Righteo, now that I've made it back here to the Sanctum, I thought I might as well deposit my most recent work.
Well, the piece takes place in early 1945 as the Russians are beginning the final push into Berlin during World War Two. The perspective is that of a jaded Panzergrenadier feldwebel (Sergeant), who leads one last patrol against the first waves to save his home. His wife, on the other hand, sees that the battle has already been lost, and hopes to find her way to the Elbe, into the hands of the Western Allies and away from certain death at the hands of the Red Army. Hope you enjoy.
-Sgt
Adrenaline is a beautiful thing, Joseph thinks to himself with a snicker.
"Go! Move! Out of the truck!"
It starts in the head as a loftiness, a temporary immortality
that springs to the front of the cerebrum.
"I want a staggered column, up to the ridge. Sound discipline. Let's go."
Soon, it trickles down the neck, delves into the spine, seeps into the face: weary eyes go bloodshot, the mouth turns dry. He adopts the look of a madman.
"Fire on the left! Left! We need help over here! Sheisse!"
His muscles have no boundaries, expanding beyond any limits set before him. Pain is a moot point, a weakness of those unwilling to take risk. He begins to get a little cocky.
Ung-GOOM, as another shell hurls into the air. "Keep the Panther covered! Mach schnel! Keep up!"
Bullets whiz by. Massive cannons spurt shells and choke on red hot ashes. An ungodly mist envelops the field of combat, a small, rugged ridge in Germany. Anticipation, agitation, aggression, all separate, all at once.
The symphony of combat is a familiar record to his ears, again and again, the same sounds.
Joseph loads his gun mechanically, not even stopping to think as he jams the mag into the receiver. He had been doing this for eight years now, and it was starting to get old.
Flipping the killing contraption towards the enemy, he pushes and shoves back into the euphoric terror of war.
"So you return to the front?" she had asked him, a puzzled look over her face. "You'd rather be beaten to death by Russian barbarians than face your family?"
Joseph leaned at her, his hands held open in sympathy. "This is the only way I know how to help, Marie. I-"
She leapt onto his excuses, loud and harsh."I don't care about what you know and what you don't! I can teach you how to help, here!" She held out her hand to him, imploring, her eyes scouring his expression. "We could get out of Berlin, we could get to the Elbe." A shift in her hips. A change of tone. "We're talking about the survival of our family, Joseph!"
He slumped onto the crumbling wall behind him, one hand pinching his nose. She always gave him a migraine when they argued. "I don't intend to... die out there, Marie. I only hope to organize something, some semblance of defense so we don't have to leave." She still wasn't satisfied. "Look, if the army holds, we may still be able to live here. And think of the girls!" His voice changed to that of a parent. "We don't want the kids to see the outside, do we?"
She crossed her arms as her teary eyes searched his. "You want to live here? Go ahead. This place is nothing to me. Nothing but ruins and burning buildings, and it isn't much better than it was before." She straightened out her back, so she towered over her hunched husband. "If you don't stay, I'm taking the children. We'll go to Switzerland, to my father. I'll never come back to this goddamn country again."
Joseph looked away from her. He wanted so badly to simply command her, demand for the family to stay, but never would a weary soldier be able to retaliate against the wrath of a mother. "Okay." Joseph stood, his arms limp with the weight of a decision too hard for man. He kissed Marie on the forehead as the two slowly embraced.
The sole remaining window in the house shimmered as the sun eeked through its dirty panes, its light showing a cracked cement floor and dreary green walls, weary of bombs and artillery.
Joseph nodded, less to Marie and more to himself, tears now welling in his eyes. This is the only way, he kept saying to himself. The only way. He couldn't let the Russians have the family. The only way.
With one last look, the two turned their backs on each other. Joseph grabbed his rifle and gear; Marie scooped up her frying pan, and some eggs for the children.
Another day, another loss, Joseph thought.
Then he walked out the door.
Joseph's worn jackboots stamped down the dirt-covered street, the hobnails crushing the little pebbles and debris that were thrown from broken walls and roads. Squares of rock and splintered chunks of wood littered the roadway, the buildings they once held up gutted, mangled, an empty shell of what they once were. Empty windowsills gaped into empty houses which contained empty bodies. The stench was horrible, but one got over it after a couple of months. The rumble and dimmed flashes of far-off artillery could be heard and seen as they lit up the darkened sky.
A mist encompassed the alleyways and streets, making them seem all the more devoid of any real life. Shapes and shadows flittered in and out of view: a child carrying stolen shoes; rats scurrying amongst the abandoned alleyways; a mother grabbing what food she could find among the rubble; Volkspolizei patrolling the streets, broken bottles and two-by-fours in hand. Civilization in its most primal form.
He followed the thrumming sound of a military engine to return to his halftrack, his driver and soldiers where he left them the previous night: Sitting, shivering, hunched over around one of the burning house fires, their guns laid against the odd contraption of a vehicle: part truck, part tank, two wheels up front and then treads scrunched in the rear, a machine gun on top. A herald of technology in the backwards town.
No one moved as he approached.
"Ready?" Joseph shouted to the driver. He gave a slow nod as Joseph hiked through the rubble closer to the group. "Alright, then. Load up." More nods, some murmurs, a sniffle. They all quickly checked their pockets. There was swearing as some realized they were robbed.
"Anyone got a map?"
"As long as you've got some coffee to trade," one grumbled.
"To hell with it if Zurich is cooking, though."
One laughed, then stopped when his cough got the best of him.
"They'll have some at the front if we get there fast enough," Joseph said with a sly smile.
Lots of groans, then some started moving, talking. They started acting human.
"You move like bears, you old bastards," the youngest among them wheezed.
"Yeah, we've got the hair for it, too," someone shouted back.
Sickly yellow smiles flashed as they unanimously scraped and wrenched their way into the back of the armored car. They fell into regular conversation as the halftrack started; small talk, hopeful talk. There was a pop as the metal car awoke, then a gush of black smoke as it lurched into movement. The squad coughed and swore as the cloud rose into the passenger seats.
The driver laughed at the insults and death threats as he settled into his fur-covered seat. "C'mon, baby," he cooed behind his massive welding goggles and grubby, soot-covered five-o'clock shade. "Let's get this show on the road."
Night came slowly, but never really took over the sky. Artillery pounded even harder than during the day; muffled blasts, barely audible over the rumble of the engine, as rounds struck their targets, then sharp squeals as Stalin's Organs shot off rocket after rocket, each one a fiery speck and swirling gray tail on a black canvas.
Joseph curled himself into a ball in the tiny seating compartment of the halftrack, squeezing between the others for warmth in the unforgiving spring frost. Nobody said much after the first few minutes, and only the faint but growing sounds of desperate battle could be heard over the crunch and crumble of wheels and tracks over destroyed buildings. Names of villages long gone and streets long bombed passed by: Machen Drive, Sterling District, the Goerring mansion; all ruins, nonsensical jigsaw puzzle pieces of what they used to be. Joseph knew; he had been to each of them.
One of the soldiers sniffled, head in his hands, another kid moving closer to confront him.
"Hey, Zurich. Zurich?"
Zurich mumbled incoherently, then yelled in bewilderment between his sobs, a fist smashing into his leg with a quiet thump.
"What's the problem, soldier?" Joseph had poked his head out from his cocoon.
All the man could do was point. Outside the compartment, behind them, to the right. Joseph gaped in disbelief.
"Driver."
"Ja, leutnant?"
"Stop the goddamn car."
Five people, a mother, three boys, and a girl, blindfolded and gagged with Nazi flags. Dead, one shot to the head each. Each body had been mutilated, the boys heads shaved of hair and beaten to a pulp, the women's dresses ripped apart, their bodies bare for their captors. The wall behind them was painted with blood and bullet holes, and a slogan in bold, socialist red:
"Death to faciste.
For the glory of the mother country."
The crying soldier sagged forward in agony, falling to his knees in front of his gutted house and lifting the soulless body of his wife to his face, his tears diluting the blood leaked onto her cheeks as he turned to face each of his dead children.
He grinned.
"And to think, I've never met the kids before."
Chuckles turned to tear-drenched laughs, laughs into hysterical yells, the screams into a stream of cries and sobs.
The other soldiers stood and watched.
"I guess it's true, what they say," one said in a hushed tone.
"What is that?" Joseph whispered back.
"The sound of a single man's grief is louder than the entire symphony of war."
Joseph met the waiting eyes in the operator's seat as he eased into the back of the waiting halftrack.
"Let's drive."
The engine began to rev, smoke belched out of the exhaust.
"What about that guy, what about Zurich?"
"The war's over for him."
The driver sighed and turned back to the controls. Joseph slid into his place again, adjusted his helmet so it shielded his gaze from the explosions on the horizon, and closed his eyes as the rumble of battle and Zurich's cries nursed him to sleep.
"Mach schnel," he mumbled.
There was a sharp knock at the wooden door. A thousand twisted images gripped Marie as she whipped away from her suitcase at the sound, the clothes she was folding splaying from the table out onto the cold cement floor. She cursed under her breath.
"Frauline?" a breathless voice called.
Marie stood in shock, fiery nights and days shrouded in choking smoke rushing back to her. Her eyes passed over vibrant greens and festive reds drifting nonchalantly, settling over the smudges of brown on gray, explosions over a manufactured wasteland.
"Mein frauline?" the voice beckoned again.
She hunched over, picking each dress up slowly, examining it, remembering how each was bought, recalling which nonsensical meeting or officer's dinner she had worn it to, what Joseph thought of each one. Happy memories, she thought. Those were hard to come by.
Tired of trying to peer in through bullet holes, the visitor shoved the door forward, its oaken sheen bringing in whatever light the sun could muster through the fog. "Hallo?"
Marie stopped when she came upon a deep blue, the image pulling out another thousand pictures: conquering the Alps with Joseph and her family; the honeymoon, skiing the night away; resting, arguing... arguing, yelling, screaming. Anything but holy matrimony, he had told her. Then she had slapped him, harder than she intended. She thought she still could see the scar from the table corner on his temple the last time they saw each other.
A man's shadow obscured further observation of the palette of dresses. She turned on her knees to see a Wehrmacht man, not much different from her husband, but younger, his eyes bloodshot, a short beard growing on his lean and muscular jaws. His entire body heaved under the weight of a monotone greatcoat that draped all the way down to the ankles, and he began to talk.
"Russians, not far, close, shelling today or tomorrow." He doubled over onto his legs, and took off his helmet, wiping sweat from his brow. "Evacuation. Now."
Marie nodded slowly. How different was this man from Joseph? He stood tall and proud like him, wore his garb, was handsome like him. What made Joseph special? Her eyes wandered over the ragged body of the soldier as he straightened his composition.
The man's eyes caught hers mid-examination. "I have my own wife to go to, frauline," he muttered, his tone turning from one of respect to pity. Marie winced, then managed a quiet
thank you.
There was an awkward silence as the man scanned the room. Without looking, he quietly asked, "Food?"
He was too desperate to reason with, so she simply told him. "Last cupboard on the left."
The man grunted as he judged the weight of a loaf of bread, then stuck it down his greatcoat pocket with a smile barely flashing over his face. His eyes darted to Marie, but they went quickly back to the cement floor in shame. "Danke."
He, too, walked out the door, Marie thought to herself, and he, too, was swallowed by a force beyond her control, a force so basic and fierce that no single person could ever stop it. Not even the wrath of a woman scorned.
She slumped down onto the floor, her possessions flattened into the dusty floor around her as her mind raced ahead.
How much longer until her family walked through that threshold, as well? How many more times could they evade it before retribution for a war they were marked responsible for ended them?
She began pulling, yanking the few things that remained unpacked to her, wrapping herself in what she had left, the pastel blues and greys covering her tired eyes, shading them from the dark realities in front of her.
The weight of a dying, wheezing world was being left on her shoulders for her alone to bear, and the only people who could help her were being shredded apart along with it.
So she began to cry.
Joseph's eyelids yanked away from his bloodshot pupils as a loud snap and a hard lurch disturbed his slumber. The halftrack driver swore as the first birdcalls of morning sounded the coming of another day.
"There goes that axle again." He turned to face the others in the seating compartment "Achtung! Big, strong, wundersoldaten in the back!" The men remained in their seats. The cold leather was better than the still-frozen ground. "Shut the hell up, Kretz," one yelled back.
Joseph leaned out from his cramped seat and shot the agitated soldier a look. "You shut the hell up, Daupman."
The other soldiers came to attention quickly now.
"But feldwebel-"
"No buts. Kretz is the driver. If you want to get into any part of this godforsaken war, then he deserves your respect." Joseph leaned closer, his crystal blue eyes peering deep into Daupman's hazel ones, breaking apart any resistance to his commands. "I don't consider telling someone to shut the hell up respectful."
Daupman stared back for a second, then pulled back into his seat, his face contorted into a snarl. "Hrmph."
Joseph slunk back into his seat as well. Still kids, he thought.
He sat up straight, wiping his dripping nose and rubbing the flakes from his eyes. He looked into the swirling gray soup that was the sky. "Alright," he mumbled. Time for some military muscle. "Daupman, since you so handily volunteered yourself, you're on repair duty. Junkers, you're with him. No, don't give any crap. You know as well as me you were the fool who spilt the oatmeal last week. Now, come on. Up. We've got to rejoin the line at Seelow before tomorrow." Joseph looked around at the eager eyes surrounding him. "I guess the rest of us are going on recon. I want to know if we're going to run into any more sniper problems."
The two pointed out for repair duty slid out the sides to assist the already yapping Kretz while the rest of the troops quickly began to file out of the back with Joseph.
The earth didn't budge as he fell onto it; the road the halftrack rested on was of gray-green cobblestones, but it still held strong. Good, he thought. The squad could move quickly and without delay. He pointed into the general direction the squad had been driving and grunted. Go that way.
Joseph started taking mental notes: surrounding area was flat, a mishmash of crumbled houses and orchards- probably a little vineyard of some rich Prussian family before the war knocked on their door. Some of the trees had taken direct artillery fire and exploded into fantastic shapes, their middles flayed open, massive wooden spikes stabbing randomly into space as they bent slightly with the wind. Like a chicken without a head, Joseph thought. He chuckled at the image.
One soldier dragged slowly on an old porcelain pipe. "Sky is gray," he grumbled, his voice cracked and low. "Cossack weather. Like always."
Joseph didn't really know why he enjoyed such things, why he had such violent little tendencies.
"Like a big goddamn soup. Does it ever change these days?" The old man took another puff on his pipe.
Maybe it was the war getting to him, changing him, Joseph pondered. His head never really was right after the opening shots in Barcelona, anyway.
A younger soldier was checking the ammo belt he carried for the gunner when he joined in. "I'm somewhat glad, you know. No sky, no planes. And since we have no planes left." The boy shrugged. "You know."
Joseph scratched his chin as he began to walk, a rearguard to the squad. Maybe, after so many drills and advanced lectures and theoretical studies, he had reverted to a primal state. Maybe, he wondered, he had become nothing more than a simple caveman, an idiot savant to war and all its monotonic savagery.
The gunner checked up with the ammo guy, and, a menacing MG-42 light machine gun balanced on his shoulders, rolled up his green-gray sleeves, revealing a golden brown sun tan and long, rugged scars. "Thank Gott im Himmel, it's getting warmer. I thought the winter would go on forever. Isn't that right, Bullets?" He slapped the ammo guy on the back.
Or maybe this was just the way he was: a barbarian, a man with a natural bloodlust. Perhaps his entire life had been the result of this one little tic in his mind that allowed him the grimmest sense of humor he thought possible.
Bullets nodded. "In our condition, and with a winter like that, I wouldn't be surprised if it did last forever."
Marie had always said that, even at the very beginning, as he recalled. He was a madman, a fool. Thank God he had joined the army, she had yelled, because she didn't deserve to put up with such disgusting manners. Like rats, she had screamed. These heroes of the Reich, these pompous bastards who'd rather kill one another for some earth and water than raise a proper family. No better than vermin.
Joseph shook his head, wiped it of anything outside war. Focus. Focus.
Smoker shook his head as well. "That fight, the bridgehead at Vistula, that was nothing. Like a slap match between gentlemen compared with what we're about to get."
Bullets and Gunner glanced at each other, and then at the old man walking along, smoking his pipe, a gun in his hand and grenades in his greatcoat pocket. Bullets asked first.
"Were you there?"
"Hrm?"
"At Vistula. Protecting the bridgehead."
"That's how I got this nasty number here." Smoker pulled back his collar to reveal at least ten stitches along the hairy, pale, wrinkled neck, still an irritated red from the bullet wound. "Fer der Fuhrer," he grumbled, then promptly spat on the ground
next to the road.
Bullets shrank back. Gunner stepped between the two. "So. This one." He paused for a second, looked at Bullets, looked back. "Are you scared?"
Smoker thought for a moment, then grunted a 'Ja' between his puffs. "Shitless," he added.
Joseph automatically flipped the G-41 semi-automatic rifle that rested on his back into his hands as the first pops and squeals of the day's artillery punctuated the others' words. "How subtly the truth rings," he whispered.
A hand in the front of the advance went up.
"Quiet. Find cover."
Joseph went down with everyone else when the point man called the order, then ran crouched up to the front of the squad. "Situation."
"We heard Russian, from the terrace." The point man pointed at the last standing house next to the orchard. "Probably scout party. Looters."
"Hm." Joseph didn't like it. Flat ground, lots of cover. Easy ambush. "Do we still have someone with a panzerfaust?"
"Let's see."
The hand went up again, the shape of a P, then crossed fingers. Someone swiftly joined the two.
Bullets looked quizzically at the building. "Tank?"
"No," Joseph whispered as he pointed out the target. "I want a rat hole, the closest side of the building."
Bullets nodded, unclipped the grenade launcher from his belt, and let it rest on a stone wall. He aimed. "Got it."
The pointman signaled again to the squad behind them, telling them to form up in cover, then jumped into the nearest crater. Joseph slid behind an abandoned cart, then nodded to Bullets, who nodded back without looking away from his sights. He took a breath, his finger braced on the rough trigger. His grip tightened.
"Go!" Joseph shouted.
They broke cover at once, weapons at ready.
Bullets pulled the trigger.
There was a quiet 'pop' as the explosive detached
succinctly from its tubing.
The explosive flew into the wall, leaving a clean hole near the bottom and smashing into something behind it, where it erupted into a ball of flame and light for an instant. Dust and excited Russian spewed out of the opening as the squad's backs simultaneously hit the stones below it with a collective thump.
"Granate!" A soldier primed the explosive on a stick grenade, shimmied up to the hole, and tossed it in. There was a crack and flash, and Joseph jumped in through the makeshift entrance without so much as a nod.
Dust clouded his sight, a stench of burnt flesh flooded his nose. Something moved on the right, near the door. He raised his rifle. Ka-shh, ka-shh. Kept moving. Another on the left. Ka-ka-shh. It dropped, sprawling onto the ground. Kept going.
There was a yell, and he felt the swinging of a rifle butt as it narrowly missed his right ear. He whirled about, gun in one hand, the other yanking out the knife from his belt. He pulled it upward, the blood from the first slice warm on his freezing face. He repeated the motion, again, again.
He stabbed hard, the knife sticking into the man in front of him. Joseph's world spun downwards and he left the figure to its death. He staggered backwards, tripping on something, and took a heavy breaths as he fell against a wall.
Screams and cries for forgiveness and moving shadows in the dust swirled about him. He pulled his knees to his chest, clutched his rifle between them, and bowed his head as his squad finished the job.
"Where are we going?" the child nagged. "I don't understand. What's going on? Are you alright, mom?"
"Fine. I'm fine," Marie replied sternly. She stared ahead, at a quiet forest, into their future, into the uncertain.
"Then where are we going? What's the problem?"
"Daddy wants us to go away, little one."
"Why?" Ingrid yanked on her arm hard, demanding an answer. "Does daddy love you still? You said he loves us." The child's eyes began to water; the world was a confusing place.
Marie sighed and stopped walking, looking down at her child. "Because the world here is too angry," she whispered. "And daddy still loves us." She pulled her youngest along as they kept on going. "That's why he wants us to leave."
A gust of wind disturbed the thick layer of soot that encrusted the landscape, the outskirts of the city that the family had once called home. Marie stopped looked back for an instant, taking a last glance at the flattened old buildings, towers of smoke that ascended towards nothingness and the little spots of light, some slowly destroying a culture and others prolonging its inevitable death. Marie turned away.
The country ahead was little encouraging. The paved roads slowly degraded into an earthy dark brown pockmarked with shards of metal and debris, shades of houses and broken windows transforming into an endless darkness under twisted trees, unknown eyes observing from discreet locations. Mother nature was as unrelenting as the Russians.
"Are we going to play in the forest, mother?"
The beast stared back at her, beckoning them to their doom. This was their future, Marie thought. This was the only choice left for her and the girls. Joseph could have that man-made hell that Hitler and Stalin contrived. She would venture into the prison of nature's design.
"We'll just be passing through, honey," she whispered. "Remember, we have to get Gretchen from school, right?"
"Oh, yes!" The girl propped herself up at the mention of her sister.
Marie smiled at youthful incomprehension. She readjusted the pack she carried and squatted down to Ingrid, a rascal smirk across her face. "Now," she whispered as she held Ingrid at her shoulders. "I'll race you through the forest!"
Ingrid grinned back. "Well, then, you have no chance at beating me!" she took off, her little green knit bag bobbing along after her.
"Get back here, you!" Marie laughed as she ran, scooping her child up and sticking her tongue out at her. Ingrid returned the favor, and they both laughed. The girl's eyes beamed as mother and child giggled together among the craters and around the minefields in the murky blackness of the firs, pines, and bushes.
The squad came to grips with what just happened around in their new home, a wrecked little villa next to a mutilated orchard. The clouds of dust had settled, laying on furniture and bodies, giving a derelict feel to the single, long room in the building. The three dinner tables had been turned over, the fine cherry tree chairs already chopped apart for firewood. All the windows had been smashed in, the light trickling in making the jagged remnants of the glass glitter in the afternoon sun. Candle holders had been scratched so that their gold covering lay flaked on the ground, diamonds and gems in earrings and rings ripped out and lost among the shards of glass; the few found amongst the wreckage spilled out of the pockets of the five dead men in the middle of the room.
Little curls of smoke from the old porcelain pipe licked at the ceiling. There were clicks and rustles as the men reloaded their guns slowly, lackadaisically. A few sat in the corners, hands in their matted hair, wrapped about their cold shoulders, twiddling nervously in their pockets, trying to stave off logical human thought for just a little longer.
A still-hanging chandelier shook violently, the rattling glass and metal waking the dormant killers. Then the ground, too, and soon the rest of the house began to tremble.
Bullets looked up at the dirt falling from the holes in the ceiling. "Shouldn't we move?"
A picture frame fell to the floor, shattering. The pieces of glass and dust began to dance on the floor. No one moved.
"We'll survive," Joseph replied, standing up to peek out a window.
An eerie whistle slowly rose over the hills to the East, and the first artillery shells began to rain down around the orchard.
Five simultaneous explosions outside rocked the house, throwing chunks of dirt against the walls. Another few hit behind the house, on the road, white chemical flames licking at the scorched cobblestones flying everywhere.
Smoker joined Joseph at the window. He sneered. "I guess we're valuable enough to use phosphorous rounds on," he grumbled.
"Huh," was all Joseph could utter. He found the explosions fascinating.
The shells kept coming, an underlying rumble of firing guns still present between explosions. One hit the orchard, igniting the dismembered oaks around it. Another smashed into a tree, split it, and failed to detonate, the steel casing smoking in the ground.
There was a closer whistle, a higher squeal. Joseph straightened up. Not good.
"Down!" he shouted.
An incoming round rammed into the other side of the house, the chemicals and burning fumes lashing out at anything and everything, engulfing a table, some chairs, and one of the soldiers in flames.
The hapless man fell to the floor without a sound; he began to writhe and squirm, his lungs melting from inside as he unknowingly inhaled the phosphorous gas. He held out his hands, grasping for something to hold onto, groping for one last taste of humanity as he vomited up his stomach acids.
"Don't help him." Some soldiers held back their friends. "Stay clear of the chemicals," they shouted.
The man's eyes, looking wildly at his comrades, the ceiling, his own charred being, finally widened as the life was smoked out of him, his arms pulling back into his chest and his hands curling into abstract shapes.
The far-off rumbling stopped, the last few whoomp-booms kicking dirt up against the house before silencing.
The squad stood, circling around the hole in the far wall, the burning furniture, and the smoking body in the corner, its pale-white eyes staring out of a blackened face.
Joseph stepped in front of the group, looking around at them. Some had begun to pray, others simply observed in pure amazement. One still twiddled his fingers. Joseph turned back to the dead man, leaning over and snapping the dog tags around his neck off, sticking them in his pocket. He stood for a moment, looking at the dead man in front of him, at the name and number on a tag.
And his eyes welled up with tears.
Was this all they were to be remembered by? Was this the
fate they were condemned to?
Someone coughed. "We should go."
Metal and string. That's all we were ever worth.
"Feldwebel?"
Joseph nodded. "Ja." He hurried to join the others shuffling out the door.
They walked out not into Germany, but into a hellish forest, into the orchard: the trees burnt as if torches, their jutting spikes becoming matches in the choking smoke disturbed by the artillery. The ground underneath them lay barren, the plants and grass uprooted or burnt as well. Some men stopped, observing the scene.
Joseph looked back at them. "Let's go." Nobody moved.
Something snapped. Joseph couldn't take it anymore. They needed to leave.
He yelled at the hellish world as he flung his helmet to the ground, his blonde hair wildy flying around his scarred and worn face. "Let's fucking go!" he screamed.
The men stared at him, in shock.
Joseph sighed. He kicked at a stone, then beckoned them to him. "Schnel." He turned around and marched solemnly into the fire and flame.
The others took another quick glance at the little villa, then followed him headlong.
Well, the piece takes place in early 1945 as the Russians are beginning the final push into Berlin during World War Two. The perspective is that of a jaded Panzergrenadier feldwebel (Sergeant), who leads one last patrol against the first waves to save his home. His wife, on the other hand, sees that the battle has already been lost, and hopes to find her way to the Elbe, into the hands of the Western Allies and away from certain death at the hands of the Red Army. Hope you enjoy.
-Sgt
Adrenaline is a beautiful thing, Joseph thinks to himself with a snicker.
"Go! Move! Out of the truck!"
It starts in the head as a loftiness, a temporary immortality
that springs to the front of the cerebrum.
"I want a staggered column, up to the ridge. Sound discipline. Let's go."
Soon, it trickles down the neck, delves into the spine, seeps into the face: weary eyes go bloodshot, the mouth turns dry. He adopts the look of a madman.
"Fire on the left! Left! We need help over here! Sheisse!"
His muscles have no boundaries, expanding beyond any limits set before him. Pain is a moot point, a weakness of those unwilling to take risk. He begins to get a little cocky.
Ung-GOOM, as another shell hurls into the air. "Keep the Panther covered! Mach schnel! Keep up!"
Bullets whiz by. Massive cannons spurt shells and choke on red hot ashes. An ungodly mist envelops the field of combat, a small, rugged ridge in Germany. Anticipation, agitation, aggression, all separate, all at once.
The symphony of combat is a familiar record to his ears, again and again, the same sounds.
Joseph loads his gun mechanically, not even stopping to think as he jams the mag into the receiver. He had been doing this for eight years now, and it was starting to get old.
Flipping the killing contraption towards the enemy, he pushes and shoves back into the euphoric terror of war.
"So you return to the front?" she had asked him, a puzzled look over her face. "You'd rather be beaten to death by Russian barbarians than face your family?"
Joseph leaned at her, his hands held open in sympathy. "This is the only way I know how to help, Marie. I-"
She leapt onto his excuses, loud and harsh."I don't care about what you know and what you don't! I can teach you how to help, here!" She held out her hand to him, imploring, her eyes scouring his expression. "We could get out of Berlin, we could get to the Elbe." A shift in her hips. A change of tone. "We're talking about the survival of our family, Joseph!"
He slumped onto the crumbling wall behind him, one hand pinching his nose. She always gave him a migraine when they argued. "I don't intend to... die out there, Marie. I only hope to organize something, some semblance of defense so we don't have to leave." She still wasn't satisfied. "Look, if the army holds, we may still be able to live here. And think of the girls!" His voice changed to that of a parent. "We don't want the kids to see the outside, do we?"
She crossed her arms as her teary eyes searched his. "You want to live here? Go ahead. This place is nothing to me. Nothing but ruins and burning buildings, and it isn't much better than it was before." She straightened out her back, so she towered over her hunched husband. "If you don't stay, I'm taking the children. We'll go to Switzerland, to my father. I'll never come back to this goddamn country again."
Joseph looked away from her. He wanted so badly to simply command her, demand for the family to stay, but never would a weary soldier be able to retaliate against the wrath of a mother. "Okay." Joseph stood, his arms limp with the weight of a decision too hard for man. He kissed Marie on the forehead as the two slowly embraced.
The sole remaining window in the house shimmered as the sun eeked through its dirty panes, its light showing a cracked cement floor and dreary green walls, weary of bombs and artillery.
Joseph nodded, less to Marie and more to himself, tears now welling in his eyes. This is the only way, he kept saying to himself. The only way. He couldn't let the Russians have the family. The only way.
With one last look, the two turned their backs on each other. Joseph grabbed his rifle and gear; Marie scooped up her frying pan, and some eggs for the children.
Another day, another loss, Joseph thought.
Then he walked out the door.
Joseph's worn jackboots stamped down the dirt-covered street, the hobnails crushing the little pebbles and debris that were thrown from broken walls and roads. Squares of rock and splintered chunks of wood littered the roadway, the buildings they once held up gutted, mangled, an empty shell of what they once were. Empty windowsills gaped into empty houses which contained empty bodies. The stench was horrible, but one got over it after a couple of months. The rumble and dimmed flashes of far-off artillery could be heard and seen as they lit up the darkened sky.
A mist encompassed the alleyways and streets, making them seem all the more devoid of any real life. Shapes and shadows flittered in and out of view: a child carrying stolen shoes; rats scurrying amongst the abandoned alleyways; a mother grabbing what food she could find among the rubble; Volkspolizei patrolling the streets, broken bottles and two-by-fours in hand. Civilization in its most primal form.
He followed the thrumming sound of a military engine to return to his halftrack, his driver and soldiers where he left them the previous night: Sitting, shivering, hunched over around one of the burning house fires, their guns laid against the odd contraption of a vehicle: part truck, part tank, two wheels up front and then treads scrunched in the rear, a machine gun on top. A herald of technology in the backwards town.
No one moved as he approached.
"Ready?" Joseph shouted to the driver. He gave a slow nod as Joseph hiked through the rubble closer to the group. "Alright, then. Load up." More nods, some murmurs, a sniffle. They all quickly checked their pockets. There was swearing as some realized they were robbed.
"Anyone got a map?"
"As long as you've got some coffee to trade," one grumbled.
"To hell with it if Zurich is cooking, though."
One laughed, then stopped when his cough got the best of him.
"They'll have some at the front if we get there fast enough," Joseph said with a sly smile.
Lots of groans, then some started moving, talking. They started acting human.
"You move like bears, you old bastards," the youngest among them wheezed.
"Yeah, we've got the hair for it, too," someone shouted back.
Sickly yellow smiles flashed as they unanimously scraped and wrenched their way into the back of the armored car. They fell into regular conversation as the halftrack started; small talk, hopeful talk. There was a pop as the metal car awoke, then a gush of black smoke as it lurched into movement. The squad coughed and swore as the cloud rose into the passenger seats.
The driver laughed at the insults and death threats as he settled into his fur-covered seat. "C'mon, baby," he cooed behind his massive welding goggles and grubby, soot-covered five-o'clock shade. "Let's get this show on the road."
Night came slowly, but never really took over the sky. Artillery pounded even harder than during the day; muffled blasts, barely audible over the rumble of the engine, as rounds struck their targets, then sharp squeals as Stalin's Organs shot off rocket after rocket, each one a fiery speck and swirling gray tail on a black canvas.
Joseph curled himself into a ball in the tiny seating compartment of the halftrack, squeezing between the others for warmth in the unforgiving spring frost. Nobody said much after the first few minutes, and only the faint but growing sounds of desperate battle could be heard over the crunch and crumble of wheels and tracks over destroyed buildings. Names of villages long gone and streets long bombed passed by: Machen Drive, Sterling District, the Goerring mansion; all ruins, nonsensical jigsaw puzzle pieces of what they used to be. Joseph knew; he had been to each of them.
One of the soldiers sniffled, head in his hands, another kid moving closer to confront him.
"Hey, Zurich. Zurich?"
Zurich mumbled incoherently, then yelled in bewilderment between his sobs, a fist smashing into his leg with a quiet thump.
"What's the problem, soldier?" Joseph had poked his head out from his cocoon.
All the man could do was point. Outside the compartment, behind them, to the right. Joseph gaped in disbelief.
"Driver."
"Ja, leutnant?"
"Stop the goddamn car."
Five people, a mother, three boys, and a girl, blindfolded and gagged with Nazi flags. Dead, one shot to the head each. Each body had been mutilated, the boys heads shaved of hair and beaten to a pulp, the women's dresses ripped apart, their bodies bare for their captors. The wall behind them was painted with blood and bullet holes, and a slogan in bold, socialist red:
"Death to faciste.
For the glory of the mother country."
The crying soldier sagged forward in agony, falling to his knees in front of his gutted house and lifting the soulless body of his wife to his face, his tears diluting the blood leaked onto her cheeks as he turned to face each of his dead children.
He grinned.
"And to think, I've never met the kids before."
Chuckles turned to tear-drenched laughs, laughs into hysterical yells, the screams into a stream of cries and sobs.
The other soldiers stood and watched.
"I guess it's true, what they say," one said in a hushed tone.
"What is that?" Joseph whispered back.
"The sound of a single man's grief is louder than the entire symphony of war."
Joseph met the waiting eyes in the operator's seat as he eased into the back of the waiting halftrack.
"Let's drive."
The engine began to rev, smoke belched out of the exhaust.
"What about that guy, what about Zurich?"
"The war's over for him."
The driver sighed and turned back to the controls. Joseph slid into his place again, adjusted his helmet so it shielded his gaze from the explosions on the horizon, and closed his eyes as the rumble of battle and Zurich's cries nursed him to sleep.
"Mach schnel," he mumbled.
There was a sharp knock at the wooden door. A thousand twisted images gripped Marie as she whipped away from her suitcase at the sound, the clothes she was folding splaying from the table out onto the cold cement floor. She cursed under her breath.
"Frauline?" a breathless voice called.
Marie stood in shock, fiery nights and days shrouded in choking smoke rushing back to her. Her eyes passed over vibrant greens and festive reds drifting nonchalantly, settling over the smudges of brown on gray, explosions over a manufactured wasteland.
"Mein frauline?" the voice beckoned again.
She hunched over, picking each dress up slowly, examining it, remembering how each was bought, recalling which nonsensical meeting or officer's dinner she had worn it to, what Joseph thought of each one. Happy memories, she thought. Those were hard to come by.
Tired of trying to peer in through bullet holes, the visitor shoved the door forward, its oaken sheen bringing in whatever light the sun could muster through the fog. "Hallo?"
Marie stopped when she came upon a deep blue, the image pulling out another thousand pictures: conquering the Alps with Joseph and her family; the honeymoon, skiing the night away; resting, arguing... arguing, yelling, screaming. Anything but holy matrimony, he had told her. Then she had slapped him, harder than she intended. She thought she still could see the scar from the table corner on his temple the last time they saw each other.
A man's shadow obscured further observation of the palette of dresses. She turned on her knees to see a Wehrmacht man, not much different from her husband, but younger, his eyes bloodshot, a short beard growing on his lean and muscular jaws. His entire body heaved under the weight of a monotone greatcoat that draped all the way down to the ankles, and he began to talk.
"Russians, not far, close, shelling today or tomorrow." He doubled over onto his legs, and took off his helmet, wiping sweat from his brow. "Evacuation. Now."
Marie nodded slowly. How different was this man from Joseph? He stood tall and proud like him, wore his garb, was handsome like him. What made Joseph special? Her eyes wandered over the ragged body of the soldier as he straightened his composition.
The man's eyes caught hers mid-examination. "I have my own wife to go to, frauline," he muttered, his tone turning from one of respect to pity. Marie winced, then managed a quiet
thank you.
There was an awkward silence as the man scanned the room. Without looking, he quietly asked, "Food?"
He was too desperate to reason with, so she simply told him. "Last cupboard on the left."
The man grunted as he judged the weight of a loaf of bread, then stuck it down his greatcoat pocket with a smile barely flashing over his face. His eyes darted to Marie, but they went quickly back to the cement floor in shame. "Danke."
He, too, walked out the door, Marie thought to herself, and he, too, was swallowed by a force beyond her control, a force so basic and fierce that no single person could ever stop it. Not even the wrath of a woman scorned.
She slumped down onto the floor, her possessions flattened into the dusty floor around her as her mind raced ahead.
How much longer until her family walked through that threshold, as well? How many more times could they evade it before retribution for a war they were marked responsible for ended them?
She began pulling, yanking the few things that remained unpacked to her, wrapping herself in what she had left, the pastel blues and greys covering her tired eyes, shading them from the dark realities in front of her.
The weight of a dying, wheezing world was being left on her shoulders for her alone to bear, and the only people who could help her were being shredded apart along with it.
So she began to cry.
Joseph's eyelids yanked away from his bloodshot pupils as a loud snap and a hard lurch disturbed his slumber. The halftrack driver swore as the first birdcalls of morning sounded the coming of another day.
"There goes that axle again." He turned to face the others in the seating compartment "Achtung! Big, strong, wundersoldaten in the back!" The men remained in their seats. The cold leather was better than the still-frozen ground. "Shut the hell up, Kretz," one yelled back.
Joseph leaned out from his cramped seat and shot the agitated soldier a look. "You shut the hell up, Daupman."
The other soldiers came to attention quickly now.
"But feldwebel-"
"No buts. Kretz is the driver. If you want to get into any part of this godforsaken war, then he deserves your respect." Joseph leaned closer, his crystal blue eyes peering deep into Daupman's hazel ones, breaking apart any resistance to his commands. "I don't consider telling someone to shut the hell up respectful."
Daupman stared back for a second, then pulled back into his seat, his face contorted into a snarl. "Hrmph."
Joseph slunk back into his seat as well. Still kids, he thought.
He sat up straight, wiping his dripping nose and rubbing the flakes from his eyes. He looked into the swirling gray soup that was the sky. "Alright," he mumbled. Time for some military muscle. "Daupman, since you so handily volunteered yourself, you're on repair duty. Junkers, you're with him. No, don't give any crap. You know as well as me you were the fool who spilt the oatmeal last week. Now, come on. Up. We've got to rejoin the line at Seelow before tomorrow." Joseph looked around at the eager eyes surrounding him. "I guess the rest of us are going on recon. I want to know if we're going to run into any more sniper problems."
The two pointed out for repair duty slid out the sides to assist the already yapping Kretz while the rest of the troops quickly began to file out of the back with Joseph.
The earth didn't budge as he fell onto it; the road the halftrack rested on was of gray-green cobblestones, but it still held strong. Good, he thought. The squad could move quickly and without delay. He pointed into the general direction the squad had been driving and grunted. Go that way.
Joseph started taking mental notes: surrounding area was flat, a mishmash of crumbled houses and orchards- probably a little vineyard of some rich Prussian family before the war knocked on their door. Some of the trees had taken direct artillery fire and exploded into fantastic shapes, their middles flayed open, massive wooden spikes stabbing randomly into space as they bent slightly with the wind. Like a chicken without a head, Joseph thought. He chuckled at the image.
One soldier dragged slowly on an old porcelain pipe. "Sky is gray," he grumbled, his voice cracked and low. "Cossack weather. Like always."
Joseph didn't really know why he enjoyed such things, why he had such violent little tendencies.
"Like a big goddamn soup. Does it ever change these days?" The old man took another puff on his pipe.
Maybe it was the war getting to him, changing him, Joseph pondered. His head never really was right after the opening shots in Barcelona, anyway.
A younger soldier was checking the ammo belt he carried for the gunner when he joined in. "I'm somewhat glad, you know. No sky, no planes. And since we have no planes left." The boy shrugged. "You know."
Joseph scratched his chin as he began to walk, a rearguard to the squad. Maybe, after so many drills and advanced lectures and theoretical studies, he had reverted to a primal state. Maybe, he wondered, he had become nothing more than a simple caveman, an idiot savant to war and all its monotonic savagery.
The gunner checked up with the ammo guy, and, a menacing MG-42 light machine gun balanced on his shoulders, rolled up his green-gray sleeves, revealing a golden brown sun tan and long, rugged scars. "Thank Gott im Himmel, it's getting warmer. I thought the winter would go on forever. Isn't that right, Bullets?" He slapped the ammo guy on the back.
Or maybe this was just the way he was: a barbarian, a man with a natural bloodlust. Perhaps his entire life had been the result of this one little tic in his mind that allowed him the grimmest sense of humor he thought possible.
Bullets nodded. "In our condition, and with a winter like that, I wouldn't be surprised if it did last forever."
Marie had always said that, even at the very beginning, as he recalled. He was a madman, a fool. Thank God he had joined the army, she had yelled, because she didn't deserve to put up with such disgusting manners. Like rats, she had screamed. These heroes of the Reich, these pompous bastards who'd rather kill one another for some earth and water than raise a proper family. No better than vermin.
Joseph shook his head, wiped it of anything outside war. Focus. Focus.
Smoker shook his head as well. "That fight, the bridgehead at Vistula, that was nothing. Like a slap match between gentlemen compared with what we're about to get."
Bullets and Gunner glanced at each other, and then at the old man walking along, smoking his pipe, a gun in his hand and grenades in his greatcoat pocket. Bullets asked first.
"Were you there?"
"Hrm?"
"At Vistula. Protecting the bridgehead."
"That's how I got this nasty number here." Smoker pulled back his collar to reveal at least ten stitches along the hairy, pale, wrinkled neck, still an irritated red from the bullet wound. "Fer der Fuhrer," he grumbled, then promptly spat on the ground
next to the road.
Bullets shrank back. Gunner stepped between the two. "So. This one." He paused for a second, looked at Bullets, looked back. "Are you scared?"
Smoker thought for a moment, then grunted a 'Ja' between his puffs. "Shitless," he added.
Joseph automatically flipped the G-41 semi-automatic rifle that rested on his back into his hands as the first pops and squeals of the day's artillery punctuated the others' words. "How subtly the truth rings," he whispered.
A hand in the front of the advance went up.
"Quiet. Find cover."
Joseph went down with everyone else when the point man called the order, then ran crouched up to the front of the squad. "Situation."
"We heard Russian, from the terrace." The point man pointed at the last standing house next to the orchard. "Probably scout party. Looters."
"Hm." Joseph didn't like it. Flat ground, lots of cover. Easy ambush. "Do we still have someone with a panzerfaust?"
"Let's see."
The hand went up again, the shape of a P, then crossed fingers. Someone swiftly joined the two.
Bullets looked quizzically at the building. "Tank?"
"No," Joseph whispered as he pointed out the target. "I want a rat hole, the closest side of the building."
Bullets nodded, unclipped the grenade launcher from his belt, and let it rest on a stone wall. He aimed. "Got it."
The pointman signaled again to the squad behind them, telling them to form up in cover, then jumped into the nearest crater. Joseph slid behind an abandoned cart, then nodded to Bullets, who nodded back without looking away from his sights. He took a breath, his finger braced on the rough trigger. His grip tightened.
"Go!" Joseph shouted.
They broke cover at once, weapons at ready.
Bullets pulled the trigger.
There was a quiet 'pop' as the explosive detached
succinctly from its tubing.
The explosive flew into the wall, leaving a clean hole near the bottom and smashing into something behind it, where it erupted into a ball of flame and light for an instant. Dust and excited Russian spewed out of the opening as the squad's backs simultaneously hit the stones below it with a collective thump.
"Granate!" A soldier primed the explosive on a stick grenade, shimmied up to the hole, and tossed it in. There was a crack and flash, and Joseph jumped in through the makeshift entrance without so much as a nod.
Dust clouded his sight, a stench of burnt flesh flooded his nose. Something moved on the right, near the door. He raised his rifle. Ka-shh, ka-shh. Kept moving. Another on the left. Ka-ka-shh. It dropped, sprawling onto the ground. Kept going.
There was a yell, and he felt the swinging of a rifle butt as it narrowly missed his right ear. He whirled about, gun in one hand, the other yanking out the knife from his belt. He pulled it upward, the blood from the first slice warm on his freezing face. He repeated the motion, again, again.
He stabbed hard, the knife sticking into the man in front of him. Joseph's world spun downwards and he left the figure to its death. He staggered backwards, tripping on something, and took a heavy breaths as he fell against a wall.
Screams and cries for forgiveness and moving shadows in the dust swirled about him. He pulled his knees to his chest, clutched his rifle between them, and bowed his head as his squad finished the job.
"Where are we going?" the child nagged. "I don't understand. What's going on? Are you alright, mom?"
"Fine. I'm fine," Marie replied sternly. She stared ahead, at a quiet forest, into their future, into the uncertain.
"Then where are we going? What's the problem?"
"Daddy wants us to go away, little one."
"Why?" Ingrid yanked on her arm hard, demanding an answer. "Does daddy love you still? You said he loves us." The child's eyes began to water; the world was a confusing place.
Marie sighed and stopped walking, looking down at her child. "Because the world here is too angry," she whispered. "And daddy still loves us." She pulled her youngest along as they kept on going. "That's why he wants us to leave."
A gust of wind disturbed the thick layer of soot that encrusted the landscape, the outskirts of the city that the family had once called home. Marie stopped looked back for an instant, taking a last glance at the flattened old buildings, towers of smoke that ascended towards nothingness and the little spots of light, some slowly destroying a culture and others prolonging its inevitable death. Marie turned away.
The country ahead was little encouraging. The paved roads slowly degraded into an earthy dark brown pockmarked with shards of metal and debris, shades of houses and broken windows transforming into an endless darkness under twisted trees, unknown eyes observing from discreet locations. Mother nature was as unrelenting as the Russians.
"Are we going to play in the forest, mother?"
The beast stared back at her, beckoning them to their doom. This was their future, Marie thought. This was the only choice left for her and the girls. Joseph could have that man-made hell that Hitler and Stalin contrived. She would venture into the prison of nature's design.
"We'll just be passing through, honey," she whispered. "Remember, we have to get Gretchen from school, right?"
"Oh, yes!" The girl propped herself up at the mention of her sister.
Marie smiled at youthful incomprehension. She readjusted the pack she carried and squatted down to Ingrid, a rascal smirk across her face. "Now," she whispered as she held Ingrid at her shoulders. "I'll race you through the forest!"
Ingrid grinned back. "Well, then, you have no chance at beating me!" she took off, her little green knit bag bobbing along after her.
"Get back here, you!" Marie laughed as she ran, scooping her child up and sticking her tongue out at her. Ingrid returned the favor, and they both laughed. The girl's eyes beamed as mother and child giggled together among the craters and around the minefields in the murky blackness of the firs, pines, and bushes.
The squad came to grips with what just happened around in their new home, a wrecked little villa next to a mutilated orchard. The clouds of dust had settled, laying on furniture and bodies, giving a derelict feel to the single, long room in the building. The three dinner tables had been turned over, the fine cherry tree chairs already chopped apart for firewood. All the windows had been smashed in, the light trickling in making the jagged remnants of the glass glitter in the afternoon sun. Candle holders had been scratched so that their gold covering lay flaked on the ground, diamonds and gems in earrings and rings ripped out and lost among the shards of glass; the few found amongst the wreckage spilled out of the pockets of the five dead men in the middle of the room.
Little curls of smoke from the old porcelain pipe licked at the ceiling. There were clicks and rustles as the men reloaded their guns slowly, lackadaisically. A few sat in the corners, hands in their matted hair, wrapped about their cold shoulders, twiddling nervously in their pockets, trying to stave off logical human thought for just a little longer.
A still-hanging chandelier shook violently, the rattling glass and metal waking the dormant killers. Then the ground, too, and soon the rest of the house began to tremble.
Bullets looked up at the dirt falling from the holes in the ceiling. "Shouldn't we move?"
A picture frame fell to the floor, shattering. The pieces of glass and dust began to dance on the floor. No one moved.
"We'll survive," Joseph replied, standing up to peek out a window.
An eerie whistle slowly rose over the hills to the East, and the first artillery shells began to rain down around the orchard.
Five simultaneous explosions outside rocked the house, throwing chunks of dirt against the walls. Another few hit behind the house, on the road, white chemical flames licking at the scorched cobblestones flying everywhere.
Smoker joined Joseph at the window. He sneered. "I guess we're valuable enough to use phosphorous rounds on," he grumbled.
"Huh," was all Joseph could utter. He found the explosions fascinating.
The shells kept coming, an underlying rumble of firing guns still present between explosions. One hit the orchard, igniting the dismembered oaks around it. Another smashed into a tree, split it, and failed to detonate, the steel casing smoking in the ground.
There was a closer whistle, a higher squeal. Joseph straightened up. Not good.
"Down!" he shouted.
An incoming round rammed into the other side of the house, the chemicals and burning fumes lashing out at anything and everything, engulfing a table, some chairs, and one of the soldiers in flames.
The hapless man fell to the floor without a sound; he began to writhe and squirm, his lungs melting from inside as he unknowingly inhaled the phosphorous gas. He held out his hands, grasping for something to hold onto, groping for one last taste of humanity as he vomited up his stomach acids.
"Don't help him." Some soldiers held back their friends. "Stay clear of the chemicals," they shouted.
The man's eyes, looking wildly at his comrades, the ceiling, his own charred being, finally widened as the life was smoked out of him, his arms pulling back into his chest and his hands curling into abstract shapes.
The far-off rumbling stopped, the last few whoomp-booms kicking dirt up against the house before silencing.
The squad stood, circling around the hole in the far wall, the burning furniture, and the smoking body in the corner, its pale-white eyes staring out of a blackened face.
Joseph stepped in front of the group, looking around at them. Some had begun to pray, others simply observed in pure amazement. One still twiddled his fingers. Joseph turned back to the dead man, leaning over and snapping the dog tags around his neck off, sticking them in his pocket. He stood for a moment, looking at the dead man in front of him, at the name and number on a tag.
And his eyes welled up with tears.
Was this all they were to be remembered by? Was this the
fate they were condemned to?
Someone coughed. "We should go."
Metal and string. That's all we were ever worth.
"Feldwebel?"
Joseph nodded. "Ja." He hurried to join the others shuffling out the door.
They walked out not into Germany, but into a hellish forest, into the orchard: the trees burnt as if torches, their jutting spikes becoming matches in the choking smoke disturbed by the artillery. The ground underneath them lay barren, the plants and grass uprooted or burnt as well. Some men stopped, observing the scene.
Joseph looked back at them. "Let's go." Nobody moved.
Something snapped. Joseph couldn't take it anymore. They needed to leave.
He yelled at the hellish world as he flung his helmet to the ground, his blonde hair wildy flying around his scarred and worn face. "Let's fucking go!" he screamed.
The men stared at him, in shock.
Joseph sighed. He kicked at a stone, then beckoned them to him. "Schnel." He turned around and marched solemnly into the fire and flame.
The others took another quick glance at the little villa, then followed him headlong.
Deal? 
