Reincarnated: Vive La France

The rocks of Bolea were blackened from older wars, the kind no one remembered clearly anymore.

The ridge overlooked a narrow road through the low hills, with just enough space for a convoy, just enough elevation for a trap.

Franco's men had learned.

They weren't running this time.

Captain Valdés crouched behind a fallen wall, watching.

His field gun crews had already ranged the approach.

Sandbags were stacked in overlapping lines. Snipers were dug into slits between old stones.

They'd studied the French tempo how they advanced, how their recon units worked.

"They'll come before noon," Valdés muttered.

His lieutenant checked his watch. "If they stick to pattern, yes."

"When they do, we show them we're not the same fools from Jaca."

At 11:13, the sound came, low and steady.

Engines.

French armored trucks rolled into view.

Behind them, half-tracks carrying infantry, their rifles slung lazily, unaware.

In the center truck, Sergeant Leclerc leaned his head against the side panel.

"Quiet today," he said.

Corporal Blaise, barely twenty, adjusted his helmet. "Maybe we outran them again."

"Or maybe they're waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"For us to feel safe."

Ahead, the road narrowed into the kill zone.

Valdés waited. "Not yet. Let the second vehicle pass."

The trucks rolled deeper.

French scouts walked ahead, scanning with bored eyes.

Then the first gun fired.

Not a rifle an old field piece, hidden under netting.

The shell hit the third vehicle.

It lifted off the ground and split, sending its gunner flying in a trail of smoke and limbs.

"Ambush!" someone shouted.

Machine guns opened from the ridge, tracing bullets across the road.

Two Frenchmen dropped trying to dive behind a tree.

Another clutched his leg, screaming into the dust.

Sergeant Leclerc dove behind the nearest wheel well. "Radio back! Cover left!"

"They're dug in!" shouted Blaise, crawling to a ditch. "We need smoke!"

White canisters hissed across the road, blooming fog like breath in cold air.

Through it, French units regrouped fast.

A flank team peeled off toward the right slope while engineers dropped prone to patch together a forward gun emplacement.

A French lieutenant shouted, "Colonials forward! Take the ridge!"

Hadj Ben-Kacem's Algerian shock troops rushed the left edge, zigzagging between stone walls.

Two fell.

The rest made it to the first trench, where flamethrowers hissed and the air turned into screaming heat.

Valdés fired his pistol once, then dropped it when the blast cracked the wall above his head.

A grenade rolled into his nest.

He tried to throw it back but wasn't fast enough.

When the smoke cleared, the ridge was taken.

Dead littered both sides.

Twenty-eight Frenchmen, dozens more wounded.

The Francoist line had lost nearly a hundred, but they'd made them bleed.

Back at a mobile French field post, the wounded were laid on canvas stretchers.

A nurse cut open a uniform sleeve with shaking hands.

"You need water?" a soldier asked her.

She shook her head. "They shot medics. We didn't mark our backs this time."

Near the radio truck, Colonel stood silently.

"They're fighting better," someone said.

He nodded. "They're learning."

That night, the French began rotating their front-line units.

For the first time since the invasion began, men were sent back from the line not because of injuries but exhaustion.

Private Martin sat on a crate, staring at his hands. "I saw a boy younger than me bayoneted in a trench."

Sergeant walked past. "Good. You'll fight harder next time."

Martin didn't answer.

Elsewhere, the roads turned deadly.

Franco's men had abandoned open engagement.

Now they fought dirty.

They rigged bridges with explosives, set bombs in wine barrels, and left mines in irrigation ditches.

French engineers adapted clearing ahead, moving slower.

But it slowed the advance.

In a small town west of Casbas, an abandoned train station became a death trap.

A French scout unit entered without caution.

They found Nationalist sharpshooters on the rooftops and tripwires laced through the hall.

The explosion took out eight men.

The follow-up fire killed four more.

Lieutenant Rousseau cursed into the radio. "Casbas is not soft. We need a full push."

Three hours later, the push came.

It started with artillery six batteries firing in tandem.

The sky above Casbas turned into a dust sheet.

Windows shattered.

Doors broke inward.

Then came the infantry, moving in three waves.

First through the orchard fields, then over the dry canal, then into the streets.

Franco's men didn't break.

They fought from windows, basements, butcher shops.

They shot down from belltowers and vanished into alleyways.

French soldiers called it "hell in stone."

Sergeant Leclerc kicked open a bakery door and was met with rifle fire.

The bullet grazed his helmet.

He fell backward, laughing.

"They're good now," he shouted. "They're good!"

His squad cleared the building room by room.

They lost two more before securing it.

In the main square, a French tank rolled over a barricade and was hit by a molotov.

Fire licked up its sides.

The driver panicked and reversed into a fruit stand, crushing a Francoist fighter hiding beneath.

Corporal Blaise limped across the square, dragging a wounded comrade.

"We need medics!"

"No, you need to move!" shouted an officer. "Casbas is ours only when no one's left to shoot!"

It took six hours to clear the town.

When the dust settled, sixty-four French were dead.

More than two hundred Spanish on the other side.

But the flag that flew above the shattered town hall was French.

That evening, Moreau arrived on foot.

He looked at the pile of rifles being stacked outside the hospital tent.

Carmen followed him.

"This isn't a march anymore," she said.

"No," Moreau replied. "Now they believe in their side again."

"They should."

Moreau looked at the French wounded laid under tents. "And we should remember that this is war, not salvation."

"They'll keep dying," Carmen said. "Whether we win or not."

He nodded. "So we make sure it costs less to end it than to prolong it."

In the north, Franco sat with General Valdés in a dugout.

"You made them stop," Franco said.

Valdés lit a cigarette. "For an hour. Then they learned."

"You took down three of their carriers."

"They brought nine more."

Franco leaned forward. "Then we bring the war to their side."

Valdés laughed bitterly. "With what? Half-trained conscripts and field guns from the last monarchy?"

Franco didn't answer.

Instead, he circled another town on the map.

"Let them bleed," he said. "If we can't break them, we wear them."

At a rear French camp, soldiers sat eating cold bread and cheese.

One passed a letter to another.

"It's from my sister. She says the papers say we're heroes."

"Heroes?" the man laughed. "She ever clear out a trench in the rain?"

"No. But she's proud."

The first man grew quiet. "So am I. But this... this isn't what I thought."

Another soldier nearby joined in. "No one's cheering in Casbas. They're dead in Casbas."

Silence settled.

Finally, the sergeant barked, "Eat. Rest. Tomorrow we move."

At dawn, the fog was heavy again.

Trucks rolled down the new corridor fuel, shells, bandages, radios.

Engineers laid wire across farmland.

Near the ridge at Bolea, a French captain stood surveying the field.

He stepped on something a discarded Spanish helmet, cracked and burned.

He looked down at it, then up at the hills.

"Stone and fire" he whispered.

Behind him, the columns moved forward again.

No one cheered.

No one shouted.

They just kept walking.