NOVGO.NET Chapter 682: The Quiet in Between the Gunfire
Chapter 682: The Quiet in Between the Gunfire
Outside, the front had been a single long howl for three days, engines, flares, the quick staccato of men dying, and only now, in the small pocket between orders, had Erich allowed himself to sit.
He held the tin cup with both hands as if the metal itself might steady him.
The coffee was scorched and black and terrible, but it burned a way through the frost of fatigue and warmed his palms.
A cigarette hung from his mouth like a made-up prop; he did not feel the habit so much as the shape of it, the way ritual sometimes steadied a soldier more surely than prayer.
He understood after his foray in Spain why there were literal paintings of his grandfather smoking, despite never seeing the man do it himself.
At this point Erich had been awake for seventy-two hours.
He had not thought of sleep in any practical way for longer than that.
The men around him moved like ghosts, doing what needed doing.
Every face showed the same hard set. the look of men who had already reconciled themselves to loss and kept walking.
A lieutenant came up, boots whispering on the damp ground.
Müller, only a touch younger than Erich, carried a map and the nervous warmth of a man who still expected the world to make sense.
He had always been quick to notice the difference between a commander’s performance and a commander’s truth; today his eyes lingered on Erich’s shoulders and found them thinner than they ought to be.
“Sir,” Müller said, voice low. He looked at the cigarette, then at the cup, then at the soldier’s face. “You look…” He stopped, wordless.
Erich exhaled smoke and let it go with him.
His hands trembled, not from fear but from the drum of exhaustion that anchored itself to his bones. “We all look that way,” he said. “Some hide it better.”
Müller’s expression sharpened. “You’re not taking the stimulants are you?”
There it was, named plainly. Erich had expected the question sooner or later.
The Reich’s armed forces had long since issued pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine to soldiers performing combat operations.
Handed out in the long nights, a mechanized liturgy to keep men on their feet until the machine of war broke them or they broke it.
Most officers did not ask, only accepted the rationing of alertness.
“No,” Erich said simply. He tapped the cigarette against the cup and let the ash fall like a grey confession. “I’ve been without it.”
Müller blinked. “You’re exhausted, sir. You don’t look like yourself, it’s faster, it keeps you sharp when sleep won’t come.”
Erich set the cup down and folded his hands, fingers marked by grease and small burns.
He found strength in the steadiness of his voice.
“My grandfather once told me something after the Great War,” he said.
The name Bruno settled between them like an absent presence.
“It was his companies that first created the chemical compound we now take for granted. He knew the side effects before it was ever approved for human consumption. He also knew how addictive it could be. It was because of this that he introduced programs to help our veterans long before the first shots were fired in Serbia… Shelters, work, doctors, men who taught them how to stand again without the bottle or the syringe.”
He watched Müller’s face, the way the lieutenant’s jaw moved as the story took the place of the immediate present.
“Austro-Hungary did not do the same,” Erich continued. “They let their men slide into whatever poison was easiest. The machine did not rebuild them. The families could not. The empire frayed; civility, the little bars of trust between men, wore thin. That was the final nail. Not always the battlefield. Sometimes it’s the slow collapsing of what keeps a nation up when the guns are quiet.”
Müller’s mouth opened, closed. There was accusatory pity there, pity toward the idea of dependence, toward the cost it extracted. “So you…”
“I will take coffee until my heart pounds like a drum and my hands shake,” Erich cut in, and a ghost of a rueful twist touched his mouth.
“If I have to drink enough caffeine to kill an elephant to get through this war, then so be it. I would rather wake with a trembling hand than wake to the realization that my mind belongs to a pill or a powder. That kind of surrender is not something I want to pass down to the men I command.”
He did not romanticize it.
He was bone-weary and hollow-eyed and he would not pretend that his choice made the world kinder.
He did not pretend it made him a hero. It made him deliberate. It made him responsible in a way that was quieter than most medals.
Müller looked at him with something like new respect, and then with something that was almost relieved.
“You’ll need a man to cover you for a while. Go sleep, Oberstleutnant. You can stand the rhythm another day, but not seventy more.”
Erich glanced once toward the flap of the tent, toward the map pinned with blue and red slashes marking the teeth and blood of the last three days.
The orders would not stop because he slept; his absence would be rearranged into someone else’s duty, and that knowledge sat on him heavy as a burden and light as a relief.
“All right,” he said at last, voice roughened.
He stubbed the cigarette in the mud, the ember dying in a last hiss.
“You take the battalion while I close my eyes for an hour. If the men break, wake me. If they don’t, wake me anyway.”
Müller saluted, brisk and certain, and moved away with the map pressed to his chest, the small, private weight of command now in his hands.
Erich closed his eyes.
He let the coffee bite and the cold fold around him. For a moment, only a breath, he tasted nothing but the dark and the ticking of a world that would not stop.
Then sleep, thin and stolen, found him.