[i]"Form on me! Form on me!" Victor leaned heavily on the flag's pole, the banner of Verrun hanging limping from it as though the enemy's bullets had torn the life from it. In many respects, it was no different from the hundreds of corpses that littered the glacis below. The sergeant tried to pull himself up again, slipping on the bloody mud beneath his boots. His one leg no longer obeyed like it should have. He suspected the spray of grapeshot and the accompanying pain had something to do with it. All the same, he gripped the slick wood with both hands while roaring to what survivors might hear him above the din of the battle. "Reform! To me! Onward!"

Only a handful of soldiers rallied to his cries. The rest of the Forlorn Hope were little more than bloody chunks of meat scattered along the glacis and up to the breach in the fortress walls, the luckiest of them blasted into unrecognizable lumps covered in blood and earth. The unlucky screamed and weep where they had fallen. Despite torn bellies and ripped limbs, those men still lived... for a while longer. The army's engineer's had judged the breach practical, telling the Verrun generals that they should be able to take and hold the opening long enough to force their way inside their opponents walls. They had been... wrong. The besieged had mined the glacis leading up to the walls and then mined the breach itself, moving some of their steam cannons from above the walls to behind them so that the Verrun soldier's first view of the fortress's interior would the muzzles of the cannon. There were no officers now. As far as Victor knew, he was the only non-com still standing as well. It was a disaster, a bloody fucking disaster, and nearly all of the Hope had paid the price for the city educated engineers' mistake.

Victor was not going down without one last effort, one last push to try and get into the fortress. Sheltered within the shadow of the wall's exterior, he could count less than a score of men still able and willing to answer his call and rally beneath the banner. They all looked to him now, frightened faces splattered with brown, black and red... oh so much red... Did they all have to look so damned young? Had any of them even learned to shave yet? Or had their wicks dipped by a whore? And why did they look to him now so eagerly with expressions that all said the same thing: 'We're not dead, are we, Sarge? We're going back now, right? You'll see us safe?' Those faces so desperate with hope twisted his guts, especially at the sight of them falling to despair as he spoke his next words.

"One more push, lads. We give it one more go. If we can secure it, the Sixth and Seventh of Foot and Twenty-Third Sharpshooters are right over that ridge. If they can see the banner in the breach, they'll come to reinforce us. Ten minutes, lads. We just have to hold ten minutes." It was ten minutes Victor was sure they would never get to see the end of.

"Sarge," some earnest young voice spoke up, "What about the cannons?"

Victor wanted to throttle that earnest young voice. "I'll take care of the cannon," he reassured them. "I've still got a few fuses left for the grenades. We charge in on my say-so. Form two ranks, front rank kneeling and just. Keep. Firing. Don't worry about aiming, just fire straight ahead." Sparing a hand to adjust the black leather kepi on his head, Victor then pulled out one of the canister grenades before edging himself to the very edge of the wall. The men followed close, hunched over but with rifles at the ready. They were the Forlorn Hope, the 'forgotten heap'. In Verrun's army, they were the first onto the field and the last off of it; it was unsaid that the second half of that statement was correct because the dead were always the last to be cleared away after a battle. Victor's heart was in this throat, sweat making his bloody grip upon the battle standard all the more tenuous. 

Before he could change his mind, Vincent gave a roar born of fear, defiance and pain. The flag pole's butt end was shoved into the rubble at an angle, then used to lever himself around into the middle of the opening where he was clearly exposed to both the enemy and the reinforcements hidden below. Grimacing in agony, he reared back his one arm to throw the grenade forward even as his men swarmed around him and forward. *Ten minutes* he thought in desperate panic. *How long is ten minutes? A good beer can last ten minutes, can't it? A quick tumble with a camp follower could take ten minutes. Coffee takes around ten minutes to boil, right? That isn't long, is it, to wait for a good cup of coffee?"

As the steam and smoke cleared in the late morning air, Victor realized that ten minutes was just the right amount of time for a score of men and a torn up sergeant to die as the cannons opened fire on them.[/i]

Victor woke up with a scream that was cut off as though he was struck by a sudden seizure. He was in his bed. In his home. In the orchard. Abordale. He panted these facts over and over to himself as he sought to banish the memory. Ten minutes. Ten minutes had cost him eighteen men... boys... Two others had lived, although the definition of 'life' was going to be questionable for one of them. His leg throbbed. Each twinge and twang inside of knee reminded him that he could have suffered far worse. They had taken the breach, taken the fortress... because it had all been a feint. The fortress had finally fallen not to the reinforcements that had never been behind the Forlorn Hope at all, but to an ariel bombardment that had come a few minutes later. Victor still had not idea how many of his men had died by friendly bombs. The Hope had been used as part of a ruse, a distraction. To make it all the more credible, they hadn't even been told.

Betrayed by his own leaders. Betrayed by his own duty to complete the job. Betrayed by the City of Verrun. 

Staring into the dark shadows of his home, Victor let silent tears fall.