From a Dark Horizon by Luke McCallin

Author:Luke McCallin [McCallin, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

34

Meissner summoned him later that day, after they had pulled out of the trenches. The stormtroopers left with no regrets, and the garrison watched them go in virtual silence. Soldiers doomed to stay here, to rotate in and out of the line, doomed to get knocked around periodically, to lose men day after day to the thousand ways there were to die in the trenches. Reinhardt remembered passing the sentry at the communication trench up out of the first line, up on his parapet in his body armor. All that weight, good only for stopping a bullet or perhaps a piece of shrapnel. It would not help against gas. Or being buried alive. Or catching pneumonia. Or dying of dysentery from the awful food or the fouled water.

“Thank you for the note, Reinhardt,” Meissner said. He was surrounded by boxes and luggage.

“Did Gelhaus send one as well?”

“No. Is something on your mind, Reinhardt? You seem anxious.”

“Am I still to serve with you? General Hessler said we were finished in the storm troops. Me and Gelhaus. Maybe Sergeant Brauer.”

“For what you’d done? Think nothing more of it. There are no orders. I think he must have spoken out of frustration. And now, whatever he might have wanted is gone with him and we will need everyone.” Meissner walked over to a desk covered in maps and map tubes. “The fighting along the Marne is going very badly,” the Colonel said, his finger circling Soissons to the west. “The British and French and Americans have pushed us right back. I think that was the last throw of the dice. There’s nothing left to do but wait for what the Allies will throw at us, whenever they want to throw it. So we’re moving. Going here, south of Albert. Somewhere called Bray,” he said. He pointed to a spot on the map, east of the city of Amiens, and right on the edge of what the Germans had taken in Operation Michael. “We’re moving out tomorrow and will be in position within a week or so. A little more training, and then . . .” He stopped, as if considering something.

Reinhardt looked at the map. The Somme salient the Germans had carved out as a giant bulge, anchored around Arras in the north, and Noyon in the south. There was Flesquières, from which Reinhardt and his men had started the offensive on the morning of 21 March. Bapaume, shattered by artillery, through which they had marched three days later. Some of the names in the area close to where they were going had fearful reputations. Beaumont-Hamel. Mametz. Thiepval. Guillemont. Fricourt. The Butte-de-Warlencourt. The Ancre River. Other towns, other villages, other valleys, fields, streams, and rivers. Names on the map but hooks in his memory. Places that had fed upon his men, gouged them out and away. A wasteland was what they had fought upon and for. A wasteland from what the British had done in 1916, and what the Germans had done during their retreat in 1917, and then again in the Spring Offensives.

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