The retreat to Konin had left us a shadow of a battalion, and the Empire gave us no time to grieve it. Reports came in like poison gas, seeping under every door: Kaliningrad retaken, the northern lands swallowed back whole, their divisions driving south with a momentum that felt less like an army advancing than weather arriving. They meant to encircle us. Trap what was left of us in a noose of fire and iron and close it slowly.
We fortified Konin like men possessed. Trenches clawed into the earth with shovels and, when the shovels broke, with bare hands — fingers split, nails torn, blood mixing into the mud we packed against the walls. Barricades made from overturned wagons and the rubble of houses that had stopped being houses. Barbed wire that tore at our palms as we dragged it into place, strung between posts in the dark by men too exhausted to curse properly anymore. Machine-gun nests went up in gutted shopfronts and the upper windows of buildings that no longer had complete walls, belts of ammunition coiled and ready like something waiting to strike.
I worked through the night until my blisters burst and reformed and burst again, until I couldn't tell which of the stains on my hands were mud and which were mine. Commander Nowak moved along the lines with a lantern, his eyes sunken, his voice gone hoarse from twelve hours of giving the same orders in different words.
"Deeper. More wire. We hold Konin or the Empire swallows us whole. The Front's reinforcements are coming — buy every minute with blood if it comes to that."
I didn't yet know how literally he meant it.
---
Dawn came grey and indifferent, the air still carrying the smell of yesterday's unburied dead — a thick, sweetish rot that coated the back of the throat and didn't wash out with water. We crouched in our trenches, rifles cradled, waiting. Out in the fields, the bodies from the previous day's rout had begun to bloat and darken, crows working at them in unhurried groups, lifting and resettling whenever the artillery rumbled close enough to startle them.
Piotr was beside me. Nineteen, from Warsaw, working his rifle bolt over and over in a motion that had stopped being about the rifle.
"Think the mages come first," he asked, "or the infantry?"
"I don't know, Piotr."
He nodded like that was useful. The artillery rumbled out past the tree line, distant and constant. I thought about Justyna, her hands, our kitchen in the evening, whether she'd know if this was the day.
Then the forward observer's voice cut through everything.
"Movement! Approaching the fields!"
---
We strained over the parapet, through mist that hadn't fully lifted. Shapes resolved slowly into people. Our people — hundreds of Polish refugees trudging across the open ground directly in front of our position, bundles on backs, the old supported by canes, children crying in that exhausted register that means it's been going on for hours. They moved like water finding the only channel available, spilling across our entire field of fire.
Nowak had his binoculars up. "Civilians," he muttered. "If we fire, we're butchers."
Then he went rigid. I felt the wrongness at the same moment — shapes at the rear and flanks moving with a different rhythm, grey where the rest were faded browns and blacks.
"Empire troops! Behind them — using the refugees as a shield! OPEN FIRE!"
---
The guns opened up, and the field in front of us became something I will not lay out in full. I have decided that some horrors don't need to be catalogued to be understood, and what happened to that crowd in the next ninety seconds is one of them. What I will tell you is what happened in the trench, because that is mine to tell.
Piotr's hands froze on his rifle. His mouth opened and nothing came out for a long moment, and then what came out wasn't words.
A man two positions down — a father, who'd shown us photographs of his daughters three nights before — turned from the parapet and was violently sick into the mud, his rifle clattering against the wall. Nobody mocked him. Half of us wanted to do the same.
I kept my eyes forward because someone had to. Something closed inside me during those ninety seconds that I don't have a clean name for — a door, a hinge, some part of whatever I'd been before this war deciding it couldn't survive in the same body as what I was watching, and leaving.
Nowak stood with the binoculars lowered now, not looking through them anymore, his face the colour of the mist. "God forgive us," he said, once, quietly. Then, louder, because commanders don't get to stop: "Hold the line! They're closing — HOLD!"
---
The Empire's vanguard had used those ninety seconds exactly as intended. They reached the trenches and came over the lip with bayonets already moving, and what followed had nothing left in it of drill-ground technique.
A German dropped into our section directly ahead of me, rifle swinging toward me. I fired first, no memory of aiming, and the round caught him through the throat — not a clean wound, the bullet tearing sideways through muscle and cartilage, and he went down with both hands clawing at a ruin that no pressure could close, blood pulsing between his fingers in time with a heart that had perhaps four more beats left in it. He made a sound like air escaping a torn bellows. Then he made no sound at all.
Piotr was grappling with another a few feet away, the two of them locked in that ugly intimacy of close combat, grunting and straining, boots losing purchase in the mud. His knife found the man's eye — drove in to the hilt with a wet give I felt more than heard — and the man went rigid, every muscle locking at once, before his whole body sagged like a puppet with the strings cut, vitreous fluid and something darker leaking down his cheek as Piotr wrenched the blade free.
A third came at me with his bayonet lowered. I caught it on my own rifle, steel ringing against steel, and then closed the distance and put my knife into him below the ribs, angling up the way the sergeants had drilled into us without ever quite explaining why it worked better. It worked better. He made a sound I'd only ever heard from animals at slaughter, and what came up out of his throat onto my hands and forearms was hot and thick and smelled of bile, and I felt him go slack around the blade, his whole weight suddenly mine to hold up before I let him drop.
Further down the trench, a Sarb-pattern bayonet — no, German this time, I correct myself even now — caught one of ours across the forearm and then, on the second thrust, opened his stomach. He didn't fall immediately. He stood there for a moment with both hands pressed to a wound that wouldn't stay closed under any pressure, looking down at himself with the particular bewilderment of a man whose body has betrayed a promise it never explicitly made, before his legs simply stopped working and he went down into the mud already growing dark beneath him.
A rifle butt took a man across the jaw two feet to my left — I heard the crack of bone giving, saw teeth scatter pale against the trench wall — and the German who'd swung it didn't get to enjoy it, because the Pole he'd struck, somehow still upright, drove a knife up under his attacker's chin with the last coordinated motion either man would manage, and the two of them went down together, locked in a final embrace neither had chosen.
The trench filled with the particular chaos of men trying to kill other men in a space too narrow for anything but the rawest version of that exchange. Blood slicked the duckboards underfoot until they were treacherous as ice. The walls themselves bore witness, dark arterial sprays drying against raw earth. I fought because stopping meant dying, and lost track of how many hands had been on my rifle, my knife, my throat, and how many stopped moving because of something I'd done to the men they belonged to.
"Fall back! Second line!"
I found Piotr — his shoulder torn open, a flap of fabric and flesh hanging loose, white bone visible at the edge of the wound where a blade or fragment had gone deep — and hauled him bodily out of the trench, the two of us scrambling over ground that gave unevenly underfoot in ways I chose not to examine.
---
We fell back through Konin's broken streets into the second line, and the artillery found us there too — shells walking through the rubble from both directions, the town shaking apart in long convulsions. A position thirty metres to my left simply ceased to exist in a single detonation; the squad holding it was gone in the same instant the sound reached me, and what the blast left behind when the smoke cleared was a crater rimmed with things that had been part of six men a moment before, scattered without pattern across the broken cobblestones, and a settling quiet where their voices had been.
A shell landed closer, near enough that the overpressure alone dropped two men where they stood without a visible wound on either of them — their noses and ears bleeding freely, eyes open and fixed on nothing, the concussion having done its damage somewhere inside where I couldn't see it and didn't need to.
The Empire came on through all of it without slowing, boots over rubble, rifles cracking from positions we couldn't suppress fast enough. I fired when I had a target. One trooper rounding a heap of broken masonry took my round in the chest and folded at the knees, going down in the loose, sudden way of a marionette with its strings cut all at once, and stayed down, which by that point in the day felt almost merciful by comparison to everything I'd already watched happen to bodies that day.
But we were outflanked, low on ammunition, the wounded screaming from positions we couldn't reach. Nowak raised a filthy strip of cloth on the end of a bayonet.
"Surrender."
We came out with hands raised, weapons dropped in mud already churned dark, what was left of a battalion that had been whole two days before — perhaps a third of our number, covered in blood that was mostly not our own.
One man, broken past calculation by the day, feigned compliance and lunged for a fallen pistol near a dead trooper's hand. The response was immediate and total — a volley that caught him from three directions at once, the impacts visibly staggering his body before it folded, blood misting from multiple wounds in the same instant, and he was on the ground before the echo of the shots had finished rolling off the broken walls. None of us moved. Moving meant joining him.
The officer who took charge spoke Polish with a hard accent and harder eyes. "No mercy for resistors," he said.
They lined a number of us against a wall already dark with old stains I understood, looking at them, predated us by not very long at all. I won't describe what happened at that wall in the detail I've used elsewhere. I will say that the man immediately to my right was there, and then, after a single flat crack that I felt in my own skull before I understood I'd heard it, he was something else entirely — the wall behind him wearing what he'd been a half-second before — and I never learned his name, and I have regretted that every day since, because it felt like the smallest thing I could have given him and I hadn't managed even that.
Piotr was three places further down. His silence, when it came, was different from the others'. I have decided not to write more about that, not because I can't, but because some silences belong only to the men who heard them happen.
---
And then, for a handful of us, it stopped.
"These ones," the officer said, walking the line, selecting with the casual efficiency of a man assessing livestock. "Strong backs. Labour camps." A hand on my shoulder, pulling me aside. Three others.
Piotr was not among them.
We were bound and marched away as the executions continued behind us, each crack a small dark punctuation mark I felt rather than fully heard by that point, my mind having found whatever mechanism it needed to stop registering them one by one. Konin burned at our backs, pyres lighting a sky already grey with smoke, and somewhere in that light was everything I'd helped defend and everything I hadn't been able to save, and I walked into captivity not knowing which weighed more.