Chapter 1: The battlefield is like purgatory
"Bochus, Voch-Turke......" (German: shelling, concealment)
As soon as the shouting began, a sharp and piercing whistling sound was already cut through the air. Sometimes, they sound like the whistle of a small boat on the river, but they don't add the slightest color to life; Sometimes, they are like the whistle of a naughty child in a silent night, but they don't stop with a prank; Sometimes, even if you use your fingers to plug your ear holes, they can still penetrate everything, concussion of the brain, knock on the heart, and stir up the spleen, lungs, and kidneys!
Rumble! Rumble! Rumble......
Explosions began to pound the ground violently, the impact of which created a furious wave of air, and the scythe of death swept through everything in an elusive trajectory with a haunting scyne that swirled at high speed. The earth shook violently, as if the whole world had been distorted. Hapless Lynn with his head in his hands and knees on his chest, curled up at the bottom of the cold, muddy trench in a half-sideways position, eyelids and lips tightly closed, pretending to be a rock, a lump of frozen earth, or a corpse - anything as long as he could survive the damn shelling.
In this winding trench, there were many men like Lynn who wore steel helmets with big ears on their heads, "pea camouflage" combat uniforms, and large leather boots, and their weapons were either held in their arms or placed aside. Some of them closed their eyes calmly, some of them muttered words, and some of them sat blankly, lay on their sides, or shrunk in the corner with blank faces and dull eyes. The storm of artillery fire was fierce and intense, and the shrill whistling sound was intertwined with the loud explosions, high and low, one after the other. If this is a war symphony performance, even if the tickets are upside down, I am afraid that no one will voluntarily enter the venue to listen: the time is uncertain, it will come as it is said, the area is not limited, there is no notice, and it will cause huge side effects to the audience psychologically and physically!
All this is an option for those in the trenches. Either pray or resign yourself to fate. It is not uncommon for shells to fall directly into trench bunkers, and it is not uncommon for entire squads and platoons to be killed, and some lucky old oilmen can survive a hundred shelling without being scathed.
However, every minute of the torment of shells is so long that people can't help but ask: Is time frozen at this node?
After a long time, the sound of the landslide and tsunami finally turned from dense to thin, and after a few more minutes, the last dull roar closed the powerful symphony. The night sky is quiet, and the transient changes make people experience the stimulation of their habitual surnames from the eardrum to the heart, which even has a good emetic effect on the underdeveloped cerebellum. The living survived the ordeal, but there was not a single cheer; The wounded groaned in pain, and all they got was empty compassion. As for those who died, there was no longer a distinction between honor and shame, persistence and vacillation, optimism and discouragement, and everything was over.
"Nottle...... Nottel...... Pohek Zum Kemp! (German: Attention, attention, prepare for battle)
Urgent shouts rang out as usual after the enemy's shelling had ended, and quickly spread throughout the trenches. The steel helmets with large ears shaped like sculptures moved one after another, some rushed to the forward position along the communication trench, and some got up to be their own combat position. Guns, steel helmets, water bottles, and other hard objects rubbed against each other, converging into a unique sound in the trenches, and the tense atmosphere quickly spread.
Although the unlucky Lynn was reluctant, he was afraid of the sharp pain of the kick from his big leather boots, so he struggled to get up, picked up the mud-stained rifle from the ground, and waited with a blank face. When the grumpy officer waved his fist and shouted "F-Fl-Er", he and the man next to him fell to the edge of the trench and shot forward with the weapon in his hand.
It sounded stupid, but it was the harsh reality in front of Lynn, who, just forty-one hours ago, was a good young man who hadn't even killed a chicken. I have just graduated from college, and I am busy every day, looking forward to the day when I can walk into the church covered with flower petals with my bride, accept the blessings of relatives and friends, and live a happy and ordinary life. Such an ideal of life is not an extravagant hope, but he was accidentally electrocuted and fell into a coma, and when he woke up again, he found that he had fallen into a nightmare, to be exact, a nightmarish reality!
Syllable! Syllable! Quack Quack ......
Gunshots rang out one after another. After the shelling, there must be an attack, and this simple truth was found out even by Lynn, who was unable to communicate with the people around him. It's okay not to mention language, but thinking about Lynn makes me feel aggrieved. From elementary school to university, like most school-age children, he immersed himself in studying "in the gutter", and spent a lot of effort to take the fourth or sixth grade, but when he really took the time and space trip abroad for free one day, he found that English is not common in this world. These "big ears and steel helmets" who stood in the same trench as themselves always curled their tongues when they spoke, knowing that they were Germans and speaking German, but they couldn't understand it when they pricked up their ears, and they couldn't say a word when they opened their mouths.
If your feet grow on others, it hurts you when you are kicked. Lynn quickly learned to be obedient and do whatever he saw the people around him do. Concealment, positioning, shooting, and stopping firing, more than forty hours were over. Eat when you eat, drink when you drink, except for the head is often dazed, the ears are often ringing, and the body is often shaking, everything else is okay. After all, there are no colors on his body, and his limbs are still alive, so he is much luckier than those more unlucky ones.
"Larden! Larden! (German: Reload)
The familiar hoarse voice came from not far away, and in a world where people were dying every moment, people's tempers were particularly hot, especially the "butcher". The nickname was devised by Lynn for her "top boss" in this world. The guy has a rugged face, a sparse beard, broad shoulders, round arms, and a somewhat similar appearance to AC Milan's tenacious midfielder Gattuso. Take off his military uniform and pick up the pig-killing knife, that posture, no one will question his skill of chopping meat and cutting bones!
Driven by this slogan, the big-eared steel helmets stood on the steps of the side wall of the trench. In order to protect the soldiers, the trenches were dug deep and the walls were reinforced with wooden strips, so that ordinary people could not reach the edge even if they stood upright, and had to stand on piled dirt steps or empty boxes to poke their heads out.
Without waiting for the vicious "butcher" to come to his side, Lynn hurriedly stood on the steps that had accumulated a thin layer of ice. On the first noon after waking up, he took a good look at his new skin: this body is quite hard, about the same size as the people around him, and it is estimated that it is also 1.8 meters, as for the appearance...... If the broken mirror had not been magical, then he had indeed unfortunately become a European with a high nose and deep eye sockets, with a stubble beard and shaggy hair, decadent and somewhat pale. The only thing that relieved him was that his mud-stained hair was black, and with a melon seed face, he was the same as the 30-year-old Raul. Gonzalez has a handsome foreign guy who looks like a three-point vicissitudes.
The brutal battle did not leave Lynn much time for "self-appreciation", and the trench in which he was located was on an east-west hill, and about five or six kilometers to the northeast was an ancient fort of style, which was estimated to be an important support point on the entire defensive line, and had endured the enemy's almost perverted artillery fire for the last two days; To the west, there is a large area of woods, where there are also guards, and the depth of the defense is also deployed, and the burnt roots are still a natural barrier against the enemy's tanks and armored vehicles. As a result, the seemingly high hill became the focus of the enemy's ground forces' assault. Since Lynn was conscious, there have been four battles, and the horror of the battles far exceeds the scenes of the great director Spielberg's war movies decades later.
Under the night sky, flares glow with a blazing white or yellowish glow, dyeing the earth a strange hue. Scattered or in clusters of bullets of light red and orange, they flew away from the forward trenches into the distance at breakneck speeds. In front of the hill was a relatively open flat land, and beyond that there was a stream more than two meters wide, and on the opposite bank there were originally small woods and bushes, but under the continuous destruction of the artillery fire, only a few tree stumps remained, and the potholed mud ground was like a soil pigsty in the countryside in the early years, trampled by pigs' hooves and trampled over and over again. As the enemy's offensive returned, countless figures shook on the potholes and muddy snow, and some could be seen larger than the figures, and the lethality and deterrence could be seen - tanks!
Rumble......
The artillery behind the flanks of the defenders' positions opened fire. Even in daylight, Lynn had only seen the camouflage covering the gun emplacements from afar. Due to the language barrier, he didn't dare to go over to see what was going on, and could only guess whether it was an ordinary 75-mm anti-tank gun or the famous "88-mm gun". As a new-age youth who has been enthusiastic about the military since high school, especially the military of World War II, Lynn has always felt that his military knowledge is quite rich, but in the past forty hours or so, this concept has been completely overturned. He was surprised and disappointed to find that he was not familiar with these weapons, and even felt that the Mauser rifle in his hand was more like a 98b than a 98k - there was still a qualitative difference between the picture and the real thing. The tutorials and instructions on paper are not enough to make a traditional manual rifle a smooth operation: loading is not a simple matter of loading the bullet into the magazine, the bolt is reset more skillfully than expected, and the three-point-and-line aiming seems to be capable even for a child, but the slightest tremor when pulling the trigger can make the bullet fly. As for the real texture of the butt pushing back the shoulder when shooting, Lynn also experienced it when he used a semi-automatic rifle to shoot at a target in military training, and the 7.92mm caliber rifle has a large recoil, which is more difficult to control in comparison.
(Note: The early Mauser 98B was 15 cm longer and weighed 0.11 kg than the Mauser 98K, with some minor differences, the gun was also heavily equipped with German [***] troops during World War II)
Before the sound of cannon fire had died down, a ball of fire rose in the open ground opposite, and it seemed that the shells had slightly deviated from the target. There was no room for emotion, and the sound of bombardment came one after another from the rear of the position, and the shells that broke through the air crashed into the ranks of the attackers in an instant. Under the light of the flares, two huge black shadows immediately ignited into fireballs, and after moving forward for a short distance, they lay still like dead pigs.
"What the hell! Kill them all! ”
Lynn prayed over and over again in her heart, but it wasn't because she had changed her faith. In the previous attack, he was extremely impressed by the fierce attack of the Soviet army, if his own artillery could not take out the Soviet tanks early, they would use tank guns and machine guns to kill and wound the defenders in large numbers after approaching, and the soldiers in the forward trenches had to use rocket launchers, grenades, explosive packs and Molotov cocktails to stop the opponent. Lynn saw with his own eyes that the self-damage rate of this anti-tank method reached the level of nine deaths, and the grandeur of the scene brought unprecedented shock to the soul.
After four battles, the position remained immovable, but the dead and seriously wounded defenders were carried down in batches, and even around Lynn there were many unfamiliar faces. Although no one said anything, there was a lingering heaviness in my heart, lest I would be the next to die.
Lynn didn't want to die in a strange place where she didn't even know her name.