Author: Pureauthor
Rating: T
Pairing: Franz/Amelia
Word Count: 1,872
Content Warnings: WWI AU; graphic violence
Summary: I once knew a boy named Franz…
Reasons to Read: Written in the barefaced, brutal style of a WWI narrative, this story conveys the horrific reality of warfare in a way works of ostensibly similar subjects have failed to. Honest and impactful, but never tasteless.
Excerpt: Once, on a march, with all of us bent double like beggars three times our age, shells began landing all around us, throwing up huge clods of earth and blasting us in any every direction. We panicked, and we've had run around like fools trying to avoid the blasts had not Ephraim found a path that led us half-underground, away from the worst of the blasts. I took a shrapnel wound to the leg, but lived to fight another day.
Then, one week before the armistice, we were in the thick of a fight with the opposing side. I was doing my best to make it out alive when I stepped his face by accident. Not that I supposed he would have worried about that – the bottom half of his body had been blown clean off. He had almost made it.
I glance up at the village. Everything seems so unfamiliar. The colours, the homes, the women going about their daily tasks… the ordinariness of it all causes tears to prickle at the back of my eyes.