Echoes Of Iron.Chapter 2

Novel I: The Iron Harvest

Chapter 2: The Great Retreat

The moon over the Mons-Condé Canal was a pale, mocking eye. By two in the morning, the adrenaline that had fueled the British line during the afternoon had curdled into a thick, soul-crushing exhaustion. Silas Thorne sat in the lip of a shallow scrape, his fingers stained black with oil and carbon. Beside him, the Lee-Enfield rifle lay like a heavy, sleeping beast.

The orders had come down not in a shout, but in a frantic, whispered chain: Fall back.

"Why are we leaving?" Jules whispered, his voice trembling. He was hugging his knees, his uniform tunic torn at the shoulder. "We held them, Silas. We stopped them at the bridge. I saw them fall. Dozens of them. They couldn't get across."

"It doesn’t matter if we hold the front door if the neighbors let them in the back," Silas said, his voice raspy from the smoke. He was packing his kit with methodical, slow movements. He had learned from the veterans that speed was the enemy of endurance. "The French on our right are retreating. If we stay, the Germans will wrap around us like a noose."

Jules looked back at the dark silhouette of the village. "But the people... the ones who gave us the cider this morning. We’re just leaving them?"

Silas didn't answer. He couldn't. The image of the baker’s daughter waving a Union Jack lingered in his mind like a ghost. To stay was to die; to leave was to betray. It was the first lesson of the Great War: there were no clean choices.

The retreat began in a ghostly silence. Thousands of men, horses, and wagons began to shuffle southward. The "Great Retreat" was not a gallop; it was a rhythmic, agonizing crawl. The heat of the day had been replaced by a damp, bone-chilling mist that clung to the Belgian polders. Silas marched with his hand on Jules’s backpack, keeping the boy moving through the fog of fatigue.

By the second day of the retreat, the world had dissolved into a cycle of boots hitting cobbles. Silas’s feet were no longer parts of his body; they were twin weights of fire and lead. The heat returned with a vengeance, the August sun beating down on the wool tunics until the men smelled of sheep and sour sweat.