Chapter 213: For Faith, King, and Fatherland!
Rain once more poured upon the Balkan landscape, flooding the trenches built outside the Serbian capital of Belgrade, which was now a ghost city. Fog ruled throughout the city and its surroundings, as echoes of artillery and gunfire in the distance crept throughout the haunted ruins of what had once been a thriving metropolis.
It was clear that whatever reinforcements were closest to Bruno's position had encountered the Serbian Army, or what composed the provisional government's armed forces after Bruno had massacred the overwhelming majority of the Serbian Royal Army, both in the initial engagement of the war and when he gassed the capital of the once-proud Slavic kingdom.
The blood-curdling screams in the distance, as well as the strange sounds that occurred when raindrops clanged against steel helmets and artillery pieces, did not help the eerie atmosphere. Many believed they were hearing haunted echoes of the ghosts who had once lived peacefully in the city behind the trenches.
Bruno, however, was not a superstitious man, nor did he care much about the squabbling of the men beneath his command. Instead, he peered into the fog, standing in the rain, gazing over the edges of the trench with his naked eyes.
A plume of smoke exuded from his mouth as Heinrich approached him, concerned about the sounds of battle in the distance and whether or not they should reinforce their allies, who were clearly fighting a pitched battle in the field not far away.
"Sir... Are we seriously just going to sit here and wait out the battle? Would this not be a great chance to envelop the enemy from behind and eliminate them?"
Bruno, however, remained silent as he listened to the combat ambience, as if there were something in particular he was trying to detect among the many distinctive and chaotic sounds emerging from the armed battle between the two armies.
Heinrich was one of the few men who had been granted permission to be informal with Bruno, his superior officer, so long as the two were in private. But there were enlisted soldiers standing near them; they were, after all, gazing into the fog at the front lines for a better chance of piercing its vast miasma of concealment.
Because of this, the man had to use somewhat formal language, even if it was still relatively lax by military standards. Bruno did not respond to anything the man had said and continued to sternly gaze into the distance.
That was until he finally recognized the sound he was hearing. It admittedly took him longer than it should have to identify the source, as the thought of using such means of combat, even after most of the world's major and minor powers considered it woefully obsolete, was almost unthinkable to Bruno.