Wars to End All Wars: Alternate Tales from the Trenches Read online

  “That . . . is quite good.” He looks thoughtful, a smile creeping out from beneath his moustache. “Nothing official said, nothing ever is, but it’s certainly plausible. Already familiar, thus not so very intriguing for the writers, associated with success, with prestige . . .” His smile broadens.

  Already planning communiqués with the ministry, as I leave he charges me to test the waters and I requisition resources to facilitate. That evening the crew roasts meat over camp-fires and eats under the clear, starry skies with a few kegs of Gerhardt’s beer to share between us. I slip in just the slightest of hints and let their memories do the rest.

  In the days to come, the idle chatter around the site which Gerhardt disliked so much ebbs away, but not before it plants its seed where it can be carried back to the empire. Whatever the reason behind the establishment’s reticence, their preference for stories of a false status symbol over the actual one is evident. When word returns of the strategy’s effectiveness at home, my friend’s gratitude—emblematic of his superiors’, he assures me—is nothing if not entirely genuine.

  Still, it is strange.

  We dig, one behind another. To either side, the walls of the foundation rise high. Ahead of me, I see only the faceless backs of my men, stooping, straightening, half-turning to toss broken soil behind them. Each man thrusts his shovel into the last man’s pile, piles it up behind him for the next in line to do exactly the same. No-one sings.

  I bend to my work, move the earth pile one step further back, and when I look up I see, ahead, six men labouring before the turn of the foundation. I bend, dig, rise, and now the turn is closer, only five men work before me and the other man is gone. I bend, dig, rise, and only four men are before me; but now, at the corner, I can just see the heel of the last man in the northerly line, see his shovel flash as he piles soil for the first of our number to send our way.

  I bend, dig, rise. I bend, dig, rise. Each time, there are fewer men before me and I am closer to the corner. I bend, dig, rise. Each time, I can better see the sidelong man, last in the line that is feeding ours. I bend, dig, rise, and now I am behind him, ready to sink my shovel into his cast-offs, and beyond him there is nothing but more men digging, each digging in what another man has dug for him, and as the sidelong man turns to replenish the pile between us I see his profile for a moment, his grey flesh, the sunken pit of his eye, the slackness, and then he turns away again and I bend, dig, rise, and the corner is behind me and the new line is ahead.

  I bend, dig, rise, and travel the foundation.

  I turn another corner. I bend, dig, rise.

  There are fewer men before me, but I don’t try to see their faces. I don’t look at those behind, in case they see my flesh is grey and sunken.

  I bend, dig, rise.

  I find no man before me. Only an insurmountable wall of earth, waiting for my shovel to bite.

  Finally I wake.

  The work continues.

  Our long trench is complete, ten feet deep, the walls stable, the line true. I called a halt on the Small Foundation with the job three-quarters done; it provides wide, easy access to the trench, ideal for tackling the greater challenge of the Large Foundation. Daily we trudge down the slope, recover our tools and barrows from beneath their tarpaulins, and file north up the trench until we are evenly spaced along the west wall. And then we dig, undermine the base, crumble what hangs above, fill the barrows and wheel them out, return and do it all over again. My men bounce songs up and down the line, sometimes chorusing all together, sometimes playing harmonious games in which duets or trios are passed from man to man, each singer’s partner always distant, unseen but heard over the constant noise of shovels and picks and grunts of effort.

  The work continues. So do the dreams.

  We have been labouring for some time now and, while we embrace our strenuous duties with love, every man of us falls gratefully into his cot come dusk. Yet if these nightly disturbances plague any one of those I stand alongside through the day, I see no sign of it in their demeanour, nor hear any evidence of their discomfiture when my rest is vanquished and I open my eyes onto darkness, lie unsleeping, as distressing images persist in my thoughts.

  I confess, I am affected. In the mornings I rise as stiff and weary as when I lay down, and in my hands even the sharpest shovel blade must fight its way into the earth, no longer parting it with ease. My mind feels similarly blunted. I no longer join in the songs of the line; I delegate the wrangling to Horst and concentrate on my little section, mechanical, isolated, even just an arm’s span from the man beside me. I feel their concern, know that they will not breach the barrier of respect by expressing it to me, or to each other, though they exchange glances that say everything most clearly.

  The images I see, though in many ways lacking detail of their wider context, I cannot help but feel are of this place. This strangely empty, beautiful place—why would it provoke such distressing things in me? But, more to the point I think, why is it so empty? Virgin land, ripe for the expansion of the empire, but it has lain here untouched for longer than I know to say. What is—no, rather, is there a reason? If so, perhaps it would explain why the ministry would want to deflect discussion of this project . . . but then why construct so potent a symbol here in the first place?

  Such thoughts run in rings around my waking mind, and so as much as I am able I also try to isolate myself from Gerhardt, for I don’t trust myself not to ask the very questions to which our presence here inevitably leads. He puts it down to my dedication to the work, so most often I succeed; but that same assumption justifies the gift of recreation on his part, of ordering me away from my duties to rest in his company, to turn aside from brute activity and enjoy civilised discourse. To refuse him would be not merely rude but dangerously revealing of my growing frailty, and so it happens that we eat together, drink together, remind each other of our old stories—though mostly he remembers them to me—until finally, tired and with Schnapps buzzing my head, I recklessly broach the topic.

  “Why do we build here?” I say.

  “For the empire,” he replies with jovial pomp, raising his glass in salute.

  “No. I mean, what is this monument meant to celebrate?”

  “Observatory,” he says, with care, and I scowl.

  “Come on, Gerhardt! What is the point of this? And why here?” I wave a hand to indicate the openness of the lands about us, though within his tent, late in the evening, we can see none of them. “The Westerly Fields. Hundreds, thousands of square miles, deserted from border to coast in spite of their obvious utility. Who knows why the emperors preserve them untouched, have done since . . . who even remembers how long, let alone the reasons? They are almost treated like a monument already—and now, here we are to plant a giant warrior in their heart, all the while pretending it is not what it is to be. Do you understand that better than I, do those you answer to, or are we all equally in the dark?”

  He looks hawkishly at me then. “It isn’t for the likes of me, or of you, to question this. No more than it is for your workers, or the clamouring scribblers back home.”

  “But Gerhardt—”

  “No, I’m serious. We are servants of our empire, each of us, noble or lowly. If the emperor—if all the emperors history has ever known—choose to act without deigning to clarify their purposes for the sake of you and I, that simply is the way that it is.” Now he waves a hand at our unseen surroundings. “You think there is some secret here? Maybe they just keep them as a vast, natural garden. Maybe the emperor holidays here and would like a big statue to look at. Maybe—” he quietens “—there is something historical here, of powerful interest to the imperial family, which he now wishes to acknowledge in this grand way. Whatever it is, our duty is to obey, and make his wishes actual.”

  I look at the glass in my hand, raise it, but the cloying smell is too much. I put it aside and rub both hands over my face with a sigh. When they fall away again I see my old friend looking at me with a hint of conce
rn, the same expression my men try not to turn my way.

  “Karl, do you feel well?” he asks.

  “Forgive me, Gerhardt,” I say. “It seems I am not sleeping well, these days.”

  I dig, alone. I have never dug alone.

  The sky is dark as the shadow beneath me, heavy as the shovel in my hands. The wall of earth before me has the look of millennia to it, impervious to my meagre strength. Yet the trench stretches behind me, emptied of earth by the will of men. But no other men are here.

  I thrust in the shovel, but instead of resistance the earth crumbles and the blade slides through into emptiness. The wall sags to fill the hole, leans away from me and falls, breaking into dust as it goes and blowing away down a long division in the earth, ten feet deep, that bends, stutters, jags back and forth but never seems to end.

  I shouldn’t be able to see past its first corner, but I can. I’m above the crest of its western wall, I can look along its broken length as though rising in a balloon. As I rise, the great trench shrinks until it seems to be no more than a fissure in a rock face—and I see there are more fissures, parallel lines stretching as far as the eye can see with no waves of grass between them.

  I am back in myself, in the trench, my shovel loose in my hand. Beside me, instead of a near vertical barrier, part of the western wall has subsided, creating a slope which would be easy to climb. I put aside the shovel and do so, emerging onto the broken plain. The bare surface is brown and black, pitted and uneven. No trees, no grass, no life here. Just the endless earth, battered flesh beneath bandages of mist, under a sky of infinite, uniform, distanceless grey.

  Through the mist is the shape of a man, running, towards me. Obscured as he is, I cannot see his face even as he draws close, cannot make out what it is he carries in both hands. Then the mist falls away and he is upon me, his mouth is open as if to call to me, but before I can hear what he has to say, before I can recognise him perhaps, I realise I still carry my shovel, I have it in both hands, just as he carries whatever tool he has before him. And I wake, to find myself hunched and shivering, my night clothes damp with sweat, my fists clenched so tightly that my arms ache as though torn.

  In the morning I ramble, still half sleeping, and my men call for a doctor. Gerhardt comes too. The doctor tells them it is a passing fever and has them continue with their work, orders me to consume a bowl of broth and a measure of strong drink, confines me to my cot to rest. The crew go on to the pit without me, some with joking boasts that they will achieve all the more while I waste the day. Others, like Gerhardt, say nothing; and they wield the influence, for as I lie in our tent I hear none of the singing that usually accompanies our work, drifting back to the camp with the breeze.

  I recuperate no strength as I lie there alone, my gaze on a sliver of the world revealed beyond the tent flap, or turned to the ground beneath my cot, the grass and soil trampled into a matt by our daily to and fro. I wish that I were working with them, and not plagued each night by dreams; but the dreams, and Gerhardt’s loyal, unthinking evasions, keep turning in my head even now, unearthing suspicion.

  This place. This place.

  What was it that happened here? What have we forgotten?

  What do we seek to memorialise in ignorance?

  The tent grows heavy with afternoon heat, I smother into restless slumber, and in the mist-warped wasteland I run towards the haze, praying it will envelop me wholly, praying for deeper unconsciousness; but from out of it the man’s shape runs at me, his hands still filled, mouth still open and moving. I can hear nothing of his voice, can hear only ghosts of sound: the distant humming of atonal scales, the gentle impacts of dropped pillows, the crackling of twigs or brittle leaves trodden underfoot. My mind cries out for more, for painful volume, but no respite comes.

  He runs as though to embrace me, but that embrace is barred by his burden, a frightening staff, complex and misshapen. My hands are also filled, but my shovel has become an intricate tool of metal tubes and levers, its weight at the wrong end, its long blade too narrow to turn soil. Then we come together and I put my tool to work, dig the blade into the man’s body and watch his eyes widen and close and open again in shock and agony as I pull it free, dig again, pull it free.

  As I dig, the humming grows less distant, grows loud, it fills my ears, relieving the ache of too-little-noise at last, and a smile parts my lips. Then something strikes the earth and shakes up a geyser of it all around, like soil tossed from a shovel’s blade. I am gone.

  The man drops his weapon—it was a weapon!—drops to his knees as blood pulses from him, his torso opened, guts slobbering from him like the tongue in the mouth of a great hound, hot drool cooling onto him and its breath in his face in steaming clouds. He falls forwards, his fingers sinking into the grey mud as though seeking purchase. His blood pools, spirals of grey twisting in it as it spreads, until one edge of the pool meets a tiny crack in the earth and it runs in, runs away from him in a line. Beneath his open eye, the little crack is as wide as a trench.

  His blood fills the trench in a flood, washing over its floor, up its walls, filling it like a canal, an unstoppable torrent fit to sweep away anything in its path. It runs for miles, then runs up against an ancient mill house, a huge wheel held above a dry river bed, and the blood forces it to turn, drives its mechanism in screams of warped wood and grinding, groaning stone. The flood flows ever stronger, the bloodwheel turns faster, powering a great machine that stretches away behind it to the distance, a machine of many smaller parts that come together in some incomprehensible enterprise, lines of control and activity that seem to coordinate like the orders and movements of a single body, a giant, longer than mountains are high, lying along the world as though seeking to climb its surface.

  And there is another giant, its enemy, comprised of machines and animals and men but heedless of each little one, just as impossibly huge, climbing this way to meet it.

  With ponderous effort, the awful things raise trembling arms and reach out, find handholds, take their grip. When they pull themselves forward the earth protests, then splits, new fissures running to the horizon—more trenches added to all those behind, the old ones crushed closed again beneath each giant’s bulk. They reach out again, darkening the world beneath their arms.

  Mighty fingers pull at the earth and another vast wound opens in it. The body of the man I killed tumbles in, lies on his back at its bottom, and beneath him a tangle of mud-slick corpses form his bed. The earth shakes as, miles further ahead, the giant’s other hand takes grip to drag its body onwards and, as the huge torso grinds across the fields, the walls of the trench crumble, they fall, and the countless bodies are buried again. The man I killed as well. And so am I.

  After what seems a long time beneath the earth, I wake from that darkness into another.

  I rise well before the sun and depart the tent with my men still soundly sleeping, in rows like the dead. I pull my boots on and make my way between silhouetted tents, across the hoof-trampled ground towards the earthworks, no sound but the soft flap of canvas in the low breeze, then with nothing else to breathe across but me. The world is all shadow, the sky a fathomless grey, the stars fading as the coming dawn tilts the heavens from the east. At last I stand at the edge of my hole, the easy incline into my pit, a void in the darkness around me, of which I am a part as well. I cautiously descend.

  I find the dew-wet tarpaulin in the blindness, take a shovel’s cool wooden shaft in my hand and return to the irregular working wall, yesterday’s soil pressed into today’s mud beneath my soles. I know how many strides to the earthface, have no need to reach out my hand, but I lift it anyway, fingers tentative, fearful that I will find another hand and cold fingers will slide between mine in a lover’s grasp.

  I stop and let my hand fall. There will be no other hand there, for the working wall faces west.

  I turn to the smooth southern wall, the trench end. I imagine it no thicker than a brick, a book, a single sheet of paper, so softened by age
that the history written upon it can no longer be read; and behind it an endless continuation, one of many, the long foundations which, perhaps, our empire has been built upon, filled in with soil and men.

  Or am I crazily wrong? The soil I can be sure is there, but could so many men be lost, not just once, to war, but again, to memory?

  I heft the shovel, sink it south and start to dig. But I don’t start to sing.

  * * *

  Andrew Leon Hudson

  Andrew Leon Hudson is an Englishman resident in Spain and has been writing full-time since the beginning of 2012, partly to appear as unemployed as everyone else in the country, partly in an attempt to lead a fulfilling life. In preparation for this, he has also worked in fields as diverse as prosthetic make-up, teaching, contact lens retail, “intoxicant delivery” and the services (customer and military). He used to have his own family company, but it died. His first novel, Steampunk adventure The Glass Sealing, was published about ten minutes ago, and you can fall in love with him further on his pseudonymous blog, andrewleonhudson.wordpress.com.

  Copyright Notices:

  “Introduction” Copyright © 2014, N.E. White.

  “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” Copyright © 2014, Igor Ljubuncic.

  “Wormhole” Copyright © 2014, Lee Swift.

  “Jawohl” Copyright © 2014, Wilson Geiger.

  “Tradition” Copyright © 1998, Elizabeth Moon. First published in Alternate Generals, edited by Roland Green & Harry Turtledove, Baen. Reprinted with permission from the author.

  “On the Cheap” Copyright © 2014, Dan Bieger.

  “One Man’s War” Copyright © 2014, G.L. Lathian.