At the fields of Passchendaele
Pairing: FrUk
Summary: Francis and Arthur leading up to the start of the Great War and their partaking in the Battle of Passchendaele.
Warnings: Smut, mentions of war, etc.
August 4th, 1914
"Goddamit Francis!" Arthur shouted in frustration. He had just received a telegraph stating that Germany declared war on him and invaded Belgium. In anger, he punched the wall of Francis's study and huffed out "What am I supposed to do? The Germans have just fucking invaded Belgium and I promised to protect them!"
"First, calm down ma cherie. We will find a way, my army is strong and you have the better navy. The Germans cannot beat us, they are surrounded; we have the Russians on our side." Francis replied to his outburst with a sense of calamity and composure. Leaning on his desk, he stared out the window at the summer day outside. Unlike Arthur, his confidence was high in that this was trivial and would be solved rather quickly and bloodlessly.
"I can't just calm down, I tried… I tried to keep myself out of this but…" the Englishman trailed off. He had tried to set up a peace conference to solve this debacle before it blew up into something that was much bigger than themselves. If everyone would've listened to his Foreign Minister, they might've not been there, in the morning of war. "The Germans, they don't want Belgium… what they're really after is you, Francis." Arthur continued, he had to sit down in a chair and ran his fingers though his hair in anger.
From half-way across the room, Francis avoided the other's gaze. He knew that taking him was their ultimate goal, when Gilbert took Alsace-Lorain, he obtained a taste for French blood and now he is stronger, and he wants more. This time, it won't be only Gilbert, but he now has Ludwig who is just as strong as, if not stronger than, his brother. France got off of the desk and walked with a confident gait over to the window and gazed out. "All we can do now is fight and hopefully win, Gilbert, Ludwig, Rodernrich, Elizvista and Sadiq are strong… but we can still beat them." Francis said with a very neutral tone, as if this were merely some petty conflict that would solve itself. "Just calm down and keep your chin up, Angeterrie. It will be all right in the end" he continued. If only he was right…
August 1917
Three years later, "Charge!" a British officer called out to the other soldiers. On his orders, many British and French soldiers hiding in trenches along with their primitive tanks climbed out of them and ran into "No Man's Land" littered with the bodies of comrade and enemy alike towards the Germans on the opposite side.
However, almost all of the soldiers were quickly mowed down by one German soldier armed with a machine gun. The tanks got stuck in the mud and when their operators would come out of them, they suffered the same fate as the others. The few that did manage to make it over were quickly killed by bayonets, one soldier had even tried to make it back to the other side but was shot by a fellow allied soldier for not following orders. The screams were echoed way back to the Allied trenches, scaring the younger soldiers.
"My god some of them look like they should still be in secondary school…" Arthur commented from one of the trenches. Francis nodded in agreement with him. For many, it would be more appropriate to say the boys were fighting, seeing as how they still had baby faces and still called out for their mothers. If there was one thing that Arthur and Francis learned from German is "mutti". They would hear it called whenever a soldier lay dying unsure of who to call for help other than their mothers.
Arthur and Francis took cover underneath a shelter in the trenches as it began to rain heavily. "Bon sang! (damn)" Francis exclaimed "This has been the wettest summer in years!" It has indeed been a very rainy summer. From all the rain, the soil had been turned into thick, heavy mud. Said mud would always clog up their rifles making them only slightly more useful than the toy ones that children would play with back at home.
It was then when a Belgian soldier with their weapon slug over their shoulder sought out the same shelter as the other two nations. "Belgium?" Arthur asked, immediately recognizing the face. However, since they last saw her, the nation of Belgium had cut her hair short and her breasts were bound down in order to look like the other men but her feminine, round face gave her away, at least to Arthur and Francis.
Belgium gave both of them one her signature, cat-like smiles and sat right next to Francis. "You know these fields?" she asked, not exactly to the two men, then she followed up with "They once were green. Not this muddy mess they are now." The three years of war they had been in by now had taken their toll of her. Though her uniform, which was three sizes too big, covered most of her body, Francis and Arthur knew their were many scars on her body from the fighting on her land.
"I'll be seeing you around the trenches… or heaven, whatever one comes first." she said nonchalantly. She stood back off and walked away calmly, as the others were trying to find shelter to keep themselves dry. Every soldier out there needed to keep their feet dry in order to ward off "trench foot".
It would be another month of suffering in the trenches, until the weather improved, in which any actual progress was made. Like lava which has just begun to cool, the Allied soldiers slowly but surely pried the destroyed village of Passendaele out of the hands of the Germans. It was only on November 6th that General Haig* called off the offensive as declared it a success. However, it was a bitter-sweet victory.
*He was a British general.