Prosen Army offensive line.
When the sound of the shells tearing through the air came, all the infantry behind the tanks looked up.
The Prosen troops had been reinforced with a considerable number who had basic military training but no frontline experience, or only experience from the Melania era. However, about sixty percent of the troops were veterans who had been on the Eastern Front since the beginning of last year’s offensive.
This was still due to non-commissioned officers being pulled out to form new units or being absorbed into the Asgard Knights. Otherwise, the proportion of veterans would be even higher.
After all, during last June’s offensive operations, the Prosen Army didn’t suffer heavy losses—except for the few divisions that were surrounded and annihilated at Ye Fort during the battle at Karanskaya.
Immediately, the veterans recognized that the velocity of the shells flying overhead was not fast.
“These shells are coming from quite a distance,” a non-commissioned officer remarked.
Soon after, a new recruit curiously asked, “Why do you say that?”
Old non-commissioned officer: “A shell fired from a distance, when passing overhead, will be slower because its trajectory is high. If the landing point is far from you, it’s now at the peak of its entire trajectory…”
The non-commissioned officer gestured with his hands.
Just then, far ahead, a thick plume of smoke suddenly rose, clearly the explosion of a shell.
It took a dozen seconds for the sound of the explosion to belatedly arrive.
The non-commissioned officer clicked his tongue, “The impact point is at least five kilometers away from us. To be able to see such a large cloud of smoke, this must be a super-heavy artillery shell, probably a Leopold!”
“I think it might be a Karl,” another veteran non-commissioned officer offered a different opinion.
“Are you stupid? Karl shells fly even slower, and the sound just now as it passed overhead couldn’t have been from that!”
At this moment, the curious new recruit asked, “Why only one shell? During the earlier artillery preparation, I saw the enemy positions were all exploding fireballs.”
“Idiot,” the old soldier slapped the new recruit’s steel helmet, “A single shot from a large caliber like that is serious trouble. If it hits a city, that one shell would have already killed a thousand people and injured who knows how many. A shot like that could wipe out a company—no, a battalion!”
At that moment, a junior officer who had been listening to their conversation spoke up, “You new eggheads will understand once you’ve been shelled by Ante heavy artillery.”
The new recruit protested, “I’ve served for three years before becoming a reservist; don’t treat me like a greenhorn.”
Junior officer: “You are a greenhorn. Let me tell you, some of those Ante bastards have a particularly malicious streak, they scout out civilian dwellings in advance, and once they make contact with us, they open fire on those houses in the dead of night.”
All the veterans on the scene frowned solemnly.
The junior officer continued, “Then you’ll know what it’s like to be hit by heavy artillery. A shell lands a hundred meters from your bed, and you’re so scared you jump up only to find your nose bleeding non-stop, because the overpressure tore through your delicate nasal passages.
And if you’re more seriously hurt, you might cough up blood because your alveoli were destroyed by the overpressure, and blood spurts out through your trachea.”
The new recruit became solemn, “I’ve read in the newspapers, that’s the tactic of that General White Horse, and the papers condemn him as scum who doesn’t care about the lives of his own people.”
The expressions of others became very ambiguous.
Finally, the junior officer said, “It’s not entirely his fault. Before, we treated the Ante people like scum and slaughtered them without constraint. He probably concluded that there were no compatriots left in the occupied areas.”
The new recruit was taken aback, then he asked, “Sir, have you also killed Ante civilians?”
Junior officer: “I haven’t. But when my men did it, I didn’t stop them, and even laughed alongside them. That’s why we must win this war, because if the Ante people come back to our homeland, they’ll do the same. And by then, they’ll be seen as just, because we were the villains.”
“We believe ourselves superior to the Ante people, so we carry out atrocities without any restraints. If the Ante people prove they’re no worse than us, then those atrocities will lose their footing.”
The new recruit said, “Sir, you’ve been using the word ‘atrocities’.”
Junior officer: “Yes, with or without reason, whatever the reasons may be, they’re still atrocities. Anything of that sort done to humans is an atrocity. Dammit, why did they have to target Ante women at the time, wouldn’t going for a couple of sheep have sufficed?”
It was then that an old non-commissioned officer said, “The captain wasn’t like this before, but since we were defeated near Ye Fort last year, he became like this.”
“Because now, in my dreams, I see that house on that day. Only, it’s no longer my soldiers committing those atrocities on the Ante mother and daughter—it’s Ante soldiers doing the same to my wife and daughter. And that General White Horse stands where I was, clapping and mocking, commenting on my daughter’s figure, her face.”
The captain glanced at the Ante Army defensive line still in the distance.
He said, “And in the dream, I can only watch all this because I’ve already fallen to the ground, turned into a corpse.”
At that moment, a tank passed by a snapped tree, and the captain, as if possessed, looked back and saw a patch of red. At first, he thought it was blood but then realized it was red paint.
He immediately understood it was a target marker for the defenders and shouted, “Get down quick, mortar shells incoming!”
No sooner had he spoken than shells landed a few tens of meters away, followed by a barrage of intense mortar fire.
The captain lay on the ground, shouting, “Dammit! This defensive method, it’s Rokossov! We’ve run into Rokossov again!”
————
At the command post of the fifth division of the fortress defense forces, the division commander observed the effects of the mortar barrage with satisfaction through his binoculars.