Re: Blood and Iron

Chapter 753: Pyrrhic Victory

The night was alive with fire. Tracers streaked through the canopy like veins of molten light, each burst tearing the jungle apart in flashes of chaos.

Machine guns roared in overlapping fury, mortars boomed in the distance creating a cacophony of death.

Oberstleutnant Erich von Zehntner crouched behind the trunk of a fallen tree. Mud streaked across his face, his jaw locked tight.

Every shout was drowned beneath the chorus of automatic fire. The jungle itself seemed to burn, red and orange bursts flaring between the trees, turning night into a flickering storm of flame.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the gunfire ceased. Smoke hung in the air, glowing faintly red from dying embers.

The only sounds were the rasp of labored breathing and the soft patter of ash falling through leaves. It wasn’t silence born of peace, it was the silence that hides knives.

Erich exhaled, wiped the grime from his brow, and reached for his flare gun. He popped a round into the chamber and fired.

The crimson bloom lit the canopy, exposing silhouettes shifting among the trees.

“There!” he barked. “The bastards are right there! Light them up!”

The machine gun next to him came alive again, its staccato roar shaking the ground. Rounds ripped through the undergrowth, shredding branches, tearing flesh unseen.

Erich joined in, firing short, controlled bursts into the flickering jungle, each shot deliberate, methodical, the rhythm of experience.

Only when the last echo faded did he raise his hand.

“Cease fire!”

The jungle held its breath once more. Erich stared into the black. “Someone check if any of them are still breathing.”

A soldier’s voice came through the radio, almost cheerful in its exhaustion. “Roger that, Oberstleutnant.”

A heartbeat later, the flamethrower roared. Its tongue of fire devoured the foliage, washing the darkness in orange light.

The screams that followed were short, sharp, human.

The men kept burning anyway, every root, every trunk, every shadow that could hide another ambush. The jungle burned like an altar.

And when the flames finally began to die, Erich’s hands started to tremble. He pulled a cigarette from his coat, lit it, and watched the ember glow to life.

The smoke filled his lungs like medicine, steadying the shaking until his fingers turned to stone again. He stared into the inferno and whispered to no one.

“You got what you fucking deserve you little pricks…”

The fires crackled, spreading through the undergrowth until the horizon itself shimmered red. Ash drifted in slow spirals around him, settling on his shoulders like snow.

The night, for all its thunder and fury, seemed to sigh. Erich took another drag, eyes half-closed, the reflection of flame caught in them like twin coals.

For a long while, no one spoke. The jungle hissed and wept in the heat, and above it, a single flare still burned, painting the sky the color of blood.

Dawn crept through the smoke. The jungle no longer burned, but it smoldered, a landscape of ash and twisted silhouettes.

The first light broke through the haze in narrow shafts, glinting off shell casings and wet leaves. Erich stood at the edge of the clearing, his uniform damp with dew and soot.

Around him, men moved with slow, deliberate exhaustion, turning over bodies, tagging the dead, pulling the wounded from the mud.

The night’s fury had given way to the mechanical rhythm of survival. A medic walked past, cradling a young private whose leg was missing below the knee.

Neither man spoke. The stretcher bearers had long since run out of stretchers; they used doors, tarps, whatever wood hadn’t burned.

Erich lit another cigarette and looked to the horizon. Grey light revealed the full cost of the engagement.

The earth was scarred where the flamethrowers had swept; the trees were nothing but blackened ribs jutting from the ground.

Leutnant Mertens approached, clipboard in hand. His face was streaked with grime, his eyes bloodshot.

“Final tally, sir.”

Erich didn’t reach for it.

“Tell me.”

“Five killed in action. Eight wounded, two critical. Twenty-six enemy confirmed dead, six captured alive. The rest fled into the swamps to the north. We found three supply caches, small arms, mortar shells, medical gear, most of it holdovers from their previous fight against the Americans, some however seems to be improvised. My guess is they must have had help from nearby villages.”

Erich nodded slowly, his gaze distant. “And the wounded?”

“Birds are already inbound to evacuate them. God willing they’ll make it home alive… Even if not entirely whole….”

It was only then that he took the clipboard then, scanning the pages without reading them. When Erich warned the other Battalion commanders in his brigade what they’d be facing in the Pacific, few of them truly understood.

And yet here the ledgers revealed how prophetic his words were. He lowered it after a moment.

“It’s a victory,” he said flatly. “But a pyrrhic one.”

Mertens looked up, uncertain. “Sir?”

Erich’s voice was quiet, almost reflective.

“None of these men needed to die for this. We killed a handful of peasants with a bunch of old rifles, and handmade bombs. We avenged our losses, and sent a message to the region. But the cost never should have been paid to begin with.”

He turned, gesturing toward the horizon where the thin smoke of distant huts curled upward.

“You can’t bomb fear into loyalty, Mertens. Every bullet that hits the wrong man makes two enemies you’ll never see. And in the end, we will be forced to burn this island in the same manner as we have done to these woods.”

His words lingered as the lieutenant hesitated. “Should we report it as a cleared sector, sir?”

“Report it as secure,” Erich said. “Command prefers tidy words for messy truths.”

A dry wind swept through the clearing, carrying the smell of burned wood and blood. Somewhere in the distance, a rooster crowed, absurdly out of place amid the ruin.

The sound made several of the men look up, half expecting another attack. Erich crouched beside one of the bodies, a young guerrilla no older than twenty.

The rebel’s rifle was still clutched in his hands, eyes staring blankly at the sky. Around his neck hung a small crucifix, blackened by the flames. Erich brushed the soot away with his thumb, then stood again.

“High Command will want an example to be made to the local villagers who were involved. No doubt orders have already come down through the night to begin punitive operations. We were simply the first to act. Gather the bodies and ensure they are ready for whatever grim display my grandfather has in mind.”

Mertens nodded and moved off, barking quiet orders while Erich watched the men work, digging shallow pits, carrying the enemy as carefully as their own.

He finished his cigarette and dropped the butt into the mud, grinding it under his boot. Above, the sky had cleared completely.

The first true rays of sun painted the jungle gold, as if trying to pretend the night had never happened. He picked up his radio and keyed it in.

“Thunder Two-One to all units. Area secured. Begin recovery operations and prepare for movement by 0800.”

Static answered, then a series of affirmatives. The sound faded into the morning hum of insects returning to life. For a long time, Erich stood alone, the rising light catching the silver insignia on his collar.

He thought of the villages ahead, of faces that would turn from welcome to hatred overnight, of a war that was less about conquest than contagion.

The pattern never changed. Fire bred ghosts, and ghosts never stayed buried.

“Secure,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Nothing in this damn jungle will ever be secure.”

The wind shifted again, stirring the ashes at his feet. They rose briefly, dancing in the light before vanishing into the dawn until the thrum of rotors broke the stillness.

Erich looked up as the first pair of medevac helicopters swept low over the treetops, their shadows rolling across the blackened clearing.

The downwash kicked up ash and dust, stinging the eyes of the men below.

Medics ran forward through the haze, waving orange signal panels while stretchers lined up beside the landing zone.

One by one, the wounded were lifted aboard, faces pale beneath grime, eyes unfocused, hands gripping whatever they could.

The flight crews worked without a word, their motions practiced, mechanical.

Erich watched until the last stretcher disappeared into the belly of a helicopter.

The door slammed shut, and the machine lifted skyward, vanishing into the dawn haze like a departing soul. The sound faded, leaving only the soft rustle of leaves returning to stillness.

He knew this scene would repeat itself, today in Luzon, tomorrow in the Visayas, the week after in Mindanao.

Different jungles, same ash, same silence. This was what the Pacific would become: a cycle of smoke and stretcher flights, victory measured in exhaustion.

Erich turned away as the sun rose higher, muttering to himself, “And this is only the beginning.”