There are five of them. Tony, Rolf, Kurt, Emil, and Dieter. Five. But in a matter of seconds, there will be four. A shell falls. Dieter explodes. He doesn't vanish. He doesn't fall wounded. He explodes. One moment he's there, shouting something. The next, he's hot flesh splattering across helmets.
This is the Great War. The trenches. The battlefield. A landscape consumed by fog, mud, and decay. A wet hole in the earth where death chews slowly and spits out bones at dawn. Where rats are the only creatures thriving. Where men crawl like ghosts, unaware they're already dead. And where hope... Hope is nothing but a joke poorly told among corpses.
Emil screams:
"Oh, Jesus Christ, Dieter!"
He runs forward like an idiot, as if there's something he can do. Emil is young. Too young. He still believes death can be undone if one gets there quickly enough. But there's nothing you can do when a body turns into red mist. When flesh scatters through the air as if God had tossed a deck of bloody cards. Sometimes, if you're lucky, there's a leg left. An arm. A chunk of torso with guts spilling out like badly cooked noodles. And if that shocks you, it's only because you haven't yet smelled what remains after the rain.
Tony reaches him and throws him face-first into the mud. Emil's body lands with a wet, disgusting sound, like a steak slapped onto a filthy sponge. Mud fills his mouth and nostrils, clouds his eyes. Around them, shells keep falling as if the sky itself were vomiting hatred.
"You damn fool," Tony says. "Do you want to die too?"
Tony is twenty-seven. Emil is barely nineteen—a kid. Emil sobs uncontrollably.
"I can't take it anymore, Sergeant. I want to go home. I want to see my mother. That's all. I just want to go home."
With an otherworldly calmness, Tony replies:
"You'll see your mother again, boy. But only if you're smart. And if you stop pulling shit like this."
"Today it was Dieter, Sergeant. Tomorrow it could be me. It could be anyone."
"I'm not leaving my life here," Tony says. "I'll never be one of the fallen. I've sworn on my blood that I'll make it back—to my wife and my little Lotte."
Tony is married. He got married at twenty-two to his lifelong sweetheart, Isolde. They had two children: a boy and a girl. But only the girl is still alive—Charlotte, whom they call Lotte. She's three years old. The older one, Otto, would have turned five that spring. But winter had been cruel. Fever burned him for days and then left him cold forever. Nobody could do anything. Not the doctor. Not prayers. Not Tony.
Tony and Emil return to the trenches. Now they are safe. Safe? Well, that's just a way of putting it. There's no food here. No clean water. Just thick mud and a freezing dampness that seeps into your bones like a silent infection. Trenches don't protect. Trenches trap. Like elongated coffins filled with men who still breathe. For now.
Rolf and Kurt—twenty-three and twenty-four—are furious with Emil. They scold the boy mercilessly.
Kurt spits:
"You stupid fucking kid! You can die in many ways in war. But the stupidest way to die is, ironically enough, through sheer stupidity."
Emil looks down. And then, Rolf adds, like a slap to the back of the head:
"When a comrade dies, you forget him. Immediately, goddammit. There's no time to mourn. No time to complain. No time! If you want to survive, sink your teeth into that idea and don't let go: Survive. That's all, you dumb little runt."
The last months of the war are just that: the last. Everything is falling apart with a slow kind of elegance, like a building that doesn't collapse all at once but creaks and groans until one day, it's simply gone. Germany is going to lose. No one says it, but everyone knows. The officers sense it, the soldiers feel it, and the dead—well, the dead knew it from the beginning. Rations are scarce, uniforms are rotting, and maps are only good for showing how far the next hole is. No one's fighting for victory anymore. They're fighting not to collapse before the end.
The nights feel colder and colder. Of course they do: underfed, no fat under the skin, no reserves—bodies have nothing left to fight off the goddamn cold. In truth, there's no energy left for anything. Maybe just enough to wake up. And that's only if your body doesn't give up while you sleep.
Why don't they surrender? Why do they keep fighting? That. That's the only question the living still ask. And there's no answer. Only orders, trickling down from some far-off office, signed by men who've never touched mud.
"Tony, it's impossible for us to win," Rolf says. "This is lost. I don't want to fight anymore. Neither does Kurt. Neither does little Emil. We don't want to keep going with this senseless slaughter."
"We follow orders, soldier," Tony replies. "We'll fight until the end. And if by the end there's not a single one of us left alive, then we'll fight until that end."
"But you're always saying they won't kill you. That it's your destiny to go back home."
"And I will. I'll fulfill my destiny, soldier. That's why Germany must win."
"Tony, that's not going to happen. And if we stay here, we're going to die. If it's not those damn Frenchies, or those bastard Brits, or those rich-boy-faced Americans that kill us, it'll be hunger. Or the cold."
"What are you suggesting, soldier?"
"That we leave, Sergeant. We have to abandon this damned war."
"Desertion is punished by death, Rolf."
"Then I'll pay with my life. But before that, I'll see my wife again. I'll kiss her. I'll make love to her one more time. And then, sure, I'll be ready to die. But not in this stinking fucking trench."
Kurt speaks up then, his voice hoarse:
"We could hide out until this all ends. It can't be much longer now. Afterward, we could go home. And who knows... maybe they'll even spare our lives."
Tony looks at them, one by one. Then he asks, without raising his voice:
"And what about love for the homeland?"
Then little Emil speaks. His voice trembles, but not from the cold. From rage.
"Fuck the homeland, Sergeant. The homeland never did a damn thing for me. I come from a poor family. A family that got crushed. My father and my older brother were fired for asking for something fair: fewer hours, humane working conditions. And what happened next? They got killed. Both of them. For asking for dignity. And this was before the war even started. And the homeland? It didn't do shit. I don't owe Germany anything. Nothing."
The boy's voice cracks a little, but he keeps going, his eyes locked on Tony.
"I know I don't have a wife. Or children. Only my mother is waiting for me. She's sick. She doesn't have much time left. And you already know, Sergeant: my little brother died a few months ago. He was seventeen. Barely old enough to be here. And yet—he died. Right here. On this damned front."
He pauses. Takes a breath. And then says it—the thing he's been carrying inside him for weeks:
"Soon I won't have anyone. No family. No one. But I want to live, Sergeant. I want to live just to give my mother one last hug before she goes. I want her to have a beautiful grave. With flowers. With her name written properly. And after that... after that, I want to meet a girl. A sweet girl. Fall in love. Be happy. Never think about this hell again."
The boy's arguments are irrefutable. Tony doesn't answer right away. He thinks of Isolde. His wife. He imagines her. Sees her face. Remembers her blonde hair. The white color of her skin. Her naked body. And that memory—the love, the desire, the tenderness—pushes him. It pushes him to tell his duty to the homeland to go to hell. But that's not all. What really pushes him over the edge is Charlotte. His little Lotte. His daughter. Three years old. And then Tony knows. He lifts his head. Looks at his friends. His brothers. And says, with a firm voice:
"Alright. Let's do it. We're getting out of here."
And there they are, the four of them. Running from the front. Four soldiers. Four men—dirty, wounded, starving. But alive. Still alive.