European Coalition (3)
Thock. Thock. Thock.
"Dig deep, everyone! Deep trenches are what keep you alive!"
Ever since the catastrophic losses they'd suffered on the first day of the war, the coalition army had thrown itself into nothing but trench-digging.
"They don't dig at all, and we're stuck doing this…"
"Why's it only us breaking our backs?"
Clang!
"Ah, forget it! I'm taking a break."
A soldier flung his shovel to the ground, grumbling, and plopped down where he stood.
"They won't even feed us properly, but they work us to the bone."
"I can't tell if I'm a soldier or a miner."
Since that first battle, they had no victories to show for themselves—only holes in the frozen ground.
Thankfully, the enemy's numbers were so small they never attacked. That was about the only mercy the war offered.
Still, with this many hands, the trenches advanced quickly—though countless pickaxes snapped in the process of hacking through the frozen earth.
"How in God's name did those bastards dig through ground this hard?"
"They've been digging for years, haven't they?"
"They prepared all this in advance?"
"Are any of us getting out of here alive?"
Winter's frozen ground proved far harder to excavate than anyone had imagined. The only difference between them and the Qajar troops, of course, was that the Qajars had used explosives to blast the earth loose and clear the debris away.
But from that misunderstanding, a darker one took root: that their enemy must have foreseen this assault long ago and prepared accordingly. The thought chilled them more than the ground ever could.
Slsh. Slsh.
"Ugh… being by a river, there's way too much water down here, isn't there?"
"I'd kill for a spare set of clothes."
Conditions inside the trenches were miserable. Fires burned here and there for warmth, and the thawing ground beneath them had turned into a sucking, muddy morass.
Their boots were stitched leather, and the water seeped in right along the needle holes. Their feet were soaked around the clock.
And it was winter—the coldest season of all. A silent sickness was already coming for them.
Hiiiiss. Pshhh.
A train with not a single passenger car—fifteen freight cars lined up one after another—came hissing into Mudo station in a cloud of white steam.
"Heheh. How is there this much stuff?"
"Looks like we'll be unloading all day again."
Grind. Clunk.
Workers slid open the freight car doors and began inspecting the cargo.
"What kind of clothes come in this quantity?"
"Beats me? Word is the soldiers are supposed to change their clothes constantly, so they send it all over."
One car packed wall to wall with nothing but jackets? Beside it, trousers. Beside that, underclothes. Beside that, socks.
There was enough to clothe tens of thousands of men.
The underclothes and socks in particular took up so little space that it was impossible to even calculate how many soldiers they could outfit.
"Why would anyone need this many undershirts and socks?"
"Search me? I heard the Daehan people are so serious about it that they inspect for it—something about how changing your underclothes and socks more often than your outer layers keeps you from catching some kind of disease."
When the Daehan advisors had taught the Qajar army about trench warfare, they had drummed home a single warning above all others: frostbite.
It would nibble away at a man's feet without him ever noticing, until the foot had to come off. Keep your boots dry, they said. Keep your feet dry. Always.
And it was, of course, the dead of winter.
"Shift change!"
"Everyone rotate out!"
Because the coalition had no way of seeing beyond the fortress walls, they assumed the Qajar garrison numbered only a few thousand. In truth, nearly sixty thousand soldiers were massed there.
Which was precisely why they could rotate their men constantly and give everyone ample rest.
Clip-clop. Clip-clop.
"Hold up! Wagons coming! Stow the cargo and take five!"
"Yes, sir!"
A convoy of dozens of wagons rolled into view.
The goods unloaded from them were hauled into warehouses built flush against the inner face of the fortress walls, piling higher by the hour.
There was so much of it that even the items meant to be stored outdoors were simply leaned against the walls in enormous heaps.
"Alright! Everyone come collect your clothes! Get your laundry piles out here and take your pick!"
"Yes, sir~!"
Laundry was impossible here anyway, where every drop of water froze solid the moment it left your hands.
It was far simpler this way: change into fresh clothes, and send the dirty ones south with the wagons, where the women washed them all in one great batch.
Wars large and small came so frequently to Qajar that this routine had become second nature.
For the men suffering on the front lines, the women did what they could from home.
"The mess hall's ready! Men on the next shift, eat first and get prepared!"
A proper mess had been set up in the spacious barracks that stood to one side.
"Oh! Bulgogi and bread today!"
"Ha! Nothing beats wrapping bulgogi up in a piece of bread. I could eat it forever!"
Qajar was wheat country, and its people had grown up on bread.
But the love of bulgogi was the same in Daehan and Qajar alike—a dish delicious over rice, delicious in bread, delicious any way you ate it.
It drew rave reviews wherever it went.
Clank.
"God damn it…. Give me more!"
"Haah… sorry, soldier. That's all there is…."
Mealtimes in the coalition army were always a bitter affair. A thin, grayish soup, and even that had to be split—there wasn't enough otherwise.
As for the vegetables and scraps of meat, the cooks had made off with every last morsel for themselves.
"Why do we get so little?!"
"Look at it yourself! What do you see in there?!"
It sometimes came to blows with the men doling out the rations.
Half the coalition's supplies traveled by ship, half by land.
Ships from distant Western Europe unloaded at Polish ports; from there, the goods went by wagon all the way to the front.
The distances were long, transport fees were stingy, and everyone in the chain was skimming off the top—so less than half of anything shipped ever reached the front.
Clip-clop. Clip-clop.
"Yeehaw!"
In the middle of all this, a wagon came rolling in, loaded to the brim with something.
"Oh! What's that?!"
"Think they'd give us one more loaf?"
While the soldiers watched with hungry eyes, great slabs of meat came down off the wagon, along with countless crates and sacks.
"Back off! All of you!"
"Come on! Share it around!"
"That's the Supreme Commander's personal baggage. Even we can't touch it."
"Haah… for God's sake…."
With supply in such a sorry state, the Supreme Commander was buying food with his own money and eating it himself.
And inside those tightly sealed crates, of course, were chocolate and cigarettes in plenty.
"He bought it with his own coin, so what can anyone even say…"
"Damn it all…. I came here to make money, and now I'm supposed to spend it just to eat?"
Off to one side stood the barracks where the merchants lodged.
European wars were always short on supplies, so merchants trailed after the armies selling their wares.
At ruinous prices, naturally—so for the common soldier, even that was a pie in the sky.
"Apparently they're selling women over there too."
"What do you expect? That's nobleman territory."
"Disgusting. Filthy bastards."
The grumbling voices of the soldiers were beginning to curdle into something harder.
"Why do the nobles always get it easy? Even dying, it's only us who die."
"That's right…. A bullet through the heart kills a lord just the same…."
Asia and the Middle East were lands of frequent rebellion; Europe, uniquely, was showing all the signs of popular uprising.
Setting Daehan aside, Europe was unquestionably wealthier than any other region. The trouble was that the wealth sat locked in noble hands alone.
"The way I see it, I'd like to slit a throat while they're sleeping and run for it."
"They've got bodyguards. Wouldn't be easy."
"Damn it…."
"Might be, if enough of us gathered…"
blissfully unaware of all this, Gustav was living it up in his tent yet again today.
"Kyahaha~ that tickles~!"
"THIS, my girl, is chocolate! Care to try a piece, you vixen?"
"Yes, my lord~"
In a tent thick with tobacco smoke, chocolate and Daehan liquor lay spread across the table while women romped about—enough to make anyone doubt the coalition army had a future at all.
After the great defeat of January 8th, they had dug their trenches and launched attack after attack—each one collapsing into monstrous losses and a hasty retreat.
Across the front line, horribly, thousands of coalition corpses lay frozen with their eyes still open, being picked apart by wild animals.
In just three months, the army had shrunk to two hundred thousand. While they requested reinforcements and stared across the lines at the enemy, the coalition's troubles deepened.
"Commander! Some strange sickness is spreading through the ranks!"
"Hmm? A plague!"
With this many men living in such close quarters, epidemics were old acquaintances.
"Round them up and isolate them, quickly! What kind of sickness is it? It's not the Black Death, is it?!"
The Black Death's ravages had long since subsided, but the terror of it lived in their bones. Gustav's hands trembled without his even noticing.
"No, sir. It's… their feet are rotting away."
"Feet? What on earth is that?"
Tissue necrosis from frostbite—what would come to be known as trench foot—had begun to spread.
The weather had warmed just a little, and the trenches were turning into swamps. Excrement left wherever it dropped was festering, fouling the air.
The coalition trenches had become a place where merely not falling ill counted as good fortune.
"They say they can't determine the cause…."
So many men had fallen ill that it certainly looked contagious—yet the man standing right beside a sick one never caught it. The army's physicians hadn't the first idea what they were looking at.
Had it been deep winter, they would have simply called it frostbite. That it spread as the weather warmed made no sense at all.
"Could it be? Has Qajar poisoned the water?"
"Ah? You think so? But how would they…"
"What else is there besides the water?!"
Gustav had never once seen the Qajar troops venture out of their fortress, but he had convinced himself they'd done something to the water supply.
"Find another source of drinking water!"
"We'll have to go quite a distance, sir. Will that be all right?"
"What choice do we have?"
Splash!
And so, thoroughly unsettled, Gustav poured out the water from every bottle in his tent.
He dispatched his aide for water and, in its place, had liquor brought back instead.
"Good thing I stocked up on liquor. I'll be drinking it in place of water for a while."
From then on, Gustav touched nothing that had been cooked in water—only dried meat and spirits.
The smell of alcohol and tobacco began to hang over his tent day and night.
"Commander, the sickness is spreading far too quickly. We must devise countermeasures."
"What in God's name are those physicians even doing?!"
CRASH!
How much had he drunk? Gustav, no longer able to keep his feet under him, was shouting one moment and rolling on the floor the next.
"Are you all right, sir?"
"Damn it? Why is the floor spinning?"
"Uh…"
The aide had plenty to say, but he couldn't bring himself to say any of it. The man's eyes were wrong, his mind clearly unsound—and there was a real chance he'd order an execution on the spot.
"Have the physicians taken Qajar's gold?"
"Sir?"
"OF COURSE! That's why they can't find the cause! Execute every last physician and demand the homeland send new ones!"
"…"
The aide decided, then and there, that the man had finally gone mad. Some of those physicians were men Gustav himself had personally brought from his own estates.
Thud.
"Snrrkh… fwaaah…"
"Madman…"
Gustav had toppled over and gone straight to snoring on the floor, and the aide stared down at him with loathing.
The world had gone mad, just like the corpses rotting along the front.
Clunk.
"Glug, glug."
The aide, too, found sobriety more than he could bear. He opened a drawer, pulled out a bottle of Gustav's liquor, drank deep, and walked outside.
"Damn it all, but this stuff is wickedly good…"
It was his first taste of Daehan liquor—the bitterness of the alcohol wrapped in honeyed sweetness and a bright, clean aroma. Nothing on earth could taste better.
"So THIS is why Gustav drinks himself blind? Daehan goods really are something…"
When even the aide, the last sober man standing, tipped over into drunken madness, the army began to fall apart in earnest.
Physicians were executed at an accelerating pace, while the soldiers kept falling ill and losing their feet to the saw.
"AAAAGH! My leg! Khhk—khh—!"
The amputees.
"Send us home!"
They were not allowed to go home. Some lunatic order from on high commanded them to hold the trenches where they stood.
And so another month crawled past before the reinforcements dispatched from France finally reached the front.
"What is this?"
"Madness…"
What the arriving commander found at the front line beggared description.
The warming days had set the corpses rotting, so the stench went without saying; the soldiers were gaunt skeletons from want of food; and men hobbled everywhere on crutches, missing their legs.
"What in God's name have they been doing here?"