Aldo picked up a grenade launcher off a wounded young soldier, along with his ammunition; the adapter, which was like a cup at the end of the rifle, the special magazines of blanks, and the hand grenades, converted over to the purpose of firing. It was a cumbersome, "Pull the pin" type arrangement that kept the grenade in the cup with the spoon in place, which was a very important safety feature, but at least it was field functional. He knew the weapon, it wasn't well-thought of in most cases, but Aldo understood the maxim of 'any port in a storm.' Seeing the survivors of the attack that were wounded, young men and some women mangled, some crying piteously and some bleeding out in silence and seeming (but illusory) dignity was a shock to the system. He'd talked gently to the young man, assured him he was going to make it and got ahold of the boy's equipment, while hating himself for the expediency of that compassionate act, the coldness of it. And yet, the boy no longer needed the grenade launcher -- a leg was gone, and Aldo did.

It was, regrettably, without a sight -- it was a hastily designed thing put into service a couple decades ago but never replaced with a better version due to the typical budgetary issues that sometimes plagued the PAF -- the unwillingness to change too quickly and render equipment obsolete to the point where it needed replacing. The militia would have to be retrofitted, and that tended to retard certain developments.

Aldo wasn't about to complain too much -- it was more firepower. When Krebs gave the moveout order, he watched as the artillery barrage started to land, shooting up plumes of flame, smoke, debris, splinters...belching it into the air and bringing it back down with a fury. He could smell the explosives in the air, even over the diesel fumes of the tank he was moving up behind, with a pouch of rifle grenades held in a scrounged gas mask pouch, with the mask itself chucked as unwanted weight, where he could quickly get to them, read to be inserted into the cup launcher on his rifle. He'd quickly decided that counterattacks were no time to hump extra weight and had quickly divested himself of everything but the weapons, the webbing, the ammo and a single canteen-- the water he'd not drunk when he made the retreat. His medical kit was given to a field medic who insisted upon it, citing supply problems -- already? -- and he surrendered it with a perhaps naive faith that he might not need it or that someone else would surrender theirs for him. Or perhaps he couldn't leave it on his conscience. There wasn't precisely time to auto-psychoanalyze.

It was also a bad time to imagine what the artillery barrages were doing to mere flesh and bone if they were grinding up the countryside like that -- from meadow to mudsink in a matter of seconds, the terrain went from rolling, verdant hills that the sheep grazed upon to a churned up, shell-pocked hellscape of monotony and broken trees.

He was dirty, feeling gritty and caked with a film of sweat under the wool of his uniform. It was cool air, but he was sweating like a pig already and hating the feeling, from the back of his neck, his underarms all the way down to the crack of his ass. He did learn one thing about tanks -- the fumes made him light headed. He had a gas mask, but there was no way to see well with one on, and Aldo very badly wanted to see the enemy before the enemy saw him. He'd drilled in gas masks before, knowing that they impeded breathing and made fatigue worse as he felt the mud come up on his boots with every step, slowing the advance of the infantry and, surprisingly, the armor as well. Aldo had driven cars and motorcycles in such conditions, but was surprised by how much a tank lost in the process -- the weight made it worse.

But the fumes were getting to him, and the gas mask was unacceptable, though it rested in a pouch like the one where he had his grenades, so he tied a towel around his face, after a moment of digging through his web belt's gear. Now his eyes were tearing up, but at least he had something to cover his nose and mouth with as he made the advance -- he'd done what he could for comfort, even though the cynical part of him informed him that comfort, as he trudged through the churning mud to a likely violent end, should be the least of his concerns. 

And he didn't consider what the rest of the army might be doing, or what was going on even a hundred meters beyond where they were -- there was this field, that ridge, the farmhouse and the Holtish. There was no time beyond the attack, not anymore, just the focus on the one way, acceptable way, anyway, out of this attack. He'd have to fight through.

When Krebs glanced back to check on them, and the glance lingered on Aldo quizzically, Aldo hoisted the grenade launcher equipped G34 and patted his converted ammo pouch, since his expression was masked and there was no real way to shout over the diesel of the tanks -- the damned things were loud. He hoped that got the message across -- he'd scrounged up some firepower. He hoped it might make a difference in the odds.