NOVGO.NET Chapter 681: Modern Warfare
Chapter 681: Modern Warfare
The sky over the border was a hard, steel blue the kind of cold that felt as if it had been poured from a bucket and left to freeze in the air.
Far below it, the countryside moved like living machinery: hedgerows shredded, fields churned into mud, smoke threading toward the sun.
The First and Third Armies did not come clattering in like an answer to a bell; they came like a verdict.
From the vantage of a shallow, dug-in fold in the ground, a platoon watched the line peel open.
Men huddled beneath plate carriers and helmet covers, breath clouding the air, optics fogged.
The weapons in their hands were close cousins to instruments of an era yet to be born, modern, perfected over the course of two decades.
Rapidly innovated and improved to lethal precision.
The first thunder was not ground-born.
A turboprop powered fighter came screaming across the grey, its paintwork a smear against the light.
It rolled low and hard, a predator checking the herd, and spilled ordnance in a precise, clinical pattern.
Where the rockets struck the hedgerow erupted in a bloom of orange; the scent of singed earth and smoldering foliage rose, bitter and bright.
The platoon’s forward observer keyed his radio once, twice.
It was brief, but confirmed subsequent runs.
Men cursed and smiled in the same breath.
Air made the impossible possible: corridors cut through the tangle of terrain, corridors a column of armor could run through.
The armor came next: low, angular hulls that slid across the ground with hydraulic grace.
E-series IFVs and wheeled APCs moved like sea beasts across the fields, composite skins flexing against shrapnel and splinters.
Their tracks and tires chewed up ditch and sod and left behind a raw line of ripped life.
From their turrets came short, purposeful bursts, coaxing French positions to reveal themselves, then punishing anything that showed more than a silhouette.
In the rear, self-propelled artillery unreeled its long arms; salvo after salvo of coordinated artillery thundered outward.
Thermobaric rockets turning pockets of hedgerow and barn into heat and pressure that pushed the air outward like the closing of a fist.
The concussion of rocket assisted shells ranging from 105mm to 172mm rolled through the platoon’s bones; ears rang, and a man who had been laughing a breath before went suddenly still and pale.
Medical personnel moved as they always did: quick, tight, efficient, armored ambulances arriving with a hiss to take the broken and the dying away.
They were protected by Light, Medium, and Main Battle Tanks, as well as the APCs and IFVs that flanked them.
Their armored hulls reflected bullets and shrapnel as they pulled out the injured and wounded to safety beyond the combat zone.
At the platoon level, tactics had a sharp, merciless simplicity: move with the armor, cut the enemy’s lines, and hold only long enough for the next hammer to fall.
Machine-gun teams laid down curtains of fire; riflemen used dead ground and pounded the enemy’s flanks with short, disciplined bursts.
When the French answered with a counter-fire, the platoon’s light anti-armor rockets, compact launchers resembling a hybrid of the Panzerfaust 250, the RPG-2 and the pzf 44 strapped to a shoulder, barked in reply, the concussive backblast turning a man’s face to a white flash for a heartbeat.
The fliegerfausts at shoulder level were as much psychological as physical: a promise that the air itself could bite.
They were coordinated with a mixture of self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, ranging in caliber and rate of fire, as well as self-propelled surface to air missile platforms.
In doing so creating an impenetrable dome for which enemy aircraft could not dare to interfere with.
The men concealed within the natural environment better than any other.
Blumentarn BDUs crouched against feldgrau plate carriers; the helmets, aramid shells shaped in the long shadow of the Stahlhelm but close-fitting and boltless protected them from small arms fire and shrapnel alike. Leading to far less casualties than the enemy were sustaining.
Plates overlapped with the practiced geometry of war: chest, shoulder, throat.
Radios were clipped to webbing. Pouches bore magazines and grenades; the smell of heating bodies and oil and the faint, sour tang of adrenaline did the rest.
Hand-to-hand engagements came sudden and sharp, as inevitable as rain in April.
Hedgerows that had once been hedgerows became choke points full of faces.
Men moved with an ugly grace, slamming a buttstock or throwing a grenade into a slit in a wall. In close quarters the 4× optic was ignored in favor of iron sights below.
A rifle muzzle flashed in the gap, a man dropped, the world narrowed to the will to live.
Command threads held like sewn seams.
Radios chirped, reports rose and fell, and the battalion commander’s voice cut through the static: “Alpha, hold the line. Bravo, flank and mask. Charlie, prepare demolition charges on bridge two, deny it if they push.”
Men moved as if pulled by wire. Orders were not debates. They were the thin architecture that kept the machine from collapsing.
By dusk the French lines had thinned into pockets of resistance.
The great, old forts, relics of a previous century, were smoke-streaked skeletons.
Columns of prisoners shuffled forward, eyes blank, mouths open with the shock of being alive.
On the map table the colonel’s finger traced the new corridor: a raw, bright line from the border of Ypres down to the Alps.
For all the new hardware, composite hulls, thermobaric salvos, turboprops that cut the sky in two, the human calculus stayed the same: men died, other men carried them away, and the next order simply arrived.
This was the nature of war. And no amount of improved technology, doctrine, or medical advancements could spare the soldiers who suffered and bled.
It could only be mitigated, and it was with that in mind that Bruno watched the ongoing developments of the war from the safety of his office in Berlin.
He hated it, the idea of these men, men who he ordered to march to their deaths, were doing so without him being by their side to share the burden.
But he was not the young man he once was. Too much rested on his shoulders for him to carry the soldiers burden in this day and age.
Nor was his heart capable of enduring the stress that a man must suffer as he marched into battle.
Age had stripped from him his ability to lead like a King. And so he endeavored to wage war in such a way that it ended swiftly, brutally, and without cause for another to follow it in a few decades more time.