The explosions held three hundred yards out for several minutes as the neighboring companies brought all guns to bear on those pitiful acres. The captain scanned the hellish horizon, slowly panning back and forth with the binoculars. Vasili looked up and noticed the captain's attention had fixed on something. Hoxa dropped the glasses, whipped out his pistol and took off running toward the curtain of fire, screaming and aiming with his pistol as he went. Vasili was the only one who noticed Hoxa leave. The other soldiers kept loading and unloading at the same feverish pace.

The storm eased just as dawn broke over the ridge. The rate of fire slowed due to sheer exhaustion, then stopped altogether. The soldiers that still had their earplugs in removed them. It was quiet and the scent of gunpowder lingered in the morning air. Survivors silently milled around the camp surveying the damage and the dead. Several minutes passed before anyone spoke. "Where's the captain?" asked a soldier. He was nowhere in sight.

"I saw him run that way," Vasili said, pointing to the blasted heath in front of them. "About an hour ago."

"We should look for him," the slumping corporal said. He pointed to Vasili first. "You, you, you and you, come with me."

The five of them fanned out and waded through the wet knee-high grass and bushes. Vasili retraced Hoxa's path as best he could. One hundred and fifty yards out the landscape began to change. The grass, where there was grass, was flattened and scorched. Large open craters littered the ground. The mud became too deep to walk through at one hundred seventy-five yards. The shells had punctured the earth, pounding it into a soupy brown bog all the way to the smoldering French camp. A light grey haze hovered over the churned up ground. Upon closer examination they spotted and pointed out different body parts that lay in twisted unnatural positions, coated and camouflaged in mud. The only thing moving, the only sign of life on the entire ruined plain was a wet shivering dog hopelessly mired in the muck, licking at the blood and the mud on what remained of a severed back leg.

Vasili turned away and slogged back through the mud towards the camp, leaving the other four to search for their leader. He stopped at the base of the small rise beneath the tired guns and picked up Hoxa's discarded binoculars. Wiping the mud off the lenses, he draped them around his neck and trudged up in into the remains of the encampment.

1 “Shook his head yes,” a subtle but interesting point. Bulgaria seems to be unique in Western culture in that they shake their heads side to side to indicate yes, up and down to indicate no. Culture Shock! Bulgaria, by Agnes Sachsenroeder (Marshall Cavendish 2008)