Chapter 21: Chapter 21: Wonder Woman in Action
"WOO..."
The long whistle woke Diana from her sleep, and when she saw a battleship, not many times larger than a small sailing ship, just slowly moving away from her.
"What is that?" Diana asked curiously as she looked at the rolling white smoke coming out of the huge chimney.
"One of the British Empire's key dependencies in maintaining world supremacy, an armoured cruiser of the Mediterranean fleet." Ethan explained, clutching a pile of naval food as well as two tweed coats.
"This warship could only take us to here as it is on patrol duty, but we're almost to Gibraltar and there should be another warship there to drop us off."
"Why would they take orders from you?" Looking at the tin of salted beef in her hand, Diana wondered.
"Because of my rank, there are as many colonels in the British army as there are dogs, but at least as an officer, and with a lady, these guys who hang around at sea all day will naturally oblige." Ethan pulled out his canning knife, opened the can and then inserted a spoon and handed it to Diana.
"Taste it, the British cans aren't very good, but they'll do."
The heavily oiled and salted can of beef with a bunch of chemicals in it didn't make Diana's eyes light up, she just took a few sketchy tastes and then put the tin down.
"Is this the kind of food you eat in the army?"
"This food is good enough." Ethan said as he sat on the barrel at the bow of the ship biting into his fork as he ate, "With a war spreading across dozens of countries and agriculture being decimated, the front line brigands are as happy as on Christmas eve to have a mouthful of meat."
"What about civilians?"
"Farmland has been battered by artillery and poison gas over and over again, the fields are barren, the war has been fought for four years, both sides are now seeing who can survive, the Centrals are better, the Allies have no food, no water, no resources, they can't last without some devious ways." As he spoke, Ethan dropped the can and dissected the current situation in detail.
"Mankind is always repeating the same tragedies, maybe Ares is behind all this but the real cause of this war breaking out is mankind's endless greed."
......... ......... ...
𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙛𝙤𝙡𝙡𝙤𝙬𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙛𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙣𝙤𝙤𝙣
Diana was still pondering what Ethan had said yesterday when she was brought ashore by a Royal Navy communications ship.
Then she was startled by the sudden sound of a salute.
"This?" Diana, who was subconsciously about to put her hand to her back to draw her sword, asked curiously, pointing to the crowd of onlookers boiling on the shore.
"It's supposed to be coming to greet me." Ethan hadn't thought of it himself; he had merely sent a telegram to the War Office in Gibraltar to indicate his return from a lost voyage, so how had it come to this again.
"Lawrence of Arabia." No sooner had the palisade touched shore than two or three British generals gathered round and began to shower Ethan with compliments, and a bewildered Ethan realised that Ludendorff had put a bounty on him.
"First you helped the Arabs take Damascus, then you destroyed the Ottoman arsenal, wounded the German army director, got lost and returned to the army, that's enough experience for a book." A reservist admiral cheerfully complimented.
"That's what I should have done." What else could Ethan say but all smiles about the wise leadership of the Queen and the Prime Minister.
After some propaganda plus recognition, Ethan saw an old acquaintance appear on the docks, none other than Steve with a black eye.
"Captain, the notes you asked for."
"I ... Colonel Lawrence, your contribution to this war is unparalleled." Steve looked excited to see his lost notebook.
"I came back from Cairo to give a report on Dr Poison to the Allied command, but the generals thought I was hallucinating because I was wounded, and now that you're here, you can be my witness." With that, Steve was about to pull Ethan towards the limo on the side of the road.
"Wait a minute, Steve." Ethan shouted to stop, "I need to pick out some clothes for my friend first, I'll come over later and testify for you about the poison gas."
"Ah. Well, okay then." It was then that Steve saw Diana standing behind Ethan, because of the navy coat Diana was wearing, he had previously wondered if Diana was a model for some shipping company... ,
"OK then, I'll go ahead and submit my notes, I'll have my secretary drive over and pick you up later."
"That man, he looks so eager, is it something important?" Diana surveyed the noisy docks curiously.
"Yes, we have to be there later too, so we need to get you changed, after all, our big leader here wouldn't like someone carrying a sword and shield to a meeting in battle armour."
After casually stopping a passer-by and asking about the better women's clothing shops there in London, Ethan took Diana straight to the clothing shop.
While Diana was picking out her clothes, Ethan suddenly felt someone staring at him, so he turned around pretending not to notice that the crowd outside the clothing shop had somehow been filled with seven or eight young men, who neither looked like passers-by in a hurry nor like they were waiting for a friend, and several of them had bulging waists and knew at a glance that they were carrying guns.
"Hello, does this shop have a back door?" Ethan had a good guess as to the origin of the men at the door, who were German spies lurking in England to avenge Ludendorff's.
"How about this suit?" Diana, who had picked out a grey trench coat and trousers, came out of the fitting room, and if you ignored the sword and shield in her hand, Ethan would have thought she was a well-mannered academic scholar.
"Nice, and a pair of glasses to match even better." After confirming that Diana liked them, Ethan placed the jewellery he had brought from Prince Faisal and led Diana out the back door.
"Why are we going this way."
"There's are some people tailing us that needs to be sorted out first." Ethan glanced back and the guys were indeed hurrying to follow.
"Are they bad guys?" Diana, who had found a large box to put her sword and shield in, was a little excited.
"I'll teach you first how we fight here." Ethan pulled out the two pistols he had under his trench coat and then pulled Diana into an alleyway.
"Bang bang bang ..." Less than thirty seconds after the German spy following behind went inside, there was a sharp burst of gunfire from the alleyway.
Ethan didn't give the guys a chance to draw their guns at all, firing straight and dry, and it was the first time Diana had seen what a bullet would look like after it hit someone, and while she had high resistance and wasn't afraid of gunfire, that didn't mean the rest of Paradise Island will be.
Layers of interlocking bodies piled up in the alleyway as Ethan flung out the nest of bullets, then took a step towards the last spy left on the field.
The other man, still in shock over the instantaneous and violent death of his companion, forgot to even turn on the safety of the pistol in his hand, and when he saw Ethan approaching, he subconsciously raised his pistol and pulled the trigger.
"Click, click."
"Your General will soon follow you." Ethan grabbed the other man's pistol and hammered his fist down on the bridge of his nose in one smooth motion.
The spy was about to say I'll be back, but when he saw the look of death in Ethan's eyes and Diana behind him, who was gesturing with her Vulcan sword, he could only nod his head and crawl out of the alley.
"Come on, we still have to get to Ares."
......... ......... ...
"You're over worried, Captain Steve." A condescending Captain Steve was being questioned by a dozen old men who were almost his grandfather's age in the Coalition Command on Fleet Street.
The British and French were certainly at the top of the list when it came to the rigidity of their military command structures, not to mention the outdated thinking and old tactics, and the fact that the top brass of both countries had to wait until they had suffered a big loss before they could think of a countermeasure for the new weapons.
The Dunkirk retreat, as impressive as it sounds, saw hundreds of thousands of troops evacuated in a generator operation, but if the British and French had paid a little attention to the intelligence they had gathered, they wouldn't have let the Germans play the Tour de France.
The British Expeditionary Force generals thought the Dunkirk war was also going to be the same as WWI for four or five years, so they had spent all the money, so that the officers' toilets, pets and cars were loaded onto the ships, and even the barbed wire was pulled from Britain, which scared the French, but as a result, the Rolls-Royce cars became German trophies.
He said that the Germans were developing a new type of gas, and the bigwigs said, "I know, I know, I'll just put on a gas mask if that thing hits me, we don't have much else in the Alliance, but we have enough gas masks, and if we can't give the US an order, we're done.
"No, no, no, they're developing a new type of gas, something different from chlorine gas." Steve was still trying to convince, "Here are the notes, it has their formula."
"But we don't understand any of the words on this note." The only old man not in uniform stepped forward.
"Captain Steve, you've worked hard all the way back, or you can go and rest today."
"No, Sir, Colonel Lawrence who fought with me in Ottoman he has also seen the German gas weapons so I asked him to come and explain them to you all."
"Oh, Lawrence." After hearing Ethan's name, the atmosphere in the conference room immediately changed, in fact, the Allied high command was not very fond of the Americans, everyone had been fighting the Germans to death on the front line for years, but you ended up getting rich all the time at the back.
This is why Steve's opinion was not taken seriously, because he was a member of the American Force, but Ethan was different, his was British, and he helped Great Britain take care of the Middle East, a place the British had been trying to hold for centuries. He would have been a general by the time he was 50.
When they heard that Ethan had seen this weapon, the Allied generals immediately asked Steve to come back and hear what the experts had to say.
When Ethan arrived at Fleet Street, the sentry standing guard at the gate sent him straight up.
"Sir." This salute immediately made the Allied generals nod in satisfaction, we are all soldiers, we must follow the army routine.
"Colonel Lawrence, we've heard about your war record in the Middle East for a long time, but I hope you can give us a detailed answer to the matter of poison gas that Captain Steve mentioned."
"Yes, sir." The next thing he knew, Ethan was standing at the podium in the conference room, pole in hand, detailing what he had seen and heard in the Ottoman camp with an unmistakable professional tone and fancy stance.
"And what about these formulas in the notebooks, do you move this language?" After listening to the narrative, Sir Patrick held up the notebook in his hand.
"Er, I don't know this language either, but my assistant, Miss Diana Prince, who is a very good expert in linguistics and archaeology, she should understand it." Ethan pointed to Diana, who had been a quiet spectator without saying a word since she had entered.
"It's a weapon called mustard gas, and based on hydrogen hydrogen. This gas is very corrosive."
"A chemical formula?" The generals' heads immediately went in chaos.
If you will ask them how far any cannon could hit, then they can assume somewhat from their experience but chemistry?
But there were officers in the Allied command who knew chemistry, after all, poison gas was something everyone was using.
"Our gas masks can't stop this weapon." An officer with glasses looked at his notebook and sweated, "This weapon doesn't need to be piped out like chlorine gas, it can be packed into artillery shells and hit targets dozens of kilometres away."
"That's right, when I wounded Ludendorff, he even said he would load the bombs onto airships, fly them across the Channel and raise the whole city of London."
"Bullshit." Hearing such an arrogant statement, an RAF general shot up, "Our British white phosphorus bombs are not laggards, if the Germans dare to come, we'll send them down to the sea to feed the sharks."
"And what about the front line, they could be mounted on trains to attack any of our front line defences."
"We need more colonial troops."
"If the Germans gas enough people, you can't drag all colonies to Europe."
"Ahem." Steve coughed, then spoke, "Sir, I think we could organise a force to destroy the German factories."
"But that's too risky, 𝗞𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗿 has already made peace with us, we can't risk starting a war." Someone objected. (TN: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘎𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘌𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘒𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘢.)
"I have an idea." Ethan raised his right hand and snapped his fingers.
"Why don't we dress up as Italians."
"That's a great idea." The crowd lit up, Ludendorff had previously defeated hundreds of thousands of Italian troops in the Alps, so it made sense that the Italians would now come after him for revenge.
"But ..." Steve wanted to say something else, but looked at the generals who were already ready to celebrate their victory and swallowed his words.
"Captain, and Colonel, you will come to my office later." Sir Patrick saw this, and after two quiet instructions, he left first.
"Diana, look at him." Ethan made a gesture to Diana, indicating that she should go and talk to the old man, he and Steve still had to have a meeting with the old men.
𝙏𝙬𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙮 𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙪𝙩𝙚𝙨 𝙡𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙧
A serious looking Steve and a slightly innocent Ethan pushed open the door to Sir Patrick White.
"What's the situation, Colonel?" Patrick looked to Steve.
"Very bad, Sir, the lords of the War Office don't want Captain Steve alone leading an American Ranger team for this, they want to form two teams." Ethan saw that Diana was sitting in the corner quietly reading a book..
"Alas, all this time, and still no unity." Sir sighed, then pulled a wad of pounds out of his pocket.
"This money is my personal sponsorship for you, and will Miss Diana be following you too?"
"Er, yes, she's following me." Ethan replied when he saw Diana nodding her head.
"It's a pity, her talents shouldn't have gone to war, I'd love to recommend her to study at Cambridge."
"After the war is over."
After some more miscellaneous chit-chat with Patrick, the three left, with Steve wanting to split half the money with Ethan, but he refused.
"I've got enough from the war in the Middle East, you can have all this. Remember to keep plenty of food on hand, it's not like London over there in Belgium." Ethan said, reaching into his pocket again and pretending to pull something out actually taking two gold bars out of subspace and shoving them at Steve.
"This?"
"Some more for you, recruit a few more men then, and when we get to Belgium I'll find a way to get you some guys from the local allied forces." Ethan was a little worried that without the protection from Diana, Steve would get killed by the Germans before he even get to Belgium.
"Thank you, Mr. Lawrence, you're a good man. A true soldier." Steve was moved to tears, and after accepting the gold bar he ran off ahead of them, he had to go and gather his men.
"Is there any problem?" Ethan asked in a whisper, looking at Diana after Steve had gone.
"Nothing, by the way, what is Cambridge?"
"A university. Strange, if Patrick isn't Ares, is Ludendorff?" As he spoke, Ethan looked back at the command building, where Sir Patrick was standing by the window giving himself a wave of farewell.
"I think that Ludendorff is more likely, you said that he alone caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, which only Ares could have done." Diana said with certainty.
"Then we'll go to Belgium and find him, come on, let's take you to eat something nice first."
He had taken Diana to the best restaurant in London and ordered a tablefull of food, but to his surprise Wonder Woman's own favourite was vanilla ice cream, and the table full of lobster steaks had become Ethan's task instead.
"Hello, two more ice creams please, and a strawberry jam by the way."
The waiter led the way and soon brought the dessert Ethan had ordered.
"You try this." Ethan poured the jam over the vanilla ice cream and then pushed it to Diana.
"Mmm, how did you come up with that." Feeling the pleasure of the deliciousness exploding on her tongue, Diana narrowed her eyes in pleasure.
"A little bit of experimentation." Ethan was like a kindly old father at the moment, still not having touched a single bite of food in front of himself, but having set out so much more for Diana.
"I'd like another one."
"You've had five, you'll get a stomach ache if you eat any more."
"I'm not afraid of pain."
"You'll get fat if you eat it that much."
As expected, no matter what kind of woman it was, as soon as she heard the word fat, she immediately stopped.
Diana could only regretfully put down her spoon and had a chat with Ethan.
Once he had eaten and drunk enough, Ethan took Diana to the hotel arranged by the War Office to rest.
If the normal course of events as of Marvel world were to be followed, then the two would have rolled into bed together tonight, but Ethan always felt like abducting an underage girl, so he decisively pushed Diana into her room and went back to his bedroom.
Early the next morning, Ethan hadn't even gotten out of bed yet, only to have a someone knock on his room door.
"What is it?"
"Sir, the War Office says the equipment and personnel you asked for are in place. Please go over and inspect them." A messenger with a very green looking face handed over a receipt.
"Okay, I will be there in a minute." Ethan nodded and took the receipt, then went back to his room to gather up his clothes.
"Diana, get up."
"Are we going for ice cream?"
"... Do you still want to fight Ares?"
"Oh, yeah." Diana, in her robe, turned around and took her shield and sword to head out the door.
"Change your clothes. And I'll keep your shield and sword for you." Ethan sighed, the Queen was really using him as a her daughter's babysitter.
After some fussing, the two rushed to the barracks outside London to receive the men and guns provided by the War Office for the operation.
In addition to the 10-round semi-automatic rifle, which was the latest weapon purchased, there were also the Lewis light machine gun with 94-round drum, light tank grenades, and even a War Office General gave Ethan a warrant to mobilise front-line troops at his discretion.
"Men, I'm sure the officers have told you about this mission before you arrived here." With his hands behind his back, Ethan stood on the raised platform and looked at the soldiers below him.
"After four years of fighting, the Germans feel they can't carry on, but they don't want to admit defeat, so they want to make a big story and take us with them even if they die themselves, do you think we'll agree to that."
"We won't agree, our mission this time is to give that old bastard Wilhelm a kick on his arse."
With the aid of psychic energy, Ethan's speech immediately got the blood of this group of fierce men with brains stuffed with muscles boiling, and many of them were excitedly clinching their fists, stating that if they were allowed to get as close as one kilometre to William, then the war would end immediately. Some even went off to sharpen their sapper shovels.
After counting the men, Ethan didn't linger any longer and took the men straight to Belgium on a Royal Navy destroyer.
At this point, Steve was still sadly looking for someone to send him out to sea with a few of his best buddies with his banknotes.
......... ......... ...
At the beginning of the war, Belgium was pressed into the ground by hundreds of thousands of German troops in a fierce beating, although there was no shortage of tenacious defensive battles like the Liege fortress, but Belgium is ultimately a small country, and in the end was easily penetrated by Germany.
British and French reacted promptly and pulled Belgium in at a crucial moment, so as not to let it fall completely, and then the two sides fought on a long front from Belgium to the Swiss border.
"Oh dear." Because the docks had been damaged, Ethan and the men went ashore or were extradited back and forth by a tiny barge, and Diana no longer knew what to say as she looked at the shell-damaged villages along the coastline.
"Keep your clothes on, it's colder than London over here." Ethan was used to it, he had seen cities blown to bits by Belka and Geneva full of battleship wreckage in all the times he had crossed, so he just swept the ruins and made no more moves.
Ashore, the crowd became enormous.
Although the brass as back knew that the Germans wanted to make peace, the soldiers at the front didn't, so squads of colonial troops with Adrien helmets carrying rifles were brought in by the boatload, and what awaited them, naturally, was an endless array of barbed wire, mine fields and Maxim machine guns.
"Are they all here to fight?" Looking at the numbed eyes of the colonial infantry, Diana no longer knew what to say.
"Yes, colonial infantry, the front line's favourite cannon fodder, actually those ANZAC soldiers who followed us count too, but they're all white, so they count as human beings, and as for these guys." Ethan pointed to a non-white soldier with a cutlass, "Those guys are second class."
Noisy crowds, expressionless soldiers, muddy roads, destroyed houses and unclothed women and children were Diana's first impressions of the battlefield, seeing a woman with her child begging for food from the troops along the road.
Diana gave the food she had brought, watching the woman take the food and feed it to her daughter with a thousand words of thanks, Diana no longer knew what to say.
"You're right, Ethan, with or without Ares, this war is a disaster."
"Humanity, always repeating the same fate, let's just hope that when we find Ares, we can sort this out soon. We are still a long way from the front line, we still have a long way to go."
After a long walk along the muddy road, the group smelt a strong smell of blood, it was the battlefield hospital set up by the roadside, where thousands of wounded soldiers were brought from the front line to receive treatment, although many often did not last this long and died of their wounds half way through.
After a short discussion with the head of the field hospital, Ethan borrowed a Bulldog troop carrier which would take them to the war zone twenty kilometres away and then pick up another batch of wounded soldiers.
"Damn, I seem to be back in Dardanelles again." Once on board, an ANZAC sniper looked at the half-mutilated soldier on the road and couldn't help but draw a cross.
"Trust me, it's going to be worse than Dardanelles here. At least the Ottomans don't have as many machine guns and cannons as the Germans." Ethan started the car and poured cold water on the soldier.
Although it was only twenty kilometres from the front line, Ethan had to drive for two hours to reach it because of the terrible road conditions and the bodies that fell in the mud every now and then.
"Are there still civilians here?" Diana, in the passenger seat, asked, pointing to a crying woman.
"There are civilians everywhere here, and it's impossible to take care of them in a war." Ethan jumped out of the truck and gestured for all his men to get out, he was going to go to the man in charge of this defence first to find out what was going on.
"Sir, what can I do for you?" Seeing Ethan, who was carrying the rank of colonel, appear, a soldier wearing glasses stepped forward and asked.
"Where is your commander?"
"Captain 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿 should be in his trench reading a book." The spectacled soldier pointed to the maze-like trenches, "I'll lead you there." (TN: 𝘖𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘯.)
After instructing Diana to wait for him where she was, Ethan followed the spectacled soldier and disappeared deeper into the trenches.
"Sir, this is it." The spectacled soldier pointed to the gun-proof hole in front of Ethan, and at the entrance to it was a shelf of oil paintings.
"Captain Blackadder?"
"Sir?" A large-nosed officer with an unmistakably familiar face to Ethan burst out of the hole.
"Captain Blackadder, 4th Regiment of Expeditionary Fusiliers, I wonder what your arrival is about sir."
"Hello Bean, oh no Captain Blackadder, I'm Colonel Lawrence, I'm here to see your regiment, where is your command post, I have a warrant for it from the Admiral." Ethan fought down his own desire to chuckle and shook hands with the other man.
"Colonel Lawrence? The Admiral's warrant?" The British commander wondered as he opened the order and read it carefully.
"A new type of poison gas? Is that what you're here for?" The British commander who had read the order looked at Ethan.
"That's right, I'm here for that." Ethan nodded.
"I've seen those German bastards use poison gas on the French front. I didn't think they'd resign themselves to defeat even now." He folded the warrant and handed it back to Ethan.
"I'll do my best to co-operate with you. I have thirty tanks here, sixteen heavy artillery pieces, and I can transfer a regiment of colonial infantry over if necessary."
"Thank you, Colonel."
"You're welcome, it's all for the country."
According to information from aerial reconnaissance, a second-line German infantry division was stationed on the other side of the Allied position, though this infantry division was not exactly full; the German reserves had been fought out, and in layman's terms, the manpower was empty.
And Ludendorff's factory, less than forty kilometres behind this German line, was the airfield closest to the British mainland, and once the mustard gas shells had been manufactured then the Ghota bombers could take off with these bombs and cross the Channel to drop them in Lloyd George's teacup.
Now there were only two ways ahead of Ethan, either to bypass the German lines and cut through, or to cross this kilometre-wide no-man's-land covered with barbed wire, craters and corpses.
"Colonel, be careful, the Germans have quite a few snipers." Seeing Ethan about to stick his head out of the trench, Captain Blackadder, who was at the door, hastily stopped him.
"We all use this." Blackadder picked up a long box from the ammunition box, with lenses at opposite ends.
"A periscope."
"Thank you, Captain." Ethan took the periscope and looked off into the fog-shrouded battlefield in the distance.
"We've lost tens of thousands of men here, French, Belgians, and British. German machine guns are raining down on over our heads, armoured tanks will be used as targets by the field guns, I wouldn't advise it if you want to get through here, Colonel." Colonel Connor leaned on his cane and clutched a handful of the dark mud, his face expressionless.
Having chatted with Colonel Connor, Ethan returned to the rear to find Diana, only to find that Steve had arrived up with his men at some point.
"You guys are moving fast." Ethan surveyed Steve's teammates, although they looked unimpressive, they were good fighters.
"It's been a torturous journey for us." Steve and Ethan came to a hug, and then the two began to exchange information.
"Ethan, we've got to help them." Diana interrupted Ethan, who was writing on a map, as she pulled a woman with a baby in her arms.
"That's not possible, ma'am." Before Ethan could say anything, Steve and Blackadder, who had stepped aside, objected first.
"We haven't taken an inch of this place in years past, war and intelligence work are not the same." Blackadder looked at Diana in her military coat and, thinking she was some kind of intelligence officer, spoke up and warned.
"Yes, there are countless murderous German scumbags on the other side of this land with mortars and machine guns aiming at every gaping hole here, ma'am, and the people here have suffered countless hardships, but there's really nothing we can do about it."
"Ethan." Diana looked at Ethan who had put away his brush, the other man was staring dead at the map without saying a word.
"Then I'll go." With that, Diana was about to head for the ladder by the trench.
"Stop." Ethan finally opened his mouth.
"You ..."
Ethan picked up the Maxim light machine gun that was slung against the trench wall, plus the Farquharshire rifle with the 3.5x sniper scope mounted on his back, and walked over to Diana.
"Tom, you take your men and spread out along the trenches, giving priority to clearing the German machine gunners." Allowing his men to hook themselves up to bulletproof armour, Ethan grabbed his Maxim, hooked the cartridge chain to his body and looked at the others.
"Colonel, you're only going to get yourself killed for nothing."
"Really." Ethan said before closing the visor of his helmet, then grabbed the ladder and climbed up the trench.
"Damn it, I'll go and inform Colonel Connor." Blackadder could only lament the fact that these guys were out of their minds before running back to the trench and ordering his company to prepare for battle.
"What do we do?" The sniper from Steve's squad looked at Steve.
"That goes without saying." Steve sighed, then similarly grabbed his own M-1897 trench rifle and rushed into the trench.
"Thank you, Ethan." A warmth flowed through Diana as she looked at Ethan standing beside her, then she took off her army coat and climbed up the trench after Ethan, carrying her sword and shield.
"Colonel, Colonel, they're going through no man's land." Like a gust of wind, Blackadder rushed into Connor's command.
"What? Slow down."
"Colonel Ethan, and his female assistant, they're going straight through No Man's Land, and this will have climbed up the trenches."
"Damn it. This guy." Connor then understood why Ethan was saying things were happening.
"Order all men, prepare for battle." Connor pulled out the revolver on his belt, put on his helmet and walked out of command.
"Order Captain Edward to start the tanks, have the artillery ready to fire, all hands, bayonets." Despite inwardly cursing Ethan a million times, Connor chose to back Ethan up, like he said before, he was still a soldier, so naturally he couldn't watch his comrades go to their deaths.
"All hands on bayonets, prepare to attack."
......... ......... ...
"Someone's coming, fire."
The Germans were not blind, at over a thousand metres they could still make out the general appearance of Ethan and Diana, at first just a few snipers were firing as they felt they had enough, but no matter how many rounds they fired out, the two men were unharmed, and as a last resort the snipers had no choice but to raise the alarm.
German infantrymen with 1915 round helmets poked out of their trenches, raising their Mauser rifles to load and fire, but the result was still futile.
"Are these Englishmen all monsters? Damn it." The German officer in the Prussian spiked helmet rubbed his eyes carefully to make sure he had seen correctly, and immediately pulled the messenger beside him and shouted, "Get the artillery firing, the machine guns firing, finish these guys off."
First the water-cooled Maxim, then the Lewis, submachine guns, mortars and infantry guns opened fire in unison, and the dense tracer fire wove a huge web of fire over Diana and Ethan, who had already crossed the barbed wire.
An invisible numinous barrier opened up and all the German fire immediately shattered into a pile of iron and fell to the ground upon impact.
"Now." Ethan, who was carrying the Maxim, nodded at Diana and then ripped down the barrier, while the machine gun in his own arms roared, sweeping intense fire across the German trenches, instantly knocking down a swathe of the enemy, while Diana duly raised her shield to block the incoming fire, giving Ethan a guide to his target in the process.
"They're drawing all the fire. Go Go Go." Colonel Connor, whose finger bones had turned white from gripping the binoculars with too much force, violently blew the whistle on his chest, and then as the earth shook, a strangely shaped British Mark tank drove out from behind the lines, crossed the trenches, crushed the barbed wire and appeared on the battlefield.
By this time Ethan and Diana had also reached less than a hundred metres from the German position, but that was as far as it went, with hundreds of rounds pelting both simultaneously every second and every moment, even as the German commander brought in more Maxim machine guns and marksmen to keep the line from being lost.
As one fell, another filled in, and despite the fact that the machine guns were already red with blood, the German soldiers continued to rotate as if they could not stop fighting.
"Diana, can you make a dash for it in ten seconds?" Ethan, hiding behind cover, dropped his shot-out Maxim, then raised his Farquharshire rifle.
"Yes."
"Good, then I'll leave it to you." Ethan took a deep breath, got up, raised his rifle and fired.
The 7.7mm round fired from the semi-automatic rifle, which used a drum feed, accurately hit the nearest machine gun shooter to Diana, and the 1915 helmet the shooter was wearing, which had been retrofitted with a laminated anti-breaking piece, was shot straight through.
Like dominoes, a machine gunner who had only been firing at his shield was taken down by Ethan's precise roll call.
"FIRE." a 77mm field gun that the German infantry had pushed up with great effort opened fire, the fragments of the grenade explosion clanged against Wonder Woman's shield, the huge impact knocked Diana off balance, seeing the bullets about to fall, Ethan, who had no time to change bullets, rolled out of his cover, grabbed shield and blocked in front of Diana.
"Load up and finish them off." The smug German gunner excitedly pulled back the chamber, the steaming shells fell to the ground and rose in white smoke as they touched the cold muddy water.
The second round was picked up by the buckskin gloved loader and shoved into the chamber, the gunner adjusted the confinement and just as he was about to pull the bolt, a 57mm round hit the field gun.
"CHARGE." and under cover of the Mark tanks, the Allied forces launched a full-scale counter-attack.
To be fair, the Mark IV had many problems, but this did not prevent it from being a dazzling child of World War I, especially on a battlefield with complex terrain.
"Start the engines. John." Captain Edward shouted.
"Yes, sir." The driver in the front section of the tank jerked the bar in front of him, then the transverse engine in the middle of the tank began to roar.
Several pistons began to move back and forth, a constant flow of power was transmitted through the two transmissions at the rear, then after a jolt the 28 tonne behemoth with two 57mm guns and four Hachkiss machine guns began to move slowly.
"Keep up the speed and let's wait for orders." The captain pushed open the observation window on top of the tank and real gunfire blared on the distant horizon.
"Sir, what's happening and why the sudden attack?" The loader of the 57 gun on the right asked curiously.
"Not sure, but I have a feeling we could get a major breakthrough today."
"Hey Edward, goddammit again." Another Mark tank drove by, and a captain, hatless and wearing a jacket, peeked his head out of the observation window at the back of the Mark and grinned broadly.
"Shut up. Buckeye" Captain Edward pushed his big brimmed hat back in disgust, then added, "What, you didn't have a nightmare today?"
"Nightmares? I've had them every day since the Somme but you're right, today is the end, for me, the nightmares will end today." The tank captain called Buckeye said as he took a small flask from his pocket and took a swig of whisky.
"Toot toot toot ..." along with the gunfire came the sound of more intense shouting and the blowing of the officer's whistle.
"Here comes the order, good luck, Buckeye."
"Of course, brother, we'll see you on the other side."
A dozen Mark tanks slowly formed a line and by the time the second whistle was blown, Captain Edward tank drove out of cover in the lead.
"Whoa, sir, do we have a godsend over here?" Pilot John saw two of his own men on the smoke-filled battlefield fending off the barrage from the Germans.
"Never mind anything else, get over there and support them."
"Reloading complete."
"Stop and fire."
The dark-painted tank did not attract much attention on the noisy battlefield, so the two 57 guns easily broke off four or five fire points, and it was only then that the Germans awoke as if from a dream.
"Attack the tanks, attack the tanks." The field artillery that had only just turned its guns on Ethan also had to heave and shout the call to turn the cannons, and by this time Ethan and Diana had killed the German trenches.
"Die for the me." Ethan grabbed his bayoneted rifle and stabbed an officer in a spiked helmet, then let go of his rifle and pulled out the revolver stuck to his chest and the Luger at his waist.
In a narrow trench, a short pistol is always more powerful than a long rifle.
After a flurry of shots, there were no more living men in the trench close to Ethan.
Then Ethan pulled out the one-handed hammer that Paradise Island had built for him, grabbed a grenade packet at his feet with his left hand and charged deeper into the trench.
One German officer was still trying to shout for the reserves to bring out more Maxim machine guns when a hammer came from behind.
Sending the officer flying several metres away, and before the Maxim and the shooter could react, the smoking grenade exploded at their feet.
As both with a connection to God, came into the trenches and met the ordinary German troops in short order, the German formation was stirred into a mess, especially with Ethan dropping smoke grenades from time to time with his 1895 and then targeting the officer specifically, the Germans were soon in a mess as the soldiers could not find the officers.
As for Diana, she was even more courageous, whether machine gun or rifle, nothing could stop her sword and shield in her hands, and even had the barrel of a field gun sliced off with her shield.
"Retreat, retreat." The terrified Germans were leaving bodies all over the ground ready to retreat, but by this time the Allied troops had already pounced on them and the two sides went straight into a fierce white-knuckle battle, there was no way to retreat if they wanted to.
"Diana, follow the tanks." After rendezvousing with the ANZACs under his command, Ethan found Diana, who was really brushing off the skirmishers, and the German command was still in the town behind the trenches, where the enslaved Belgian civilians were as well as a bunch of top commanders.
"No, they're too slow, I'll go first." Diana glanced at the tanks still crossing the trenches and shook her head before leaping up and sprinting behind the lines.
"Damn it, keep up with her." Ethan tugged at Steve's collar and yanked him up off the ground.
"Can we still fight?"
"Of course."
After regrouping a small force Ethan called on Edward's tank company and the two sides combined their forces and advanced on the town.
......... ......... ...
"Counterattack, counterattack the position. It must be taken back." The German divisional commander was in a cold sweat at the moment, knowing that the Army Director was not far behind him.
"Where are the tanks, get our tanks, Spitfires, and Stormtroopers, all of them, the position must be taken back immediately."
The desperate Germans mobilised all the men they could, including the hospital's lightly wounded and logistics, as well as several German self-developed A7V tanks and captured British Mark tanks, and launched a counter-attack on the Allied forces outside the town.
"Enemy tanks. Open fire." On the narrow road outside the town, Edward's company met up with the German panzers.
"FIRE." the 57 gun on the right opened fire first, firing a semi-armour-piercing round that accurately hit the frontal armour of the A7V.
"Dang." With a crisp impact, a shower of sparks erupted and then the unharmed a7v slowly drove out of the smoke.
"Load up, quick."
Boom. Another shell rang out, but this time it was not a British gun, but the A7V's 57mm gun, this one hitting a British Mark with pinpoint accuracy, putting the latter through.
"No." Seeing the thick black smoke coming from the Mark, the remaining British tanks opened fire again in unison and a fierce exchange took place.
After a gruesome exchange, the British side was left with four Marks, including Captain Edward's Black Bess, while the Germans still had two A7Vs and one Mark tank.
"Turn left, turn left. Buckeye, we can't beat them head on, attack their flanks." A furious Edward flagged down friendly troops, then the British began to split into two, tanks smashing through the town's walls and houses in an attempt to outflank.
"Steve, you guys go help Diana, I'll take that Mark." Ethan picked up a 1918 anti-tank rifle from the corpse, then nimbly weaved through the alleyways, dodging machine gun fire from the Mark tank, and finally finding a vantage point to fire from.
"Bang." The 13mm semi-flange flask round easily penetrated the Mark's back armour, the shrapnel shattering killing the loader who was loading the shell, scratching the shooter's face and blowing out the engine of the Mark's tank.
The terrified German panzers had just pushed open the escape door and were ready to run when Ethan, who had replaced his rounds, fired again.
The spray of blood left the remaining German soldiers on thin ice and they could neither run nor stay until the captain shakily fished the white flag out of his pocket and waved it out of the vehicle before the remaining men breathed a sigh of relief.
Having finished with the Mark, Ethan rushed off to help the remaining British tanks.
"One left, Bess, good girl, hang in there." Captain Edward fingered the hot engine next to his hand, his eyes begging, as the driver, John, was driving trying to avoid the swarm of A7V's chasing him from behind, having just taken out one A7V with the loss of two of their four tanks, it was now down to two vehicles, Buckeye and Edward, against the last one.
"Sir, It's deadend ahead." The driver, who had been operating the tank all the way through, suddenly shouted.
"Shit." Ahead of Black Bess was a stone and brick warehouse building, and she didn't have enough horsepower to barge through building.
"Reverse, reverse."
"Enemy tank."
"No." Captain Edward roared reluctantly as he looked behind him at the turning A7V, and the two shooters struggled to turn their guns back in a death-defying attempt.
It looked as if the Black Bess was about to be destroyed when Buckeye's Mark suddenly crashed through the fence and then into the A7V.
Both behemoths wailed at the same time, but the result was tragic for Buckeye, whose tank broke a track and killed two of its members.
"Buckeye, get out of the way." Seeing the A7V try to gain a shooting line by reversing, Edward bared his eyes, but not only did Buckeye not listen to him, he instead got out of the tank, raised his own pistol and fired at the A7V.
And in response, he was met with the fireworks of a 57mm naval gun.
"Fire." Too late to grieve, Black Bess roared again, this time firing a 57mm shell that pierced the A7V, killing four or five of its members.
"Quick, keep loading."
This time the A7V and Black Bess fired at the same time and both sides again penetrated each other.
"John? John?" A bloodied Captain Edward struggled to lean up from his seat to see the grisly death of the members of the vehicle, the driver's head cut off by shrapnel, both gunners shot in the back, and himself with a finger and half a leg sliced off.
"Good girl, thanks." Colonel Edward reached out with his intact one hand and gently stroked Black Bess's rolling engine before pulling out his own self-defence revolver.
"Come on, Germans, I won't let this tank fall into your hands." Hearing German coming from outside, Captain Edward raised his pistol and aimed it at the hatch.
"Bang bang ..." Suddenly there was a fierce burst of gunfire and then Captain Edward heard two knocks on the hatch.
"Are there any survivors in there, this is Colonel Lawrence."
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