The flamethrowers went in first.
I watched them from altitude in the pre-dawn dark, the teams moving up behind the Empire's final advance with the particular methodical pace of men carrying something that requires careful handling — the tanks of fuel on their backs, the nozzles, the ignition mechanisms that turned pressurised liquid into something that had its own physics entirely separate from the fire you made with wood and kindling. Not a burning but a projection. A liquid arc of ignition that found whatever it touched and stayed there, burning with the specific adhesive quality of something designed to be impossible to remove once applied.
The Republic trenches lit up in sections along the line. From altitude, in the darkness before dawn, the effect was almost beautiful in the way that some of the worst things are almost beautiful when seen from far enough away — long lines of orange light appearing in sequence, spreading laterally as the teams worked, the fire taking the timber revetments and the sandbags and whatever was sheltering inside the works and treating all of it as the same category of fuel.
The screaming reached me even at altitude. I want to record that specifically because I had believed, after four years of this work, that I had made my peace with what altitude did to the sounds of what happened below — muffled them, softened them, converted them into something the mind could process as operational rather than human. The screaming from the burning trenches was loud enough and sustained enough and specific enough in its quality that altitude did not accomplish this. I heard it as what it was. Men burning alive in a line that stretched as far as I could see in either direction, the sound of them climbing through the noise of everything else the morning contained and arriving at me clearly and completely, and I noted it in the operational sense and kept my construct oriented toward the target because the target was ahead and the screaming was below and those were two different directions.
Below us, in the burning trenches, the Empire's infantry was pouring through the gaps the flamethrowers had made. I could see them from altitude moving through the smoke and the orange light, some of them passing directly over positions that were still burning, stepping over or around the men who had been in those positions, who were now either no longer men in the standing sense or men in a condition that the advance did not have time to address.
A soldier near the first breach had been hit by the flamethrower before he could clear the trench — I could see him from altitude, briefly, a shape that was no longer the shape of a man who had not been on fire, moving against the trench wall with the specific desperate, purposeless motion of someone whose body has not yet finished registering what has happened to it. Then the infantry came through and he was simply part of the ground they crossed, and the advance moved on.
"Formation tight," I said into the speaking tube. "We go in fast. HQ first, anti-air second. Don't give them time to organise."
---
The Allied headquarters was a fortified manor house four kilometres behind what had been the second line, identified three days ago by reconnaissance as the nerve centre of the defensive command structure. Taking it out would not end the battle but it would do to the Allied defence what taking the head does to any body — the parts continue on stored instruction and momentum, and then the stored instruction runs out.
We went in low and fast, the approach using the terrain's fold to mask our arrival until the last possible moment. Twenty-two mages at the start of yesterday. Seventeen at the start of this morning. The constructs moving in tight formation through air that smelled of smoke and the particular chemical quality of enchanted ordnance that had been expended in volume.
We came over the last ridge and the manor house was ahead, approximately three hundred metres, and the anti-air was already tracking us.
They had known we were coming.
Not improvised positions, not tilted machine guns on jury-rigged mounts — purpose-built anti-air batteries, coordinated fields of overlapping fire, crews that had been on that ridge since before dawn because someone had told them to be on that ridge before dawn and had told them specifically which ridge to watch.
The first burst found us before I'd finished understanding what I was seeing.
Richter, on my right flank, took the initial concentration — six or eight guns finding him simultaneously, the convergence simply dissolving his construct, the aether shredding under that much concurrent impact, and Richter inside it going from a living man to a collection of components that the morning air received and distributed across forty metres of French countryside in a fraction of a second that left no interval between the burst and the outcome. He was there and then the outline of where he had been was there briefly in smoke and falling matter and then that was gone too, and the guns were already finding the next target.
I was yelling into the speaking tube for the formation to scatter when Lena went down.
I saw it happen. I want to record that I saw it happen because it matters, because the seeing is the thing I have carried since and will carry for whatever remains of the time I have to carry anything.
She was breaking right, the correct response to the scatter order, her construct tilting and accelerating into the turn, and the burst that found her found her in the turn — multiple guns, not one, the coordinated fire of several positions releasing simultaneously, the way the Republic's anti-air crews had apparently been trained to engage mage constructs rather than single-targeting them. The rounds hit her across the back and left side. Her construct flickered, the aether bleeding from its wings in pale streamers, and she went into a roll that was not a controlled manoeuvre.
I could see her inside it. I could see that she was still there, still present, the roll not yet resolved, and for one second — one specific, particular second that I have measured and remeasured in every dark hour since — I believed it might resolve into something survivable.
Then the secondary burst found the destabilised construct and completed what the first had started.
Lena Schmitt, who had been beside me since Warsaw and since Munich and since the tunnel in the Carpathians and since three days in a city that had briefly resembled a life rather than a war, went down into the French countryside at a speed and in a condition that required no confirmation from this altitude or any other.
The professional part of my mind filed her under casualties and continued functioning.
I have hated that part of my mind every day since.
---
I put everything we had into the headquarters.
Not tactically. Not with the careful, economical targeting of a professional company executing an assigned objective. Everything — every tracking round, every explosive yield, every enchantment my remaining mages could generate — directed at that manor house and everything in its grounds with a totality that had nothing operational underneath it and everything else.
The anti-air positions went first, the concentrated enchanted fire hitting each one in sequence and leaving each as a smoking crater. The outbuildings followed — vehicles, communications equipment, generators, stores. The manor house itself took the sustained fire of eleven mages at close range for forty seconds, which was enough time for the structure to go from a building to a ruin to a pile of burning stone. The screaming from inside it reached us even as we were still firing, and we kept firing, and then there was no more screaming from inside it because there was no longer an inside.
We pulled back.
It should have been enough.
It was not enough.
---
The Allied defence did not depend on its headquarters the way our plan had assumed. The front-line commanders — Australian, Canadian, Indian, French — did not stop fighting when the orders stopped coming. They fought the way soldiers fight when orders stop, which is the way they were already fighting, which is the only way available when the alternative is dying or letting the men beside you die.
The tanks came first.
Republic tanks heavier than ours, moving up from reserve positions the headquarters strike had not disrupted, hitting the Empire's consolidating infantry with the specific violence of armoured vehicles meeting men in the open without adequate response. I watched them from altitude the way I had watched everything from altitude for four years — with the professional distance that converts specific human sounds into abstractions the mind can process. The distance had gone with Lena somewhere over the French countryside and without it I watched the tanks move through the Empire's advance with whatever was underneath the distance, which turned out to be something I had no name for.
Men went under the treads without the drama the word implies — simply absorbed by the movement of something with no awareness of what it was moving over, the treads redistributing them across the ground in a way that the advance behind the tanks then had to cross, which it did, because the advance had nowhere else to go.
Others were caught by the tank guns, the shells finding grouped infantry with the same indifferent arithmetic that all artillery applies to grouped men. A section of the Empire's third wave took a direct hit that I watched from altitude resolve a cluster of perhaps twelve men into a distribution of components across a radius of twenty metres, the components coming down across ground that had already been covered in the components of other men from earlier in the morning, the layers accumulating in a way that made the killing ground below look, from altitude, like something geological rather than something that men had made of other men in the space of a few hours.
Then the Allied artillery, repositioned under cover of night and the headquarters confusion, opening up on the advance that had seemed yesterday to be on the edge of something irreversible. Shells walking through the consolidated Empire positions with the patient rhythm I had watched from the other side for four years, and the positions coming apart in the same ways positions always came apart under sustained accurate fire — completely, without discrimination, everything inside the blast radius resolved into its components regardless of whether those components had been advancing or defending or simply trying to find somewhere low enough to survive the next thirty seconds.
I watched a platoon that had been consolidating a position near the second line take a walking barrage that crossed their location over the course of perhaps eight seconds. The first shell landed short, the second on the position's left edge, the third and fourth through the centre, the fifth beyond, and in the space between the second and the fourth shells the platoon ceased to be a platoon in any meaningful sense, the men in it distributed across the ground in the way that sustained close artillery distributes men, which is thoroughly and without anything left to bury that has a clear relationship to the person it had been part of.
Then the reinforcements. Fresh troops coming up from reserve positions the Allied command apparently still had, colonial units and Republic units moving into the gaps in the defensive line and then through those gaps into the advance itself, and the Empire's infantry, which had been advancing since dawn, found itself advancing into something that was moving in the opposite direction with considerable energy and considerably more of itself than had been there an hour ago.
We tried to help.
My eleven remaining mages tried to do what mage companies do for infantry in difficulty — suppress the things suppressing them, create space where space has been eliminated. We took two tanks with tracking rounds before the anti-air accompanying the tanks found Hofer. The burst that took him was a concentrated one, multiple guns again, and what it did to his construct and to him inside it was total enough that the space he had occupied in the formation was simply empty without any intermediate stage, the way a word disappears from a sentence when it is deleted rather than crossed out.
Mayer went thirty seconds later, a Republic mage's enchanted round finding him in a gap between his shields, detonating against his casting arm and removing it at the shoulder in a bright arterial spray that the wind took immediately, his construct beginning its uncontrolled descent while he was still present enough to understand what was happening to him, which was the particular cruelty of wounds that are fast enough to be total but not fast enough to be immediate.
Eight mages. Six. Then five, a Republic mage company that had been held in reserve rising from concealed positions and engaging us with coordinated aggression that told me they had been briefed on our tactics and had prepared specific counters.
I fought back. We all fought back. I killed three of their mages in quick succession, the tracking rounds finding them in the turns and the dives with the mechanical precision that four years of this work had installed in my hands independently of whatever was happening in the rest of me. My remaining four killed two more. The numbers were still not in our favour and the infantry below was retreating and the tanks were advancing and the word retreat had moved from tactical option to simple description of what was occurring.
"Pull back," I said. "Now. Back to our lines."
We went.
---
Below us as we crossed back over the front, the Empire's advance was resolving into the thing that advances become when they fail at the moment they seemed closest to succeeding. Men moving backward in the controlled way of soldiers executing a withdrawal and then in the less controlled way of soldiers responding to pressure that has exceeded the containable, and then in some sections simply moving backward because backward was the only direction that still had room in it.
The killing ground between the lines was carpeted in a way I had not seen in four years of aerial work. The morning's advance having crossed no man's land and the first line and most of the second line's killing ground had left evidence of its crossing across every metre of that distance — the dark shapes visible from altitude in numbers that the word thousands addressed without capturing, laid in the patterns that sustained machine-gun and artillery fire creates in men when men are what it has to work with, which are not the patterns of sleep or rest but the patterns of the specific, violent physics of what large-scale fire does to organic matter at range.
And the retreat was adding to it. Men caught in the open by the pursuing fire, going down in the same ways men had been going down all morning, the specific ways — the burst taking a group and distributing it, the single round finding a running man in the back and pitching him forward into the ground with his momentum still carrying him a metre or two past the impact before the ground settled the question, the artillery shell landing among a withdrawing section and opening a crater that contained, for a moment, what the section had been before it opened.
I watched all of it from altitude and felt all of it without the distance that had made four years of watching it from altitude sustainable, and I flew back to the landing field and I landed, and I stood on the ground, and I was the only thing in my immediate vicinity that was not in motion.
---
Oberleutnant Enzo Ferretti — Compiègne Forest
The railway carriage was warm in a way that felt, given what was happening outside it, almost indecent.
I am Enzo Ferretti, and I was at this particular moment the most junior member of the Empire's armistice delegation, present for all of the discussions and consulted on none of them, carrying the pen case and watching men considerably more senior than me perform the specific exhausted theatre of powers that have run out of options negotiating the terms of having run out of options.
The messenger arrived at half past four in the morning with confirmation of what everyone in the carriage had already understood from the accumulating silence of the communications that had stopped arriving — the final offensive had failed. The breakthrough had not occurred. The line that had seemed yesterday to be one morning from ceasing to exist had, with the Allied reinforcement and the tanks and the colonial troops, become something that still existed. The Empire's advance had become the Empire's retreat, and the retreat was not a tactical withdrawal.
The senior delegate read the confirmation twice. He set it on the table in the warm carriage and looked at the Allied delegates with an expression I had never seen on a man's face before and have not seen since — not defeat exactly, but something underneath defeat, the specific recognition that a thing is finished.
"The terms," he said, his voice entirely steady. "Let us conclude the terms."
They were concluded between half past four and five fifteen in the morning.
Outside the carriage, while the terms were being concluded, the war was still technically occurring. Men were still dying in it. The men dying in it did not know that the terms were being concluded, and the terms being concluded did not know or care about the men dying in it, and that was simply how armistices work — they are administrative events that trail behind the physical reality they're intended to end by however long the administration requires.
At five fifteen the document was signed.
I watched the senior delegates sign and the Allied delegates countersign and I heard the scratching of the pens in the warm silence of the carriage. I thought about the men still dying outside while the pens scratched. I thought about whether they would be told promptly and whether promptly would be prompt enough.
I did not say anything. I was too junior to say anything, and the things I might have said would not have changed the scratching of the pens.
The war would end at eleven o'clock. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, which someone in the Allied delegation had decided had a satisfying symmetry to it, and which I found, standing in that carriage at five fifteen, to have a symmetry whose satisfaction depended entirely on whether you were the kind of person who would still be alive when eleven o'clock arrived.
I stepped out of the carriage into the Compiègne forest at five thirty and stood in the cold November air and listened, which was what I had been listening for across four years of this war — silence. The specific silence of a world in which nothing was currently being detonated.
It was not silent. The guns were still going. The agreement said eleven o'clock and it was five thirty and the guns were going because eleven o'clock was the term and the term was the term, and whatever was happening to whoever was in the path of the guns between now and eleven o'clock was happening in a war that had already ended in a railway carriage in a forest, and the war outside the carriage had not received the notification yet, and the notification was scheduled for eleven o'clock, and it was five thirty.
I went back inside the warm carriage and sat in my junior chair and waited.
---
Oberleutnant Hans Muller
The assembly order came at seven in the morning.
We gathered in the field behind the landing area — my five remaining mages alongside the remnants of several infantry battalions that had come back from the morning's advance in various states of damage and reorganisation. Perhaps three hundred men total, standing in the November cold in a field that had been a staging area and was now simply a place where exhausted, damaged people happened to be standing.
The colonel who addressed us was a man I did not know from a regiment I had no prior knowledge of, which told me that the officers who had been managing this sector were somewhere else or no longer managing anything.
"At five fifteen this morning," he said, "an armistice document was signed by representatives of the Empire and the Allied powers."
The assembled men received this in the various ways that men receive information that resolves something that has been unresolved for four years. Some sounds. Some expressions I could see from where I was standing. Some faces that did nothing at all, which was its own kind of response.
"The armistice takes effect at eleven hundred hours." He checked his watch. "That gives us three hours and forty minutes."
He looked along the ranks.
"We have a responsibility to use those three hours and forty minutes. The line is vulnerable. The Allied reinforcement is extended. A coordinated push in the remaining time could still achieve the breakthrough that this morning's advance approached—"
"The war is over." A private from one of the infantry battalions. Young face, still marked with the dirt and blood of the morning's advance, voice entirely flat. "You just said it's over. We're not going forward again."
Two other men in the ranks said something I couldn't hear from my position but which was clearly agreement.
The colonel nodded to two military police officers standing at the field's edge. They moved into the ranks with the practiced efficiency of men executing a task they had been briefed on before the assembly, which told me the colonel had anticipated objections and prepared for them, which told me something about his relationship with the orders he was giving.
The private and the two men who had spoken were separated from the assembly and walked to the edge of the field. It was done quickly and in full view of all three hundred assembled men, because the point being made was not only to the three being walked to the field's edge.
Three shots. Flat, spaced, final.
The military police officers walked back. The colonel looked at the assembly.
"The push begins at eight hundred hours," he said. "That is all."
Nobody else spoke.
I stood in the ranks and looked at the three shapes at the field's edge and at the five mages remaining to me from the twenty-two who had been my company yesterday morning, and I understood what three hours and forty minutes meant and what it was going to cost, and that none of the cost would change anything that had been settled at five fifteen in a railway carriage in a forest.
I picked up my rifle — not my primary weapon, never had been, but something I had carried since the first year out of habit I'd never bothered to break — and I walked to my five remaining mages and I said: "We support the push. Stay close. Stay alive until eleven."
They looked at the shapes at the field's edge. They looked at each other. They followed me.
---
The push at eight hundred hours gained nothing except the men it cost, which was the result of most of what happened along the entire length of the front between five fifteen and eleven o'clock that morning — the war in its final hours having apparently decided that having settled its essential question it had no obligation to stop performing the specific actions that had constituted it for four years.
We went over what had been the front line and the Republic's guns found us again and the Republic's mages engaged us again and two more of my company went into the French ground before nine o'clock — Wenzel losing his construct to anti-air that had repositioned under the previous engagement's cover and finding the ground from that altitude in the way that that altitude and that ground always resolved their disagreements, and Fischer taken by an enchanted round that found him between shields and opened him from the inside in a way that I watched from three metres away with whatever I had left in me after the morning, which was not much and was getting less.
Three mages. Then Gruber, caught in a traversing machine-gun burst that swept our position while we were suppressing a Republic infantry advance, the rounds hitting him across the chest and face in a sequence that was faster than any response available to the human body, dropping him in the position he'd been firing from with his rifle still in his hands.
Two. Myself and Kessler, a veteran who had been with the company since the Carpathians and who had the particular quality of soldiers who have been in this long enough to have become indistinguishable from the war itself.
We flew. We suppressed what we could suppress. We watched the infantry below us advance and be thrown back and advance again and be thrown back again, the same ground changing hands in the same ways it had changed hands for four years, the specific men doing the changing being the only thing that was different and different only in the sense that they were newer than the men who had done it before them.
At ten thirty a Republic artillery barrage caught a section of Empire infantry that had reached the Allied wire for the third time that morning and was attempting to cut through it again. The barrage was precise and immediate and total — the section simply ceased to exist as a section, the men in it distributed across the wire and the ground around it in a radius that made the wire itself a secondary element of the scene below me, draped with things that had been men a moment before and were now simply the argument the artillery had made about the wire's defenders.
At ten fifty the Republic mage company made a final push against our position, and Kessler, who had been with me since the Carpathians, went down in the engagement — a tracking round finding him in a dive and detonating against his construct's core, the aether releasing all at once in a single flash of light that was briefly very bright and then was gone, and Kessler with it, and I was alone in the air over a front that had approximately ten minutes left to be a front.
I kept flying because there were ten minutes and the colonel's orders were until eleven and the men at the field's edge had established the cost of the alternative.
At ten fifty-nine the guns were still firing.
At eleven o'clock they stopped.
The stopping was not gradual. It was immediate — one moment the guns were going and the next moment they were not, and the silence came up from below like a physical thing, a pressure change, something the body registered before the mind understood what had caused it.
I was in the air when it happened, my construct hovering above a line that had stopped being contested in the space between one second and the next. I looked down at the front, at the men on both sides of it standing in whatever positions eleven o'clock had found them in, looking at each other across the ground between them that was no longer the ground between them in the sense it had been for four years.
I descended through the silence, which was the loudest thing I had heard since the war started, and I landed, and I stood on the French ground, and the war was over.
---
They put us on trains home.
I want to describe the boarding because I think the ordinary details of it matter — the organisation of exhausted men into carriages, the loading of equipment, the specific mundane logistics of moving thousands of people from one place to another, the way these things happen in exactly the same way regardless of what the people being moved have just come from. The trains were the same trains that had brought us forward and they were now taking us backward, as if the whole apparatus had simply reversed its direction without changing its nature.
My five mages had become two by the time the trains were organised — Kessler dead in the final hour, Gruber before that, the company that had been twenty-two at the start of the offensive now reduced to Wenzel and Fischer and I — no, Wenzel and Fischer were gone, I had watched them go before nine o'clock, I corrected myself — to myself and no one, the last of the company, boarding a train back to the Empire with whatever I was carrying from the past four years and the past morning specifically.
I found a compartment and I sat in it and I put my kit on the floor and I looked out the window at France sliding past, which looked exactly as France had looked on every other train I had taken through it, which was to say that it looked like a country rather than a war, and the distinction between those two things had apparently been operational all along, the country persisting underneath the war the way a road persists under water when a river floods, waiting for the water to recede, unchanged by what had passed over it.
Soldiers filled the compartments around me, men I did not know from units I had not flown with, talking in the ways that men talk when something they have been inside for a very long time has just ended — not celebration exactly, not grief exactly, a quality of voice that didn't have a category in ordinary life because ordinary life didn't produce the condition it was responding to.
I thought about Lena. The turn. The secondary burst. The French countryside that had received her and kept her.
I thought about Munich and the three days in it and the rough outline of after that had included her in it, the outline I had let myself look at on the train going west, the outline that had dissolved back into the operational when the train crossed into France and had not, it turned out, been waiting for me on the other side of the operational the way I had assumed it would be.
I thought about what I was going home to, which was an apartment in Berlin I had last been in four years ago and which probably still existed but which had no one in it who had been expecting me specifically, and no work waiting that resembled what I had been doing for four years, and no Lena.
I thought about twenty-two mages and what had happened to each of them in the time between their joining the company and the company's ending, which I could account for with the operational precision that four years had installed, each name attached to a specific engagement and a specific outcome, the mechanism that had been converting men into operational data doing its last accounting efficiently and completely.
I thought about the man I had been before any of this — not a specific memory but the general shape of him, a man who had had a life that was not organised around targets and ranges and casualties and the professional distance required to operate at altitude above things that altitude was supposed to be far enough from.
I had no path from where I was sitting in this train compartment back to that shape. I could not locate it from here. The mechanism that had kept me functional for four years had done its work so thoroughly that what was underneath it, when I looked, was not the man I had been before the mechanism was installed but simply the mechanism itself, and underneath the mechanism there was nothing that I recognised as a reason to do the next thing and the thing after that, which was what living required — reasons to do the next thing, extending forward in a chain that gave the doing its point.
Lena had been the next thing. She had been the after. She had been the shape that surviving was supposed to arrive at.
I sat in the compartment for a long time after the train had been moving. The French countryside gave way to the German border and the German border gave way to German countryside, which was different from French countryside in ways I observed without finding interesting, and the light changed as the day moved and the other soldiers around me talked or slept or looked out their own windows at their own versions of the country passing, and I sat with what I was sitting with and I found that it did not resolve into anything.
I took my service pistol from its holster — the same one I had carried since the second year of the war, well maintained, a habit of maintenance that had become independent of any particular attachment to its purpose — and I held it in my lap for a while and I looked at the German countryside outside the window.
I thought, one last time, about after. About the tunnel in the Carpathians and the morning light in the carriage window and Lena saying I know all the reasons in the specific way she had said it that made the reasons feel like something she had already settled with herself long before she said it aloud.
I thought about what she would have said now, in this compartment, with the German countryside outside and the war over and both of us on a train going home.
She would have said something. She would have had words for it — Lena always had words for things, had always been more willing to say the direct thing than I was, had always been the one who crossed the space between them when I was still calculating whether crossing it was a good idea.
She was not here to say it.
The other soldiers in the compartment were not looking at me. They were looking at their own windows, carrying their own things, doing whatever the men who survived do on the trains that take them back from the places where the men who didn't survive stayed.
I heard, outside the compartment window, the German countryside — fields, a river catching the afternoon light, a village with a church spire, ordinary things going about the business of being ordinary in the specific oblivious way that ordinary things conduct themselves regardless of what has happened to the people passing through them.
Hans Muller, Oberleutnant, last surviving member of his mage company, made a decision on a train going home through Germany in November of 1918, and the train carried him through the afternoon and the German countryside went past the window and the other soldiers talked and slept and looked at their own windows, and somewhere in the fields of Germany the war's last cost was paid quietly, in a compartment, without ceremony, the way most of the war's costs had ultimately been paid.
The German countryside outside was very ordinary. The light on it was the particular light of a November afternoon, pale and low and giving everything it touched a quality of something almost finished rather than something ending.
The train kept moving.