Re: Blood and Iron

Chapter 748: Two Hours Late to Rotation

Bruno stared at the reports on his screen. The allies had poured their full strength into two simultaneous invasions.

One across Gibraltar into Spain. And the other across Algeria and Tunisia into Sicily. Things were going exactly has he expected.

Save for one inconvenience. His grandson… The son of his beloved and most eldest child. The only grandchild given the honor of being named after himself was currently fighting on the front lines.

There were no words for the complicated mixture of feelings that Bruno was forced to stifle within his chest at this very moment.

Bruno the Younger was in the process of giving his life to fulfill his orders, and defend the ground that he stood upon.

But so were hundreds of thousands of Germany’s other sons. It was not a situation he could take lightly.

If he gave the order to retreat, some might question his actions as being taken in favoritism to his own kin.

On the other hand, if he refused to act, Erich, and the rest of his men would inevitably be encircled and annihilated. Or worse taken captive and used as a political bargaining chip.

Should such a scenario occur, Bruno might be forced to stifle the rest of his lingering humanity, and instead become an avatar of annihilation.

The very thought pained him, as his fingers gripped the table’s mahogany hard enough to permanently incise the shape of its fingernails into its surface.

In the end Bruno was forced to take a deep breath to calm himself, as he calmly thought through the situation devoid of any personal emotion.

And when he did, the answer came to him, as swiftly as a quantum supercomputer that had been left to calculate for the course of a millennium.

“Give the order to retreat to all forward units in Sicily. The beachhead is lost. They are to regroup with the rearward units and pose another line of defense. Any equipment that can’t be salvaged is to be destroyed, and only to abandoned if they cannot fulfill the task of sabotage without risking their own wellbeing….”

The Generals gathered each eyed Bruno in a different manner. Some shot him accusatory gazes, as if questioning his integrity.

Others, were filled with relief, especially those who had known him longest.

They feared the idea of the man forsaking his humanity for the sake of strategic clarity, and in the end summoning a far more monstrous beast in the wake of its dread.

Fewer still understood the true play that Bruno was making. And among them was none other than Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommell, who was quick to confirm Bruno’s act so that the others gathered understood the man’s intent in full.

“You intended for the Gulf of Gela to act as a fault point all along?”

Bruno shot a gaze towards Rommel that was half gracious, and half inquisitive, before recollecting his proper stoic bearing.

“Of course, every proper engineer that one does not design a machine without a proper structural fault, a failure point, an area of compromise that is to sustain the most damage in order to save the remainder of the machine.

That is the Gulf of Gela. It was never intended to hold, only funnel the Allied forces into a conflict in which they have no escape from.”

The moment Bruno stated these words, Rommel smiled with approval, while the rest of the Generals averted their gaze.

Some ashamed that they had mistaken the Reichsmarschall’s orders for nepotism, and others guilt ridden over having perceived the man as surrendering himself to the devil.

One thing was certain though, the moment Bruno clarified his orders they were relayed to every level of the Reich’s military.

Even finding their way to Bruno the Younger’s unit that was struggling to hold the beach head with limited supplies and no reinforcement.”

—

Bruno the Younger listened to the channel like a man waiting for bad weather to break, radio voices, fragments of coordinates, the clack of distant gunfire.

He had a map spread on the hood of a half-track and a cigarette stubbed out in the dirt beside it.

Around him the company moved with the slack efficiency of men who had spent too long in drills: rapid hands, quiet faces, the small economies of motion learned to survive.

The message came on a clean voice, clipped and without ceremony. Headquarters, secure net, authority: Reichsmarschall von Zehntner. Bruno’s jaw tightened; the name folded the air.

“Alpha-7,” the message read through static, “withdraw. Execute demolition codes Echo-Seven through Echo-Ten. Regroup at inland line Bravo-3. No materiel left intact unless extraction cleared. Rear guard to buy window: forty-five minutes. Discipline. No heroics.”

There was no addendum. No plea. No softening. Just coordinates and consequence.

Bruno read it twice, because reading twice bought a man a fraction of distance to think. His men watched him.

A corporal to his left began to formulate the next step as if muscles could calculate faster than brains: demolitions checklist, incendiary orders, vehicle recovery teams, medical triage.

The young Hauptmann folded the paper back into his palm as if it were a detonator, feeling the cold print through his fingers.

“Orders,” he said quietly.

“Orders,” Kruger echoed, voice tight. Around them the men boxed equipment into crates, snapped straps, checked rounds.

The beach still smoked with wreckage; the sea was a line of black and orange. Landing craft burning like overturned beehives rolled in the tide.

Small arms fired inland, and the distant howl of tanks announced an enemy who refused to leave the shoreline empty.

He moved among them like a flame that did not want to scorch. “Engine teams, listen: destroy the drivetrains you can’t pull. Blow the axles. If a winch can’t haul it in forty minutes, we burn it.”

Hands moved faster as if his will was a clock and each man a gear trying not to stall.

They moved in a measured chaos.

What they couldn’t salvage or destroy before the next wave landed was left behind.

The men then moved on a mixture of foot, and whatever vehicle they could commandeer that wasn’t already a wreckage.

It wasn’t just the weapons, and machines that Bruno and his men sabotaged.

The bridge tore itself apart in a crescendo of metal and flame.

The pier disintegrated into bent ribs of iron. The sea gained a jagged margin. For a suspended moment the world held its breath, then they ran, inland, staggered, efficient.

The rear guard melted into the countryside, trading space for cost, ambush for delay.

Enough American soldiers, and their allies from the Latin world lie dead on the beaches.

As far as the survivors of the Garrison were concerned, they had fulfilled their duty to the fullest letter of the law.

And now that the order had come in, they were all too happy to pack up and fall back to a more stable line of defense.

Bruno the younger’s company reformed at nearest rendezvous point exhausted, shirts salt-stiff, faces ash-coated.

His executive officer came came close. “You think it’ll hold?” he asked.

Bruno looked out at the blackened seam where the sea had been.

Fires glowed like lanterns; wreckage smoked. “Not in the slightest, but I expect this was the point of our orders. Make them bleed for every inch gained, so that our reinforcements from Italy can encircle and annihilate them. We may have lost the shore, but in doing so the Americans have just walked into their own Cannae.”

Above the inland line the night settled.

Bruno the Younger allowed fatigue to press at his lids and felt, faint and bitter, the weight of a name he had not used to bend rules for.

He had followed orders, burned bridges, and not let his blood tip the scale.

The Gulf had been paid for in sand and steel, the rest of the structure stood, for now. Waiting to entrap the poor and unfortunate souls who fought for the right to pass.

Bruno sat there in silence for a long while as the adrenaline of battle wore off and the fatigue began to overtake him.

A transport truck’s headlights carved a corridor through the smoke, rumbling up the coastal road like an answer to a prayer.

It hissed to a stop. A sergeant tumbled down from the cab and jogged over, breath misting in the cold.

“You boys are two hours late for rotation,” he barked, annoyed but relieved. “Command says you’re going home. Load up, move fast. Extraction window’s twenty minutes. You don’t want to be stuck here for another deployment now that the region has gone hot do you?”

Bruno the Younger stared at the man as if the news might rearrange the stars.

Two hours. Two hours that had been the difference between sleeping in a barracks bed and being buried in sand and twisted metal.

He felt the absurd, private tilt of luck, the small cruelty of timing, and did not smile.

From beneath his jacket he drew the dog tags he’d scooped from the chest of a corporal they’d been unable to carry out.

The metal was warm from his palm. He turned them over, as if their names might read back to him the calculus of fate.

Faces flashed: a laugh at dawn, a hand steadying a rifle, the quiet of a man who never asked to be famous.

He pressed the tags to his mouth as if to taste forgiveness and then tucked them against his heart.

“Two hours late,” A Lieutenant muttered beside him.

Bruno slid the tags back into his pocket, jaw set.

“Then we’ll be home in two hours,” he said, and the words were promise and lie both.

He turned toward the truck, toward the thin promise of safety, and walked with the measured, inevitable step of a man who had learned to carry luck like a ledger: it favored no one forever.