My vision went dark and my breath caught in my throat.
At the same time, it felt like I’d been pinned under a boulder, my whole body crushed flat.
I tried to move my arms and legs—nothing.
I opened my mouth and dirt poured in. With soil packed over my whole body, I couldn’t even open my eyes.
Panic hit—I’m going to die like this—and I thrashed, but the more I struggled, the more the pressure mounted.
Not even a minute passed before my lungs burned like they were on fire.
Ah.
This is it.
Sensing death on instinct, strength drained out of me and my head went blank.
So this is the end.
Just as I gave up and started to close my eyes, a rough hand punched through the dirt, grabbed the scruff of my neck, and yanked me backward.
“Phaaah!!!”
I blinked up at a hulking brute with a face like a period-drama bandit chief glaring down at me.
A bandit… no, not that. Not a grim reaper either…
But he was in uniform.
“Hey, you with me? You almost died there.”
He wasn’t a bandit boss or a reaper.
He was one of ours.
Behind him, our soldiers were dragging buried men out of what had been the dugout.
“Th-thanks…”
That was a real brush with death.
Maybe I was still lucky. Or maybe it just wasn’t my time yet. Either way, I was alive. For now.
But it was way too early to relax.
“Alarm! Alaaaarm!”
“The Tommies are coming!”
No sooner had the shelling ended than the British launched their attack.
***
“Everyone to battle stations!”
The moment the barrage stopped, the British pushed over no man’s land.
While they crossed a wasteland of shell holes, rotting corpses, field rats, rank water, barbed wire and stakes, we scrambled into combat readiness.
“Move your asses, you bastards!”
“You trying to die!?”
Before anyone could shake off the aftereffects of the shelling, officers and NCOs were already roaring and cursing, driving men back and forth.
Me included.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
As if waking up in Hitler’s body out of nowhere weren’t bad enough—now I had to actually fight.
Not some fistfight, but a gunfight where you could really die.
If I hadn’t gotten greedy for chicken, none of this would’ve happened.
Damn it. I regretted it hard.
A real battlefield had a pressure that made all the mock battles I’d done in the army feel like child’s play.
“Get the machine gun ready!”
“Do not fire until I give the order!”
The British had already crossed more than half of no man’s land; about six hundred meters remained to our trench.
Watching them swarm forward like a tight column of ants, my heart went berserk and cold sweat ran down my back.
I’d seen plenty of trench warfare movies—All Quiet on the Western Front, Passchendaele, Paths of Glory, A Very Long Engagement, War Horse, 1917, and so on.
But the difference between seeing it on a screen and seeing it with your own eyes from a trench was beyond words.
On a screen, you don’t die. Here, your life’s on the line.
“Open fire!”
“Fire!”
At the order, everyone squeezed their triggers on reflex.
Rifles cracked in waves, and the British front rank buckled.
The MG 08 I’d only ever seen in photos online spat fire like a demon, and the British fell like dominos. Hardly any of them screamed.
More accurate to say they couldn’t scream.
I yanked my own trigger like everyone else.
But the Gewehr 98 I was using needed the bolt worked by hand after every shot to eject the casing. It was a pain in the ass.
To be fair, all rifles of this era were.
“Christ, this is killing me.”
Firing like a madman, I burned through my loaded rounds before I knew it.
As I fished a fresh stripper clip from my pocket, a bullet hissed past my ear.
“—Huk!”
I was so startled my knees buckled.
Thinking about how a difference of a few centimeters had separated me from a corpse—an ice-cold shiver ran down my spine.
“Hey! You hit?”
A sergeant saw me on my ass and shouted. I shook my head.
“N-no!”
“Then get up and fight! The enemy—”
A stray round punched through his temple, and he toppled backward like a machine that’d just run out of power.
Blood pooled in the uneven trench floor.
Shit. I barely survived, and now I’m about to die again—after just a few minutes?
“Aaagh! Aaaaagh!”
“Medic!”
“Dammit, Franz!”
“Help!”
Screams of the wounded and frantic shouts for a medic battered my ears, scrambled my head.
But worse sounds were coming.
“What the hell is that?”
“No way—”
“Fuck! A tank!”
“Tanks!”
A weird engine howl, the clatter of steel tracks—then high, sharp cries announcing armor erupted all along the trench.
Dragging myself up with everything I had, I saw the hulking beast rolling over no man’s land.
A tank.
The flower of ground combat, the grim reaper of infantry.
A Mk IV, just like the one in my memory, with a tail of infantry in tow, ground toward us.
I’d heard that when tanks first appeared, the German army had no idea how to kill them and panicked.
But by 1918, two years into the tank era, things were different.
After the initial shock, the Germans figured out the armor wasn’t invincible and rushed out countermeasures.
“They’re coming—take aim!”
As the tank appeared, our side pulled out a secret weapon.
The Tankgewehr—huge to the point of stupidity, like someone had blown up a normal rifle to two or three times the size.
As the name suggests, it existed for one thing only: killing tanks. Hence the ridiculous size.
It weighed a ton, too—but the performance made up for it.
“Fire!”
With a thunderclap no ordinary rifle could match, the Tankgewehr spat flame and slammed the Mk IV’s front armor.
“Hit!”
“Got it!”
Peppered by those fat 13.2 mm slugs, the tank shuddered to a halt.
Either the driver got ventilated, or the engine was cooked.
But the British didn’t bring just one.
Even as we dealt with the first, two more rolled up behind it.
To make matters worse—
“Hey! What are you doing!?”
The gunner didn’t fire as the second tank rumbled past the burning wreck ahead. A panicked officer screamed.
“They’re right there! Why aren’t you shooting!?”
“The gun’s jammed! The casing’s stuck and won’t come out!”
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
With our ace benched in the stupidest way, we had one option left.
“Here. One each.”
“Uh—me too…?”
“Yes. That’s the only way to deal with that monster.”
As the tanks closed, they handed out bundled grenades.
One ended up in my hands, just like that. Suddenly I was the guy who had to take on a tank.
Damn it.
“Hold—here they come!”
“Listen—you must take it out in one go.”
Yeah, yeah, stop talking. My heart’s about to explode.
The other two poor bastards looked ready to pass out, faces bleached bone-white.
Hard to tell if they were still alive or already corpses.
The tank crawled up to the lip of the trench. I’d heard tracked clatter a thousand times in the army, but I’d never realized how terrifying it really was.
“Now! Throw!”
At the command, the three of us hurled our bundles almost as one.
Every last ounce of strength—and they dropped beautifully, right on top of the tank.
Then—boom.
“Got it!”
Direct hits to the top armor—flame whooshed out and the tank went up like a torch.
Tankers, bodies on fire, screamed as they tumbled out, and our waiting riflemen cut them down in a volley.
But—
“What the hell? That bastard’s still moving!”
Of the other two throws, one detonated off to the side, and the other didn’t go off at all for whatever reason.
Which meant the British still had one tank.
It raked the trench with its machine gun and turned the two grenade-throwers into sieves.
Then it started to grind the trenchline under its steel tracks.
If it broke through here, we were done. The sponson gun on the right would rake the trench, and we’d be meat.
At that desperate instant, I spotted the dud bundle.
The tank had stopped too, maybe with an engine hiccup.
If I was going to kill it, this was the moment. I sprinted for the grenade.
“What are you doing!?”
“That’s suicide!”
Either way, I die. So I gambled. I scooped the bundle off the ground and ran straight at the tank.
Why hadn’t it exploded? Simple.
We’d never pulled the pin. Of course it didn’t go off.
I yanked the pin and chucked the bundle up onto the tank.
Then I dove, wrapped my head in my arms, and hugged the mud.
A deafening blast; then the patter of fragments and parts raining down.
When I lifted my head, the tank was blazing.
I started to whoop—when a shriek ripped in from my right.
I turned. A British soldier, bayonet fixed, was charging me.
The blade flashed, catching the light. I yanked up my rifle and pulled the trigger.
Nothing.
A chunk of shrapnel the size of my thumb was jammed in the receiver.
“Motherf—”
By then the Brit was on me, howling as he swung his rifle down.