by Carlo Zen
But that strange calm only lasted so long. After the whiz of something cutting through the air came a big, heavy boom we weren’t used to. It sent chills up our spines.
Those weren’t 128 mm shells; they’d brought out their precious 180 mm field guns.
“Listen up, troops! Friendly reinforcements are on their way! Let’s stick this out!”
At that moment, we were happy for instructions over the radio from our battalion commander, but our sense of futility was greater. Our battalion had no shortage of replacement troops. We’d nearly lost our will to fight, so I guess they were throwing us a line to cling to.
Maybe that line would work on guys who didn’t know how unreliable it was, but we understood all too well how that illusion would hold up.
“So when the hell is that support unit getting here?”
Someone on the machine-gun crew expressed what all of us who knew that battlefield were thinking. We really needed reinforcements. The way it was going, we figured we would all have to die defending that quagmire and covered in its muck.
So we really wanted backup as soon as possible.
“I want reinforcements…preferably before we die.” Was it me who murmured it? Or the fellow next to me? I still don’t know, but I’m sure someone did.
That was when the nearby radio operator started shouting at the top of his lungs. The operators were the guys monitoring enemy transmissions, making sure they didn’t pinpoint us. Usually they were full of bad news, but later I would think over and over how sometimes they did have something good for us.
“Reinforcements! Reinforcements are here!”
I remember very well how people thought the operator was shell-shocked and sent him pitying looks. But then we saw something we could hardly believe, so there was no time to think about that.
Or rather, we heard it.
“O Fatherland, my love, be at peace.”
On every channel over a wide area, the words were broadcast so powerfully even a regular soldier with no magic ability could hear them.
Clouds of dust were blackening the sky, and the mud seemed to be swallowing up everything on the battlefield, but the voice that rang out over the chaos was surprisingly calm.
It was no wonder we questioned for a moment whether we had gone crazy as well. The phenomenon seemed that unreal.
It was the code for a unit of reinforcements. We cocked our heads thinking the backup couldn’t be real, that it had to be an auditory hallucination.
“O Fatherland, my love, be at peace.”
But we weren’t hearing things and we weren’t crazy; someone was really repeating those words in the official language of the Empire. And it was the single-use password to show they were friend and not foe at that!
“Guardians of the Rhine! Ye are loyal! Ye are rocks! Ye are loyal! Ye are rocks!”
The operator boosts the signal to the highest output possible, and the answer from the radio dugout was the happiest sounding I’d ever heard. The stream of words coming out of the machine-gun squad’s radio will be forever carved into my eardrums.
We always laughed at what silly codes they’d come up with. The radio operators, especially, would make fun of them, but this time, just this once, I think all of us were truly consoled by them. The widespread interference only mages could employ. It could only be mages. It could only have been the elite mages of the Imperial Army.
So it’s lucky they didn’t know—that their saviors, their reinforcements, were hazardous, could bring utter destruction to their allies.
She was supposedly on their side, but even the Imperial Army brass treated her as a god of death. It was a battalion for war nuts by war nuts, and they had arrived on the battlefield.
Slicing through the haze of clouds and gunsmoke, she bristles with nerves. Major Tanya von Degurechaff, internally sick of this, externally expressionless, is leading her response unit to the Rhine Air Defense Identification Zone Sector D-5.
“Code confirmed. This is the 203rd Aerial Mage Battalion, call sign Pixie. We’re en route. Arriving in 160 seconds.”
Tanya isn’t particularly keen on trench warfare. The only job I hate more is turning on the charm for propaganda.
After all, now that I’ve been turned into a girl, I’m faced with this annoying military framework where men are superior. Just the thought of my promotions being blocked by an invisible glass ceiling is enough to dampen any desire I might have to act all girlish for propaganda. Trench warfare, on the other hand, is just too dangerous.
Apart from that, the Empire’s personnel system has adapted extremely meritocratic principles for the war, in a way, so I’m more or less satisfied with it.
So even though hugging every contour of the land to maintain the lowest-possible altitude as she speeds toward the battlefield is dangerous, she is satisfied because at least she’ll be valued.
That said, she’s in command of a mission to cross an area littered with spent shells and assault the enemy artillery position with gunsmoke curling high into the air. Even if it came with hazard and war zone pay, it didn’t feel great.
“Troops, you’ll be performing supporting combat. Ready anti-surface ordnance, diffusion explosion formulas, optical deception formulas, and counter-bullet outer shells. Take on counter-air and -mage fights as you like.” Gripping her rifle and computation orb tightly, Tanya gives the necessary instructions in a matter-of-fact tone.
Supporting combat is actually a pain for commanders. Bombing the wrong side is unforgivable. If we blow away our own troops, next will be a shower of bullets from the firing positions on the ground, no question.
The trenches and positions are built in such a way as to limit damage, but even so, nobody is happy to be blown up by accident. Only the USA is allowed to accidentally bomb whatever the hell. That they somehow get enough leeway to—oops—bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade makes me jealous, in a way.
Setting those thoughts aside, the only viable option for this support mission is to swoop in close to the enemy position and go to town. In that case, the best plan is to maintain as high a speed and low an altitude as possible and invade all at once in a sneak attack.
But that’s theory. The ones actually maintaining that speed and altitude are already fed up. No one will tell you that flying fast near the ground is comfortable.
Although this allowed me to escape the trouble surrounding the sinking of the Commonwealth submarine, getting sent to the Rhine front was bad luck.
“CP, this is Pixie. Send the target.”
“Roger, Pixie. Take out the enemy artillery emplacement pummeling G and H Companies.”
“Understood. I’d like to request five minutes of supporting suppressive fire starting now. We’ll get them during that time.”
Still, I’m glad that on this type of arena Tanya’s managed to retain the measure of autonomy that naturally comes with being a Silver Wings Assault Badge recipient. For starters, I can choose my targets freely.
And the rear base may not have been perfectly tidy, but it was way better than getting all muddy, being ordered to defend a position, and ending up the target of a barrage in the confusion.
The place just barely counts as a rear base, though. The meals aren’t the standard portable trench rations but proper hot food. On top of that, if I may broach an indelicate topic, the waste management situation is also better. It’s only our first spring. If the air when I’m flying low reeks this badly, I can only imagine they’re doing the exact opposite of what hygiene dictates.
As the cultured man with a commonsense grasp of hygiene I was before trenches, becoming a little girl, and what have you, I can only say it’s a difficult environment to withstand. It’s about as bad as being aboard a submarine sinking into an out-of-order toilet.
Instead of that, I have work commensurate with my pay striking field guns, with their feeble anti–air fire, from the sky.
And as long as there are no intercepting mages, we’ll just be duck hunting. They’ll b
e great targets. I want to rack up as many accomplishments as I can and fulfill the requirements for leave. I may be here as punishment, but if nothing’s on paper, I must be allowed to exercise my rights.
I want to hurry up and get transferred to the rear to find a safe post.
“Five minutes? That won’t even suppress the anti–air fire, much less the artillery.”
After all, even a strike mission, which is comparatively safe for the front line, forces you to run some pretty lousy risks.
For example, the observation squad is going out of their way—volunteering—to support us. If the frontline observers are acting as guides for us, that has to mean the situation is less than ideal. Usually, the observers would be out there spotting impacts. If they have time to kill, it must mean our side doesn’t have much artillery.
If we deploy our mage’s outer shells at full power and fly in anti-surface assault formation, there’s no way we’ll get shot by our own, at least.
If by some miraculous chance we suffer direct hits, we should be able to escape fatal injury thanks to the new orb model. More importantly, defense from artillery is drilled into everyone in boot camp.
“That’s no problem. And don’t worry about us—keep firing after we go in.”
After all, keeping an eye out overhead is the commander’s job in an anti-surface assault. Having one unit strike while another unit provides air cover is a basic necessity in an air battle.
I’m sure I don’t need to explain that if I fly with direct support, the danger of getting caught in a barrage lessens to an incredible degree. Plus, I can finally increase my altitude. Escaping that sticky, thick air even feels a little nice.
Anyhow, leaving the smell and the danger zone is enough to improve Major von Degurechaff’s mood.
“Lieutenant Serebryakov, we’re getting five minutes of supporting fire. After all the artillery shelling drills we did, I don’t believe there’s any numbskulls in my battalion who would take a friendly shell to the head.”
“Understood.”
Frankly, it still feels weird to call my being “she,” but anyhow, this little girl is wearing a rare smile. She pays no mind to the rather strained quality of the reply and, noting that it’s time for work, cheerfully starts on an upward trajectory. Since we’ll be attacking the ground, we don’t have to climb to freezing cold temperatures—another plus.
As a result, Major Tanya von Degurechaff is decidedly chipper. Her expression even relaxes into a grin.
And that scene is carved into the mind of the former soldier who was there watching it. How many years has it been since the war? Yet his memories of the time are still clear as day.
Pleasantly surprised by the news of reinforcements, we figured things would work out somehow. That said, the threat level we were facing might have dropped a bit, but lowering our guard as well would see us turned into silent corpses.
So our company used the little extra time we’d been given wisely. The dead were moved aside, and stretchers were prepared for the wounded. And the machine guns had just worn out, so we arranged to swap in replacement barrels. To our dismay, however, although they had plenty of the all-important barrels, apparently Logistics was too understaffed to deliver them to the firing line in the middle of a large-scale battle.
When they told my team to send someone, I was called upon to settle my tab from that ritual both traditional and sacred known as cards. In other words, “You owe us!” Come to think of it, I think the cards hated me back then. Or I just couldn’t see through the clever cheating of my company mates. It pains me that now I have no way of knowing.
But at the time, those things weren’t even a dream in my mind as I set off, grumbling and crawling to the base dugout. There I negotiated with the formidable Logistics NCO and ended up stuck carrying the parts.
People tend to have this misunderstanding that it was safe in the rear, but on the Rhine front at the time, safety was a fantasy.
The closest distance between firing lines was only a few dozen meters. I wish I had been staring down the enemy in one of those. Since the trenches were so close together, the risk of accidentally hitting friendlies was high, so they couldn’t usually conduct bombardments.
Even if that wasn’t their situation, artillerymen apparently hated firing into dangerous areas where they might lay waste to their own along with the enemy. Whether Empire or Republic, we all had the common desire to avoid blowing up our fellow troops.
Rather than drop high explosives on our own positions, shoot for the enemy, even if you miss. It was common sense for both armies, so if you watched out for snipers, land mines, and rifles on the forward-most line, you weren’t likely to be an instant fatality.
But I should probably add that it wasn’t rare for artillery to mistake the position of the front line or to have trouble telling friend from foe in the confusion. I was once in a position nearly overrun by the Republican Army, and I saw all the invading soldiers get wiped out in an instant by Republican Army shells. Our respectful nomination of the enemy artillery for the Field Artillery Badge made it into the official gazette as a bit of a gag. We applaud the Republican artillery’s great demonstration of their training and contribution to the imperial war cause.
That’s the kind of battlefield we were dealing with, but there was only one reason the rear was considered the most dangerous place to be.
It’s the radios. Any strong waves that aren’t your own are obviously enemy command or a base dugout. It doesn’t take even two days to crush a newbie’s delusions of safety because of our sturdy underground fortifications.
If you can’t achieve much firing on the front line, then aim a storm of steel at the communications apparatus you can find, or so the thinking goes. If heavy armor-piercing rounds hit, dugouts are practically meaningless.
You’re holed up in a cellar one minute, and then next, you’re being plowed by artillery shells—the end. A suffocating death under a collapsed trench would be dreadful. Nobody was eager to set foot in a radio dugout.
At the time, they were so dangerous it was taboo to keep the communications base in the same dugout for more than forty-eight hours. Nobody talked about it, but everyone avoided doing it.
The reason radios were brought to the front despite those conditions was that we needed them. You can’t keep something as big as an army together with semaphores and trumpets alone. Wireless technology has proved effective amid the fog of war, so it’s no wonder armies continue to depend on it even now.
And listening in on the flood of messages was second nature to not only the radio operators but also the rumor-starved soldiers in the trenches.
That’s why I was keeping my ears open by habit and heard it. Something so unbelievable I wondered if the fray had ruined my ears.
“There aren’t any numbskulls in my unit who would get hit by a friendly shell. We need to prioritize keeping the enemy under control and holding them back above all else.”
A commander asking for a bombardment to be shot over them? I was about to shake my head, thinking there must have been some mistake, when—
“CP to Pixie 01. These are high-explosive shells with fuses timed for air bursts, you know!”
“Pixie 01, roger. That’s fine.”
Despite the static, I could tell she sounded cheerful. I’m still confident in my hearing ability even at this age, but that time was the one occasion I didn’t trust it.
She sounded so excited. Her tone was lighthearted, but her message was disturbing. What I heard over the radio was definitely the voice of someone having fun. She thought nothing of a direct hit from an air burst. She wasn’t worried about shrapnel coming down like rain?
Without thinking, the NCO I didn’t even know and I looked at each other. We had to make our artillerymen bombard our own mages? I couldn’t believe it. If they hit them, there would be hell to pay. Even if they were forgiven, they would have killed their own.
“…Is she serious?”
“She can�
�t be. Why do the mages listen to her?”
But either God is a piece of shit, or he has some farsighted design us lambs can’t even begin to imagine. She was serious.
In the case of friendly fire, it was impossible to tell which emplacement had hit the wrong target, so incidents were handled with silence. They were unfortunate accidents, and no one said a word.
But it’s a different story if the artillery is executing an observed fire mission on an area with our troops in it. Their reputation would be ruined. No one would forgive firing on our own troops, even if it was an order.
“…Major, do you…?”
“Don’t worry about us. Continue the bombardment.”
Even more invigorated. It scared me that such good cheer was coming over the radio. No, even now I’m not sure exactly what I was scared of.
The fear of being shelled for hours on end, holed up in a trench praying to make it through. The terror and the urge to scream at the top of your lungs, Just put me out of my misery! Only someone who has experienced that horror can understand it. There was something strange about someone who could laugh off the fear of a bombardment.
I wasn’t this scared even when the sniper was aiming at us. I was cold. It felt like my body was frozen to the core. What the hell is this chill?
“Pixie 03 to Pixie 01! Detecting multiple mana signals! Two company-sized groups of enemy mages are on their way up! Time to contact is 600!”
I remember that the warning someone issued brought me back to myself. And the radio operator frantically relayed the enemy info to other stations.
It was either just a new enemy unit or an intercepting unit. Even so, that was daily life on the Rhine lines, so I felt a strange happiness at returning to the normal from such an anomaly.
I remembered that I had to take the replacement parts and ammunition and return to the firing line. I had to get back while the communication trench was relatively tranquil. So it must have been about the time I thanked the NCO, grabbed the stuff, and was about to set off running?