The men around the table—generals, admirals, heads of ministries—opened the folders that lay before them. Heading each bundle of documents were aerial photographs of enormous twisting chains of fortifications. Maps followed, and intelligence summaries.
“Is this reliable?” the Premier asked.
“Sir, I’ve seen a good deal of it with my own eyes,” Jeffrey said. “And we have the labor gangs working on it penetrated to a fare-thee-well. It’s genuine, and it’s a major effort. Not just the labor, they’ve got plenty of that, but the transport capacity it’s tying up and the materials. Steel, cement, explosives for the minefields.”
“So you’re right. They’re going to withdraw,” the Premier said. “We’re beating them!”
“Sir.” The elected leader of the Republic looked up at Jeffrey’s tone. “Sir, we’re making them retreat—and that’s not the same thing. We have to consider the strategic consequences. If you’ll all turn to Report Four?”
They did; it started with a map. “That line—they’re code-naming it the Gothic Line, for some reason—is cursed well laid-out. When it’s finished, they’ll make a fighting retreat and then sit and wait for us.”
“We’ve pushed them back once, we can do it again!” the Premier said. “No invader can be left on the Republic’s soil, whatever the cost.”
Christ. Usually the Premier’s aggressive pugnacity was a plus for Jeffrey and the conduct of the war; he’d trampled the political opposition into dust, and the people had rallied around him as a symbol of the national will—they were calling him “the Tiger,” now. But if he got the bit between his teeth on this—
observe:
Men in khaki uniforms and odd soup-bowl helmets clambered out of trenches and advanced into a moonscape of craters and bits of trees, ends of twisted barbed wire, mud, rotting fragments of once-human flesh. They walked in long neat lines, precisely spaced. From ahead, beyond the uncut barbed wire, the machine guns began to flicker in steady arcs . . .
. . . and men in different uniforms, blue, helmets with a ridge down the center, huddled in a shell crater. Bulbous masks hid their faces, turning them into snouted insectile shapes. Bodies bobbed in the thick muddy water at the bottom of the shell hole, their flesh stained yellow. Somehow he knew that the air was full of an invisible drifting death that would bum out lungs and turn them to bags of thick liquid matter . . .
. . . and a man in neat officer’s uniform with a swagger stick in his hand and the red tabs of the staff looked out over a sea of mud churned to the consistency of porridge. It was too viscous even to hold the shape of craters, although it was dimpled like the face of a smallpox victim. Plank walkways lead off into the steady gray rain; about them lay discarded equipment, sunken in the mire. So was a mule, still feebly struggling with only the top quarter of its body showing.
“Good God,” the man said, his face gray as the churned and poisoned soil. “Did we send men out to fight in this?” His face crumpled into tears.
Jeffrey shook his head; the problem with visions like that was that the implications stayed with you.
“Sir, right now we’ve managed to turn the war from one of movement into one of attrition favoring us. This is the Chosen countermove. If we attack their prepared positions, we’ll bleed ourselves white; attrition will favor them. Believe me, sir, please—if you’ve ever trusted my military judgment, trust it now. We’d break ourselves trying. The ground up there favors defense—that’s how we survived their initial attack—and those fieldworks of theirs are as impregnable as the mountains. And that’s not all.”
He stood and took up a pointer, tracing the Gothic Line with its tip. “This shortens their line, and with massive artillery support and good communications from their immediate rear, they can thin out the forces facing us. Which means they can concentrate a real strategic reserve, not just rob Peter to pay Paul, pulling units out of the line to plug in again elsewhere. They haven’t had a genuine reserve. If they get one, it frees up the whole situation and concedes a lot of the initiative to them.”