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Just a few hundred on the fraught nightmares of a Mechanized Sergeant as he leads his men out of one hellhole and into another.
The sky was weeping cold ash; settling between and upon and inside the pox of shell craters and debris, chilling and purifying the scene of fraught conflict. We could not see the sun anymore, as we shivered, scarves wrapped tighter around our noses and mouths – the rolling clouds of distant smoke were so titanic and enveloping, leaving nothing but the blank canvas of anonymous sky behind them. The engine of the Chimera spluttered, and we dived back below the armoured cupola (scarred and scorched where a mortar round had been glanced aside too late) and were immersed once again in the coughs and the grunts of the bay, bathed in the ethereal red light somehow suitable for an iron coffin.
It was three days since the battle lines withdrew. I knew still that somewhere further on, a mile, twenty miles further, another Mechanized Brigade Sergeant was urging his men to run through a precipice of death and screaming fire, was pushing an outdated machine to her limits through boggy bocage, was tearing at his balaclava with vain tears because he’d just consigned another man to an uncomfortable and lonely death. And now it was all over and the baton had been passed on; they had broken through their section. The maths had been done and the conditions fulfilled and the blood shed and the brigade was moving forward in peace – the rumble of armageddon on the Golgotha Plateau still made the growling machine tremble. I had stopped trembling earlier, looking back I think my energy had been committed to other measures. The gaps between the floor gutters were now infinitely fascinating; I stared through them, remorseless and destitute now.
We’d heard the radio traffic when the battle was joined. Most of it was aggressive, vengeful static, tearing out of the radio in revenge for the hour of radio silence observed all along the front. The rest was barked orders, most unintelligible. The worst were the screams for retreat, rare, but still present. The ugliest were the primal howls of the wounded, the APCs torn open like tin-cans and set ablaze with a squad inside – flash burns, shrapnel wounds. The radios were out of range, we only could silently guess what was happening. The only people daring to speak were the two cabbies, muttering and growling as they dug in the spurs for another hillock.
I groaned and engrossed my pounding head in an unidentifiable piece of cloth, the shuddering carcass of the Chimera luring me off with its animal rhythm into a darkling forest of disturbed, intermittent sleep.
Hope you like it.
sA
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