No Quarter

[Moritz Erichsen]

Terrain: Forest of Ardennes
Time: 01:15 pm
Weather: Sunny, but breezy.

Across France’s borders with Germany and Italy, there lay the Maginot Line. It had a fortress with artillery casemates, tank obstacles and concrete fortifications, built under governmentally-inspired initiatives (in a period of post-war economic recession) after the trauma of being invaded in the Great War and intended to keep – but never in reality guarantee – the country safe from the Germans, and which clearly dominated French military assessment during the inter-war years under Marshall Foch’s shrewd beliefs that the Germans would be seeking revenge after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The French knew better than to toy around after Germany’s offences, and De Gaulle’s beliefs on maintaining a military offensive structure were held off for the sake of firstly tending to defensive measures and securing the country’s borders under the illusion it would thus prevent the Germans from invasion and yet another World War. The line’s purpose, of course, was completely and utterly emasculated once the Blitzkrieg had come and become a historical fact, taking France at its sweep and reducing all human beings within the ill-fated territory to the status of a servant during the seventeenth-century, or that of pigs being sent to the slaughterhouse to be made pork kebabs for the Nazis.

Lieutenant Moritz Erichsen dipped the dirty helmet into the waters of the river Meuse, rubbing the cold steel from the mud that had been glued to it since the fight across the Maginot Line in the Ardennes: there had been a large infantry battle appropriately followed by a series of artillery bombardments in the forest of Ardennes, lasting for several hours until the Allied units had been forced to retreat back into their line, thus with the German and Italian troops claiming feet of soil further into their offence. It had been disastrous, as a matter of fact, but Moritz could not be bothered. He was not a patriotic man, fighting for King and country, nor was he torn between the two nations, as opposed to actually showing absolutely no sign of consequence in terms of the war’s objectives and ideological beliefs. He was fighting and taking part in this catastrophic war because it was commanded of him, and because, frankly, he had nothing else to do. Had he not forged forfeit papers to claim he was Graham Bouchanan’s legitimate son (the legitimacy could be brought into question, naturally) and thus signed up for the British army, he would have been requested to for the German one; having been fished up by the social services after years and years of avoiding capture, he would have been amongst the first in the line to be merrily trotting along the conscription procession and signing up a deathly contract with fate.

The Givetian Ardennes Mountains with the all-embracing, dense and breath-taking forests as well as the rolling hills were a sight to be ignored by Moritz, despite the peace of mind they could graciously offer a soldier who unconsciously wished for some. The birds were chirping restlessly on the branches of the trees, but God – if there indeed was a God – knew they would soon quiet down, forever. They would never sing again, but their songs would echo across the centuries and for eternity haunt the minds and fates of those who rest their lives upon illusions and hopeless dreams. The sky was a clearest blue that drearily warm summer’s day, but it would inevitably be painted red. The river’s waters were still crystal clear and would, them too, be tainted with mud from the sinners and murderers of this world, and those who possessed no heart or soul – and those who did, but were mercilessly exploited under dim reasoning and false pretences. He cleaned the helmet from the dirt but did not bother wearing it; instead, he carelessly threw it across the grass, where it rolled for some moments until it hit a rock, and stopped. He slightly groaned as he raised himself up, feeling a rush of pain run through his spine, his right hand feeling for the red, swollen wound at his arm. He picked on it, almost like a misbehaving little child, until he tore the sensitive skin from the edges and trickles of blood began to flow from the source down across his arm.

He had managed to get the bullet off his skin, and tied a piece of military clothing around the area, and though the bleeding had not been incessant, on the grounds of the bullet having hit a critical vein, it hurt like hellHe used his teeth to tear the reddened skin from the edges, tasting the bitterness of his blood, and then with his mouth dried the liquid off, meanwhile making an animalistic noise inside his throat at the pain caused from scratching the skin off. His heart was pumping fiercely across his ribcage, but Moritz had been through much worse to be disheartened by something as trivial – to him – as this. He was simply annoyed, and to some extent, annoyance was far worse than fear, in his perspective. “Fuck,” he swore under his breath, and then swore again, a stream of invective let loose from his vulgar voice, while the sun suddenly shifted and began poking at him in the eyes. He changed position and moved closer under a large oak tree, throwing his weight against the moth-eaten trunk. The bleeding ceased, but he was still annoyed. This had been one of his bad days.

[Abel Hahn]

Unteroffizer Hahn’s eyes fluttered, the blue sky at which he faced masked by the leafy canopy of the Ardennes forest. His mind had previously been haunted by feverish demons from the deepest corners of his imagination, fleeting phantoms of the prior battle. But now it was just the pain. The endless pain. He opened his hazy blue eyes once again before squinting them shut. He moved his arms behind him to prop up his upper half, the scratchy woolen fabric of his grey Wehrmacht tunic crackling against the dead leaves that littered the forest floor; not allowing anything to move unheard through the forest paths. He shifted his weight onto one arm and gingerly prodded the back of his head, feeling the sticky broken skin where a British soldier’s stock had glanced him. Abel peeled a leaf from the dried blood, hoping it hadn’t been infected. The blow had knocked him straight out cold, and from what he could see around him, he should be glad. The small clearing was littered with the debris of war; blood, bodies, and the blown out carcasses of tanks. He moaned quietly as he rolled onto his back, unbuttoning his tunic’s breast pocket and withdrawing his hunter’s green handkerchief and blowing his nose, a mass of both mucus and blood flowing from his nostrils. He took a deep breath through his nose and immediately wished he hadn’t, for the revolting stench of decomposing bodies was in the air. Abel rolled over and vomited quietly, hoping his sickness did not draw any attention to himself.

Abel wiped his lips with his kerchief and then abandoned the dirty rag in a pile of leaves. Hahn sat up fully, coughing into his elbow. After his lungs were racked by the fit he ran a hand through his hair, trying to think of his next move. Hahn searched the ground for his helmet, but when he spotted it he found a ghastly dent in the flaring back where the blow had connected. He discarded it and turned to the body next to him and proceeded to scavenge the helmet. He leaned over the corpse and turned it onto its back, seeing that it couldn’t have been a boy over 19. Abel untied the strap from under the pale chin, the skin chillingly cool in the warm air. When he finally worked it free he repeated an opposite process on his own head, the steel gripping his skull comfortably. He was overjoyed when the headgear did not reach the wound on his lower skull, but instead it sloped over it in the back. Abel then picked up his own Mauser and ejected three old shells before sliding a new stripper clip in, ramming to first round home and sliding on the safety.

The soldier stood up, for the first time looking entirely over the expanse of the skirmish. Tiny blue-grey and tan lumps were French and British soldiers, while greenish-grey lumps were German stiffs. Some were bloody kills, with innards and tissue smattered everywhere. Others had burned to death, particularly ones by the husks of blown out tanks. Others hardly looked dead, but instead like they should be sleeping back in their encampment. From what he could see, Abel was the only survivor amongst the casualties. His mouth lolled as he tried to remember faces, but most of them were just fresh-faced recruits just old enough to serve. He stumbled down the path, making out a few Italian soldiers amongst the dead. He plunged himself deeper into the thick woodlands, trying in vain to get away from the ghastly site of all the casualties. If he would be discovered by his own troops he would just say that he was looking to reunite, that he had not actually stumbled away from the place in cowardice and regret. But it would be more troublesome if he ran into a British or French patrol, for they would certainly kill him. The British might have some mercy on him, but from what he had heard, the French were heartless.

Abel was awoken from his fearful thoughts as he heard a string of vulgar English phrases, prodding his mind from lessons with his tutor back in Seelow during his childhood. He crouched low, wrapping his rifle sling around his left arm to steady his aim. He pressed off the safe as he crawled to the edge of some brambles, looking over the scene before him. A British officer was leaning against an old oak tree, pulling at a wound on his arm. Abel looked through the iron sights and peered at the British soldier, trying to keep a steady aim on his chest. The German remembered his briefing for taking soldiers of the crown captive, and he decided this better work. He took a deep breath through his nostrils and spoke loudly and clearly; "Tapferer Soldat der Krone, legen bitte Ihre Arme nieder und setzten Ihre Hände hinter Ihren Kopf. Sie werden durch die 21. Panzer Abteilung des Drittes Reichs gefangen genommen."

TRANSLATIONS

"Brave soldier of the Crown, please lay down your arms and put your hands behind your head. You are being captured by the 21st Panzer Division of the Third Reich."

[Moritz Erichsen]

“Oi, Lieutenant – wouldn’t it be nice, say, to go to Folies Bergère this evening for our leave? The other chaps are dying to meet Liane de Pougy! They say she’s the most beautiful and notorious courtesan in good old Paree!”
“Will you walk from here to Paris to meet the bird, Thomson?”
“Oh, I would do anything to meet her, Sir! I would walk on heated coal just to get a glimpse of her eyes.”
“And a peck of her skin.”
“Oi, Lieutenant, that’d be bold … but aye, who wouldn’t fall for that? I mean, to think she was raised in a nunnery and what she became? Ha! I bet the old nuns have turned to the devil for her. I bet their bones melted s’long they heard Liane’s carreer. Bet their ugly little mouths cracked open with shock – ”
“You see that panzer two hundred feet in the distance, Thomson?”
“Aye, Sir.”
“You survive that, and I’ll pay your train ticket to Paris.”

It was curious, how war could warp time in such an unnatural and distressing tactic, as would masterfully construct the frustrating illusion that words uttered only half an hour ago belonged to a different century, a time during which he had no place on Earth, a time of ambiguity and deception, a time of haunting and spreading darkness. Words uttered only three hours ago seemed to have been voiced through the other side of a heavily plastered wall, and with annoying noise during the reception, the image appearing only through the mist. The leaves were ever so green on the trees, but the grass on the ground was yellowed on parts, pools of dirt and mud from the tanks and the steely armour having desecrated the sacred natural beauty, though the forest of Ardennes stood tall and proud, lovingly embracing the corpses of her children, armoured flies compared to her own vastness, and with their decomposing she would feed from. It was all part of the natural process, almost with beautiful darwinistic morbidity. The saprophages would eat on the human flesh, slowly rotting on the dried leaves, the manure flies and beetles feeding off the skin of those who only a few moments ago were screaming human emotions: fear, love, terror, hatred. Despair. On this ground that a man alive walked thoughtlessly and with ungracious audacity, another one had fell. Charlie Thomson had survived the panzer, and had cheerfully meant to show up in front of Lieutenant Moritz Erichsen to announce the remarkable feat of having been successful in his mission when a grenade fell on him and the young soldier was exploded in pieces. There would be nothing to bury besides his helmet. Liane de Pougy would have to wait.

With his body resting against the moth-eaten oak tree, hours afterwards, Moritz was poking at the wound, meanwhile coughing up blood into his shoulder while resting his head sideways upon it, feeling a terrible headache, while his stomach was grumbling for food. He was exhausted, but not sleepy. He never slept much, even before he had signed up for conscription in the British army. His wound throbbed inconveniently, with precise and tight beats; he felt the need to poke at it with his fingertips, and thus he did again. They had lost many men today, and Moritz would not even remember their names. All he could think was lucky him who would not have to pay for the train ticket to Paris. Not that he was a man to keep his word (which he did whenever he wished to, and whenever it was at his interest) or be decent in any way, shape, or form; his promises were empty, vain; he offered no hope, he took no blame. He was a ruthless, sadistic leader who barked commands and orders, completed missions successfully, for he was the man desired whenever one wanted a job done, and who possessed no heart or soul to feel the emotional pain, the childless parents, the wives with no husbands, and the mothers without their sons. The daughters with no brothers.

“They say the French women are the most beautiful in the world.”

There were dead leaves on the ground. He could smell the piss in the buckets several feet away from him, and the sheer concrete of the bombed tanks on the other side of the forest. Several soldiers’ bodies had been desecrated by savage mutilation and being thrown into the river Meuse as though they were sacks of potatoes. This was their fate, their fucked-up, ultimate fate. In slow-motion, slow-dancing tunes, the soldies fell into the river, one right after the other, arms, and legs, and kidneys, and broken hearts; leaving behind families, children, and women they loved. They would shortly wear their black clothes and hide their pained faces behind veil, and weep forever, their crying voices echoing throughout the centuries, throughout eternity, the desperate, never-ceasing cries of anguish and pain. Those beautiful, tragic women they loved. Instead of their men, all they would be returned to was a formally written letter of condolences from the government, a hypocritical government, a government of cannibals, telling them they had died like heroes, they had fell during battle to protect their country. But in reality, there were no heroes. There were only humans. Humans, and lives scattered because of whimsicalities. Lives that had a short and brutal end. No, not heroes. Victims.

“I would love to marry a French woman. Blimey, Mother would resent that!” and Thomson had then laughed in plain satisfaction.

He smelled the bleeding Kraut from feet afar. He could smell his own kind. He did not react whatsoever, but only retained his attention at his wound, not giving a rat’s arse on the Nazi approaching. Until the other man had finally stumbled in near proximity and finally spoke those words which, in Moritz’s ears, sounded hideously pompous and unnecessarily kind in a hollow and sickening manner, Moritz did not even raise his head to look at him. Instead, he licked the trickling blood off the area surrounding the wound, and then rubbed his chin against his greatcoat in the shoulder, and wiped it off, staining his clothes thus. “Bumsen Sie Sie ja, Mann und Ihre gebumsten nazistischen Scheiden,” he told him brusquely, and then walked away from the tree. He quickly unzipped his pants and pissed on the grass, relieving himself, but also displaying a form of humiliation for the German soldier who had believed he could simply hop along the forest and put ropes around him. When he turned to look at him, he was wearing an expression of intolerable ennui through his facial features, blood from the battle embellishing and ornamenting the black tattoos carved across his neck (the ones which could be seen, as the others across his arms and back were covered by the greatcoat). Blood from a fallen victim. In this way, oddly enough, and interestingly so, he was carrying a corpse along with him, a corpse of a dying soul, and that was not just him. It was tainted blood, contaminated liquid, staining him with another man’s additional sins and crimes. He had enough to bear for himself.
[Translation: Yeah, fuck you, man, and your fucked-up Nazi cunts]