OR1-EP5: Hymn of the Bridge (17)

Adalbert Herzog cautiously walked into the field hospital they had set up, filled with soldiers who had been forced to evacuate the front lines after being wounded in battle. The Defense Force had suffered no lower losses than the Rebels in the intense fighting over the past few days, largely due to the inhumane offensive the Rebels had taken making it difficult for the Defense Force to actually inflict effective kills on the Rebels' main force. Some of the commanders claimed that they had killed hundreds of indigenous rebel soldiers, and the value of such battle results, even if they actually existed, was highly questionable. According to other soldiers on the front line, most of the indigenous soldiers used as cannon fodder by the rebels were using old and obsolete firearms, with only four to five rounds of ammunition in their hands, and their only purpose on the battlefield was to disrupt the plans of the defense forces and continue to put pressure on the defense line.

The 5th Infantry Regiment was able to resist for a long time, thanks to the supplies transported from the rear. However, it looked like reinforcements would not arrive, which cast a shadow over the minds of most of the soldiers. They still can't understand why the other friendly armies would not pay any attention to the battles that took place here, and they will never know where the strange tacit understanding that actually appeared in parts of the zone where fierce clashes were supposed to take place originated from. Soldiers only need to know who the good and evil sides are, and the rest of the questions shouldn't be for them to think about. The more they thought about it, the more prone they were to dangerous thoughts.

"How many people here can return to their combat positions?"

"About fifty or so." The military doctor who was working sighed, "Fortunately, many of them were only slightly injured ..."

Wanting the soldiers to truly understand the cruelty of war, it was not enough to just let them see the scenes of enemy and flesh and blood, but also to let them actually get injured and lie half-dead in the hospitals in the rear, so as to be able to select the true warriors. The young men who decide to go to war out of a momentary frenzy will soon calm down and think about what they have gained or lost in this war.

When Adalbert Herzog joined the army, his father was strongly opposed to it. The Herzogs had produced generals before, but they didn't have any powerful allies in the army, and Adalbert was starting from nothing to carve out the family's sphere of influence in a new area. According to the old Governor-general's plan, Adalbert should have gone to law school so that he could have gone straight into politics in his mid-twenties, relying on Governor Herzog's power. However, Adalbert was disobedient, and not only did he join the army, but he looked like he was going to spend his whole life in it. The enthusiasm of the day has faded, and now Adalbert fights on with sanity and an inexplicable sense of crisis. He saw the young soldiers who lay crying in their hospital beds, and he saw his comrades who were gradually changing from enthusiastic youths to numbed machines, all of which they should and must experience.

Major Herzog walked into another room and looked at the wounded men who were wrapped up in mummies.

"How bad are these men's injuries?"

"The least serious is amputation." The military doctor hurriedly explained, "There's a poor man over there who was blown up whole from the waist down, and it was hard for us to resuscitate him ..."

Major Herzog wanted the medic to just leave the men to die, and after much deliberation, he abandoned the idea. They'd already wasted a lot of resources; it didn't matter if they wasted some more on the wounded. It struck him as somewhat comical that the environmentalists who spent their days marching through the streets of their native European cities were constantly telling the citizens that they should conserve resources, but the corporations themselves wasted far more resources than the citizens used.

As the number of casualties increased, conflicts within the defense forces emerged. Some of the black soldiers rallied and asked their officers for their rights, hoping to get other white soldiers to rush to the front lines to fight in the war. They had joined the army to gain more rights, and if they could not survive, it would all be for nothing. In the face of this skepticism, Colonel Duttmann painlessly ordered two companies to be deployed below to rotate in the defense, but he still wanted to make these Native soldiers the mainstay against the enemy's auxiliaries. The rebels were using the natives, they were using the natives, and there was no need for white-skinned men to lose their lives in this fight.

Adalbert turned his head just as he saw McNeil, cane in hand, coming out of the side room.

"Good morning, sir." McNeil raised his intact right arm in salute to Adalbert.

"I heard you'd been shot several times, but I've been so busy lately that I haven't had a chance to come over and visit you." Adalbert hurriedly sat McNeil down, and the suspense within him was finally removed as he looked at the other man's bandaged left arm and right calf. McNeil still had a role to play, and he couldn't just leave the battlefield at this point.

"Certainly, minor injuries." McNeil coughed a few times, "But face is lost. I was sort of saved by the others for the first time this time, and in the end, the operation was too risky. If we've gotten anything out of this one, it's probably keeping the rebel artillery units at bay, but I always suspected that they'd attack our positions from a greater distance."

Adalbert saw McNeil's left hand make repeated fist-clenching motions and knew that the other man was testing his physical dexterity and the severity of his injuries. He was amazed by the speed of McNeil's recovery; the last time McNeil had been on a mission in Rhodesia he had also been badly injured, only to get better quickly and storm into Colonel Duttmann's office to stage an all-out brawl in a matter of days. According to Smilas, who was there, McNeil beat the Colonel so badly that a dozen soldiers couldn't catch him. Speaking of which, Smilas was now next to the town in the valley, and Adalbert wondered how many soldiers he had lost in the earlier battle to capture that town. Adalbert would appreciate it if Smilas could lead the rest of his troops to come up and support them immediately.

The raids on the artillery positions were conducted 4 times in total, with 1 of them failing and the other 3 dealing serious blows to the artillery positions the rebels had already set up. Not wishing to sustain further losses, the rebels temporarily retreated, and a delighted Colonel Duttmann immediately ordered his men to take up the positions ceded by the enemy and to re-establish a line of defense. This decision was strongly opposed by Adalbert, Major Herzog, who believed that the 5th Infantry Regiment, with its current losses, was not in a position to blindly expand its defenses, which would only allow the rebels to take advantage of the situation.

Colonel Duttmann's expression at the time was subtle, and he condescendingly said to Adalbert:

"As long as we don't want to lose, the enemy can't win."

"The state of affairs is unmistakably clear; the superiors have made a secret deal with the rebels, and we've been abandoned here." Adalbert warned the officer with his thoughts, "We have yet to learn what the dealings are between the two sides, what is certain is that the press of friendly forces to the northwest is related to these secret deals."

"And the evidence?" The Colonel raised an eyebrow over his right eye, "We have to follow the law, these unfounded accusations will not convince anyone."

Adalbert was speechless. He couldn't judge causality by virtue of intuitive results or correlations without becoming a conspiracy theorist himself of the sort he himself hated most. He did, however, believe that there were insiders among the defense forces, and that they were widely distributed. Right now, their task was not to hold the valley and the railroad, but to get out of it alive. It was true that they themselves had violated the Guardian Corp's overall battle plan, as neither the Guardian Corp General Command nor the superiors had ordered them to attack, and the overall battle plan did not include anything for the Northwestern Front, but this purely accidental battle had already begun, and there was no reason for the Friendly Forces or the superiors to sit back and do nothing about it.

"I don't have proof. However, if you wish to die here yourself, feel free to debate the validity of the so-called accusations with me."

No reinforcements would be arriving from the rear, and supplies were managing to reach the front lines in a timely manner, a bizarre situation that piqued Smilas' curiosity all the same. Smilas suggested to Colonel Duttmann to call for direct assistance and observe the movement of friendly forces. Previously, their actions had been kept secret, with no information released by the friendly forces with whom they had maintained a tacit understanding, while the rebels' clandestine actions had been ignored by the other Defense Force units. If this pantomime, in which everyone had a clear view of what was actually going on, continued, the only ones who would lose would be Colonel Duttmann and the entire 5th Infantry Regiment, and the ones who would gain would be the scum and wild dogs who were secretly carrying out their dirty dealings.

The colonel gripped the glass of water in his hand and gazed with a serious expression at the pins on the map marking the distribution of the enemy.

"You know very well that we cannot pin our hopes on outsiders." Colonel Duttmann pointed to the dogged battle lines in the rear, "Once the soldiers down there are made to believe that they will soon be saved, they will never fight hard again."

"But the negative effects will be even worse if they believe they will be isolated and trapped for a long time."

Colonel Duttmann compromised by politely phrasing a request to his superiors for immediate troop support, explaining the importance of this location - presumably the superiors already knew this. Colonel Duttmann then decided to fortify the line, judging that the rebels would continue to spread out their forces to attack all parts of the line, and that they could be stopped if they could be firmly countered in all directions. His thinking was simple: the rebel volunteer division was not equipped for mountain fighting, these living hell Rhodesian rebels had no chance to attack the mountain, their artillery and armored vehicles were useless, and the Fifth Infantry Regiment was able to finish one of the most brilliant battles in its history here.

The backbone of the Rhodesian Rebels volunteer division was defected former Defense Force soldiers, and the unit had since absorbed some of the local militia forces, and recently recruited a large number of indigenous soldiers into the war, swelling its total strength dramatically to 15,964, and possessing more than three hundred tanks - although some of the tanks were old and no longer fit to be seen on the modern battlefield models. In order to better command this cobbled-together force, the rebels divided the volunteer division into seven infantry brigades of varying numbers and strengths and one armored brigade, and secretly transported most of the light infantry units to the front lines to resist the defense forces' attacks during the cease-fire negotiations. Currently fighting the 5th Infantry Regiment was the rebel 4th Infantry Brigade, which had just been redeployed to the southwest from northeastern Rhodesia, and had previously been wary of an attack by the Airborne Corps, which was currently on hold, so the rebels hastened to order the remainder of the volunteer division to support the southwestern front. Unexpectedly, the rebels were blocked by the 5th Infantry Regiment of the Defense Army on the road to Matabeleland, preventing their main force from advancing. Since the start of the tug-of-war between the two sides, two infantry battalions of the Mashonaland Infantry Regiment under the 4th Infantry Brigade [of the Volunteer Division] had been almost completely wiped out in the fighting, with medics and corpsmen throwing hundreds of body bags down the hill every day, which had brought shame to the rebel commanders.

However, the 5th Infantry Regiment had probably reached its limit as well. Perhaps Colonel Duttmann would have ordered the station abandoned and fled if a raid led by McNeil had not succeeded in smashing the rebel artillery positions. Of all the routes up the mountain, the gentlest road lay on either side of the railroad, and this was the point of contention between the rebels and the defenders. Neither side dared to damage the railroad, and even the Defense Force bombers bypassed the area, giving the rebels the confidence that they would be able to take these transportation facilities intact.

Adalbert recounted the colonel's judgment to McNeil, who at first had a stony expression and then a look of uncontainable horror.

"Why did you not stop him?"

"Couldn't stop him, he was arrogant."

"In a way, the colonel wasn't wrong ... As long as supplies can keep arriving here, we can continue to support ourselves." McNeil rummaged through those old newspapers in his backpack, "He's mistaken about one thing, though: it should be, as long as we don't want to win, we can't lose."

"Don't want to win?" Adalbert felt a little strange, "Don't be ridiculous, where would you find a commander who doesn't want to win?"

"Assuming that all commanders judge the battle wisely, there will always be some who will realize that they are in a situation that is a dead heat where victory is impossible in any case. Under these conditions, it is the best strategy to abandon any illusions of victory and think only of ending the battle or opening the next one at minimal cost." McNeil sighed, "The colonel is still living in a dream, knowing that it is impossible for us to withstand the enemy's offensive."

McNeil insisted on returning to the front lines to fight, and Adalbert saw fit to agree. The young soldier dressed and was led by the others to the vicinity of the railroad, where Lieutenant Heinz Meyer was nervously directing the other soldiers to repair the gaps in the line.

"Oh, you're back." Lieutenant Meyer looked McNeil up and down, "However, you're not fit to take part in such a fierce battle ... might as well be in the back with covering fire."

Colonel Duttmann's hasty decision had disastrous consequences. The base commanders were forced to spread out their forces, with very few soldiers defending each road. Considering that they also needed to prevent the rebels from sneaking up on them from other paths (such as the same cliffside detour as they did), there was even less manpower that could be freely deployed. As a result, when the dozens of soldiers under Lieutenant Meyer saw the group of two to three hundred men charging up the railroad, a look of trepidation crossed every face.

Michael McNeil sat on a stake and pointed his machine gun in the direction of the enemy. He vaguely felt some numbness in his left arm, and his left hand was not very flexible. In the battle in which he had raided the artillery position, he had been shot twice in the left arm and once in the right leg, but fortunately neither of them had struck a vital blow, and he himself did not care for the injuries. It was only after he had rejoined the battlefield that he realized that a moment's delay could be a fatal blunder for the battle. He took a deep breath, took aim at the blackened crowd, and began strafing the enemy.

These soldiers, who had completely lost their minds under the enslavement and torture of the Rhodesian rebels, charged forward like puppets, firing randomly upwards, though rarely causing any damage, and really causing a lot of trouble for the defense forces. Those rebel soldiers then attacked the position with grenades and rockets under the cover of these natural shields, and each time they were able to beat the defense side to a bloody pulp. Lieutenant Meyer intended to place snipers on the front line, but the most talented combat specialist under his command was now wounded, and he didn't dare just throw McNeil to the front line to die. So, he selected two relatively experienced native soldiers and asked them to flank the enemy.

Just one minute into the battle, the first dead man appeared on the defense force side. A white soldier, intending to move to a bunker on the right, was shot down by the enemy halfway across the field, spilling red and white mixture all over the ground. The surrounding comrades dragged the body away, half in pity and half in disgust, and sent men to fill his place and continue the fight with the enemy. McNeil tried to block the enemy's path up the hill, but unfortunately the enemy was so numerous that after killing one group there was another, and an unending stream of rebel soldiers were attacking in succession. It seemed that the rebels realized that it was in their best interest to keep the natives, who were accustomed to slavery, alive and dying for them.

Dumiso Tutu ducked his head behind cover and shouted toward McNeil:

"Out of bullets!"

In the heat of battle, a few hundred rounds of ammunition were no different than firecrackers in a nuclear war.

McNeil picked up the magazines stacked aside and threw them behind the bunker. His position was well covered by the bunker and the woods, and the enemy couldn't see his exact position, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to hit him quickly enough. The deterrent of the machine gun was able to stop most of the enemy's attacks, and the rebels were unable to place snipers below, as dictated by the method of attack adopted by the rebels. They relied on the many natives to fend off enemy bullets, then they had to face a new roadblock formed by the bodies piled up on the road.

After half an hour, the indigenous soldiers brought by the rebels were dead or wounded, and the remaining rebel soldiers withdrew from the scene after a few indiscriminate bombardments with mortars. Lt. Meyer hastily ordered the lightly and seriously wounded to be sent back to the rear for treatment, but some of the slightly wounded soldiers were adamant that they should remain and continue the fight. Their gallantry was prevented by McNeil, and the listless machine gunner told them to obey their officers as soon as possible and not to burden the ensuing battle.

Within minutes, the rebels launched a new attack. Under the threat of rockets, Lt. Meyer, who had crawled woefully out of the dirt and dust, ordered a retreat in a panic as he crawled toward the retreat above. The other soldiers did not leave their posts, knowing that turning their backs on the enemy was a death sentence. Even if they retreated, someone had to stay behind to buy them time.

Michael McNeil was just about to stand up when suddenly his paralyzed right leg forced him to sit down again. Seeing this, a few of the native soldiers stepped forward to ask McNeil what he intended to do. Lt. Meyer was no coward, he was just intimidated by the size of the enemy.

Another rocket exploded on the slope, and the rebel officer behind him was punching and kicking the soldier who had just fired it, blaming him for being a threat to the railroad.

"You few brave men who aren't afraid to die stay here with me and hold them off for five minutes." McNeil looked at the enemy's movement, "Tutu, you go to the road on the left, tell them to say ... that we can no longer hold here. If they've already retreated, you don't have to come back, find your own way up the mountain."

Nine soldiers, including McNeil, decided to stay and buy time. They pooled their ammunition and continued to resist using what remained of their cover. The rebels could not seem to send any extra native soldiers and had to make the African Britannians charge forward. There was no danger on the road below, and the rebels would have to make a strong assault on the defenses if they didn't want to risk blowing up the railroad tracks, and every step forward would be costly. The machine gun in McNeil's hand rang out incessantly, the rebels fell in pieces like wheat in the fall, and the noise of the machine gun firing was all that was left to his ears.

The sight before him reminded him of a slaughterhouse, where the mutilated animals lay on the ground or were hung on hooks to be visited by others at will. It was an unrealistic fantasy to talk about caring for other animals until one learned to love people.

A rebel soldier rushed through the lines and was immediately stabbed to death in his bunker by three native soldiers. More and more rebel soldiers poured in, their snowy bayonets blinding in the sunlight. McNeil looked at the nearly depleted bullets and ordered the others to retreat. He himself slipped on two flak jackets, raised a light machine gun, and continued to fire at the enemy. Seeing McNeil's limited mobility, his kind comrades dragged him away from the scene, and the men struggled to withdraw from the position and move to the upper defenses.

Similar defeats occurred in almost every part of the line, with the exception of one of the steepest roads. Here the rebels suffered a catastrophic rout, and many of the soldiers fell to their deaths rather than being shot by the defenders. Two days before the battle began, the soldiers defending the area sent special engineers to clear the hillside, making the rebels struggle to make the ascent. In the end, the rebels fled the scene in disarray after leaving more than a hundred bodies behind.

Adalbert Herzog came looking for the colonel with the latest battle report, and he couldn't help but get a bad feeling when he saw the colonel packing his bags.

"This is a necessary action ... We cannot sit still. If we don't take the initiative when the enemy is weakened, the enemy will get a break." Colonel Duttmann remained stubborn, believing that the main cause of the defeat was the slowness and incompetence of the soldiers-after all, they had won a great victory in the defensive battle on one of the routes.

Major Herzog pointed out to his chief that even if their losses in each battle were only half those of the rebels, it would still be a failure in the overall scheme of things. The rebels far outnumbered them, and as long as friendly forces didn't come to their aid, they could only impede enemy reinforcements, not block them.

"Finished?" The Colonel dashingly signed his name on a document with a dragon's flourish, "Good, wait a few more days, if they don't listen, we'll have to use our last resort."

TBC

Chapter Notes:

If the Airborne Corps had succeeded in suppressing the rebellion in Salisbury, perhaps this war would never have happened.

Even in the most dangerous times, there are still people who delude themselves into thinking they can stay out of it.