A full year had passed since a single assassination in Sarajevo set the whole continent alight, and we were deep into 1915 now, the war having long since stopped being the brief, glorious thing the recruitment posters had promised. The Russian front had collapsed entirely — the Great United Front's armies shattered in Galicia and beyond, their lines giving way the way dry sand gives way, not in any single dramatic moment but in a slow, total surrender to gravity. In their wake the Empire had carved Poland into puppet states, fragile new nations flying the black-red-gold banner under what they called protection. The east was won.
But war is not a single front, and victory in one place buys no rest anywhere else. While the north and west celebrated, we bled in the south for a narrow strip of water that several empires had apparently decided was worth more than the lives currently being spent to control it.
I am Ömer Asaf, twenty-six years old, a corporal from the dry hills outside Ankara, and I had been fighting for the Suez Canal for two endless weeks. My unit — Ottoman infantry, stiffened by a handful of Empire advisors and their enchanted artillery batteries — clung to the eastern bank in a maze of sandbags, wire, and trenches dug zigzag into sand that burned through your boots by midday. Across the deceptively calm ribbon of water, the Commonwealth and their Egyptian conscripts had dug just as deep on the western side. Between us was no-man's-land in its most literal form: a cratered, half-flooded hell of sunken barges and debris, where the corpses of men and horses bobbed gently in the current as if they'd simply decided to go for a swim and forgotten to come back out.
The artillery never stopped, day or night. British naval guns firing from somewhere out on the Red Sea mixed with our own howitzers in a continuous thunder that shook the ground beneath us and turned the canal's surface into a boiling, foam-flecked stew of shrapnel and spray.
---
I crouched in the forward sap with my periscope raised just above the parapet, eyes raw and stinging from sand and exhaustion that had stopped feeling like tiredness and started feeling like a permanent condition. The heat pressed down like something with actual weight to it. My tunic was soaked through. Flies worked the open wounds of the men behind me with a patience that I'd come to find more disturbing than the artillery.
Nothing moved on the far bank. Sandbags. The occasional glint of a helmet catching the sun. The lazy puff of an artillery spotter's smoke signal, drifting up and dissolving in air too hot to hold a shape for long.
Behind me, two veterans from the 15th Division talked low and bitter in the thin shade of the trench wall.
"Cavalry charge tomorrow, they're saying." The older one spat into the dirt, a thick glob that the sand drank immediately. "Horses against machine guns and a canal full of dead men. The officers must be drinking the Empire's wine straight from the bottle."
"Progress," the other said, without humour. "Fifty metres in two weeks. Three hundred men paid for those fifty metres. If the Empire wants this canal so badly, let their mages fly their pretty glowing toys across it themselves. We're meat for British guns so the Germans can brag about owning the road to India."
I said nothing. My mouth was too dry for opinions, my lips cracked and tasting of salt and old blood. I kept my eye to the periscope, watching the far bank, praying — in the vague, half-formed way you pray when you've stopped fully believing prayer changes anything — that nothing on that bank decided to stir before someone gave the order that would make it stir regardless.
---
The order came at dawn.
Cavalry first. Two full squadrons of Ottoman lancers burst from the rear in a thunder of hooves, sabres catching the rising sun like scattered silver, horses screaming as they charged the pontoon bridges we'd thrown across in the dark. It was, in retrospect, exactly the madness the veterans had predicted, and watching it happen didn't make it feel any less inevitable.
The British machine guns opened up almost immediately, and what had been a cavalry charge became, within about thirty seconds, a demonstration of exactly why cavalry charges had stopped working against machine guns roughly a decade before this war started, a lesson nobody apparently above the rank of corporal had felt obligated to learn from.
Horses and riders came apart in the crossfire in ways that didn't distinguish much between animal and man. I watched one horse take a long burst across its chest and go down in a tangle of shattered forelegs, its full weight coming down on the rider beneath it with a sound I felt more than heard at this distance. A lancer near the front of the charge was caught by something heavier than rifle fire — I never learned what — and simply separated at the waist, his torso continuing forward through the air on its own momentum while his legs stayed correctly seated in the saddle for one more full stride before the horse, riderless from the hips up, understood something was wrong and began to panic.
The charge broke before it reached the far bank. Men and horses screaming together in a register that made the two sounds genuinely hard to tell apart, the canal beneath the pontoons churning from blue-green to a deep, ugly red.
Then the whistle. Sharp. Final.
"Over the top! For the Empire! For the Sultan!"
---
We went up the ladders together, the whole line moving as a single desperate organism. I ran as fast as my legs allowed across sand already scorching through my boot leather, rifle slick in hands that wouldn't stop sweating no matter how dry the air was. Men fell around me before we'd even reached the water's edge — shot through the back, the skull, the chest, tumbling backward into our own trenches with wet, final-sounding impacts that I made myself not look at directly. Looking cost time, and time, in that thirty seconds, was the only currency that mattered.
The canal itself was the hardest part by a distance that wasn't close.
The pontoons swayed and bobbed underfoot, already slick with blood and splintered wood from the cavalry's failed crossing. Some men tried to swim instead, which I understood as pure desperation rather than strategy, because the Suez was wider than it looked from the bank and the current pulled harder than any of us had accounted for in our planning, assuming there had been planning beyond go forward.
I watched three men go into the water near me. British fire chopped the surface around them white within seconds. One surfaced screaming, his arm gone at the shoulder, the white gleam of bone visible for the half-second before a second burst took his head off entirely in a fine red mist that hung over the water longer than seemed physically reasonable. Another simply sank, dragged under by his own pack and the ammunition he was still carrying, without enough breath left to make a sound about it. A third made it nearly halfway before rounds stitched diagonally across his back, and what they left behind thrashed weakly for several more seconds, a shape that no longer had the coordination to be called swimming, before the canal closed over it for good.
I chose the pontoons instead. Ran low, boots sliding on planking gone treacherous with blood and worse. Bullets cracked past close enough to feel the disturbed air, punched clean holes through wood inches from my feet. A man directly ahead of me took a round through the spine and pitched sideways off the bridge entirely, dragging a section of rope and timber down with him into the water in a tangle that nearly took two more men with it. I jumped the gap his absence left, landed hard enough to feel it in both knees, slipped once on something I didn't look down at, caught myself against a dead man's boot — his, not mine, though for one disorienting half-second I genuinely couldn't have told you which — and kept moving.
Somehow. By whatever combination of luck and Allah's mercy a man is permitted to claim for himself afterward without sounding ungrateful for the men who didn't get either, I made it across. Perhaps twenty of us, out of however many had started the crossing, reached the far bank alive — gasping, drenched in sweat and a substantial quantity of blood that wasn't ours.
---
We went into the British trenches like something let off a chain.
The fighting in those narrow ditches turned hand-to-hand almost immediately, the space too tight for anything but the rawest version of combat. I drove my bayonet into the first Englishman I saw, straight through the throat. He made a wet, climbing sound and clawed at the steel with both hands as if his fingers could undo what the blade had already done, blood coming in hot rhythmic pulses across my face and chest with each remaining beat of a heart that had perhaps four left in it. I wrenched the blade free and kept moving, because stopping in a trench full of men still trying to kill you is its own particular kind of suicide.
A British sergeant came at me with a trench knife, and I caught his wrist before the blade found anything vital, and drove the butt of my rifle into his face twice — the second blow taking enough teeth and bone with it that the sound alone told me the fight was effectively over before I finished it with a bayonet thrust to the stomach that opened him in a steaming tangle I stepped past rather than over, because over would have required looking at it longer than I was willing to.
Around me the same arithmetic was repeating in every direction. Bodies piling in the trench floor in a mixture of khaki, Egyptian brown, and our own grey, the distinctions becoming less and less meaningful the longer the fighting continued. Bayonets finding flesh with the particular wet finality I'd already learned to recognise. Rifle butts breaking jaws. Men strangling each other in the mud because they'd both lost or dropped whatever weapon they'd started with and neither was willing to simply stop.
---
When the immediate violence finally burned itself out, the trench fell into a strange, hollowed quiet, broken only by the moaning of men who hadn't quite finished dying yet. I moved deeper along the line, clearing dugouts one by one, heart still going hard enough that I could feel it in my throat.
In one small dugout — barely more than a hole cut into the bank with a sagging canvas roof — I found something that mattered to me, in that moment, more than the war did.
A crate. British rations. Tinned bully beef, hard biscuit, two tins of condensed milk.
My hands were shaking badly enough that opening the first tin took longer than it should have. I hadn't eaten anything that deserved the name in days — stale bread, watery soup on the days we were fortunate enough to get soup at all.
I ate like something that had forgotten it was supposed to have manners. Cold, greasy meat shovelled in with filthy fingers, jaw working too fast, condensed milk running down into my beard in thick white streaks that I didn't bother wiping away. It tasted like salt and iron and, somehow, underneath both of those, something close to relief. I understood, eating it, that this might genuinely be the last meal I ever tasted — the British counter-attack could come back over that lip any second, or our own guns might fall short and bury the lot of us in a trench we'd just spent half our unit's lives stealing. But for this one specific stolen handful of minutes, I ate like a man who had decided, temporarily and entirely, that he didn't care which of those things happened next, only that his stomach be full before whichever one did.
Fresh fighting was already echoing down the line somewhere to my left. I kept eating anyway. Grease and milk smeared into my beard, eyes half-closed, savouring something so small and so entirely human that it felt, for those few minutes, like the only thing in Egypt that the war hadn't yet managed to take from me.