'The first day since I crossed over is finally behind me.'
Lelouch was completely jolted awake by the rumbling artillery outside the cellar, unable to fall back asleep.
He reached into his uniform's breast pocket and pulled out a pocket watch, checking the time by the dim glow of the small lamp on the telegraph desk.
It was only 4:30 a.m.
It was now October 26th.
Lieutenant Barack had given him the watch yesterday after the cavalry unit looted it from an enemy corpse while sweeping the battlefield. Its original owner was supposedly Colonel Dejoka, commander of the 3rd Regiment of the Belgin 4th Division, who had been killed by direct fire from a 77mm field gun the previous evening.
Judging from the intermittent shelling that had lasted all night, Lelouch could tell the French and Belgin forces were launching wave after wave of attacks.
The artillery fire from the Belgin side to the east had grown especially intense in the latter half of the night. If Colonel List's deductions from last night were correct, this meant Major General Victor's 6th Belgia Division had arrived on the battlefield.
Victor certainly wouldn't repeat the blunders and walk into the same traps that Degizel's Belgin 4th Division had just suffered.
It was almost impossible to expect Colonel List to trick Victor's artillery into a kill zone again. Thus, the battle in the latter half of the night was destined to be a brutal slugfest of pure strength.Lelouch quickly gathered his things and waited for a lull in the shelling that marked the end of another enemy offensive. Only then did he open the cellar door and head to the surface to get some fresh air and see if he could help.
Barely a few dozen paces from the cellar, he spotted a row of makeshift sheds. They were constructed from wooden planks scavenged from the ruins, leaned diagonally against a broken wall to create stable, triangular spaces. Beneath them lay two solid rows of wounded soldiers, stretching sparsely all the way to the street corner.
In the distance, several large bonfires burned, strikingly conspicuous in the pre-dawn darkness and visible from streets away.
Lelouch caught the arm of a medic hurrying by with a medical kit. "Aren't you worried those fires will draw artillery strikes?"
"They're for cremations. The corpse-handlers lit them and ran off," the medic replied casually, not recognizing him, before turning away.
Lelouch stared at the bonfires, which resembled a corpse pyramid, standing frozen for a good ten seconds. He was deeply shaken, estimating that at least a hundred bodies were burning in each pile.
He then looked toward the wounded soldiers on the other side; a single glance told him there were hundreds of them as well.
In just one night, the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 12th Division had lost nearly twenty percent of its men!
For a fully staffed regiment of nearly four thousand, the cumulative casualties were likely approaching a thousand.
It was only because of the troops' strict discipline and tenacious fighting spirit, combined with this being a life-and-death defensive battle with nowhere to retreat, that they could fight so resiliently.
In any other scenario, or with an army possessing weaker morale, such catastrophic losses would have broken them long ago.
Yesterday, Lelouch had merely been focused on survival. He had actively proposed strategies to turn the tide of battle and prove his worth, hoping to be valued by his superiors and avoid being sent to fill the front lines as infantry.
And he had succeeded. The colonel treated him well, even allowing him to sleep soundly in a cellar for six hours in such a hellish environment.
But the bloody scene before him, along with the sour stench of festering wounds and the rotting scent of corpses, violently assaulted his senses.
In distress, he snatched off his military cap and gripped it, unknowingly twisting it into a tight knot. He bent over, resting his hands on his knees, wanting to gasp for air but unable to stomach the surrounding stench.
It took him quite a while to recover. After Sergeant Klose patted his back to help him catch his breath, Lelouch leaned on him to stand straight again, letting out a self-deprecating sigh.
"I don't think I'll be able to sleep again until the moment we break out of this siege."
"Why is that?" Klose asked.
"Because the next time I close my eyes, I won't be able to stop thinking about how many more comrades will die while I sleep," Lelouch said. "All because we couldn't end this sooner."
After speaking, as if to ease his own conscience, Lelouch rushed over to the row of makeshift sheds. He scrubbed his hands vigorously with boiled water and began helping the medics bandage the wounded.
As a military enthusiast in his past life, he had learned some basic first aid. Most of the severely wounded men he tended to simply lay there staring blankly, offering little reaction.
"Sir, this isn't your fault. You've already given the colonel so many ideas—and if it weren't for your warning, yesterday's flood would have caused massive casualties for our army," Klose said loudly, unable to bear seeing him blame himself.
Many of the wounded heard Klose's words. When they looked at Lelouch again, their eyes were filled with gratitude and awe.
"Are you the officer who warned about the flood yesterday? Thank you so much."
"You must be exhausted. Make sure to get some rest. If we had a few more brilliant minds like yours, we'd definitely hold out until victory!"
"Sir, we can hold out until the Belgin forces break first, right? If we keep fighting like this for another full day, the whole regiment will be wiped out."
A crowd of wounded soldiers surrounded him, asking questions with gratitude, excitement, or lingering fear.
Several severely wounded men who previously hadn't even bothered to move suddenly sat up despite their grave injuries, absolutely determined to ask a couple of questions.
Unable to bear their anxiety, Lelouch quickly made a solemn promise. "Rest assured, everyone! We will outlast the Belgin army! The current situation is like a 'ko fight' in an ancient Eastern board game called 'Go'. We and the Belgin army are caught in each other's 'ko eye'. It all comes down to whose 'liberties'—whose endurance—can last longer!
"No matter how many enemies there are, as long as they run out of breath first, we can link up with our allied forces in Blankenberge! And I promise you, the regimental commander has already figured out a way to break the enemy; those strategies just can't be deployed until dawn. Everyone must hold on. I guarantee the commander will completely shatter the enemy's morale today!"
Lelouch delivered his impromptu motivational speech with impassioned vigor, expecting nothing more than to sustain the survival instincts of the severely wounded.
During this rally, his own mindset was quietly shifting.
In today's battle, the sooner they could force the enemy to surrender, the fewer people would die on both sides.
The war had only been going on for three months; the hatred between the two sides wasn't that deeply rooted yet. As long as the enemy changed their diplomatic stance, ceased their pro-Britannia leanings, and formed a pro-Demania cabinet, this could still end peacefully.
These small, third-party countries were merely dragged into the conflict anyway. There was no need to fight to the bitter end.
The wounded soldiers, however, knew nothing of the high command's plans. They had assumed they could only rely on brute force against an enemy that outnumbered them more than tenfold, and after a night of bloody fighting, they had fallen into despair.
But Lelouch's words rekindled their will to live, giving them the drive to hold on.
"I'm actually quite ashamed. These meager first-aid skills of mine can't really save many people," Lelouch remarked with a heavy sigh on the way back to regimental headquarters.
Klose firmly disagreed. "No, sir! The comfort you gave them is something the medics can't provide. I saw it with my own eyes—after hearing your words, the light returned to the eyes of many of the severely wounded!"
Lelouch nodded thoughtfully. Propaganda work for their own people was just as important. Demania had previously been terrible at this, only using brute orders to force people into action without ever explaining why.
...
Harboring a burning desire to end the battle as quickly as possible, Lelouch hurried to regimental headquarters.
Colonel List had clearly spent the night making do with a chair in headquarters. When he saw Lelouch, his face was etched with exhaustion and stress, but he still shared some good news with an uplifted tone:
"I've communicated with Army Group Command. The photographs and mimeographed flyers are all ready. They've also transferred over a dozen reconnaissance planes to Ghent Airport. It's only seventy kilometers away; they can fly here in half an hour."
The colonel checked his watch as he spoke.
"That's excellent. I believe the Belgin offensive will weaken very soon," Lelouch said, genuinely believing it.
"In a moment, I'll have Barack handle the handover of the refugees," the colonel said. "You'll be responsible for continuously broadcasting the surrender telegraph to the enemy's high-ranking officers. Do not drop the ball on this. You need to coordinate as closely as possible with the reconnaissance planes dropping the flyers."
"Yes, sir!"
All units quickly finalized their preparations.
A few minutes later, temporary ceasefire flags were raised over the ruins on the easternmost edge of Nieuwpoort. The German Army's reconnaissance company then fired up every megaphone they could find, using the lull between enemy attacks to shout toward the opposing lines.
This was swiftly noticed by the 6th Belgia Division on the other side and reported to their commander, Major General Victor.
Major General Victor had only arrived on the battlefield after midnight. He had been leading his troops in a relentless assault for over four hours, only to be held off at every turn by List.
Upon hearing his subordinate's report, he quickly grabbed his binoculars and carefully observed the western lines.
'The Demanians want to surrender? No! That's not a white flag; it's a ceasefire flag! What gives them the right to demand a temporary ceasefire? They must be crumbling and need a breather!'
"We can't let them have their way! Hurry up and organize the next wave of attacks! Whatever the enemy wants, we must do the exact opposite!"
Although Major General Victor was no master of strategy, he understood the most fundamental principle of war: never let the enemy get what they want. Thus, his instinct was to do the opposite and make things miserable for them.
His subordinates didn't dare question him and immediately rushed off to prepare the next assault.
But soon, the shouts from the enemy megaphones drifted over, followed by a large crowd of ragged Belgin civilians appearing at the front of the lines.
"Do not open fire! These are Belgin civilians whose homes were flooded yesterday!"
"Our forces sheltered them in our cellars overnight. We are now handing them over to you to prevent accidental casualties in the crossfire!"
"Please do not slaughter your own countrymen!"
It wasn't just the Demanian officers shouting; the hundreds of terrified civilians, equally afraid of being caught in the crossfire, were crying and screaming toward the Belgin forces in the east, begging them not to shoot.
Judging by their numbers, there were a good three or four hundred of them—accounting for more than half of the civilians Colonel List had conveniently rescued the day before.
When the soldiers of the 6th Belgia Division, who were preparing to attack, saw women and children in the crowd, an uproar immediately swept through their ranks.
"Are they really our civilians?"
"Why would those Demanian beasts rescue our people?"
"Who exactly blew up the dike? Why didn't the Demanians receive a warning beforehand? And why weren't our own civilians told to evacuate in time?"
Countless questions surged into the minds of the 6th Belgia Division soldiers. Most of them hadn't participated in the specific operation to breach the dikes and release the floodwaters; they had been kept in the dark by high command just like everyone else.
By the time Major General Victor realized what was happening and tried to stop the rumors from spreading, it was already too late.
The Demanians had indeed sent several telegraphs requesting instructions from high command the night before, but those were all regarding the air-drop of propaganda flyers. As for releasing the civilians and broadcasting surrender messages over the Radio Set, Colonel List could execute those maneuvers on his own without needing coordinated support from above; naturally, he hadn't wasted time asking for permission.
Therefore, even though the Britannia forces had intercepted the German Army telegraphs, decrypted them, and urgently relayed them to the Belgin forces—and ultimately into Major General Victor's hands—Victor was only prepared to defend against the flyer drop. He was left completely unguarded against the other two tactics.
Today, he had dispatched nearly all of the division's military police and disciplinary enforcers to "prevent the soldiers from picking up flyers later; picking up any paper from the ground constitutes a breach of military discipline." With all resources directed there, his defenses against any other surprises had naturally dropped to an absolute minimum.
As a result, he was completely blindsided by an ambush from an entirely different angle!
Over three hundred Belgin civilians, supporting the elderly and carrying the young, walked along the coastal highway toward the Belgin positions.
Lieutenant Barack, deputy commander of the cavalry company attached to the 12th Division of the German 6th Army Group, personally rode his warhorse, leading a small squad of soldiers to escort the Belgins through the no-man's-land between the two armies.
At the town entrance in the rear, the reconnaissance company had set up military cameras in several different positions, capturing the entire process in real-time from multiple angles.
If the Belgin forces actually dared to turn hostile after receiving the refugees and shot Lieutenant Barack and his escorts, their country's international reputation would be utterly dragged through the mud.
Even if the Belgins held their fire, these photographs would serve as crucial circumstantial evidence in the future to prove exactly how this battle transpired.
Unsurprisingly, the Belgins didn't dare make a reckless move. They simply accepted the three hundred of their own civilians in silence.
As the civilians entered their lines, further unrest began to ripple through the Belgin forces.
Some soldiers who had relatives stranded in the flooded zones immediately abandoned military discipline to look for them. A few actually managed to find their loved ones, plunging the area into utter chaos.
The returned civilians hadn't undergone any professional training. They didn't know what they should or shouldn't say, so they simply blurted out the truth, further fueling the panic inside the Belgin army.
After delivering the refugees, Lieutenant Barack immediately spurred his horse and galloped back into town.
The half-hour temporary ceasefire for the handover quickly came to an end. In theory, both sides were free to resume hostilities.
However, the chaos on the Belgin side was far from over. Victor was completely unable to reorganize his offensive in time, left only to slowly figure out a way to rein in his men.
As if the situation wasn't bad enough, it was at this exact moment that the Demanian Radio Sets powered up to maximum capacity, continuously blasting open-code surrender telegraphs in French toward the Belgin side.
The regimental radio at every Belgin regiment could pick up the signals; whether they listened or not was up to them. Several regiments tried to frantically power down their devices to block out the broadcast, but their eyes had already been polluted by the short, impactful unencrypted messages.
Once an idea burrows its way into a person's mind, deliberately trying to forget it becomes an impossible task.
A buzzing sound soon echoed through the sky as over a dozen reconnaissance planes flew over Niopold.
They had flown directly along the coastal highway from Ostend to Niopold. Catching the first rays of morning light, dozens of crates of flyers and photographs were air-dropped from a low altitude, scattering everywhere.
Even with the military police enforcing discipline, it was impossible to catch everything. Some soldiers secretly picked up the photographs and immediately found themselves unable to tear their eyes away.
Among these photos, some featured clear aerial shots of soldiers in Belgin uniforms tampering with what appeared to be the canal's seawall dikes. Another photo showed that exact location blown wide open, with torrential floodwaters roaring down.
Even though the photos were black and white, the overwhelming majority of the soldiers began to waver.
For many, their reasoning was actually quite simple: If the photos didn't expose the truth, why would the enemy go to such lengths to drop them?