Reincarnated: Vive La France

The ground near Alagón had been destroyed by weeks of movement.

What had once been cobbled streets and quiet alleys was now a group of barricades, sandbags, and broken buildings used for cover.

French armor tried to roll forward that morning three light tanks backed by infantry but the road buckled beneath the first, a mine exploding under its left tread.

The tank lurched sideways, its hatch flung open as the crew scrambled out.

Small-arms fire cracked from a church bell tower.

"Up top!" someone shouted.

A French soldier aimed a grenade launcher, fired.

The bell tower burst into dust.

Two bodies tumbled with the bricks.

Captain Luc Marchand crouched behind a corner, radio pressed to his ear.

"Snipers north quadrant. We're getting hit from dug-in civvies"

"Orders?" asked his second.

"We pull back. This isn't worth the armor we're burning."

They retreated two blocks and regrouped.

In a burnt café, a lieutenant watched the retreat and spat into the ashes.

"They're turning their towns into coffins."

Behind him, smoke drifted off shattered windows and half-hung laundry lines.

A body lay in the doorway, covered in a sheet someone had tried to nail into place.

South of Fraga, a freight train moved steadily down the resecured rail corridor.

It carried fuel, munitions, preserved food, and crates of medical supplies.

Two French guards leaned from the rear carriage, rifles slung, watching the track bend.

"You think they'll hit this one too?" one asked.

The other shrugged. "They already blew the last line. But this one's clear."

"Yeah? Tell that to God."

As the engine passed a small quarry siding, something rolled out what looked like an old coal cart.

The engineer barely had time to react before the blast lifted the engine into the air.

A rolling wave of flame cut through the middle cars.

Screaming followed.

Supplies tore through the air like shrapnel.

French soldiers from nearby outposts ran toward the smoke.

By the time they reached the wreck, more than twenty were dead.

Others staggered away, faces blackened.

Colonel stood at the site hours later.

His expression was unreadable.

"They've turned to sabotage," his aide said. "Local partisans. Guerrilla work."

"They're running out of army," he said, "so they become ghosts again."

He stepped around the wreckage and looked toward the next ridge.

"Ghosts don't hold ground. We do."

In the pine woods near Barbastro, a colonial regiment was ambushed near dusk.

The forest was still, too still, when the front scouts disappeared into the underbrush.

Suddenly, fire arced from the left tree line.

Molotovs burst against armored sides.

The flames caught brush, lighting the twilight.

French infantry fell back, ducking behind logs.

One soldier screamed as a burning branch landed on his leg.

The counterstrike came fast suppressing fire, grenades rolled blind through the trees, a bayonet charge ordered not from doctrine, but desperation.

The forest fell quiet again by nightfall.

Eighteen French dead.

Thirty-one wounded.

And in the clearing where they regrouped, a sergeant whispered.

"They're learning. That makes them dangerous."

At headquarters, maps were updated hourly.

France now held more than five hundred kilometers of Spanish soil.

From Navarra to Huesca, from the outer fringes of Zaragoza to the Aragon front, a solid line had formed.

A captain tapped the board. "The rail between Monzón and Leciñena is back online. Fuel flows unbroken."

"Casualties?" General Gamelin asked.

"Higher than projected. But morale is steady. Ground held increases daily."

In Burgos, Franco met with General Valdés behind shuttered windows.

"They're bleeding more," Valdés said. "But they never break."

"We bury roads. We poison wells. We slit the throats of their forward scouts and hang them by their boots outside churches."

Valdés stared at him.

Franco's voice was calm. "If they want Spain, they must choke on every inch."

Near the front, Carmen returned from a medic post.

The tent had been filled with men who'd survived the ambush at Barbastro.

One had lost his eye.

Another, his leg.

A third was writing with a bandaged hand, a letter to a wife that no longer had an address.

Carmen walked into the field HQ where

Moreau stood over his maps, alone, marking supply routes, roads, and elevation points.

Not city names.

Not targets.

But logistics.

"You're not pushing forward anymore," she said.

Moreau didn't look up.

"You have Zaragoza. You could strike Madrid. But you wait. You hold. You bleed slowly."

Still no answer.

"I've known you enough to believe this is caution."

She left him there, the lamplight flickering over his unreadable eyes.

By dusk, in a tent south of Zuera, Renaud found him.

The wind outside was high.

Moreau sat alone, coat half-buttoned, fingers stained with charcoal from drawing new movement patterns.

On the canvas before him were circles not for cities, but junctions.

Roads.

Bridges.

Communications lines.

Renaud didn't sit.

He walked slowly to the edge of the table and rested one hand on it.

"You taught us how to move fast," he said. "You taught us what silence and armor could do together. You have been moving like a knife. So why do we crawl now?"

No answer.

Renaud let the quiet stretch.

"You used to break with steel and silence. Now we bleed for every town with names no one remembers."

Still nothing.

Moreau's hand moved to circle a northern intersection with two pencil marks.

"You're planning something," Renaud said quietly.

He just observed.

Seeing no reply he turned to leave, but stopped in the flap of the tent.

"I know what's in your head, Moreau."

His voice was softer now.

"But at the end of it all, you'll have to decide what's more valuable. The victory you see or the people who follow you to it."

He left.

Moreau didn't move.

Outside, the trucks kept rolling.

New men arrived.

Older men left the front.

Supplies rotated like clockwork.

Engineers dug in deeper.

Signals ran through clean copper wire across valleys and hills.

The line was held by steel and sleep deprivation.

The air was colder now.

The ground was firmer, packed by boots that didn't know retreat.

The war moved forward.

But the man who once moved faster than all of them stood still.