He pulls a hipflask from his pocket and shoves it across. ‘Schnapps. Enjoy. Prost.’
The taste is fire. A burning intoxicating acid.
The zone of dawn-light sweeps across continents. We’ve survived into another day that was not meant to be.
Around noon we encounter a battalion of troops in Confederate grey. It rapidly gets vicious. As we hunker down there’s a group of stragglers who come up behind us. They are slow, but heavy. They smell stenchy bad, with drifts of circling blowflies and bluebottles. I’m used to offing them, spearing my knife to rip through dull diseased eyes set into rotting corpse faces, while Wilhelm uses his bayonet to lethal effect, learning from me how to down them and keep them down. While trying to keep it silent so as not to attract attention from the main Confed
