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

  The Russian still was not paying attention. Gavrilo managed to raise his rifle, agony lancing up his arms. Perhaps now, he would finally prove to everyone that he was no coward.

  There was a sudden flurry of laughter, crystal sharp, beautiful, almost like a birdsong in spring, and it cut through the clamor of dying and destruction. Gavrilo knew that voice. Anka.

  She was right next to him, whispering in his ear, all the words he had hoped to hear as a child, long long ago.

  Sometimes, Gavrilo would have sworn that he was the only one hearing it. But not this time.

  The enemy soldier tensed and looked down, the confused frown gone, replaced by grim determination.

  Gavrilo wanted to press the trigger.

  It was the Russian who released the first shot.

  The bullet hit him in the stomach and made his legs disappear. They weren’t there anymore, he could not feel them. His grip on the rifle slacked, and it dropped back in the bloody mud at his side. Gavrilo opened his mouth, trying to bemoan his misfortune, but then he realized there was no air in his lungs. He couldn’t cry even if he wanted. No pain. Just wordless frustration.

  The Russian grunted and walked away, no longer concerned. Gavrilo watched the haze wrap him. And for a moment, he swore Anka was there, too, gliding across the field, her straw shoes not touching the mire and destruction. The fog became thick and black, and the world faded.

  Gavrilo stared at the forest. Autumn had come and set the trees on fire. Orange, russet, faded gold, copper, the last proud scream of nature before winter came and robbed life away. Just as they were going to do with him.

  In the filthy trenches, he never would have guessed the war would ever end. But it had. The Austrians had won the war. Just days after the failed attack, the Tzar had declared a ceasefire and offered surrender. Just a few more days, and Gavrilo would have gone home unscathed, a veteran of the great war, a hero. No longer a man terrified of rifles aimed at his back, or the machine guns aimed at his chest. No longer a small, frail man trying to prove his worth. Oh, he should have gone far away after the assassination, fled the country. Now, it was too late.

  Deep down, he still wanted to show Anka he was no coward. He still wanted to see her, and tell her.

  He had charged the Russians, he had aimed a rifle at an enemy soldier. That must mean something.

  “Are you afraid, Gavrilo?” a female voice asked.

  He should have been startled, but he was calm. He closed his eyes and inhaled, air trickling slowly into his weak lungs. Through the stench of gangrene and dying prisoners, he smelled freshly cut straw and crushed cloverleaf, the scent of childhood and open pastures, the unmistakable fragrance of the girl with the flaxen hair that had doomed him. She was there. Somehow she had managed to infiltrate the camp, past the sentry towers, past the shaggy dogs, past the fences and thousands of maimed soldiers, all awaiting their final turn at the shooting ground.

  “No,” he lied.

  “But you die today,” she countered, voice calm and beautiful.

  He shrugged his frail shoulders. “So be it.”

  “Don’t you want to live? Don’t you want another chance?”

  Gavrilo snorted softly. He opened his eyes and looked at the withered flesh of his legs, made dead by that Russian bullet. What could he ever do as a cripple? He no longer belonged to the world. Years had slipped past, and the Russians would never let them go, it seemed. No one had ever written to him, or asked about him. He had been forgotten, abandoned, written off. Even the Austrian army did not want his kind back. Best if they all died quietly in captivity rather than returned home to burden society. Victors left their defeated behind.

  “Another chance to fail?” he retorted. Thinking of his foolish attempt to kill the archduke, he realized it had all been in vain. A silly ideal of a foolish youth intoxicated on stories of past glory.

  There would always be someone in power, and someone else who wanted that power, and all of them preying on small nations. There would always be war. And it would be people like him who died fighting for a nameless leader. During his captivity, he had heard of the Communists staging a revolution in Prussia. Once bitter enemies, Russians and Austrians had joined forces to defeat the Reds in the German Empire, as if nothing had happened in the three years of killing among them. Even the Ottomans were stirring again, trying to invade the Balkans while Ferdinand was busy fighting to the north. Gavrilo’s hope for peace and independence had been stupid, childish.

  If he had succeeded in the assassination, he would just have made one great king declare war on another. He would have died in a different trench, somewhere else, fighting under a different banner. Because he would have been too much of a coward to take his own life, or run.

  “You think you failed, Gavrilo?” Anka asked him, tone neutral.

  “Look at me,” he whispered, a lone tear streaking down his unshaven cheek. He was angry that he could not hold it back.

  “What made you spare his life?” she insisted.

  Whose, Gavrilo wondered. “Cowardice,” he admitted, feeling a weight lift off his chest. He wanted his mistakes to really mean something, but that was more foolish, childish petulance. His hesitation had brought him to the outskirts of Chelm. His fear of death had led him right there, into its cold, vicious embrace. Then, even as an invalid, he had refused to die. Years spent in a prison camp, he had outlasted typhus and the frost, an inkling of something feral and stubborn keeping him alive. All because the words of a girl he once loved burned in his soul.

  His whole life, he had tried to avoid the truth.

  Now, just before the firing squad mangled his ruined form once and for all, he could at least face it. Admit it. It made everything so much easier.

  “I had such high hopes for you,” Anka spoke, her voice melancholy.

  “All I ever did was because of you,” he admitted, poison thick in his throat. He turned around to face her.

  There was no Anka. Just ranks of cripples, blind soldiers and dying men, counting their last minutes.

  Pledge yourself to me, and I will save you, he heard a faint whisper above the sizzle of coughs and wheezes.

  Gavrilo snapped his head, furious. She wasn’t there. She may never have been. Perhaps he was just a madman, like the rest of these prisoners.

  But the coward in him woke up, licking his dry, cracked lips. What was the price of a promise? What could he lose? More of his legs? What else could the enemy take from him, except his pain, his misery, his desolation. He would make a promise, it would be just another lie, another failure in his wasted life.

  For a moment, he considered mouthing a plea, asking Anka to save him.

  But that would mean being a coward for one more day, or a whole year. That would mean living with the realization that he had precipitated the world into a great war when he had lifted his forefinger off the pistol trigger. There would be the cruel, ever-present understanding that he had let the army lead him to a slaughter, march him into a thunderstorm of metal, and become a cripple in the name of the archduke that he hated. Even that Russian soldier had pitied him so much he couldn’t have bothered killing the coward. It would mean betraying himself, after everyone else had.

  But it was also the only enemy he could fight on equal footing.

  No more, he decided.

  Facing the death squad meant there was nowhere else to run. You couldn’t be a coward anymore, even if you wanted.

  A Cossack guard stepped into the ward and pointed his rifle at a random group of prisoners. Broken and robbed of all will to resist, the Serbs and the Hungarians stepped out into the field, walking toward the upturned heaps of earth above a mass grave, just in the shade of all those beautiful russet and golden trees. Gavrilo wheeled himself after them, weak arms trembling on the uneven rims of his chair.

  He thought he could hear Anka murmur in anguish as he made his decision and joined the procession. She was begging him now. One word, and he would be saved. She would make him walk aga
in, she promised.

  I had listened to her once, long long ago, he remembered. Never again.

  One of the Russian soldiers guarding the path spat at him. Gavrilo did not care. The cowardice would end now. The pain of his existence would be over.

  Finally, someone came and pushed him toward the edge of the man-dug gorge, its bottom filled with lifeless dolls. Men at his side trembled, dazed and scared. He stared straight ahead, and the converging mass of troops in black uniforms and the white eagle badges on their chests. They didn’t seem eager to be shooting, he noticed. In fact, they looked tired from firing all morning.

  Birds chirped, and he thought of his early days back in the mountains, before he had met Anka. The only time he had really been happy. Something resembling a smile crept onto his face, trying to twitch muscles that did not know how to grimace the right way. Fools like him would always be there to serve the higher cause, to fight in the name of god or the devil. Fools like him would give up their lives so the nobles and the rich could enjoy theirs. He could not stop the world running its ugly scheme, but he could at least make his last stand.

  He would no longer be a coward. Never, ever again.

  Anka was crying now, almost screaming. But he ignored her.

  The Russian officer ordered his men to load the magazines. The front line knelt, those polished boots shining in the sunlight. Gavrilo watched with keen interest. These men were lucky not to be fighting in the trenches of Schlesien. They had it easy. Rumors told of the communists also preparing to stage a revolution in Petrograd, and that the fighting would spread, and there would be an ever greater war than the one of 1914. For him, it was a small consolation that he would not live to see the consequences of his actions sending tremors across the globe.

  Most importantly, he would prove Anka wrong. He would be brave.

  He had never imagined bravery to mean death, but then, he remembered all those monuments they erected for dead heroes in the city squares. Never for the living ones. Only the dead. Maybe they would chisel one for him, at the corner of Moritz’s Delicatessen, where he had doomed the world. His smile was a lively thing now, he felt. His fingers brushed the wrinkled, whiskered skin.

  The death squad lined up and raised their weapons, aiming the barrels. Some low, some high. He could tell those that squinted at his small, crippled form, and felt a gush of pride. Anka was sobbing, but the wind carried her lament away. He had once loved the girl with the flaxen hair, not knowing that she had never loved him back.

  “Gavrilo, please!” she wailed.

  “Aim,” the Russian officer ordered.

  “Gavrilo!” Anka shrieked.

  “Fire!” the officer barked.

  Gavrilo closed his eyes and let the coward die.

  * * *

  Inspired by: Gavrilo Princip, 1894–1918

  Igor Ljubuncic

  Igor Ljubuncic is a physicist by vocation and a Linux geek by profession. He is the owner of the awesome website www.dedoimedo.com. Before dabbling in operating systems, Igor worked as a scientist. He really likes to write, particularly in the fantasy genre. You can learn more about Igor’s writing on www.thelostwordsbooks.com.

  Wormhole

  * * *

  Lee Swift

  The stagnant water splashes my face as I fall to the ground.

  Ahead of me, the Vickers machine guns tap their rhythms of death like devilish woodpeckers, forcing me to remain in the mud, where I have spent so long.

  Screams of fellow soldiers echo around me; blending into the concerto of machinegun fire and explosions. I cower, remembering what it is to be scared again. My heart pounds, my ears ring, my body freezes and my eyes refuse to open. I retch and throw up the tiny amount of biscuit I had to eat this morning, and I’m forced to remain with my face pressed against the mucus and bile as the machine guns continue to unleash their steel onslaught above my head.

  Another shell lands close by, shocking me into action.

  I open my eyes and begin crawling through the mud, hauling myself over corpses as I go, asking god to see me through this hell.

  The shrill horn of the rallying officer drifts across the land, ordering us, me, to press the attack.

  I search the landscape defined by skeletal stumps of trees, and craters until my eyes rest on the lip of the enemy parapet, and the sporadic light of tracer fire from a Vickers gun. I reach back and feel the smooth wood of the grenade handle tucked in my belt. With trembling hands, I pull the cord and sling the grenade. There’s a muffled bang, and the infernal woodpecker returns to silence.

  I’m still terrified, but my instincts don’t let me hesitate. Within seconds I’m up on my feet, charging the trench. I stumble over bodies of two nations on my way in, and drop down onto the abhorrent trench floor. An explosion throws me off guard. My head spins and I can feel the enemy’s limbs seize my shoulders. I fight back, punching wildly in one last desperate struggle.

  “Albrecht, Albrecht, calm down! It’s me, Lars.”

  The urge to struggle subsides as the concerned youthful face of Lars blends into view.

  “You were having that nightmare again?”

  I sigh and nod, wiping the sweat from my forehead.

  “What time is it?” I whisper, looking around the room. The other men in the billet are asleep.

  “It’s early. Why don’t you try to rest?” He smiled, lifting his glasses a little higher on his pleasant face. He places his unblemished hand on top of mine.

  I try to muster a smile back, but it’s no good.

  “Lars,” I say, placing my hand on top of his. “There’s still time to avoid this. You don’t have to come along.”

  Lars’ smile falters and his gaze drops to the floor, his hand slipping away from mine. “It’s easy for you to say. You’ve already seen action. You’ve done your bit for the Kaiser.”

  “So have you,” I whisper.

  Lars snorts. “The great Prussian Transport Corps—some honour. You can go back to your life with your head held high. I go back as . . . no, I need this, Albrecht, and besides, you can’t get rid of me that easily.”

  He leaves my bedside, and I ponder the conversation.

  ‘You can go back to your life?’ My dear, naïve Lars, I can’t even remember life before all this.

  I turn my body to face the wall and pull the sheet further around myself, to block out the echoes of the shellfire from my mind. It made no difference. If anything, the isolation and memories became worse, explosions now interspersed with echoes of the screaming wounded that littered no man’s land, screams that I could easily imagine coming from Lars.

  At 0700 we gather in the chateau’s courtyard for morning inspection. I look at the men’s faces and all I see is youth.

  “Lance-Corporal!”

  I turn to face Sergeant Drescher. He is striding into the courtyard, accompanied by two officers. The first is clean shaven and wiry of figure. The second is portly, an epitome of the fat-cheeked officers seen on slanderous propaganda cartoons. Even beneath the soft grey-green cloak that covers the fat officer’s upper body, I catch sight of his chains and medals, and the Pickelhaube on his head is highly polished, bearing the silver crest of Bavaria.

  I salute.

  The officer’s thick handlebar moustache spreads wider as he smiles.

  “Is this Lance-Corporal Trumann? It really is a pleasure to meet you. I am Colonel Von Machen and this is Adjutant Schneider. Before you leave, I have a little something for you.” He reaches over and pins the Bavarian Merit Cross to my uniform.

  There’s an awkward pause as my Sergeant looks expectantly at me.

  I salute, but show not an ounce of pride. I can see the Colonel’s nostrils flare. “Well,” he says tucking his command stick under his arm. “It’s good to know that I have such bravery in my ranks, fighting on after what lesser men would consider a debilitating injury.” He points to my eye patch. “Indeed, the Kaiser himself has said what a promising young fellow you are.”

  “My a
pologies, Colonel,” I say, “but I do have a debilitating injury. I was ordered to come here. The doctors voiced their concerns, but Oberstleutnant Hauptmann ordered them to get me on my feet and discharge me.”

  “Is that so?” The Colonel rocks on his heels. “Come over here, please.” We walk back into the chateau. The Colonel spins around and taps his command stick hard onto my chest.

  “Lieutenant-Colonel Hauptmann is a shrewd fellow. If he says you’re fit to fight, then I agree. Perhaps he saw that your time in the hospital made you soft. Perhaps you were more comfortable enjoying the heat and light, cavorting with the fräuleins whilst your fellow countrymen do the fighting.”

  I present only silence.

  “Strike him, Schneider,” the Colonel says. Schneider hesitates. “Confound it, I gave you an order. Strike him!”

  Schneider punches me across the face.

  “Now,” the Colonel says with a menacing tone. “What do you have to say? Any further glib remarks or shall I have you struck again?”

  “Colonel,” I say, rubbing my face, “you said I’d rather be enjoying the comfort of the hospital rather than fighting with my countrymen. With the greatest respect, I cannot speak to the presence of fräuleins in the trenches, but you seem to be under the impression that heat and light were absent from the holes in the ground we inhabited. I can assure you, we had both. Let that be an indication to you as to how far we advanced in the name of the great Kaiser Willhelm. I am no coward, but I don’t wish to be insulted by a fellow German telling me that this situation is anything to be proud of. You need veterans like me. That is why I’m here now, regardless of my condition.”

  The Colonel looks like a smouldering bomb. It doesn’t take long for him to explode.

  “You dare speak to me that way? By god man, I’ll have you flayed to death for that!”