I was still eating like something that had forgotten how to do it properly when three more survivors stumbled into the dugout, eyes wild, uniforms soaked through with blood and canal water, faces streaked black with dirt and spent powder. The skinny private from Izmir didn't bother asking. He just tore open another tin with his own teeth and shoved fistfuls into his mouth, chewing too fast, chunks falling back out onto the table that he didn't seem to register losing. Another man grabbed the biscuits and crumbled them in shaking hands before cramming the pieces in, crumbs scattering like something snowing indoors. The third laughed — a cracked, hollow sound that put a chill through me despite the heat — and tipped a tin of condensed milk straight down his throat in thick gulps, some of it running into the blood already drying on his chin, the two fluids mixing into something neither of them should have had to share.
"Eat fast," I said, mouth still full, voice thick around the words. "This might be the last decent meal any of us ever—"
The table shook.
Not a tremor. A deep, heavy rumble that rattled the tins off the table edge, set the lantern swinging in wide unsteady arcs, and brought a fine grey rain of dust sifting down from the sagging canvas overhead. The half-empty cans rolled across the floor in lazy circles. We all froze with our mouths still full, eyes finding each other in the dim light.
"What in God's—" someone managed around a mouthful of biscuit.
I went to the trench lip on my hands and knees, heart already climbing into my throat, and looked over.
My stomach dropped clean through the floor of the dugout.
---
It was coming straight at us. A steel thing unlike anything I had words ready for — massive, riveted iron plate painted in dull green and brown, tracks tearing through the sand with a grinding roar that I felt through my own teeth before I fully understood what I was looking at. Black smoke belched from somewhere at its rear. Two small turrets bristled along its flanks, machine guns sweeping back and forth with a patient, mechanical attentiveness that made my skin crawl worse than the artillery ever had.
And strapped to harnesses across its top rode Commonwealth mages — their flying constructs folded away for now, but their hands already lit with that same cold arcane glow I'd watched our own sorcerers wear, their machines hovering just above the tank's hull like something guarding it, runes pulsing in slow patient rhythm.
Behind the beast came the infantry. Thousands of them, British and Egyptian together, screaming as they came, bayonets fixed, faces twisted into the particular fury that comes from finally being allowed to stop waiting.
"Tank!" My voice cracked on the word. "Open fire! Everything you have!"
---
We emptied everything we owned into it. My rifle barked until the barrel burned my palm and the bolt grew too hot to work bare-handed. The water-cooled gun in the next emplacement chattered through a full belt, steam hissing off its jacket in a continuous thin cloud. Sparks scattered off the tank's hide like a shower of angry insects. None of it did anything. The rounds pinged and skipped away, leaving nothing but bright scratches across iron that didn't care. Even the handful of enchanted rounds our officers carried bounced clear, as if the mages riding atop the thing had woven some invisible ward around the entire hull.
It rolled forward without slowing for any of it.
---
The tank reached our forward line and simply continued through. The parapet went under its tracks like something made of paper, sandbags bursting open and spilling their contents across the churned sand. Men who hadn't scrambled clear fast enough went under the treads — and I will tell you honestly, because I promised myself I would tell this honestly or not at all, that the sounds those tracks made going over a man were not sounds I had categories for before that morning. A wet, compressing crunch, abrupt and total, screams cut off mid-syllable as bodies gave way beneath iron with no more resistance than overripe fruit underfoot. Blood came up from under the treads in thick dark jets, mixed with things I won't describe further than to say they had, until a half-second before, been load-bearing parts of a human skeleton.
One soldier tried crawling clear on his elbows, too slow by perhaps a full second. The track caught his legs first. I heard the bones go — a series of dry, snapping sounds in quick succession, like someone breaking kindling over a knee — and his scream climbed and then collapsed into a wet gurgle as the rest of him followed his legs under the iron.
Another man, caught half out of the trench in the act of climbing, took the tread's full weight directly across the skull. There is no gentle way to describe what happens to a man's head under several tonnes of moving steel, and I will simply say that what sprayed across the sand afterward, in a wide pale arc, told me everything I needed to know without requiring me to look at the ground where his face had been.
---
British infantry poured into the trench directly behind the tank, and the fighting that followed was worse than the morning's crossing had been, because by now none of us had anything left to lose carefully.
I drove my bayonet into an Egyptian soldier's stomach and he screamed, both hands going to the wound as his own intestines began sliding free between his fingers in hot, slick loops, and I twisted the blade deeper anyway, feeling the give of something tearing further inside him, because stopping meant he'd recover enough to use the rifle still slung across his back.
A British soldier came at me with a knife. I caught his wrist, drove my forehead into his face until I felt his nose collapse and heard teeth crack loose behind his lips, and finished him with a thrust to the belly that opened him in a steaming tangle I stepped past without looking down, the same way I'd been stepping past things all morning.
Around us the trench had become something closer to an abattoir floor than a defensive position. Fists and rifle butts breaking jaws. Bayonets finding gaps in clothing and then in flesh. Men who had run out of anything resembling a weapon simply trying to strangle whoever was nearest, because the body, in extremity, apparently doesn't much care what tool it uses.
---
"Retreat! Back across the canal! Save yourselves!"
We broke.
Men poured out of the captured trench and ran for the pontoons, boots sliding on ground gone treacherous with blood and loosened sand. I was among them, lungs already on fire, my rifle abandoned somewhere behind me without my having made a conscious decision to drop it.
The Commonwealth mages opened up on us from above as we ran. Enchanted rounds streaked down and found runners with that same small, deliberate correction mid-flight, throwing men into bloody fragments — limbs separated cleanly at the joint, torsos opened from within, the detonations scattered across our retreating mass in a pattern that gave nobody any real sense of where the next one might land. The tank's side guns swept in long unhurried arcs, cutting men down in rows the way I imagine wheat falls, if wheat screamed and clutched at itself on the way down.
Worse than the mages, worse even than the tank, were the men chasing us on foot. British and Egyptian infantry came after us like something that had stopped recognising us as soldiers and started seeing us as simply prey. They shot men in the back. They bayoneted the wounded where they lay rather than waste time taking them prisoner. I watched men raise both hands and scream *surrender* in whatever broken fragments of English or Arabic they had, and watched those men shot anyway — one particular moment stays with me clearer than most: a soldier with both arms raised high, an Egyptian officer stepping up almost casually and emptying a revolver into his face at a distance of perhaps two feet, the head snapping backward in a fine red mist before the body had even finished understanding it was supposed to fall.
A man near me slipped directly in the tank's path. The treads didn't slow. What they left on the sand afterward was less a body than a long dark smear with certain identifiable interruptions in it that I have chosen, in the years since, not to dwell on by name.
Another runner beside me took a burst across the chest and spun down into the sand, still twitching, fingers opening and closing on nothing as whatever was left of his life worked its way out of him in real time, in full view, with nothing either of us could do to hurry or slow it.
---
I reached the pontoons just as the first men were starting across.
Then the mages struck the bridges directly.
Blue-white fire lanced down from their hovering constructs. The nearest pontoon went up entirely — splintered wood and burning men thrown skyward together in the same blast, indistinguishable from each other for the half-second the fireball held them. The next bridge followed within seconds. Both exits collapsed into the canal in clouds of steam and smoke, sinking timber and the men who'd been crossing it together, and just like that there was no way back across the water for the thousands of us still on the wrong bank.
"Fight to the death!" Someone screamed it from the rear, though I never learned who, and it scarcely mattered, because there was no longer a meaningful alternative on offer.
Some men tried to surrender anyway, hands going up out of pure animal instinct rather than any real hope. They were cut down standing, rounds punching through raised palms and the chests behind them, bodies folding into twitching heaps that the chasing infantry simply stepped around on their way to the next one.
I ran for the last section of intact pontoon I could see. A shell landed close enough that the blast took my feet out from under me entirely and threw me sideways into the canal like something discarded.
---
The water hit like a wall built specifically to stop me. My pack, rifle, the bayonet still somehow on my belt, the ammunition — all of it dragged at my limbs like deliberate weights. I thrashed, lungs already burning past the point of patience, and tore at the straps with fingers that didn't want to cooperate. Buckles gave one at a time. I kicked free of the last of the gear, boots filling with water and dragging at me anyway, and clawed my way back up toward a surface that felt much further away than it should have.
My hands finally found the jagged broken edge of a shattered pontoon. I hauled myself up, half-drowned, water streaming from my nose and mouth in a continuous unpleasant rush.
A shadow fell across me before I'd finished coughing the canal out of my lungs.
An Egyptian soldier stood on the bank above, young, eyes carrying a hatred that had nothing personal in it and everything to do with the morning we'd both just survived in opposite uniforms. He drove his bayonet down into my shoulder before I could move. The steel went through muscle and found bone with a wet, grinding crack that scraped audibly against my collarbone, and the pain that followed was total enough that for one long second I couldn't even produce the scream my body clearly wanted to make.
Before I could do anything with the half-second I had, he kicked me back into the canal.
His boot came down on the top of my head and held me under. I thrashed in pure animal panic, air leaving my mouth in a frantic stream of bubbles, blood from the shoulder wound spreading out around me in dark unfurling clouds that the current immediately began pulling apart. My lungs screamed in a register that had nothing left of language in it. The boot didn't move. I felt the heel grinding against my skull, pressing me deeper into water that had gone cold and dark and entirely indifferent to whether I came back up.
The darkness closed in fast after that. The last things I had were the cold water filling my throat, the crushing weight of that boot, and the calm, almost peaceful certainty that this narrow strip of water was going to be the only grave I ever got.