NOVGO.NET Chapter 683: Disarmed Combatants
Chapter 683: Disarmed Combatants
Oberstleutnant Erich von Zehntner smoked a cigarette, leaning against his command vehicle while the battle raged just beyond its reach.
Gunfire cracked in the distance, mingling with the thunder of flak and artillery bursts.
Wire-guided anti-tank missiles, loosed from the tops of armored vehicles, tore French armor apart before it ever had a chance to return fire.
Light and medium tanks darted forward with practiced precision, weaving through ranks of infantry fighting vehicles and wheeled carriers that poured men into battle.
Through his binoculars, cigarette clamped between his teeth, Erich watched the fight unfold.
The Germans moved like wolves, coordinated, relentless.
The French marched in lockstep.
Heavy, ponderous, like the Marian legions that once subdued Gaul.
Perhaps in 1914 such columns, bolstered by Allied industry, would have punched through trenches.
But not now.
Not against his battalion tactical group.
They outnumbered him, yet still their machines burned, one after another.
German infantry dismounted from their carriers, aramid fiber helmets and composite plates turning French rifle fire into little more than noise.
They advanced without hesitation, fueled by discipline, stimulants, or something closer to madness.
Precision fire cut men down even as French soldiers turned to flee.
Erich sighed, lowering the binoculars. He flicked the cigarette to the mud and ground it under his boot.
“So unnecessary…”
The Leutnant beside him stiffened, uncertain whether to respond. Erich didn’t even look at him.
“Go on. Say it.”
Caught off guard by the permission, the officer stumbled over his words. “It’s… nothing, sir. Just… what did you mean by unnecessary?”
Erich kept his gaze on the dark sky, where German fighters tore the French Air Force to pieces.
Explosions burned like flowers above the clouds. His voice was flat, almost drowned by the gunfire.
“This war. It was so unnecessary.”
The lieutenant raised the binoculars and saw what Erich had already judged: hundreds of French vehicles lying in smoking ruin, soldiers sprawled dead or bleeding in the brush.
Prisoners who had tried to surrender now crouched in the mud at gunpoint, beaten if they dared to speak.
Erich climbed into the command vehicle and keyed the wire. His tone was calm, clipped, as though reporting a maneuver on exercise.
“This is Oberstleutnant Erich von Zehntner. The enemy has been encircled and defeated. Survivors are raising the white flag. Requesting extraction for prisoners of war.”
Erich stayed hunched in the command vehicle for a long moment after sending the wire, staring at the radio handset as if it might speak back.
Around him the noise of battle rolled on: the dull thump of artillery in the distance, the rasp of engines moving to new positions, the sharp cries of the wounded carried by stretcher-bearers toward the rear.
He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Sleep was a luxury now. Duty, however, was not.
He thought of his grandfather again, of the stories Bruno had told him about the Great War.
Tales of trenches filled with mud and gas, of men driven to despair not only by bullets but by the silence after.
Bruno had always ended those stories with the same lesson: war is never noble, only necessary.
Erich had believed him then. Now, with smoke curling from the wreckage of a French column still burning on the horizon, he believed him more than ever.
—
Far away in Berlin, the General Staff bent over maps, tracing arrows through Belgium and France.
Orders flew back and forth, dictating deployments, supply drops, artillery allocations.
A runner stepped forward with a telegram, placed it in Bruno von Zehntner’s hand.
Bruno read it once, folded it neatly, and let the room’s noise fall away.
His expression hardened.
He knew the truth of logistics: there was no safe way to extract prisoners trapped between Ypres and the border.
They could barely evacuate their own wounded as it was.
And memory gnawed at him.
In the Great War he had shown mercy, treating prisoners with dignity bordering on luxury. His reward?
Those same men returned home to denounce him as a butcher and a tyrant, their stories fueling the very hatred that now armed another generation.
No. He would not make that mistake twice.
Bruno’s voice sliced through the chatter, cold and final.
“Inform the Oberstleutnant, and all units caught between Ypres and the Belgian border: we do not have the means to extract disarmed combatants. They are to be terminated upon capture. Understood?”
The aide froze, eyes flicking toward the assembled generals.
None of them spoke. One dropped his pen; another swallowed hard. The silence pressed like a weight.
Bruno’s gaze pinned the aide. “Well? What are you waiting for? Relay my orders.”
The young man’s spine went rigid. He saluted and left at once, boots striking too fast against the marble.
Bruno exhaled and turned back to the map. “So hard to find good help these days, wouldn’t you say?”
Not a soul answered.
The generals sat rigid, pale, rabbits before a wolf. At last, one muttered the thought they all feared to name.
“Disarmed combatants…”
Bruno smirked.
A ghost of another war crossed his mind, German POWs at the end of 1945, stripped of their rights under that very euphemism.
“Yes. Disarmed combatants. Not prisoners of war. We owe them nothing. Isn’t that right?”
The words lingered in the air like smoke, a pall over the room, even after Bruno closed his office door behind him.
Bruno sat in his seat, staring at the picture framed on his desk.
A picture of when he was younger.
When they were younger.
And when Erich von Humboldt was still alive.
He had once pretended that war could be waged with chivalry, that an enemy could be treated with dignity and respect and that mercy would be remembered.
He had even extended that mercy personally.
Charles de Gaulle had been a prisoner of War, fed well, housed decently, even treated as a man rather than a beast.
And how had France repaid that? With venom.
De Gaulle himself was the proof that kindness bred only deeper hatred, that mercy did not bind wounds but salted them.
Bruno no longer suffered such illusions.
The world was now engulfed in another Great War, and it was mercy, his mercy, that had sown the seeds of it.
As he placed the photo back down upon the desk he remembered an old adage.
“It is better to be feared than to be loved, if one cannot be both”