OR1-EP5: Hymn of the Bridge (16)
Michael McNeil and a few black soldiers were walking along the path, surrounded by silent woods, through which they were crossing in order to bypass the enemy's frontal line of attack. In order to minimize their losses, the rebels had hastily armed large numbers of Aboriginal inhabitants who lacked basic fighting skills with simple equipment and sent them straight into battle, exposing them to the fire of the defense forces while they themselves attacked the defense positions unhurriedly from the rear. This situation worried McNeil, he could not see Colonel Duttmann has any positive measures to deal with, it looks like the habit of speculation instead of real talent in the critical situation of the man does not burst out of the potential of what. After weighing his options, McNeil made a bold decision: to try to attack the rebel rear. This action was quite dangerous for him, but if he could make some progress, he could threaten the rebels' advantage.
Before the operation began, Adalbert had sent men to investigate the situation below, where the rebel artillery batteries were engaged in a continuous shelling of the defense positions. In the four directions in front of and behind the artillery positions were a handful of rebel soldiers in charge of supervising the battle and a large number of native soldiers who had been brought in to fill the ranks. The defenders could not abandon these lines; if they retreated, the enemy would have a chance to attack the nearby stations directly or to make an assault on the bridge, and their efforts would be in vain. Colonel Duttmann had given orders forbidding any soldier or officer to retreat. In a stern tone, he told a meeting that he would throw the greedy ones at once where the casualty rate was highest.
"That's better than just shooting them." McNeil supported this approach as well.
Much of the hillside is very steep, and the few areas with gentler slopes have become the focus of rebel care, and it's from those routes that the main rebel force and the native soldiers tasked with serving as human shields have launched their attacks. Other than that, the rebels did not try to attack from the flanks at the moment, they thought it was unrealistic to let these cannon fodder, who did not have any combat skills at all, to carry out such a difficult task. Adalbert was keenly aware of the rebels' movements, and he decided to preemptively launch a surprise attack on the rebels before they could utilize the slopes on either side. In Adalbert's opinion, the more time the rebels delayed here, the more anxious they would become, and the more likely they would be to choose the troublesome options that had been abandoned earlier. Therefore, it was necessary for them to conduct a deterrent test attack before the rebels resorted to unscrupulous offensives in order to feel out the rebels' battle plans.
The soldiers who followed McNeil on his mission numbered a dozen or more, nearly all of whom were negroes.
"They're not capable, but they fight hard." Adalbert handed the soldiers over to McNeil for unified command, "They believe that if the rebels win, they will only become slaves and corpses in mass graves. It's a shame that our compatriots who are more powerful than they are don't have the guts to stand up to the enemy like that."
Every day for the past week, the rebels have organized large numbers of Negro soldiers to make haphazard attacks on the lines, and the rebel machine gunners and snipers have gradually weakened the lines by the cover of these men. In addition, the shelling never ceased, and if Colonel Duttmann had not already ordered the shells to be piled up on the other side of the railroad, perhaps they would have had yet another ammunition depot explosion here. Trains full of all kinds of supplies had arrived three days ago, and the hungry defense soldiers dragged their tired bodies forward to collect their share of the supplies. McNeil couldn't help but feel disappointed as he watched his comrades fighting over bullets and things.
Presumably, the rebels wanted to capture the passes in the valley and the railroad above intact, and therefore did not act destructively. This enabled Colonel Duttmann to use his personal connections to continue the delivery of supplies. However, this good fortune appeared to be coming to an end, and from the accounts of the other soldiers, McNeil realized that the quality of the supplies was rapidly declining at a rate visible to the naked eye, and nowhere was this more evident than in the deteriorating food. At this rate, there would come a time when those superiors who noticed the anomaly would order a ban on continued support for their unauthorized subordinates.
"When are we going to retreat?" A soldier in the back suddenly posed the question to McNeil. There would be no enemies here, and the only danger they had to watch out for was slipping off a cliff and falling to their deaths.
"Retreat? You think we have to retreat to survive?" McNeil cautiously advanced holding onto the large trees that grew over the edge, and he was a little dizzy as he looked down into the abyss below him. If the rebels arranged for a death squad to climb up from here, perhaps the defense forces would be taken by surprise. Colonel Duttmann did not think that the enemy would sneak up from here, just as the enemy did not think that they would send their soldiers down from the mountains to ventilate the area below. It thus appeared that the commanders on both sides were probably equally stupid, and if there had been any real wits among them, the battle would, I fear, have been declared over.
"Yes, there are too many enemies-"
"But we can't retreat, there are still friendly forces below." McNeil cleared his throat, he'd been drinking very little water lately and it was taking a bit out of him, "The Colonel and Major Smilas have to hold both to keep the enemy here. If either of them is the first to retreat, the other will be in desperate straits. We can't abandon our comrades, and I'm sure they won't abandon us either."
"I hope so."
They walked forward for ten minutes or so, and found some of the household refuse that the enemy had abandoned here. There was rope tied to a large tree nearby, the other end of which dangled down the cliff and fluttered in the center. McNeil walked around to check it out and saw a somewhat decomposed body lying below.
"They were here?" There was a hint of fear in Dumiso Tutu's voice.
"So, you are cringe?" McNeil laughed, "I know, they must have tried to take a shortcut ... from here and had an accident and their plans were canceled. It seems we will never know by what means the two sides confronted each other in the previous battle; in short, the rebels did not gain the upper hand."
The people stopped paying attention to the trails, they were on heightened alert, and for a few moments they marched on towards their destination. With the sun hanging above their heads, the atmosphere became irritating, and some of the soldiers simply stopped and wiped their sweat before continuing. A few soldiers with keen hearing always thought there were others shouting nearby, and they insisted they heard yelling and cursing. McNeil didn't think so, but he soon vaguely heard similar sounds himself, and sent a couple of soldiers ahead to explore the area first. Always priding himself on his bravery, he should have done this himself, but he needed to lead the dozen or so soldiers on an important mission now, and couldn't just waste his life in a meaningless battle.
A few minutes later, the two soldiers returned to their original position and whispered:
"They're abusing those soldiers ..."
In McNeil's place, he probably would have just said natives or blacks. It would have seemed odd for a native soldier to call someone of the same skin color black in front of other white soldiers, and to call them fellow soldiers would have seemed to tarnish what some saw as a term that was only worthy of Europeans. There was already a divide between the two sides, and now the stalemate in the battle has increased that divide. The Native soldiers generally viewed the white soldiers as being death-wary and wanting to use them as cheap escorts on the battlefield, while the white soldiers didn't want the Natives to stand up and take credit for what was rightfully theirs.
McNeil found a tree, climbed it, surveyed the neighborhood, and spotted a rebel officer not far away, holding a club and kicking the native soldiers.
"Amazing." McNeil jumped down from the tree, "Those dozen men had guns in their hands, yet they were submissive as pets in front of him. Had they known to pick up their guns and fight back, we wouldn't have had to agonize over it."
"If we had killed the leading rebel officer, they would surely have laid down their arms." A soldier standing behind McNeil voiced his thoughts, "... I understand their mentality, they don't have much autonomy and will just go with the flow. We should quickly bring the rebel officers under control after killing them, perhaps they will turn to assist us."
"That's too risky, are we gambling that they won't resist?"
"Try it, maybe they will indeed turn their backs on us."
McNeil also didn't want to alert the enemy halfway, he ordered the other soldiers to gradually approach the enemy, and searched for a suitable sniping spot nearby himself. He searched for a long time, but did not find a zone on the ground with an open view, so he had to resentfully choose to climb up a tree, this time he could clearly observe the enemy's every move. The rebel officer was holding a baton-like weapon and shouting at the native soldiers standing in front of him, occasionally picking out one of them and then punching and kicking it, while the others just stood and watched, unresponsive. This indifference pierced McNeil's heart; if a man can be indifferent when he sees others like himself suffer, it is only a matter of time before he perishes. In the logic of the strong, only the weak need these traits to maintain an inexplicable sense of identity. However, there were no characters in the world who could stand on their own strength alone, and cooperation and compromise were widely available.
He aimed for the officer's head, while the rebel officer suddenly left the field of view and stepped aside to look for something by his backpack. It wasn't long before he cursed and returned to his original position, looking like he was accusing the native soldiers of stealing some personal item from him. McNeil duly pulled the trigger and the man's head exploded into a shower of blood in the scope. The other soldiers in the back of the ambush swarmed in and within seconds had the other native soldiers, who were on their hands and knees, under control. The native soldiers, who were under the command of the rebels, were equally unresponsive to the sight of their officer being killed, and they stared blankly at McNeil, who was gradually walking towards them.
McNeil picked up one of the rifles that had fallen to the ground and realized that there were only pitifully few bullets in it.
"You guys, the first round is still a blank." McNeil opened one of the magazines and brought the bullets to the eyes of the crowd.
"Outrageous, they just want these people to die." Dumiso Tutu was furious as he walked up to the black soldiers in rebel uniforms and shouted, "Hey! Don't be a slave to the African Britannians, come to us and let's all fight these Britannians who have taken your homes."
The black soldiers remained standing numbly, and if they weren't still breathing, McNeil would have suspected that they were robots or dummy models.
Dumiso Tutu shouted several times in a row without seeing any positive response from the others. He sat gamely looking at the rifles that had been discarded on the ground, inwardly displeased with the behavior of his compatriots. They should have realized that the Britannians were just using them, and that the EU would at least still see them as a human being, why on earth would they choose to defect to the Britannians?
McNeil sighed as he raised his rifle and aimed it at the native rebel soldiers as the crowd looked on in surprise.
"I'll give you two choices: first, come with us to attack the nearby rebel positions; second, die here. It depends on your choice."
Hearing McNeil's statement, the soldiers sluggishly picked up their rifles from the ground and lumbered forward like zombies in an old movie. The black soldiers who had followed McNeil here only felt ridiculous and pathetic when they saw this. They had left Rhodesia around the time the war broke out, so naturally they were not sure what was really happening in Rhodesia. Under the butcher's knife of Britannia, all confidence in life and self-consciousness had been shattered, leaving only endless suffering and torture, and soul-destroyed shells living like walking corpses in the world.
The rebel artillery battery was positioned about 200 meters away. Unlike the indigenous cannon fodder units that used older models of firearms, their artillery was looted from the Defense Force's active equipment stockpile, thanks to the widespread disorganization of the Defense Force from top to bottom that gave them the opportunity to take advantage of it. The soldiers in short-sleeved shirts had made it their daily job to shell the Defense Force positions above them, and they had placed three observation posts on the front line to provide feedback so that they could correct their angles and bearings. This shelling had paid off, and the defenders had been forced to abandon several of their most defensible points in favor of a gradual retreat to rest in the woods near the cliffs, while the rebels took advantage of the gaps in the line to keep pounding the 5th Infantry Regiment's positions.
"These guys are really good tools." The rebel soldier who was operating the artillery laughed out loud, "As long as those useless and outdated weapons are issued to them, they will be able to continuously rush to the front line to go through fire for us."
"That's why they are also only worthy of serving us as slaves, this is fate, decided by God."
A dozen soldiers in rebel uniforms appeared on the left, only one of them was white, the rest were black. These black soldiers fearfully followed the white soldier as the group slowly and methodically drew closer to the position.
"Ah, they're being obedient today." The sharp-eyed rebel soldier realized that they didn't belong to a unit he was familiar with, "Where did you come from?"
"Just withdrew, the enemy's supplies seem to have arrived, they're counterattacking ferociously today." The leading white soldier explained, "I saw that they also brought in 9 cannons ..."
The sound of gunfire came from not far away, causing the rebels to be alert, and some soldiers immediately left their artillery positions and prepared for a counterattack. The Rhodesian rebels had modeled their artillery company after the Britannian Imperial Army, dividing it into an artillery department and a tactical department, with the former being responsible for artillery and the latter for field battles, and both sides working closely together in order to ensure that the artillery company would survive on the battlefield. Apart from those specialized artillerymen, the soldiers of the tactical department were all capable shooters, and their skills were completely no less than their counterparts in the infantry company. Seeing a group of black soldiers charging haphazardly without any rules and regulations appearing in the woodland, the rebel soldiers were first surprised, and then relaxed their vigilance and shot towards these living targets. The black soldiers of the defense army also returned fire, but their shots were not accurate, and the bullets often could not even touch the corners of the rebel soldiers' clothes. The black soldiers who attacked blindly fell one after another, and the disheartened rebel soldiers had already seen what would happen to them and planned to return to their posts to continue their patrols after eliminating the last few soldiers.
Unexpectedly, the earth-shaking explosions and the air waves coming from the rear gave these paralyzed rebel soldiers a heavy blow. The rebel soldiers who were toppled by the explosions climbed up from the ground with their bodies full of wounds, and just as they were about to turn their heads to inspect the status of their positions, they were sent to meet God by a few rounds of bullets. Behind them, Michael McNeil, in his rebel uniform, was frantically attacking the rebel artillery unit in the midst of the chaos with his comrades.
It was an accident - McNeil followed the advice of the other soldiers and called out to the indigenous rebel soldiers who were not yet far away, asking for an exchange of uniforms between the two sides. And quickly afterward, he tore off and affixed their respective name tags to their counterparts. If they only wore identical uniforms, maybe one of the rebel soldiers happened to know the officer killed by McNeil, and then they would be exposed on the spot.
"Are they really going to attack?" Dumiso Tutu wasn't quite convinced that his countrymen would follow McNeil's instructions to storm the rebel artillery positions.
"They seem to make a habit of obeying all unreasonable demands, and it appears that the massacres carried out by the rebels in the north have destroyed their will." McNeil gazed at these walking corpses who continued to advance after changing into their new uniforms, "They can no longer see reality ... Since they have lost all their ability to think, I promised that I would give them complete freedom after the battle, and these poor lunatics believed it immediately."
In fact, McNeil didn't even have to worry about the men escaping or suddenly surrendering to the rebels in front of their position.
The rebel soldiers simply didn't expect the Defense Force to send a group of soldiers to attack them from a cliffside detour, and likewise didn't expect that this group of Defense Force soldiers would happen to kill and impersonate a rebel officer who was training the native soldiers in slavery and impersonate the other side and the other side's subordinates halfway down the cliff, resulting in McNeil blowing up a bloody mess. With the help of the chaos that followed the explosion, McNeil quickly withdrew from the core with the other soldiers and, with the help of the surrounding cover, began to shoot the fallen rebel soldiers one by one. However, there were still ten times more survivors than them in the position that had gathered close to 200 men, and after the initial chaos was over, the rebel soldiers rallied and began to launch a counterattack.
"Pull out of here, don't get surrounded by them!"
With the fires still burning, McNeil had to cover the retreat of his comrades. By following the path of the rebel artillery unit up the hill, they could find another route back to their position, provided they weren't crushed halfway by a charge from the next group of indigenous rebel soldiers.
A bullet pierced his left shoulder. McNeil fell to the ground, his head and helmet colliding closely, a buzzing inside his head. Still with the echo of noise lingering in his ears from the big explosion, his dizziness was so great that all he could see was his comrades anxiously grabbing his arms and dragging him backward out of the fray. Several black soldiers stepped in front, taking McNeil's place and covering his comrades' retreat against a hail of enemy fire.
McNeil could barely hear anything, but he struggled to his feet, holding back the sharp pain on the left side of his body, and yelled at the soldiers who were still moving up:
"Come back! No need to die here!" He grabbed the shirt of a soldier next to him and tried to stand up, "Let me-"
McNeil had dragged his wounded comrades to safety many times before, and this time it was someone else's turn to protect him. The crowd didn't give him a chance to continue his charge, they quickly and decisively evacuated the scene, leaving behind dozens of rebel corpses and artillery that had been turned into scrap metal.
At the time of the explosion, Adalbert Herzog was traveling with Colonel Duttmann to the other side of the bridge to meet their new cargo. The rattle of the explosion caused the duo to hesitate for a moment, but they quickly forgot about the interlude and returned their attention to the cargo in front of them.
"We're going to need additional construction crews to finish the job." Major Herzog looked behind him at the workers who were moving the crates, "I just don't know if they'll be willing to assist us ..."
"Thirteen hundred tons of explosives is almost ready." The Colonel sneered, "Even if we can't hold this place, we can't afford to lose the railroad and valley trail to the rebels, much less have the superiors look at us like clowns or criticize our faults in a meeting in a dignified manner."
Three engineers in uniform were stepping aside to report to their chief on the progress of the project. Colonel Duttmann had been working on a program in secret, and the truth was probably known only to a few, including Adalbert. It was what they called the final solution: to blow the mountain right to pieces, not only destroying the railroad in one fell swoop, but also blocking the valley below. In this way, the rebel forces on the front line would lose all hope of retreating, and would have to be rounded up by the defense forces. As for the inconvenience this move would bring to the defense forces' march, it was perhaps insignificant: Duttmann was confident that the northern regions, already suffering under the air force's frequent bombardments, would soon surrender.
"But ..."
"What?"
"That would kill Smilas." Adalbert immediately proposed to the colonel to inform Smilas of the plan.
"... He's not a fool, if he saw us blowing down the valley, a guy as smart as him would surely run away."
"However, his route of retreat is lined with enemy troops, and escape would be delusional-"
"There's no need. In case the enemy learns of this and decides instead to focus on the route below the cliffs, our sacrifice will be completely in vain." The colonel stopped responding to Adalbert's proposal, "So be it!"
TBC
Chapter Notes:
The battle may have taken place in one of the national parks in Zimbabwe.
Without air power the rebels had to struggle to attack upwards.
