Quarterfinals: Shane and Hannah

Shane

We sit astride our horses, two long lines of helmets gleaming in the sunlight. Some of the men exchange words with their neighbours. We are young, the sun is warm, and we have our chance to bring glory to England. My horse tosses his head, bit jangling, and I laugh at his impatience for the charge.

"Patience", I say, "we shall soon be off and those red devils will know the meaning of fear!" I stroke the strong neck and he arches his head, ears pricking.

Beside me, Edmund's lips move in silent prayer, his eyes looking long down the valley to the guns. He senses my gaze and turns to look, eyes gleaming under the shining sweep of his helmet brim. "God is with us, John", he says, "and through Him we shall prevail."

"I do not doubt it", I reply, because he is right.

"All things are possible to him who believes", Edmund says, "and our God is a God of war. Jehovah is mighty in battle", he goes on, those eyes bearing into me with fervour, "and He is with us."

"Are you afraid?" I ask, and he laughs gaily.

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for He is with me, John. He is with all of us for our cause is right and just and He will see us through."

The command to advance is given and we move forward in unison, and the air fills with the noise of the rumble of hooves and the rattling of sword on scabbard. Cardigan leads us, sitting tall astride a fine chestnut mount, the white plumes of his helmet fluttering in the breeze. He draws his sabre and the blade shines in the sunlight as he thrusts it towards the guns.

"Forward, men! For God and England!" he cries, his voice ringing and bold. Our mounts surge forward as we draw our own swords almost as one, and the morning is filled with the ring of steel on steel. We thunder down the valley behind Cardigan, six hundred of us, all bold, brave and gay.

I see the line of gun belch their smoke and fire moments before the first line of men and horses crumple under the balls. The man before me slumps in his saddle and topples sideways, chest torn open. All around are the screams of men and horses as the deadly balls rip holes in our ranks. Riderless mounts run from the ranks, eyes wild and mouths all flecked with foam, only to sweep back to join us in our charge.

Fire pours down on us on all sides. My world closes in until all I see is the tossing mane of my horse, the darting hooves of the horse in front of me and the red flashes from that terrible line that signal death for more of my fellows. A rider close to me is tossed backwards, unseated by a shot. The horse run on as his rider slides off his hindquarters, painting a vermilion stain over the white hair. Its eyes roll in terror, and the gore painted flanks are thick with foam.

I set my heels into my mount and he plunges forward at even greater speed. My blood is singing in my ears now, my heart a wild hammering in my chest, and I shout with all my might, filled with the thrill of the charge and battle. I shout and I pray because all around me men and horse are tumbling and we are still unharmed. God is with us, and He will not see the righteous forsaken.

We do not stop. We do not slow. Cardigan rides on, straight and tall in his saddle, his sabre flashing over his head and we follow him, mimicking his actions. A cheer rises from those of us left as we close on the guns, blades flashing over us like a halo of shining steel. My horse whinnies, fierce and strong, undaunted by the destruction around us. Beside me, Edmund does not cheer. His lips work, though the prayer is lost in the thunder of hooves and guns and the blood in my ears. A moment later, his horse stumbles and collapses with a horrible shriek, his foreleg shattered by one of the balls. Edmund is flung over his head onto the ground. His helmet has come loose and his blonde hair shines for a moment in the sun, bright against the dark and torn up earth. He struggles to his feet, face bloodied, then one of the horses with no rider crashes into him, striking him with its chest. Edmund tumbles backwards with a wordless cry, broken, and is lost from view under the flashing hooves.

Still we do not slack and not a man turns back. Our ranks close over the holes in our lines left by shot and shell, and our gallop increases as we sweep together towards the guns, now hidden in a haze of smoke, broken only by the red flashes of fire from their deadly mouths. Dust and gravel torn up by the shot swirls around us, blinding and sharp, then suddenly we are right amongst the guns, scattering men before our horses. A Russian comes at me, gun raised and I slash at him and he collapses, bleeding and screaming.

I see Cardigan, his sword rising and falling as he rides among the soldiers. The plumes of his helmet still wave, tall and white. The dust churns around us, thrown up in the confusion of feet and hooves as we struggle with the enemy. Hands tear at me, trying to pull me from the saddle. I slice down with my blade and they fall away.

Everything is noise; the sound of steel on steel, the grunts and shouts of men – all the clamour and chaos that is the sound of battle and death.

I tug on the reins and swing my mount around, laying about left and right at the heaving mass of Russian gunners and soldiers as they attempt to bring me down. A sword flashes and my horse shrieks, his neck laid open in a brutal red slash. He rears, almost unseating me as he lashes out with his hooves and I see a man go down, skull broken by the blow.

"Ride, boy," I cry, suddenly afraid, and he does, leaping over fallen men and horses alike as he bolts back the way we came. The ground under us is littered with bodies, some living, but mostly dead. All around us, other men join in our mad dash away from the killing ground, back towards the safety of our own camp. Shots still pour into the valley from the guns on the hills.

I can see the tents of our camp, the flag of England waving against the sky, when the guns we had just ridden amongst burst into life behind us once more and my horse crumples under me without a sound. I slam into the dirt and the air rushes out of me as my noble, brave steed, who has borne me thus far through Hell and almost back, lands upon me. I scream as I feel the bones in my leg crack under his weight, and strain to pull free, but he is dead and unmoving and I am pinned down, pressed into the dirt as hooves and shot tear the ground around us into a loamy froth. I close my eyes and rest my head against the flank of my horse, which is still warm and soaked with sweat and foam from his wild dash.

I watch as our men stream back, formation abandoned, and so few remaining of the bright and brave six hundred who had started out. Horses go down, torn by shot or with legs broken on the ruptured earth. Some men do not rise again, and some do, only to fall once more under the rain of fire the guns still pour against our backs. I press myself into the dirt against the body of my horse and feel it jerk from time to time as rounds strike him. Even in death, the noble beast still serves me well.

"Thank you," I whisper. The first hot tear burns a track down my cheek and into my moustache, and I lie there under the Crimean sun and weep. I weep for the men who will never see home again, and for the brave horses who carried their riders so gallantly and bravely without knowing it was to their destruction. I weep for Edmund, cut down by lead despite his faith and fervour. And as the day wears on into evening and the guns at last fall silent and all I can hear is the groans and cries of dying men and horses, I weep for myself in the knowledge that God was not with us.

I lie under the purple sweep of sky as the stars wink into view, and the only one who is with us in this charnel house is Death.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hannah

His Highness had requested that the infantrymen sleep early and well, but William and I laid on the barren ground with our eyes open and our hands pressed beneath the folds of our woolen breeches, shaking despite the lack of cold. William trembled because he was furious—I could discern it in the downward slope of his mouth, the weighty stare that pierced the thick cloud cover overhead, the perpetual tension in his arms and legs. I trembled because every man within these ranks, William and Gustavus and the fifteen thousand infantrymen who stirred in their sleep beside me, would be stabbed or exploded by Imperial forces the following morning and because neither I nor God could prevent the ensuing carnage. As men coughed in the circle around me and horses whinnied from far away, I bit my lip and prayed that the night would last far longer than it ought to, that the sun would never rise and that the lot of us would remain this way, battered and disillusioned and utterly whole, for a small eternity. But the sun would rise, and Gustavus would order us to our feet and send us to our deaths, and God would peer silently at us all as Leipzig burned and Protestant blood stained German soil. The letters would fly home to Sweden; Agnes would weep, and Oscar would forget his father; and the Lord would show little mercy to those who'd fought in His name, those who'd championed His glory rather than their own.

But none of this had transpired quiet yet, and my friend William was suffering now, from a predicament that I considered treatable. Turning my attention away from myself, as I was wont to do, I managed to parcel away my own gaping fears by easing the pains of the man beside me:

"Hugo shouldn't have spoken to you that way."

William's head swiveled in the dirt, his frown deepening as he propped himself up with a jacketed elbow. Overhead, a glimpse of moonlight broke through the hovering mist, and my stomach twisted as the curved scar in William's cheek was illuminated in excruciating detail. When he scowled, the angry mark thickened, the blood beneath it threatening to burst from its rusty-brown crust.

"Damn right he shouldn't have," said William, his voice strangely quiet despite the absence of all other sound. His white-blonde mustache twitched as he spoke, and his fingers knotted themselves in his jacket. "Didn't know what he was saying. Didn't think about it before it left his mouth. If he'd been at Frankfurt, he'd have held his tongue."

"Men like Hugo will never understand," I replied, somehow sounding more pedantic than I would've liked. "The mercenaries aren't a godly people. They fight under our banner, but they act out of self-interest, and—"

"I know, Luther," William broke in, the barb forcing me to fall silent. "I understand. But they ought not to mention Magdeburg, if they're smart or decent. Ought not to talk about it with—with mockery, or with anything else, I'm sick of the lot. Hugo's the worst, but they're all..."

"Unbearable," I said, and William grunted.

Clouds drifted overhead, and I thought of a day weeks prior when William's cousin Oliver had turned to ash, the streets of Magdeburg illuminated with the flaming bodies of thousands of citizens. I thought of those of us within His Highness's ranks, trapped miles away in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder; I thought of us waiting for the great city to burn because we could do nothing else, because the Germans between Frankfurt and Magdeburg would allow us to save no one. I thought of the William who had stood beside me on that day, breaking in ways that no man could ever hope to mend.

But we would join the citizens of Magdeburg soon enough, wouldn't we? When morning dawned, we'd march toward the Lober and on toward Leipzig, and then we'd march toward the gates of Heaven as hosts of Protestants rose to greet us, dead and beaten and happy all the same. God would take us into His hands even as he dedicated our land to the Catholic invaders who twisted His name; He'd give us everything even as He took everything away.

"You all right, Lucas?" said William, his face still and expressionless.

As the fears that I had secreted away began to roar in my ears, I considered telling William the truth—that I, the zealot, could no longer feel the hand of our Lord, that I had lost Him somewhere between here and Frankfurt—but I only shook my head and turned my gaze toward the hidden stars, my heart an ominous drumbeat in my chest.

"Tired," I replied, and I closed my eyes as weeks' worth of fatigue closed around my lungs like a fist.

How could William not sense it? How could the bulk of these men, intelligent and well-trained as they were, fail to grasp the futility of our mission? The same soldiers who had razed Magdeburg stood before Leipzig, and His Highness aimed to send us hurtling against them, to combat their comparably stronger numbers with our own, weaker ones in an attempt to save the Protestant stronghold. But how could he expect us to prevail? How could any of these people? Were they naive, or did they trust in the benevolent deity to which I had clung for years, a deity that I could no longer feel beside me?

Which of us were the fools?

God had taken from the Protestant forces repeatedly and without mercy—cities, territory, relatives and women and children—and yet these people loved Him all the same, feared Him and yet obeyed Him in the way that a son would follow a father. Perhaps I might have loved Him, too, if I did not miss Agnes and Oscar so keenly and if the nature of divine justice had not seemed to warp before my eyes, but I was tired and prematurely beaten, and so my fear had expanded to take the place of my love. In the dark, I trembled and brooded, and God failed to emerge from the shadows, failed to show me the same comfort that He had once brought on the shores of Sweden. I laid alone, and God did not lie with me.

Tomorrow I would lie alone, too, on the scorched earth between Seehausen and Breitenfeld, and I wondered if God would abandon me then, too.

*

As swathes of morning mist hovered over the ground, and as the boots of thousands of weary men tromped the earth into flat stretches of barren dirt, I caught my first glimpse of the flashing, imperious mass that was General Tilly's Hapsburg forces. Steel glinted from all corners of their enormous phalanxes, and thousands of jet-black, uniform-clad soldiers stretched toward the horizon carrying pikes and muskets, sitting astride horses and crouching beside great, gleaming cannons. The Hapsburg uniforms were finely-made, I understood, for their commanders' Catholic coffers were deep and their Catholic pride was even deeper. They would not have dared march from Leipzig wearing the garments that we sported, mismatched except for the material and distinguished as a unit only by the green branches lodged inside the helmets. They would have assumed that such a uniform marked a legion for death, that shoddiness of dress indicated deficiency of skill. Perhaps, I thought as we advanced across the plains, this line of thinking would soon be proven correct.

The Lober River wound ahead of us, and His Highness Gustavus ordered us into columns even as we gazed at Tilly's forces with a mixture of awe and horror. For the first moment in what seemed like months, the men beside me had found reason to doubt their chances of success; they murmured amongst themselves as they splashed through the dirty water of the Lober, as mud clung to the soles of their shoes and the distant whistle of cannonballs sent a collective chill through the assembled units. Behind me, William whispered quiet, impassioned swears; before me, the leagues of Swede and Saxon forces seemed to ripple as cannonballs streaked through the sky ahead.

"Forge on," Gustavus's voice carried from the front of the ranks, and my stomach churned as the first cannonballs began to rain onto the troops that surrounded me. William and my unit had been spared, but far to the left, horses screamed as a shining cannonball pierced the cavalry unit, and men behind me barely received the chance to groan before the battery crushed their bones into dust. "Forge on!" Gustavus called again, and the churning in my stomach became a roar, the sense that God had abandoned us suddenly all the more keen.

We waded from the Lober onto the fields of Breitenfeld, and the cannon fire had not yet ceased. Gustavus directed us to the right of the blasts, where the reddish-gray clouds of smoke and dust could not suffuse our lungs, but the shining ranks of the Imperial forces only became simpler to see. They were an endless wave of black and silver, a mass of expensive equipment and ill intent; they stood before the shadow of Leipzig with palpable, fully-justified confidence.

They would win, and we—

Suddenly, a boom rocked the ranks behind me, then another. Our own cannons had begun to fire, and I watched as shimmering cannonballs arced through the air towards the Hapsburg forces. The forces of the blasts quieted my doubts for only a moment, but that moment provided enough room for the whispers of the men beside me to reach my ears, suddenly unified into a single, solemn chant:

"God is with us."

I felt my fears give way to the urgency of the chant, listened as the words mounted into something more than a whisper: "God is with us. God is with us." He isn't, I thought, but the notion could not combat the forcefulness of the chant as it became a spoken message, then a shouted message, then a battle cry.

"God is with us!" shouted Gustavus's voice from the front of the ranks. I peered through the mist, and there he sat astride his dappled horse, his hand barely touching the green feather in his cap. Beside me, thousands of men reached for the twigs planted inside their own helmets, and something stirred inside of me as the shoddiness of our uniforms suddenly paled in comparison to the unity that they provided. I'd thought that the twigs seemed foolish once—how could I have? Why hadn't I foreseen this moment, this sense of mounting brotherhood at the cusp of a battle—why had I looked upon my own uniform the night before and felt utterly alone?

"God is with us!" shouted the men to my left and right, and the voice of William was among them—brusque William, downtrodden William—more forceful and urgent than I had ever heard it before. I did not dare turn to look at him, but I imagined that the scar on his face twisted as he screamed into the wind, remembering his burning cousin in Magdeburg: "God is with us!"

And as our cannons again fired into the ranks of the Imperials, and as we trod forward towards unimaginable grief, I still believed firmly that we would die there on the plains of Breitenfeld, that we would perish just as the men of Magdeburg had perished before us. Yet I looked upon the shining muskets of the Hapsburg forces and the banners that flapped over their heads, proclaiming God's favor, and I shook my head and lifted my own hand toward the branch in my helmet, allowing my voice to join the refrain.

"God is with us," I said, and in that moment, with the voices of my countrymen stirring that lost sense of unity and comfort within my chest, I believed that He truly was.

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