main882: Commander Magath was already introduced in An Eldian's Journal around Chapter 28. This is not the first time he's in this story. AND YES! 1917 is an inspiration for this little arc. The movie's main plot points were rather simple, but I adored the running scene where the lance corporal Schofield guy was running across the battlefield. I thought I could repurpose it but add a lot of my own stuff in there and make it relevant to Heinrich and Viktor's progression.
ikanisfish: You've returned! I'm smiling like crazy right now. To be frank with you, I thought you lost interest in this story back in February or whenever your last review was since this story keeps getting darker and darker. I also sent you a PM, but you didn't respond, so I thought you moved away from fanfiction. Not gonna lie, I did miss seeing your reviews.
Same as I've said to main882, 1917 is an inspiration for this little arc. The movie's main plot points were rather simple, but I adored the running scene where the lance corporal Schofield guy was running across the battlefield. I thought I could repurpose it but add a lot of my own stuff in there and make it relevant to Heinrich and Viktor's progression.
I don't see any new reviews from you on the An Eldian's Journal either. You should still be able to comment after completion, however. is a pretty weak website, so maybe you'll have better luck using the app.
Also, did you predict that Ymir would take over the story, or was that a surprise?
The Diary of A Young Girl
By Ymir Fritz
Entry #7
An industrial oven perched in the sky pulsed waves of humidity that swooped under the chaos-infested medical tents. This humidity wrapped around unwilling people like factory-produced raincoats—itchy and untailored—and held them against their will, making perspiration their logical reaction to the weather's untimely assault. In truth, the sun acted as the industrial oven, which would be better referred to as a galactic oven due to its indentured servitude to bring heat to many mammoth spheres.
One raincoat of humidity grew a hood to cover Heinrich's head. He was still in the medical tents, receiving the blistering admonishment and rushed words of higher medical staff. The boy rubbed his dripping forehead with the back of his hand and picked up a scissor an agitated surgeon requested.
The surgeon exclaimed while stitching a patient at a corner of the med-tent. "Do you expect me to use a sweaty scissor? Your germs could get into him!"
Heinrich stuffed his grimy hands in a new pair of latex gloves and wiped the scissor with a bandage he found nearby. He scrubbed the looping parts excessively.
The surgeon shook his head impatiently and took the tool from Heinrich, "Well, this will just have to do." He cut the end of half a foot of stitches and set the bloody sewing needle aside in a small tray with other bloodied tools.
The ability to faint had been kneeded out of Heinrich's system. It was no longer an option for him. He scurried around, appeasing one nurse after another to the degree that he did not absorb what he was doing; he just acted. Minimal thinking was involved. I could infer that from the missing emotional responses, and I can make an identical assumption about Viktor.
Major Frudo adjusted his belt and rose the trench end into the medical tents. He scanned for Viktor and Heinrich and caught the boys amid their scurrying. "Okay, you two, Commander Magath wants you on the group heading to aid Camp Barnsil."
Viktor set aside the bandage he was holding, "What's the plan aside from us going there, sir?"
Frudo looked down on the boys and observed their tenseness. "Just worry about what you need to do, okay? Go with that group, and they'll tell you what to do."
"Yes, sir…" Heinrich said without much of a fight.
After all the boys had done, they were still not considered senior enough to be told battle specifics. They were still undeniably cogs in the war machine, even if they thought they were special cogs.
Frudo softened, "I can tell you both are tired. Get some sleep on the ride there, but I think the thought of the next mission will keep you awake."
Frudo turned away to continue his tasks, and the two friends gathered the few items they still had and attempted to leave the medical tents. But of course, a few nurses forced them to complete a few more tasks before they moved on to the next dragon to fight in their quest.
After dealing with the nurses, the two friends crept through the trenches to the entrance where they killed Kurt's titan a mere day before. They noticed that the natural chaos of the trenches following the impromptu change of plans evolved into an organized chaos, integrating the lost and fragmented groups into larger, more defined groups. It was a welcomed evolution since it was humbling to see those scattered in confusion finally congregate at an arrow's head and arrive at a clear direction to follow.
"Are these the people going to Camp Barnsil?" Heinrich asked, picking up the loosening strap of his satchel and looking upon ten trucks with people piling in.
"I'm not sure," Viktor said. He then looked at the dugout where Kurt's titan plunged his hand into and fetched a handful of soldiers like they were pieces of candy. That titan was the first anteater to plague the mound of ants dubbed "The Cullens"; the explosive shells followed as the second anteater with their mortar tongues.
Viktor said, "I was kind of a coward here, wasn't I? I didn't have the guts to kill our already dead friend, and I let those still alive pay for that until you went and did it yourself."
Heinrich did not contradict this statement and did not provide comfort either, but he called, "Viktor?"
Viktor paused his somberness.
"I miss your jokes. Regret doesn't suit your face."
Viktor said blandly, "You're not going to hear much jokes from me for a while."
Heinrich nodded a fraction and returned his focus to the ten vehicles parked at the entrance. The trucks were disordered like a handful of cards thrown on a table, and the truck bodies themselves were in the shape of bread loaves, except for the heads of the vehicles. They vibrated with engines that were contained suns, adding more heat to the area than necessary.
Soldiers and commanding officers put items and themselves into the backs of the trucks, but a commanding officer of unknown rank remained outside one of the trucks. His helmet was tilted to the side like it had a personality.
Heinrich asked the tilted helmet officer, "Excuse me, sir, is this the group heading to Camp Barnsil?"
His answer was curt and concise, tight around the letters, "Yes, it is. Are you Private Dassler and Private Steiner?"
The boys nodded simultaneously.
"Commander Magath said something about two younger than usual soldiers joining us. Get in." The truck behind him was already stuffed with ten low-ranked privates, but they scrunched together to accommodate the two boys.
Viktor climbed into the truck, but the tilted helmet officer held back Heinrich with a rough paw on the shoulder, "I suggest you put on a new uniform. This one could give people the wrong signals."
"Where can I get a new one, sir?"
"I have plenty, but you need to get a combat medic armband when we arrive at Barnsil."
The tilted helmet officer retrieved a fresh uniform set from a crate stored in one of the trucks and handed it to Heinrich. The boy turned away from the crowd of soldiers peering from their trucks and fumbled to remove the ME uniform.
One cheeky private shouted, "Don't worry about changing in front of us. We're all men here." He certainly kept himself entertained in the vast wellspring of tensity.
Heinrich successfully put on the new uniform but appeared confused while observing the clean regions of cloth on his chest, as if he had been used to wearing hideous things his entire life. He climbed onto the truck Viktor got into and was slapped in the face by ten new glares from soldiers aside from his friend. They all then glanced away like they had done something forbidden.
This total of twelve soldiers formed an orgy of silence. It did not include any physical contact aside from shoulders shoved next to other shoulders, but their silences somehow felt vile and nude, and they intermingled with each other. It would have given people shivers if not for the rattling and tapping of the truck's mechanical components.
After an uneasy set of anticipation-filled minutes, the contained suns that were the trucks' engines achieved a straight line of roaring. The wheels rolled as the departure began.
-X-X-X-X-X-
Viktor and Heinrich sat across from one other in the back of the truck on benches that held five other soldiers each. But like in a public bathroom, everyone's space was sliced by someone else's, creating a congested atmosphere whose only saving grace was an opening where a garage door should have been. It was where every soldier entered to load the truck.
The awkwardness could be drained through there, but it did not seem to be quite enough.
From Heinrich's viewpoint, when the Cullens' trenches had finally become the size of beads, the boys were awarded a temporary mission: kill time until they arrived at Barnsil. To me, killing time is a wild sport that I have mastered to a level of deserving medallions and pins. It does not require a jovial or exciting spirit to whisk oneself through the laboring host of seconds, each second carrying other seconds and those carrying more seconds packed tight like a layered doll. It only demands you play games with the mundanity of the drabness around you. I favor a grounded outlook on life with infrequent imagination, but dire boredom calls for dire measures, so I follow through with these games.
I find games where they ought not to exist, playing connect the dots with the blackheads of a soldier's nose, in the dead fly on a window using it as a marker to hop over structures in the environment by adjusting my head, and aside from the people bleeding, I imagine the guns themselves bleed with their metal arteries bruised with burns as bullets can no longer fit in their bowels.
I am retired from mass murder, but that does not bar me from massacring enough minutes to make standard entertainment pointless.
I sat on the floor between Viktor and Heinrich, looking up to see if they would also play the games. They loved answering thought-provoking questions as a past-time, but their minds were too constricted to consider anything beyond their goal that day. They had been narrowly staring through an imaginary telescope with a strange object at the end—it was not a planet—it was a fiery and desolate field with barbed wire. They were likely baking in the idea of the inevitable danger to come. No doubt they were overdramatizing it to the scale that they somehow, even when looking up at a ceiling, saw the same grainy film pass like the crisis between two nations was the whole universe.
They could not see. They could not see how pointless and insignificant their worrying would be. Birds would still chirp, dogs would still bark, and cats would still meow regardless of the mission's result, but the people they may save with a mission success would die anyway when the destroyer of worlds and his wall of titans arrive a few years later.
Viktor put his worry on hold as he asked Heinrich something they had not discussed that day. They did not play any games.
"Are you happy we'll finally be disbanded from the military? After we do this final piece of the mission?" he asked.
"Wait, are we going to be kicked out?" Heinrich leaned forward in interest.
"Yes, how do you not remember? Commander Magath said that after he pushed us out of his cut and cover."
"I wasn't paying attention. I was probably busy thinking about who that person could have been that even suggested to Commander Magath to let us get recruited in the first place." He paused, "I'll just assume that's Mr. Kruger now."
"Okay, fine, but what do you think about us leaving?"
Heinrich stared blankly at Viktor's boots. "I have no clue how to feel about that."
"What do you mean?" Viktor was floored by Heinrich's indifference. "We can finally be regular people again and not have to pick up a damn gun. We can forget this mess of a …" He struggled to find the right word to end that statement.
"That's true, but this won't be a respectful exit. People will start spreading rumors about us if we show up in the internment zone this early after we finished training."
"Oh, so you care about status now?"
"Even if I care, even if I don't, other people value status, and we will treated based on that. Besides, weren't you interested on doing good out here so internment zone Eldians would actually give a shit about us, so we can actually make something happen when we return?"
Viktor raised a finger to his mouth, signaling Heinrich to silence himself.
One private had been looking in on the conversation, but when Heinrich caught the gaze, the fellow returned to staring at the ground.
Viktor continued, "Look, Heinrich, I don't know if you remember what Kurt said before he died. But I sure as hell do. He wanted us to accept what we have when we return to the internment zone. We have to be happy with the friends we got since that is all we have."
Heinrich stared and chuckled.
"What? What are you chuckling at me for?"
"You just just sound so…how do I say it…you sound like a pacifist all of sudden like the ambition to do anything has been drained out of you. Before you used to— "
"Will you stop it?"
"Stop what?"
"Stop saying 'you used to be like this before, but now you're like this.' What do you expect from me? We've never done anything like this before. This is new territory for me." Viktor sighed, "Anyway, I'm not a pacifist."
Heinrich raised an eyebrow, suggesting he thought otherwise.
"Fine, I may be one now, but you may be one too. We experienced the same things on this journey." He paused, "You're a hypocrite, you know that?"
"How so?" Heinrich retorted.
"You're more of a pacifist than I am. You spent the first half of this mission avoiding shooting someone properly. And you damn well know what that led to."
"You don't have to remind me of that every time we talk." Heinrich hid a dash of anger behind his lips.
"Whatever."
Heinrich and Viktor tossed the concept of pacifism like it was synonymous with weakness. I reject this viewpoint. Like most ignorant folk, these boys were unaware of the authentic spirit of the concept because the term had been misused to death. People continuously painted it with increasingly incorrect layers each time it was spit from a mouth like it started as a simple house, but the renovations over decades made one forget its beginnings.
Indeed, pacifists disapprove of war as a method of conflict resolution since they understand that violence can only create temporary peace. Violence to subdue issues is cheating, a shortcut to bypass understanding, and like a pile of sand, this temporary peace would whittle away if someone sneezed too hard near it.
Heinrich and Viktor were not pacifists since they had no understanding of these things. They were simply scared of guns. They were too young and unknowledgeable to question yelling and violence as their country's choice for intervening in conflicts.
I will admit that grand-scale violence capable of obliterating everything, such as the rumbling, is also a shortcut to understanding. The issue with this rumbling is that a small island and its people would continue to exist, and they would be alive to misunderstand, be offended, or offend others. But if no one is alive to do those three things, there will be no need to create fragile solutions. The key is that everything should perish since small-scale violence between a few countries will leave so many alive to misunderstand, be offended, and offend others.
To that, I say the two remedies to a grand conflict are approaching with the goal of understanding or full, uncompromising violence to leave nothing behind.
Heinrich uttered to Viktor, eyeing the rifles other privates held, "You said I should have been a little bit more of a monster then…."
Viktor stayed silent.
"I'll be more of a monster. I won't let something like that happen again."
"You can't be a monster. We're combat medics. We must be the angels people see while injecting morphine into them." Viktor looked keenly at Heinrich, "You don't really have a face an angel, though."
"Why did you say earlier today I should be more like a monster?"
"You don't need to be more like one now. You should have been more like one before we got to the Cullens since we were not just combat medics then. We had to take the role of regular infantry and combat medic positions. It's that traditional infantry role you failed so spectacularly."
Heinrich leaned back and put his head up, placing his hands on his face and slowly dragging them down. "I hate this. All of this."
A private next to Viktor took his battle helmet off and unleashed ginger hair that flopped to both sides of the face like a droopy seagull. With no prior introduction, he said, "I couldn't help but overhear, but do you think we're monsters?"
"Excuse me?" Heinrich answered, visibly uncomfortable.
"Do you think we're monsters?"
Viktor and Heinrich exchanged confusion until looking again at this ginger-haired private who could not have been a smidgeon older than twenty years.
He expanded on his question, "Do you think us soldiers are monsters for what we do?"
"I..uhh," Viktor was unsure how to respond.
A private next to Heinrich warned, "Don't listen to that buffoon. He's got a screw loose. He hasn't been right in the head since our last mission."
The ginger-haired private leaned back from the two friends, resheathing his sudden invasiveness, "I can't seem to find an answer to that question. That's why I asked since I hoped one of you would know, but I guess not." He did not seem too offended.
Heinrich responded, entertaining the question but stammered in the newly awkward atmosphere. "If the law allows soldiers to do what we do, kill people on sight, I don't think that makes us monsters."
"Then why are there so many people that look depressed out of their minds when they get back home?"
"There's no law saying people can't be like that." Heinrich was tepid in his words.
"There's also no law that says you can't punch someone. Do you think that makes it okay to punch a person anyway?"
A boxy private on the farther end of the bench whined, "Hey, do you mind? Some of us are tryna get some sleep here before our brains get blown out later." He shut his eyelids.
The ginger-haired private ignored the perturbed fellow and directed his questions to the two friends again, "What do you think a monster is?"
Viktor and Heinrich traded unease once more. It tip-toed around the truck, procrastinating, but Heinrich grabbed it by the scruff and pulled it back in. He answered. "It's something ugly, evil, and not-human, but in the case of person, its when they lack compassion for another person."
"I can get behind that. We are in a time where innocent-looking Marleyan children throw rocks at old Eldians through internment zone gates. And they do this with smiles on their faces. Would you call them monsters?"
"Yes," Viktor responded. "Because they lack compassion towards other people."
"No." The answer hung in the air, dissonant, as the ginger-haired private shook his head. "They may just have different morals that their parents taught them. After all, they think we are the spawn of devils. Throwing rocks at a few aged devils doesn't seem to raise any flags to them because we are barely human in their eyes."
Viktor and Heinrich winced at this line of reasoning.
The ginger private identified the confusion and introduced an analogy. "In a regular food chain, it's like how humans eat pigs. Humans don't call each other monsters for eating a chicken since that is the natural order of things. If there was a food chain just for humans, Marleyans would think they are on a higher level than us Eldians, but the difference is they don't actually eat us."
"In that case…." Viktor trailed off, parsing thoughts together. "Would it be alright for me to kick the head of a weak Mid-East soldier who can't fight anymore and not be a monster since, according to the newspapers and politicians, they are worse than Eldians?"
The ginger-haired private sat on that question with his mouth slightly open with words failing to fall out.
Heinrich and Viktor did not know that this private committed the same act in real life, and that was the cause of his faltering upon hearing the question. He was a victim of the rumbling, so I learned this when I went through his memories.
"According to your logic, you wouldn't be a monster," The private finally said. His eagerness slipped.
The overly aggressive box of a human at the end of the bench shouted again, "Hey, you three can shove your existential questions up your asses. Let me get some sleep here."
The ginger-hair private set his rifle against his shoulder and put his hand out to Viktor. "What's your name?"
Viktor returned the handshake and said his name; he forced a grin. Heinrich wiped the sweat from his hand on his pants and did the same, but he asked for the private's name in return. "What's your name?"
"It doesn't matter. You'll never see me again."
Like the rain in the desert, the ginger-haired private's first question rarely arrives in a conversation because it is always stuck in traffic behind secrets that are never shared. People are socially conscious, so they desire to avoid social discomfort; thus, fellows who pose those absurd questions are scarce, and when they pose them, it feels anti-social. But I think a myriad of people ask these things in their heads but hardly speak to others about them.
Heinrich and Viktor were average in physical strength and intelligence but were unique in this characteristic. They shared these odd things among themselves.
-X-X-X-X-X-
With that bizarre conversation, I had forgotten the truck that held everyone together like metal glue and its vibrations and sputtering. It set a stage for some thoughts an average person refrains from gluing in the air. Although large like a window, the hole in the back was only rear-view focused, so I needed something more revealing of the naked world. I floated out of the truck fifteen minutes into the journey to keep track of our surroundings.
One of the multitudes of sores boiling the Mid-East landscape met the determined faces of the military trucks from afar. This boiling sore was far from active, and it did not produce steam either, but it boiled like fresh tar in the eyes of the two friends; I could assume that from their wry grimaces. It was a town Heinrich and Viktor yearned dearly to forget—the depleted town of Asrub.
A set of Marleyan trucks separate from Heinrich's group already claimed this town. They had left while Heinrich and Viktor were still running errands for the medical tent staff.
The friends looked retrospectively through the truck's rear end at the men roosted on building tops across the town. Viktor asked, "Do you think that family is still alive?"
"Which one?" Heinrich responded.
"That one," Viktor emphasized as if he did not need to narrow it down further.
"I remember." Heinrich shook his head slowly and said shyly, "Those parents are probably dead with their boy…the boy you stabbed."
Viktor looked to the side, the limited sun adding new lighting to his face. The rims of his eyes were moist.
This driving through freshly made memories did little to inject positivity into the boys' minds, so they relegated their attention to their boots, the only reliable things they had.
Asrub shrunk into the distance much like the Cullens' trenches did before. The wicked mustard gas had long gone drifted into the wind, marrying with the oxygen and retiring to an untroubled life. It did not deserve peace. It was a catalyst to Kurt's doom.
The set of ten trucks approached another familiar sight ten minutes afterward. The husks of two crisped metal birds, wavy like potato chips and crumpled like a bag of some, sat ravaged on the grim field. Each plane had fried each other when their pilots, gluttoned on adrenaline no doubt, fought their hardest to bring each other down.
Their pilots were splayed out between their machines, the titans they commanded.
This station pulled at Heinrich's chin, forcing him to look out the back of the truck. He saw another set of Marleyan trucks and their men perched like eagles around the perimeter. He bit his lip and looked at Viktor again, "It would have been so much easier if we had just gone around the station at a safe distance. Kurt would not have gotten shot in the leg."
"But if we didn't go through it, we wouldn't have found that vehicle and a driver to help us with it. But I get what you mean. Everything we did looking back it seems so…childish. We could have done so many things differently."
Heinrich scratched his cheek and put his hands together, "I've been wondering one thing in this truck ride so far. If the Barnsil captain had given us a truck to use, we could have avoided encounters with so many bad situations. If only they allowed us to use one…."
I revealed myself to Heinrich feeling tired of this conversation. I said mockingly to him, "You seem to love making 'If' statements a lot, don't you? Do you think its going to help you with anything?"
Heinrich avoided my gaze and stayed muted.
The boys' struggles seemed so trivial when one considers how easily they could have avoided them if they had the right tools. Suppose the Marleyan military improved its communication systems and tracking systems; messengers would not have to risk lives out on battlefields. But instead, the investors and government who back these uniformed clowns spent more money on recruiting than on quality equipment.
It must have felt intolerable for Heinrich and Viktor. I am glad I did not feel their pain, but I admit I have felt worse.