Re: Blood and Iron

The Germans had spent countless man-hours over the past few months clearing the mines that remained between their fortifications and the enemy, which lie beyond no-man’s-land. It was a task that the French could only sit by and watch as the enemy prepared for their major offensive.

As all means to repel or destroy the German Armor proved wildly ineffective. But this roar of tank engines across the entirety of the western front had given the French a false sense of security on a psychological level.

They were so accustomed to hearing such sounds that they would not think twice of it, to the point where today September 22nd 1916, the German 8th army situation on the borders of Germany and Luxembourg began its push. Which was accompanied by hordes of German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian soldiers across the entirety of the Western front.

But this was not immediately recognized by the weary, and fatigued French soldiers, many of which had resorted to daytime drinking and drug abuse to handle the shell shock they were all inflicted with.

One of the men was currently injecting heroin into his arm as the rain poured down upon his head. His helmet was somewhere or another, not that he really knew, as he neglected his post in favor of a much needed sedation.

There was just one major problem with this approach, he was so zonked out of his mind that he could not determine the ever-increasing sound of the enemy engines approaching his position, and many of his comrades were in a similar state of intoxication, as the German armored vehicles ever closed in on their position.

And then suddenly there was an explosion, engulfing him and his nearby comrades in an instant. A combination barrage of nebelwerfers and self-propelled artillery had begun to strike the front lines of France’s currently controlled positions in Luxembourg, obliterating its poorly constructed defenses and turning the men within them to meat paste.

Those who had survived the initial bombardment were quick to attempt to flee, as they looked over the wall of the trench and saw that an overwhelming number of armored vehicles were advancing into no-man’s-land and assaulting their position.

The Autumn Offensive had begun, and the French soldiers supposed to be the tip of the spear had been caught completely with their pants down. The reaction of course was to fall further back and reinforce rear lines as the vanguard had already been obliterated by overwhelming power.

The echoes of artillery continued to resound throughout the distance as smoke clouds and fire emerged throughout all sectors of the French front lines, from the borders of Germany all the way to the top of Belgium war had erupted seemingly out of nowhere.

And the French, who had been trying their best to prepare for this reality in advance soon found themselves not only running from the artillery dropping on their position every second of the day, but also from the bombs being dropped on their heads from the thousands of He-51 planes which flew over the skies of Luxembourg with absolute impunity.