Re: Blood and Iron

The smoking chamber of a bolt-action rifle as it ejected a spent brass case, one of too many to count filled the air, as a man in low ranked military uniform ensured another round was seated before aiming down the weapon in his hand and squeezing the trigger again.

Squeezing wasn’t quite the right word, panic, adrenaline, and excitement flooded the blood stream as bullets whipped past his body and shredded the men behind him, the sanguine liquid of life now ripped from its grace and future poured out on the dirt beneath their freshly rotting corpse something barely worth mentioning.

Such a scene was common, far too common, far too tiresome to even think about in the Balkans. Especially here, and now in the interwar era. Yet the young man, the boy really, hardly even an adult, perhaps even younger than one would expect by the age on his face, fired another thunderous shot downrange towards the machine gun nest, and the men within it who had killed his comrade just moments before.

The language he spoke was old, changed in time into something new, modern, but whose roots were ancient. He was a Serbian boy, who had witnessed Bruno’s march through his lands just two years prior, but then he was young, younger than now, not yet old enough to pick up a rifle and defend his home, avenge his father, and brothers, some of which were choked to death in the miasma of gas that suffocated Belgrade into extinction, and the soldiers defending its heritage.

But this was a new year, a new Serbia, a new army, and most importantly a new capital. Ironically, the city itself, the buildings within it were more damaged now than they had been in Bruno’s diabolical vengeance against the black hand.

Evil had been committed here, then, now, and long before anyone alive today had ever drawn their first breath. It was the nature of life, the nature of the Balkans, the nature of humanity. And so too, men and boys struggled, with arms in their hand, for family, god, king and country as they killed in the name of all the above, and to protect what was behind them.

Finally, as the boy splattered the brains of the machine gunner, he rushed into the nest bayonet affixed and thrust the steel that lie at the end of his rifle straight into the heart of the loader.

The man he killed was easily twice his age, and wearing a Croatian uniform, a shared history, heritage, and linguistic roots. But a different cross, a different God, a different nation. And so they fought, they bled, and they burned.

And his death was just one of many in the name of such fruitless endeavors. Another nameless face in the tides of bodies that had been claimed by war and its cruelty. And the boy who killed him? Not the slightest remorse.

No, just fatigue. He was tired, physically, mentally, spiritually, and far too accustomed to the bloodshed at an age that was simply unforgivable for such a sentiment to be learned.