Bright Sword: The Flowers of War

Chapter 239 Escape (Part 1)

It was exactly 7:00 AM.

The hellish artillery barrage, which lasted for more than an hour, finally subsided.

But what shrouded the Japanese positions in Xinxian was not the tranquility of surviving a disaster, but a more suffocating, deathly silence.

What was once a relatively complete trench system has now been reduced to sections of broken trenches filled with mud and body parts.

The sturdy machine gun bunker was reduced to twisted steel bars and concrete fragments after being bombed.

The barbed wire has long since disappeared, replaced by huge, dark craters, densely packed like countless festering sores on this land.

The air was thick with the pungent smell of gunpowder and blood, almost tangible, along with a nauseatingly sweet odor unique to burnt protein.

"Beep—beep beep—!"

The piercing sound of bugles suddenly rang out from behind the Shanxi militia's position, breaking the deathly silence!

"The general attack begins!"

"kill……"

The deafening shouts of battle, like a flood bursting its banks, instantly engulfed everything!
Hundreds and thousands of Shanxi militia soldiers, dressed in gray military uniforms, leaped up from their starting positions like a tide.

Holding their M1 Garand rifles, they charged in a loose but orderly formation toward the dilapidated Japanese position, still emitting wisps of smoke!

Above them, the militia's machine gun positions fired a dense barrage of tracer rounds, relentlessly suppressing any resistance that might attempt to rise up on the Japanese positions.

……

Katsuhiko Nakata huddled in a foxhole that had been partially destroyed by the bomb, trembling like a leaf.

He was just an ordinary private in the 1st Battalion of the 32nd Infantry Regiment of the 24th Division. As a conscript worth only five cents, he simply did not have the courage to give up his precious life for the Greater East Asia Holy War.

Just two hours earlier, Takeuchi Takama, his village buddy who had always taken the best care of him, had died at the machine gun position. The squad leader Kameda, who had sent Takeuchi Takama to hold the machine gun post, had also died. His leg was blown off by a grenade, and he bled to death less than ten meters away from Takeuchi Takama.

Then, their position was shelled again.

When the shelling began, he was so shocked by the huge explosion that he bled from all seven orifices and fainted on the spot.

When he woke up again, he found himself buried under the ruins of half a bunker.

He struggled mightily to crawl out of a warm, sticky mixture of what he couldn't tell if it was his comrades or mud.

Then he saw the scene before him.

Squad leader Lieutenant Kameda, the guy who always had a stern face and liked to whip people with his belt, his upper body was missing, and only one leg was still wearing military trousers, stuck in the mud in a strange position.

His sergeant, the fat man who always smiled and showed him pictures of his daughter, was lying not far away, with a huge, bloody hole in his back, his intestines and internal organs spilling out onto the ground, still wriggling slightly.

As for the rest of the squad... Katsuhiko Nakata couldn't tell who was who anymore. Everywhere were mutilated, charred corpses and piles of indistinguishable pieces of flesh and blood.

The entire position seemed to have been thoroughly erased by a god with an eraser.

He was the sole survivor of the entire squad.

Just then, a deafening, thunderous battle cry came from the other side, a sound that made his very soul tremble.

He looked up in horror and saw countless earthen-yellow figures, like locusts emerging from the ground, swarming towards his position.

resistance?

Katsuhiko Nakata glanced at the Type 38 rifle in his hand, its barrel bent by the impact, and then at the battlefield around him, which resembled a slaughterhouse. An uncontrollable, primal fear gripped his heart instantly!
Fuck the empire! Fuck the emperor!
All he wanted was to live!

This was the only thought in his mind.

Before anyone noticed him, the only living person around, Katsuhiko Nakata practically tumbled and crawled out from the other side of the foxhole. Like a frightened rabbit, he scrambled across the cratered and corpse-strewn battlefield, keeping his body as low to the ground as possible.

He crossed a stream stained with blood, waded through a scorched field, determined his direction, and then, disregarding everything, ran desperately toward the faint outline of Xinxian County in the distance.

He became a deserter.

A shameful deserter on a collapsing defensive line, who abandoned all honor and responsibility in order to survive.

But he doesn't care.

He just wanted to get away from this hell, as far away as possible.

…………

Xinxian, a small town in northern Shanxi with a population of just over ten thousand during peacetime, had long been ravaged by the continuous warfare. Most of the residents had fled, leaving behind only empty houses and the troops of the invading army roaming the streets. On the western side of the county town, at the foot of a relatively secluded hillside, sat the medical team of the Japanese 24th Division.

Given the scarcity and scarcity of resources, as well as the lack of regard for the lives of soldiers, the Japanese military has historically invested very little in medical care.

Take the division as an example; the entire division only has about two or three hundred medical personnel.

At first glance, the number of people seems quite large, but once they are assigned to the regiments, battalions, or even companies below, the number becomes pitifully small.

Unlike large field hospitals directly under the army or front, division-level medical teams are much smaller, usually only a few hundred people. They are mainly responsible for providing the most urgent and initial treatment to the wounded coming from the front, and then transferring the seriously wounded to field hospitals in the rear.

This place is a huge transit station leading to the rear or hell.

At the heart of the medical team was a makeshift bandage station.

Haruko is a nurse at this bandage clinic.

"Ah...ah...it hurts! It hurts so much!"

A young Japanese soldier lay on a makeshift operating table, groaning in pain. A shrapnel had torn a deep gash in his thigh, exposing the bone. Blood had soaked through the thick gauze, staining his military trousers a dark red.

"Please be patient, it will be over soon."

Haruko kept comforting the wounded around her. Her voice was very soft, and her face, which was mostly covered by a mask, showed a trace of fatigue. Fine beads of sweat from her intense focus were also on her forehead.

At this moment, she skillfully used tweezers to pick up a cotton ball soaked in alcohol and carefully cleaned the blood and dirt around the soldier's wound.

Even through the thick hillsides and houses, the continuous, earthquake-like artillery fire coming from the front lines could still be clearly heard.

Each violent explosion caused the ground of the entire bandage camp to tremble slightly.

The air was filled with a strong, nauseating odor, a mixture of blood, disinfectant, sweat, and excrement.

The surrounding area was filled with wounded people lying on stretchers or on the ground.

Groans, cries, and curses uttered in agony rose and fell.

Haruko has been working here for more than 48 hours straight.

She couldn't remember how many wounded she had treated or how many times she had changed bandages. Due to continuous work, her hands had become red, swollen, and numb.

She had just finished bandaging the soldier's wound and hadn't even had time to straighten her aching back when an even more chaotic commotion erupted at the entrance of the bandage station.

"Quick! Get out of the way! Seriously wounded!"

Several medics stumbled in, carrying a stretcher. The person on the stretcher was less a "person" and more a mangled, rotting piece of flesh.

His limbs had all disappeared, and his entire torso was blown beyond recognition. Only his chest was still rising and falling faintly, proving that he was still alive.

Then, more wounded people poured in.

These people were extremely disorganized and had no sense of organization whatsoever. Many of the seriously wounded did not even have stretchers; they were simply helped in by their companions or dragged their broken bodies in step by step.

Many of them had tattered uniforms, their faces and bodies covered in soot and congealed blood scabs, and their eyes were vacant, filled with the terror of surviving a catastrophe.

"What's going on? Why are there so many wounded soldiers all of a sudden?" The medical team leader, a middle-aged military doctor, shouted at a medic wearing a cross armband who had just entered.

The medic's face was filled with fear, his lips trembled uncontrollably, and he stammered:

"The position... the position... has been... breached by the Chinese! It's all over! Everyone is gone!"

This news was like a bombshell, exploding throughout the entire bandage clinic!
All the nurses and doctors stopped what they were doing and stared in disbelief at the flood of wounded people pouring in through the door.

Haruko was stunned. Looking at the familiar or unfamiliar young faces, now all dismembered, a chill ran from the soles of her feet to the top of her head.

The cruelty of war, at this moment, struck her heart in the most direct and brutal way.

She even saw a young soldier who had greeted her with a smile yesterday and offered to treat her to candy from his hometown, now lying on the cold ground with his arm severed at the shoulder, blood gushing from the huge wound.

The soldier also saw Haruko. His mouth opened and closed as if he wanted to say something, but in the end he only made a series of "ho ho" sounds, like a broken bellows.

"Haruko... what are you standing there for! Come and help!"

The military doctor's roar snapped her out of her shock.

Haruko bit her lip sharply, took a deep breath to suppress the trembling in her heart, hurriedly grabbed a new roll of bandages, and rushed towards the soldier with the missing arm...

(End of this chapter)