave.
A private with no front teeth offered Pierre a cigarette. Pierre took it without speaking. The private lit it for him and went back to looking at the wall across from him, which appeared to be his main occupation.
Pierre and I found a dugout — a burrow of reinforced timber and canvas lit by two lanterns and occupied by a dozen men in various states of exhaustion. We sat and ate because you eat when you can, a lesson the veterans communicated without words simply by doing it — stale bread, tinned beef in grey gravy, coffee that was mostly hot water with aspirations. Someone had rigged a radio in the corner, crackling and intermittent, and a comedian's voice drifted through the static making jokes about the Emperor's personal hygiene, and three men laughed, and for perhaps four minutes the dugout felt almost like a room where people existed rather than endured.
Then the bulletin cut in, the announcer's grave tone slicing through the static.
The Empire had invaded through Belgians. The entire western front had shifted. The Island Nation of Commonwealth had entered the war. Pals battalions from recent Paris arrivals were being redeployed north, immediately, to reinforce positions that were apparently under severe pressure from the weight of the Empire's push.
Pierre set his tin down on the duckboards very carefully and looked at me.
"We haven't even fired our rifles," he said.
"I know."
Jacques, who had appeared at some point and was sitting in the corner with his notebook open and nothing written in it, said: "How many men do you think they have."
Nobody answered him because nobody wanted to think about the answer.
---
The bombardment started twenty minutes later.
No warning. The first shell hit somewhere to the right of our section and the sound and the shockwave arrived as a single event — a crack and a compression that rang in your teeth and rattled the lanterns in the dugout and sent a fine fall of dirt sifting down from the ceiling. Then the second. Then so many that they stopped being individual events and became a continuous condition, the earth shaking in a sustained rhythm, the lanterns swinging, the timber props of the dugout groaning under the weight of the ground above them.
And then the mages came back. You could tell by the quality of the detonations — the enchanted rounds had a different signature, a sharper crack, an ozone smell underneath the smoke. They were working along the trench line, and the screaming from outside had a quality that told you the casualties were severe.
A shell hit the trench directly above our dugout.
The ceiling came in.
Not all at once — first a crack running across the main beam, then a sound like a held breath releasing, and then the earth came down in a wave, a flood of soil and splintered timber and darkness that hit me across the shoulders and drove me flat onto the duckboards. Cold mud in my mouth, immediate and total, filling my teeth and tongue before I could close my lips. In my nose, blocking both passages, so that the first breath I tried to take drew nothing. I was pinned — something across my back, a beam or a body or both, and the weight of it was absolute.
Dark. Complete and immediate.
I could hear, muffled and strange, the sounds of the men around me — Pierre's voice somewhere to my left saying something that wasn't words, just sound, the sound of a man telling the darkness he was still there. Something that might have been Jacques moving. The groan of the remaining timbers above, deciding whether they were going to hold.
I clawed at the mud in front of my face with both hands, trying to clear enough space around my mouth to breathe. My fingernails tore — I felt that clearly, that specific bright pain, which was somehow more real than everything else — and my fingers hit something solid in the earth, a rock or a root, and I moved around it and kept clawing. The mud filled back in behind my hand as fast as I cleared it. My lungs were burning now, the held breath reaching its limit, and the dark was doing something to my vision, black on black, shapes that weren't there.
Don't panic. The thought arrived in someone else's voice, calm and unreasonable. Panic kills you faster than the mud.
I stopped clawing. Exhaled the last of the held breath slowly through my nose, clearing both passages just barely. Got a breath — thin, muddy, tasting of earth and rot, but air. Got another.
Pierre was still making sounds. Jacques had gone quiet, which I refused to interpret.
Above us, through the earth and the timber and the weight of everything that had come down, the bombardment continued. The ground shook in steady rhythms. Another section of the ceiling gave somewhere to my right, a rush of soil and a man's voice cutting off mid-word.
I lay in the dark, breathing in the small space my hands had made, and thought about Le Coq Rouge — the amber light of the gas lamps, the cold glass in my hand, Pierre halfway through a story, Marcel laughing before the punchline. The smell of cigarette smoke and spilled wine. The newsboy coming through the door with his papers and his breathless urgency and the terrible, irreversible news.
Four mugs meeting in the middle of the table.
Hell. Why not. For the Republic.
The darkness pressed down, patient and complete, and the mud filled my mouth again, and I thought: this is what it costs. This is the price of why not.
Above me, the earth shook, and kept shaking, and didn't stop.