I twisted my bayonet free from the Austrian's throat with a wet, sucking pull, arterial blood spraying hot across my face in a fine mist that tasted of iron and salt. He dropped to his knees, gurgling, both hands clawing uselessly at the ragged wound as blood bubbled from his mouth and nose in thick, frothy ropes. Around me the ridge had become exactly what a battlefield looks like once the formal part of the fighting ends and the part that has no name takes over. Italians and Austrians locked together in pairs and clusters, stabbing, clubbing, screaming into the snow.
One of my comrades drove his bayonet into an enemy's eye socket — the sound it made was a wet squelch I will hear for the rest of my life, grey jelly and blood sliding down the man's cheek as his whole body convulsed and his bladder let go in the same instant. An Austrian swung his rifle butt and caved in the skull of a boy from my own platoon, no older than seventeen, brain and bone fragment scattering outward in a pink-grey spray that landed across the snow in a pattern almost too symmetrical to look at directly. A Germano-Hungry sergeant took two bayonets at once through the stomach, screaming as his own intestines came uncoiling out in steaming grey loops that slipped repeatedly through fingers too slick with his own blood to hold them in.
We fought like something that had stopped being entirely human until the last of them broke.
---
"Push! They're running!"
Their line shattered all at once, men throwing down rifles and fleeing down the far slope, slipping on ice gone slick and dark. We rose out of the carnage and opened fire on their backs — a ragged, furious volley that none of us would have been proud of in calmer circumstances and none of us hesitated over in this one. Retreating men jerked and dropped as the rounds found them. One took a shot through the spine and went down face-first, legs still kicking in a slow, useless rhythm as the lower half of him stopped receiving instructions from the rest. Another spun as a round opened his stomach, crawling afterward through his own spilling intestines while he called for his mother in German, the word the same in every language that mattered in that moment.
We kept firing until the slope below was littered with twitching shapes, snow running red for fifty metres downhill, the air gone thick with the particular coppery weight of fresh, large-scale killing.
---
"Advance! Don't let them regroup!"
We went forward over the fresh dead, bayonets still dripping, and Cordina came into view properly for the first time — church spires, smoke curling from chimneys against jagged peaks, a city sitting in a natural pass that made it worth every life we'd already spent climbing toward it. Whoever held Cordina controlled the artery that fed troops and supplies through the Alps to the front beyond. Lose it, and the whole Italian effort in these mountains would have to find another way to breathe.
Street fighting was its own particular hell, different from the ridge in ways that mattered.
We pushed into the outskirts under our own covering fire, doors kicked in, windows shattered with rifle butts. An Austrian squad waited in one narrow alley and opened up at point-blank range — three of my men went down in the first volley, chests punched open in wet red bursts, blood misting the cold air as they folded. I threw myself into a doorway and returned fire, my round catching one of them through the eye and out the back of the skull in a fine red-grey spray that marked the wall behind him.
We cleared the city house by house. Bayonets through doors before we'd even confirmed what waited behind them. Grenades into rooms followed by the particular wet thud-and-silence that told you the room was finished. In one upstairs room I found two Austrians sheltering together — I shot the first through the stomach and watched his intestines spill across a carpet that had probably been someone's wedding gift once, then put my bayonet through the second man's throat, blood fountaining over my hands until I wrenched the blade free.
By nightfall, Cordina was ours. What resistance remained either surrendered with hands raised or died in the gutters, bodies stacking against walls the way firewood stacks when nobody's being careful about it. The city itself was wrecked — windows blown out everywhere, streets cratered, smoke and the smell underneath it thick enough to taste. Commonwealth bombers had tried to help earlier in the day and mostly failed; their bombs landed on our own positions nearly as often as the enemy's, whole blocks turned to smoking craters full of Italian dead and the carcasses of pack horses, because from altitude in these mountains, apparently, everything below looked exactly the same.
---
Now we had to hold what we'd just taken.
Everyone understood the counter-attack was coming, infantry and mages both, perhaps two hours out at most. My battalion split fast under orders barked too quickly to argue with — one company to the northern ridge, another to the eastern gate, mine to the central square and the rail yard. We dragged sandbags out of ruined houses, flipped carts and wagons into barricades, wedged machine guns into upper windows and onto rooftops still structurally willing to hold the weight.
Some of Cordina's own people joined us — Italians who'd lived under Austrian rule long enough to have built a hatred with real architecture to it. They picked rifles up off the Germano-Hungry dead, eyes fierce, hands shaking with something that was as much rage as fear. "For Cordina. For Italy." We took every extra gun gladly, even the half of them that clearly didn't know which end the bullet left from.
It wasn't enough.
---
The mages came with the dawn light, their constructs cresting the peaks like something out of a darker version of scripture. Enchanted rounds streaked down, curving and detonating on contact. One of our defence posts simply vanished in a single fireball — the men inside torn apart, limbs thrown clear in bloody arcs, torsos reduced to red mist that came back down on the street below like something obscene mistaken for weather. Another blast collapsed a barricade entirely, sandbags bursting and the men sheltering behind them crushed under falling masonry, blood working out from between the cracks the way juice works out of fruit under a boot.
The civilians who'd joined us died in the open. One old man lost his head cleanly to a round that took it off at the neck, the stump fountaining in rhythmic pulses for several seconds afterward. A woman near him was caught at the waist by a separate blast, her upper body pitching forward while her legs, for one horrible suspended second, remained standing on their own before toppling sideways into the rubble beside the rest of her.
Then the infantry came, grey and endless, walkers striding alongside them on steel legs venting steam into the cold morning air, and the real fight for Cordina began.
---
House to house. Alley to alley. Bayonets and rifle fire through smoke thick enough to choke on. Men died in doorways with their guts opening across the cobblestones beneath them. Others were pinned against walls and finished there, blood running down the stone in thin dark rivers that the morning cold thickened almost as fast as it spread. I fought until my arms burned past the point of feeling separate from the rest of me, my bayonet red to the hilt, stabbing and shooting and clubbing anything that came at me wearing grey.
But I could see, with the particular clarity that arrives right before a man stops believing in the thing he's been fighting for, that it was already lost.
Their numbers simply didn't end. Our barricades were giving way under weight we had no answer for. Reinforcements, if they were coming at all, were days out — which in the arithmetic of this morning meant they weren't coming at all. I watched another wave crest the eastern gate, hundreds of grey uniforms with mages hovering above them like something sent specifically to make sure we understood how thoroughly this was finished. My platoon was down to eight men. The civilians who'd joined us in the night were dead or dying in the street, their bodies opened by enchanted rounds and bayonets in exactly the same indifferent ways ours had been.
I did not want to die for a cause that had already stopped being winnable several minutes earlier.
When the next assault hit the square and our last machine gun went silent in a final spray of sparks and blood, I raised both hands.
"Surrender! We surrender! Cease fire!"
The others followed. Rifles hit the ground in a loose, defeated rhythm. Germano-Hungry troops closed in around us, bayonets still dripping, eyes hard with the particular look men get when they've just finished winning something expensive.
The fight for Cordina was over.
And so, in every way that mattered to me personally, was mine.