The train shuddered to a stop with a long, metallic shriek, and I jerked awake with my heart already hammering before I knew where I was. Steam billowed past the windows in white curtains. I sat up, neck burning from hours slumped against the hard wooden backrest, and blinked at the light cutting in through the grimy glass — sharp and southern, nothing like the softer mornings back home.
Outside, the platform was gravel and dust and the smell of the river — mud and something organic, almost rotten, laced underneath with coal smoke from our engine. The men around me groaned and stretched as they climbed down, packs swaying, rifles clattering against the sides of the carriage. Someone's kit bag fell and split open, spilling socks and a photograph across the gravel. Nobody laughed. We were too stiff, too sticky with sweat, too newly arrived at a place we hadn't quite made real to ourselves yet.
Karl materialized at my shoulder, freckled face flushed, already grinning like we'd just pulled into a seaside resort.
"Smell that, Franz?" He drew in a theatrical breath. "That's victory. No more twelve-hour shifts, no more Foreman Bretz breathing down our necks. This is living."
"That's river mud," I said. "And someone's latrine."
He laughed and clapped me on the back hard enough to stagger me. Karl had always been like this — the man who could find the bright side of a broken axle in a thunderstorm. I'd loved that about him at the factory. Out here I wasn't sure how long it would last.
I scanned the horizon while the sergeants shouted us into ranks. Rolling hills, scrubby and sun-bleached, the land folding away south in long dry creases. And there in the distance, catching the afternoon light like hammered tin — the Sava River, broader than I'd expected, cutting a slow brown line through the valley. Somewhere beyond it was Sarbiane. Somewhere beyond it was the war we'd signed up for.
Lieutenant Hauser gathered us in the shade of a depot building, his mustache — which was genuinely remarkable, the kind you'd stop and stare at on a tram — set in a firm line beneath a sun-reddened nose.
"Listen carefully," he said, and we did. "Our objective is Šabac. Town sits on the far bank, controls the road and the rail line south toward Belgrade. We take it, we cut their supply throat. Engineers go first with the pontoons. Infantry forms behind in companies. We cross at dusk when the light's against their shooters." He looked along the ranks with the flat assessment of a man measuring timber. "Any questions."
It wasn't really a question.
---
We marched through the heat of the afternoon, the road a pale dust track that turned our boots grey and coated the back of my throat with grit. The sun was merciless. My pack dug grooves into my shoulders through the wool tunic, already soaked through with sweat, and the rifle felt heavier with every kilometre — not physically, just in some other way I couldn't name. The men around me talked less as the hours passed. Even Karl's humming tapered off somewhere around the third hour.
We passed through farmland that had been abandoned in a hurry. Gates left open. A cart in a ditch with one wheel missing. Chickens wandering a yard with no one to feed them, pecking at the dry earth with a patient indifference to everything that had happened to their world. The houses watched us with empty windows, doors standing ajar. I found myself peering into the dark interiors as we passed, half-expecting to see someone — a face, a hand, any sign that ordinary life had happened here recently and might happen again. There was nothing. Just the smell of someone else's cooking that had long since gone cold.
Birds circled overhead. I didn't know what kind.
What am I doing here? The question arrived again, the same one that had been visiting me since Vienna, patient as a debt collector. I'd bolted together steam engines. I knew the torque on a drive shaft coupling, the sound a bearing made when it was starting to go. I didn't know anything about this.
---
The Sava was wide and unhurried, maybe a hundred metres bank to bank, the water the colour of weak tea and moving with a sluggish, muscular current that showed itself in the debris — branches, a wooden crate, something I didn't look at too long — floating steadily downstream. The far bank was low bluffs and a fringe of reeds, and beyond that, the tree line where the road bent toward Šabac.
Engineers were already at work when we arrived, hammering pontoon sections together with the focused urgency of men who knew the light wouldn't hold. The floating platforms — lashed timber over empty barrels — bobbed and turned in the current as they were shoved out, connected section by section into a bridge that swayed and flexed like a living thing. Machine-gun crews waded into the shallows, setting up fields of fire across the water. Everything smelled of wet wood and oil and the particular nervousness of men about to do something they couldn't take back.
I checked my rifle. Then checked it again. Bolt smooth. Magazine seated. Safety off, then on, then off again. Karl watched me without comment.
The first crack came from across the river like a stone dropped into silence — and then the silence was gone entirely. Rifles, then more rifles, and then the flat wet smack of rounds hitting mud, the spit and hiss of bullets punching into the water, the sound of someone nearby saying oh in a tone that had nothing to do with surprise. Men dropped. Men ran. I went flat without deciding to, face pressed into the damp earth, tasting grit and iron and the stink of river mud, while our machine guns answered and the air above me became something torn and living and dangerous.
The artillery started a minute later — our guns, positioned back on a rise — and the world behind the far tree line began coming apart in pillars of black smoke and orange flame. I watched through squinted eyes, pressed as low as a man can get while still breathing, and felt something loosen in the Sarb fire. Figures scrambled in the distant tree line. Some didn't get up.
"Second wave — move!"
Karl was on his feet before I was. I followed.
---
The pontoon bridge was worse than I'd imagined. It shifted underfoot with every step, a rolling, unpredictable sway that sent water slopping over the edges, soaking boots and ankles. The men ahead of us were running, which made it worse, the whole structure flexing and bouncing. We were halfway across — exposed as bottles on a fence, every one of us — when the Sarbs opened up again from positions they'd pulled back to in the trees.
The man directly in front of me — I'd seen his face at meals, never learned his name — caught a round through the throat. Not clean. The bullet tore sideways through the neck, and he turned toward me with both hands going up to the wound in a reflex that couldn't help him, blood sheeting between his fingers in rhythmic pulses, his mouth working without sound. His eyes found mine. He was still standing. Then he wasn't, toppling sideways off the bridge, and the river closed over him almost gently.
I kept moving.
The man behind me — Brauer, from Graz, had lent me a blanket on the train — took a round through the face. I know because I felt it: a fine warm mist across the back of my neck, and when I turned for half a second I saw what was left of him sitting down slowly on the planks, the top of his skull simply absent, the way a boiled egg looks when you take the cap off. My mind refused to process it as a person. It filed it away as a problem of geometry — how something could be there and then not be there — and then I was moving again because stopping meant dying.
Someone to my left went into the water screaming, hit in both legs, the current taking him immediately. He was still screaming when the river bent and I couldn't see him anymore.
I slipped. Boot caught a plank slicked with something dark and I went down hard, one knee on the wood, hands grabbing the railing, face suddenly level with the churning brown water below. For one suspended second I hung there, looking at the river, and the river looked back. I got up. I don't know how.
Private Mueller — nineteen, from Linz, had shown me a photograph of his dog on the train, a ridiculous fat beagle named Ernst — was three steps behind me when the round caught him. It hit him in the chest, center mass, and the force of it sat him down on the planks with a look of mild surprise, like a man who's just missed a tram. He didn't fall over. He just sat there, and the surprise on his face softened into something else, something I'd never seen before and recognised immediately as the end of a person, and I stepped around him and kept moving and I have thought about that moment every day since.
I made the far bank on legs that felt borrowed. Knelt in the reeds, breathing so hard I couldn't hear properly, hands shaking on the rifle stock. Karl dropped beside me, face pale under the freckles, and for once said nothing. We looked at each other. We looked away.
"Up," the sergeant said. "We're not done."
---
We weren't.
We went through the trees with bayonets fixed, charging foxholes, the fighting close and ugly and nothing like the parade-ground drills that were supposed to have prepared us for it. I fired — twice, three times — at shadows moving in the smoke, at figures scrambling through brush. Whether I hit anything I couldn't say.
I shot a man in the back who was running. He dropped and crawled a few feet and stopped. I don't know why I'm including that. I suppose because it happened and I was there.
The Sarbs fell back toward Šabac, and we followed, funnelled into cobblestone streets that amplified every sound — footsteps, shouts, shots — into something disorienting and close. The town had the particular stillness of a place that had been inhabited an hour ago and wasn't anymore. Shuttered windows. A child's shoe in a doorway. A cat watching us from a wall with yellow, unhurried eyes.
We cornered the last of their rearguard in the central square — fifty men at most, muddy and hollow-eyed, the fight already gone out of most of them. Some threw their rifles down. Some didn't.
A Sarb soldier came around a cart at Karl with a bayonet already leveled, and Karl took it on the rifle barrel and turned it just enough — the blade caught him across the forearm instead of the stomach — and then Karl drove his own bayonet in, low, beneath the ribs. The man folded around it. Karl had to put a boot on him to pull the blade free, and the sound it made doing so is not something I will write down. The man on the ground was still moving when Karl turned away. Not for long.
In the doorway of a cobbler's shop — lasts still on the workbench inside — two of our men had cornered a Sarb who'd run out of ammunition. He was using his rifle as a club. He broke one man's jaw before they got him down, and then they didn't stop, and I walked past and didn't intervene, and that is also something I carry.
By the time the light failed, Šabac was ours.
---
That night the men drank. Someone had found a tavern with a cellar intact — bread and hard cheese and bottles of local wine that tasted like it had been made in anger. Fires burned in the square. Men sang. Someone retold the river crossing and made it heroic, which was one way of processing it, I supposed.
I sat with Karl by one of the fires and accepted the flask when it came to me and drank without tasting it. The wine warmed my stomach but didn't touch the cold thing sitting in the middle of my chest.
"First blood," Karl said quietly. Not the way he'd have said it this morning. Different now. A fact rather than a toast.
I nodded and stared into the fire. The faces came whether I invited them or not — the man on the bridge with his hands at his throat. Brauer's skull. Mueller sitting down with that look of mild surprise. The man I'd shot in the back.
Was this victory? It felt like something else. Something I didn't have a name for yet.
I drank, and the fire burned down, and around me the singing gradually quieted until there was just the crackle of embers and the distant sound of the river, moving in the dark the way it had always moved, indifferent to everything we'd done to each other on its banks today.
---
We spent the following days turning Šabac into something that could be held. Trenches dug in arcs around the outskirts, machine guns positioned in attic windows overlooking the rail yard, sandbags filling doorways until the streets looked like something half-swallowed by earth. The rail line was our prize — a single track running south, the artery we'd been sent to sever. We knew what it meant to them. Which meant we knew they'd come back for it.
Karl and I shared watches in the small hours, four on, four off, the nights long and cool now that the sun was down. We talked sometimes — about home, about the factory, about nothing in particular — and sometimes just sat in silence, which was its own kind of comfort. The patrols came back with reports that grew worse each day. Sarb scouts on the ridgelines. Columns of troops moving on roads to the east. An artillery train spotted at a rail junction twelve kilometres south.
I cleaned my rifle and sharpened my bayonet and tried not to think too specifically about the future. It was easier that way.
---
Twelve days in, just before first light, the guns found us.
I was in the square when the first shell came in — no warning, just a sound like the world tearing open, and then the cobblestones twenty metres away erupting in a column of fire and black smoke and things that had been solid a moment before. The shockwave hit me like an open hand across the whole body. I was on the ground without knowing I'd fallen.
Private Lehmann had been standing where the shell landed. He'd been mid-laugh, I think. After the smoke cleared there was no sign of him that I could identify as having been a person. Just a scorch mark and a boot with a foot still in it and a wide dark stain across the cobblestones.
I got up. Another shell hit the far end of the square. Another, closer. The air was full of sound and grit and the high bright singing of shrapnel. Men were running, men were screaming — real screaming, not the heroic kind, the kind that strips something out of you just to hear it, animal and absolute.
A corporal stumbled past me with his hands pressed to his face, and when he took them away I saw that something — shrapnel, a stone fragment, I couldn't tell — had taken his left eye. The socket was a red ruin leaking something clear and viscous alongside the blood, and he was saying I can't see, I can't see in the patient bewildered tone of a man reading instructions he doesn't understand. I grabbed his arm and pointed him toward the aid post and let go and kept moving because I had nothing else to offer him.
The worst was the soldier against the wall of the church. A shell had caught him from the side — shrapnel through the abdomen — and what it had done to his insides was visible, because his tunic had been shredded and the wound was open and he was holding himself together with both hands in a way that was not working. He was conscious. That was the worst part. Conscious and looking at me with a very specific expression — not pain exactly, past pain — that said he knew exactly what was happening to him and had accepted it and just wanted it to be over. He said something. I think he said please. I kept moving because I had no morphine and nothing else to offer him and because if I stopped I wouldn't start again.
I ran for the nearest house — a stone cottage, someone's parlor, furniture shoved to the walls from when we'd searched it days before — and pressed my back against the interior wall and put my hands over my ears and it didn't help because the shells weren't stopping.
Plaster dust sifted from the ceiling with every impact. The window glass went on the third hit, spraying inward across the floor in a glittering sheet. I was saying something — words, maybe prayers, maybe just sounds — I couldn't tell. My hands shook so badly I could barely keep them over my ears. The small rational part of me that was still functioning noted that the walls were stone and probably wouldn't collapse. The rest of me had stopped being rational some time ago.
Then the guns stopped.
The silence was so sudden it felt like a different kind of violence.
Whistles. The thin reedy sound of Sarb officers signalling the advance. Bugles answering. The deep rhythmic thunder of boots on the approach roads — a lot of boots — and beneath it, the crackle of rifle fire starting up as our surviving men engaged from the trenches.
They'd waited for the guns to do the softening. Now they were coming in.
I got to my feet. Found my rifle on the floor where I'd dropped it without knowing. Moved to the window and looked through the jagged frame at the smoke-filled street beyond.
Shadows moved in it. Coming closer.
I pulled the stock into my shoulder and waited.