by Carlo Zen
“In other words, even prisoners should be used efficiently. If you understand, then get it done.”
“D-do excuse me. I’ll get on that right away.”
“If necessary, punish some camp guards… If progress comes too slowly, you’ll be dealt with as well.”
Everyone needed to work hard. He knew that people valued the chance to pursue their dreams. If their dream was staying alive, they would work for it.
“Yes, sir.”
“Look, all you need to do is what needs to be done. Remember that.”
So, troops. Please hurry up and show me you can do this, he wished, just barely suppressing his inner conflict.
“All right. Get going.”
Hurry up and bring that fairy to me.
JULY 18, UNIFIED YEAR 1926, THE EASTERN LINES
Good day, everyone.
Do you like clean air and a beautiful night sky? Wouldn’t you like to lie down on the earth amid a soft, gentle breeze and watch clouds drifting off into forever?
The city is overly mechanized and rigid in its standardization—it has no personality. Let’s take a step into the outside world. I’m sure we’ll find an abundance of the nature we’re meant to return to.
Our addiction to machines and overreliance on cars might make you think walking on the earth is a little crazy.
But please remember: Our ancestors walked. And so do we. So why not learn from our forebears and take a stroll outside?
Ah, I apologize. My introductory remarks have gone on for too long. How embarrassing.
I am the officer in command of the General Staff’s Salamander Kampfgruppe, Lieutenant Colonel Tanya von Degurechaff.
My current job is armed hiking.
All I have to do is go on and on, by motorcycle or armored vehicle, across the muddy earth.
Our actual mission is to support the flank of the Imperial Eastern Army Group’s Northern Cluster. You could say it’s the newly formed Salamander Kampfgruppe’s flank patrol mission.
Well, I heard our friends in the east beat the invading enemy’s reserves in Trouncenberg. The General Staff doesn’t imagine they’ll show up again now, so let’s relax and take it easy.
Yep, relax. I don’t want to get too involved. To be specific, this should be like a game of Ding-Dong Ditch…so we can always just run away.
(The Saga of Tanya the Evil, Volume 4: Dabit Deus His Quoque Finem, fin)
Appendixes: Commentary
Afterword
To everyone who picked up Volume 4, I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.
But I said I would put it out in early summer, and it’s June! It’s June (and I think it’s fine to say that the last day of June is still undoubtedly early summer). So I don’t think it’s out of the question to make a strong argument and say I delivered perfectly according to plan.
One other thing—and due to space constraints, I can’t get into all the details, but—beware of the crooked propaganda claiming that Carlo Zen is not a light novel author. The Saga of Tanya the Evil is unmistakably a light novel. By definition, it is definitely a light novel. This is important, so I’ll say it again: It’s totally a light novel regardless of how thick it is.
Now that the important announcements are out of the way, on to the meat of the afterword. Here we are on Volume 4 of The Saga of Tanya the Evil.
To be honest, it’s such a wild title, I wasn’t sure I would be able to keep going this long, so I feel I’ve been blessed with unexpected luck. I hope to receive your continued patronage—nothing would make me happier.
A warm thank-you to Tsubakiya Design for the design, Ukita for the proofing, my editor Fujita, and most of all to the illustrator who always does such wonderful illustrations, Shinotsuki.
Now then, I firmly believe I have a moral duty to take this opportunity to extend a heartfelt apology to Shinotsuki for the horrible thing I did. Shinotsuki, who didn’t really understand the fascination of railway guns, is now tainted. Among the various factors, I can’t deny my responsibility in convincing people to say, “Anti-matériel rifles are cool, huh?”
But how could I help it? Sorry, but railway guns are just poetry in action. I can’t help it.
Readers, please don’t forget.
The Saga of Tanya the Evil is made by condensing that romance and hobby, adding water to create a soup stock of hobby and romance, carefully seasoning the romance with more hobby, and then throwing in an unbelievable amount of hard-core stuff.
And so the story is heading to the east. I told my editor the war on the eastern front “won’t take too long,” so I figure I’ll finish it off pretty quickly.
It’s only a little part of humanity’s long history since we began recording it, so in the grand scheme of things, it should be short.
But just because it’s short doesn’t mean you can let your guard down! If you let yourself get lured in without thinking, you might find yourself swooning over railway guns…
Of course, maybe that warning is coming a bit too late for those of you who have been kind enough to read up through Volume 4.
June 2015 Carlo Zen
1 phony war When two armies are officially at war yet simply stare at each other across the border. A typical example is the way Germany and the allies, Britain and France, faced off at the start of World War II with practically no land war. In the worst cases, countries actually forget they are at war with one another. There was even a long conflict called the Three Hundred and Thirty-Five Years’ War during which not a single shot was fired!
2 Ricardian formulation of comparative advantage Also known as the comparative cost theory. The basis of commerce theory. To put it in extremely simple terms, it says that everyone should make what they are good at and trade it.
3 Germans taken prisoner at the end of the war At the end of World War II, all the Germans headed west…because they didn’t know what would happen to them if they surrendered to the Soviet Army.
4 HUMINT standpoint In a nutshell, HUMINT is the gathering of intelligence from interpersonal conversations and the media. There was once an era during which Communism was particularly attractive, and there were Communists milling about all over the place. Recruitment was so easy! By the way, Carlo Zen is hoping to recruit people as “Communthusiasts.” Keep your wits about you!
5 The people are your stone walls According to Takeda Shingen, “The people are your castle, your stone walls, your moat. Protect them and they shall protect you.” No matter how solidly you build your castle, the ones holing up inside are people, in the end. If your defensive lines have no unity, that’s no good; therefore, it’s of utmost importance to win the hearts of your people. Incidentally, Stalin’s way was to exploit people as his castle, use a wall of them for protection, put them in other people’s way like a moat, trust only his sworn comrades, and destroy as an enemy anyone who might possibly have ill intentions.
6 Full-of-shit-guchi I’ll explain this! General Full-of-shit-guchi was one of the most fearsome generals in the entire world if you’re counting only one specific aspect! His real name was Renya Mutaguchi. His skill in single-handedly destroying the Japanese Army’s lines at Imphal made him feared as Brute-guchi even among the bravest of Japan’s generals. Incidentally, he appears to have been a member of the Imperial Japanese Army.
7 John Bull spirit A gentle, noble, undaunted spirit applicable to war or sports. But their food is questionable. If I had to explain it, I’d say it’s a daily practice of not putting strain on Logistics.
8 Revisionists The reaction against perfect, scientific Communism, which makes “changes” on the pretext of “revising errors.” Incidentally, it seems that science is the process of revising errors.
9 Doolittle’s Tokyo Raid Yankee ogres who bombed Tokyo with conventional bombers launched from an aircraft carrier. They’re probably the only ones who could pull off launching conventional planes from a carrier.
10 key terrain An important piece of land military geographers want to take at all costs.
For example, Mount Tennōzan in the Battle of Yamazaki, the 203 Meter Hill in the Siege of Port Arthur. If those locations were taken, the battle was lost.
But in history, there’s this weirdo, Napoleon, who used key terrain as bait to lure the enemy. He abandoned the Pratzen Heights and pounded the enemy when they strolled over there… Normally, it doesn’t work like that.
11 ideological education Let’s study the party’s political theory in order to establish correct socialism! Huh? We’re in the army so it has nothing to do with us?! Revolt! Such an enjoyable class.
Apparently, soldiers felt this “indoor training” wasn’t so bad—because all they had to do was sit.
12 warmonger War crazy. Those Shimazu clan vibes.
13 nomenklatura The directory of Communist Party members. If you weren’t registered in it, you couldn’t use currency shops, and you couldn’t be promoted. But please believe me. The Communist Party created a classless, equal society!
14 Stalin The man of steel, Comrade Stalin. Leader of the Soviet Union. Probably took out more Soviet citizens and officers than anyone else.
15 Bismarck A Prussian-made diplomacy machine. His efficiency in creating Germany was sort of insane. To break it down into three steps: First was his ingenious diplomatic work at dragging Austria into the fight with Denmark and eliminating English interference. Then he smacked Austria in the fight over who would control the territory swiped from Denmark, while having France and Russia remain neutral. Then, in the end, he had Austria maintain sympathetic neutrality while he smacked France and promptly installed the German emperor in the French palace!
16 Fouché France’s prized weathercock. If you can believe it, this chief of the secret police participated in the revolution from beginning to end and not only survived but came out a winner! …Seriously, how did he live through it?
17 Formosa Air Battle An instance of mistakenly attributed military achievement. When Imperial Headquarters tabulated the reports from each unit, the total sunk or destroyed was “nineteen aircraft carriers, four battleships, seven merchant cruisers, and fifteen boats of uncertain type”—a major victory—except in reality they destroyed only two merchant cruisers.
Honestly, anyone who knows the battlefield would have taken such results with a grain of salt, but it also just comes down to the fact that people believe what they want to.
18 someone in the lageri A lageri is a system of concentration and labor camps. By the way, the brilliant Soviets were against slave labor.
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