A Brief Exchange

A Brief Exchange Some Godforsaken Wasteland, Border between East and West Prestia Gray. Gray, gray gray. Nothing but that hellish gray. For miles. Sergeant Otto Metzl doubted very strongly if the weather anywhere in the world was any different, or even could be any different. In a dripping wet, relentlessly frigid uniform, in a similarly wet, similarly frigid trench in the single wettest and most relentlessly frigid region in the world, one didn't exactly feel optimistic. It might have been raining. Frankly, Metzl didn't care at this point. He had bigger fish to fry. He subtly, oh so very subtly, tilted the rifle he cradled in his hands to the left. “Come on, you bastard,” he growled under his breath, watching through his rifle's scope as the officer he'd been tracking took a brief, tentative glance over the rim of his fence. Metzl almost took the shot, but restrained himself. He'd get his chance eventually. Eventually turned out to be sooner than expected. Metzl saw the squarish, jet black West Prestian helmet poke over the trench rim. The window of opportunity was brief, only a second or two, but that was all Metzl needed. He quickly aligned the sights and pulled the trigger, feeling the Pressner rifle's powerful thump and hearing its unique crack. Through the scope, he saw the West Prestian officer's head disappear, never to rise again. He waited a second, and then saw the tips of white helmets with red crosses painted on them. So, he had gotten the officer. Right between the eyes, too. Metzl set the Pressner back down on the ground, satisfied at his work. There were few joys in his line of work, but getting to shoot one of the enemy's officers was truly satisfying. He knew from bitter experience in this long war that men died in the countless almost laughably futile mass attacks both sides tried every so often. He also knew that, more often than not, they were damned good men. Friends. Comrades. Brothers-in-arms. So, though he knew he could never bring back his fallen colleagues, Metzl settled for making the West Prestians hurt, and that was one thing he did with unfailing skill. Grimly, (for could such an exercise be considered joyful anymore?) he set about carving another notch in the Pressner's wooden stock. That made... twenty-five, was it? Or twenty-six? He didn't particularly feel like counting at this point. Either way, he had done his fair share in this war. Why was it they fought, anyway? It wasn't as though he hadn't given it some thought- when you were left to clean out the latrine trenches, what else could you do? It might be the government's story, but he had cynically learned to distrust each and every single word coming out of the Kaiser's mouth, but he'd be damned if he ever said so aloud. The popular story spun by the Kaiser's talking pieces, or even His Majesty himself was that His Imperial Majesty was the true heir to the Prestian throne, and that the West Prestian... whatever it was they called him, was the bastard son of the previous Empress. Metzl chuckled quietly to himself. A hell of a family feud, this was. What with the gas attacks, acid bombs (oh god above, he hated acid bombs) endless artillery rains and the interminable, dull, soulcrushing misery between those brief spasms of violence, Metzl thought it strangely petty that East and West Prestia would be at war over a simple matter of succession. Didn't they have some kind of court system to sort that out? Bah. Courts. Metzl almost laughed out loud as he scraped clean caked mud from the bolt mechanism of his abused but still marvelously functional Pressner. The Judiciary had gone to hell as soon as war broke out, and as far as Metzl was concerned, it could damned well stay there. A former convict himself, he had had his history of murder and assassinations overlooked in return for joining the Kaiser's Imperial Army. That had been eight years ago, and even then the war had dragged on for a

decade. A West Prestian tank, blocky and blunt like everything the West Prestians produced (and, for that matter, the West Prestians themselves) shambled across the clay bog that separated the main battle lines. Metzl snarled derisively. Those fancy new tanks were less than worthless out here. Anti-armor -rifle-mounted grenades, landmines, and the ever-present anti-armor cannons stationed every so and so many feet along both lines made life in a tank short on top of loud and hellishly hot. Curious, he peered down his scope, watching the West Prestian tank roll ahead, struggling for a purchase in the ground, which was truly more liquid than solid. Come to think of it, it was a miracle the trenches even kept together. Ah, there it was- that dull thump of a rifle grenade being fired. Metzl pulled back from the scope and watched the dim, small black object arc slightly through the air, landing plum on the top of the tank, just behind the center. Metzl grinned. Wasn't that where they kept the... A series of loud roars answered his unfinished question. Unfired ammunition erupted inside the tank, swiss-cheesing it from the inside, along with the poor unfortunate souls on the inside. Metzl almost laughed. From a distance, it was funny- just a little amusement, flashing lights and fireworks and so on. Out of the corner of his eye, Metzl saw a flash of light, and heard the harsh snap a split second later, but was already halfway down to the wet earth. The bullet scuffed along the rim of the trench wall, spewing wet clumps over Metzl's back. Metzl slowly got up and shuffled along the trench to a new firing position, making a mental note where the enemy sniper was camped out. Satisfied after a few moments of slouching beneath the trench rim, Metzl tentatively lifted his head over the edge to look for the offending sniper, and came within an inch of losing it. “Dammit!” Metzl spat venomously. “The bastard's hunting me.” A member of his company, Private Ullert, rushed up to him. “All right, sarge?” he asked briskly. “Never better,” Metzl replied under his breath. “It looks like we got a hunter.” “Where?” Ullert asked, not daring to peek very far over the edge. “Out that way, but he's probably shifted about,” Metzl replied, gesturing in the general direction the fire had come from. Ullert nodded curtly, the model soldier, every inch. “Right. Time for the hunter to catch his prey?” he asked. “Exactly what I was thinking, Private,” Metzl agreed, pulling off his helmet. He put it over the private's rifle barrel and shuffled down the trench a ways. He gave Ullert the signal, and he smoothly lifted the helmet over the top of the trench. Sure enough, the West Prestian took the bait and cracked away a shot that pinged off the helmet. Metzl spotted the muzzle flash, panned his rifle over towards it, lined up, compensated for the distance, and pulled the trigger. Two on the day, he thought satisfied as the sniper's head snapped back. Not half bad. Better than most, that's for damned sure. He set back to cleaning his rifle, a habit approaching the revered status of a nervous tic. It helped to take his mind of things, like the fact that he had recently annihilated two human lives who happened to be born on the wrong side of the border, or the fact that he had done so so many times that it really didn't bother him anymore. In this kind of war, he thought grimly, where leaders went to war without thinking, recruited soldiers with emotion and petty nationalism- the very antitheses of thought, used weapons designed by people who never thought of the horror their creations would cause, you just had to learn to cope. You learned to not think. That was war. He supposed, if anyone were to think and if cooler heads did prevail, people like him wouldn't be fighting for a country they didn't love and would be still stuck rotting in jail cells. Which was better, which worse? Hard to say. Best, Metzl supposed, not to think about it too hard.