A full year had passed since the assassination in Sarajevo set the world ablaze. It was now deep into 1914, and the Russian front had officially collapsed under the Empire's iron fist. The Great United Front's armies had shattered in Galicia and beyond, their lines crumbling like dry sand. In their wake the Empire had carved out puppet states across Poland—fragile new nations flying the black-red-gold banner under "protection." The east was won. But the war never slowed, never paused for breath. While the north and west celebrated victories, we bled and died in the south for a narrow strip of water that could decide the fate of empires.
I, Ömer Asaf, a twenty-six-year-old corporal from the dusty hills outside Ankara, had been fighting for the Suez Canal for two brutal, endless weeks. My unit—Ottoman infantry stiffened by a handful of Empire advisors and their enchanted artillery—clung to the eastern bank in a nightmare of sandbags, barbed wire, and zigzagging trenches carved into the burning sand. Across the glittering, deceptively calm ribbon of the canal, the Island Nation of Commonwealth and their Egyptian puppets had dug in just as deep on the western bank. Between us stretched no-man's-land: a cratered, muddy hell of half-sunken barges, floating debris, and the rotting corpses of men and horses that bobbed in the current. Day and night the artillery never stopped. British naval guns from the Red Sea mixed with our own howitzers in a ceaseless thunder that shook the ground and turned the water into a boiling, foam-flecked cauldron of shrapnel and spray.
I crouched in the forward sap, periscope raised just above the parapet, eyes raw and burning from sand and exhaustion. The heat pressed down like a living weight—sweat soaked my tunic, flies buzzed around the open wounds of the wounded behind me. Nothing moved on the far bank. Just rows of sandbags, the occasional glint of a helmet, and the steady puff of their artillery spotters' smoke. Behind me, two veterans from the 15th Division muttered in the thin shade of the trench wall, voices low and bitter.
"Cavalry charge tomorrow, they say," one growled, spitting a thick glob of phlegm into the dirt. "Horses against machine guns and that cursed water. Pure madness. The officers must be drunk on Empire wine."
The other laughed without humor, wiping sweat from his brow. "Progress? We've gained maybe fifty meters in two weeks and lost three hundred men doing it. If the Empire wants the canal so badly, let their fancy mages fly across it on their glowing toys. We're just meat for the British guns—cannon fodder so the Germans can brag about controlling the route to India."
I said nothing. My throat was too dry, my cracked lips tasted of salt and blood. I kept my eyes glued to the periscope, watching the far bank, praying nothing stirred.
The next morning the order came at dawn.
First the cavalry. Two full squadrons of Ottoman lancers burst from the rear lines, sabers flashing like silver lightning in the rising sun, horses screaming as they charged straight for the pontoon bridges we'd thrown across under cover of darkness. The British opened up instantly—machine guns rattling like a thousand demons. Horses and riders vanished in hideous sprays of blood and meat; animals cartwheeled end-over-end into the canal, riders pinned beneath thrashing, dying bodies. One lancer was cut in half mid-gallop, torso spinning away while his legs stayed in the saddle a moment longer. Another horse took a burst across the chest and collapsed in a tangle of broken legs and spurting blood, crushing its rider beneath it. The charge broke before it even reached the far bank—men and beasts screaming, the water churning red.
Then the whistle blew—sharp, piercing, final.
"Over the top! For the Empire! For the Sultan!"
We surged up the ladders like a single, desperate animal. I ran as fast as my legs would carry me, boots pounding the scorching sand, rifle heavy and slick in my sweat-soaked hands. Men fell around me before we even reached the water—shot in the back, the head, the chest—tumbling backward into our own trenches with wet, meaty thuds. I didn't look. I just ran, lungs burning, heart hammering against my ribs.
The hardest part was the canal itself.
Pontoons bobbed and swayed wildly, already slick with blood and splintered wood. Some fools tried to swim—pure suicide. The Suez was wider than it looked and the current vicious. I watched three soldiers leap in; British bullets chopped the water around them into white foam. One man surfaced screaming, his arm half gone at the shoulder, bone gleaming white before a machine-gun burst tore his head clean off in a spray of red mist. Another sank without a sound, dragged down by his pack and the weight of his ammunition. A third made it halfway before rounds stitched across his back, turning him into a thrashing, bloody rag doll that slowly disappeared beneath the surface.
I chose the pontoons. I ran low, boots slipping and sliding on blood and gore. Bullets cracked past my ears like angry hornets, punched clean holes in the planks inches from my feet. A man ahead of me took a round through the spine and pitched sideways into the water, dragging half the bridge with him in a tangle of ropes and splintered timber. I jumped the gap, heart exploding in my chest, landed hard, and kept running—slipping once, catching myself on a dead man's boot, then pushing on.
Somehow—by the grace of Allah or sheer luck—I made it. A handful of us, maybe twenty survivors, reached the far bank alive, gasping, drenched in sweat and other men's blood.
We poured into the British trenches like wolves into a sheepfold.
Hand-to-hand turned the narrow ditches into a slaughter pen. Bayonets flashed in the sunlight. I drove mine into the first Englishman I saw—straight through the throat. He gurgled horribly, blood spraying hot across my face in rhythmic pulses as he clawed at the steel with dying fingers. I ripped it free and kept moving, stabbing, clubbing, shooting point-blank. Bodies piled in the mud—British khaki and Egyptian brown mixing with our own Ottoman gray. A sergeant lunged at me with a knife; I caught his wrist, slammed my rifle butt into his face until bone cracked and teeth flew in a bloody spray, then finished him with a thrust to the belly that spilled his guts across the trench floor in steaming loops.
When the immediate fighting finally died down, the trench fell strangely quiet except for the moans and whimpers of the dying. I moved deeper, clearing the dugouts one by one, heart still racing. In one small room—barely more than a hole carved into the bank with a sagging canvas roof—I found it: a crate of British bully beef, hard biscuits, and two tins of condensed milk. My hands shook violently as I tore open the first can. I hadn't eaten properly in days—only stale bread and watery soup when we were lucky.
I devoured it like a starving animal—shoveling cold, greasy meat into my mouth with filthy fingers, chewing so fast my jaw ached, condensed milk dribbling down my chin in sticky white rivers. The taste was heaven and salt and iron all at once. I knew this might be the last meal I would ever taste. Any second the British counter-attack could crash over us, or our own artillery might fall short and bury me alive in this stolen trench. But for this one stolen moment I ate like a man who no longer cared if he lived or died—only that his belly was full before the end.
The sounds of fresh fighting already echoed down the trench line. I kept eating, grease and milk smearing my beard, eyes half-closed in desperate relief.