Centennial

For those who know their history November 14th, 2018 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the First World War armistice.  Perhaps because this date is fast approaching, I had a strange dream in the middle of the night about trench warfare and tall, spindly machines.  Usually, I forget dreams soon after waking up, but this one has stuck with me.  I'm not sure what to make of it so I'll just relate the contents as a period-appropriate narration.  If nothing else it might be an interesting concept for a video game.

It involved long-legged machines walking across no-man's land.  These "land-striders" (or "landschreiter" in German) were hundreds of feet tall, so towering that their tops sometimes became obscured in low-hanging clouds.  Conversely, other times they gave the impression that they walked upon them when the ground was covered in fog (or worse - gas).  The legs of those machines were slender metal latticework, akin to construction cranes, that tapered down into narrow poles toward the base.  Armor plating protected the joints and locomotion to each was provided by a ingenious network of chains, gears, cables and winches connected to petrol engines mounted in the machine's underbelly.  On the upper works there were bristling arrays of machine guns, light artillery, field mortars, and flamethrowers backed by a garrison of sharpshooting riflemen.  Huge pennants streamed from the back proudly displaying national colors.  Thin wisps of black smoke vented out of protruding pipes along the sides and the hum of motors mixed with the rhythmic thudding of of their footfalls.  Each was painted in military colors respective to their country; German field grey, British khaki, and French horizon blue.

There were further variations.  Some were bipedal, others tripedal, but the biggest were the quadrupeds.  Due to their incredible stature land-striders could step into, out of, or over trenches and shell craters with ease.  Even swollen rivers and soft mud would only slow their gait a little.  Aircraft buzzed around them like angry flies and tanks would crawl out of the way like beetles desperate to avoid being crushed.  Tangles of barbwire, more often than not, became wrapped around their feet, but this only increased a land-strider's lethality.  Any infantrymen unlucky enough to get caught in their path could be flailed in a single colossal step.  Small arms were wholly ineffective and, despite their immense size, land-striders are surprisingly hard to hit with conventional artillery owing to their narrow profiles. All to often shellfire would pass harmlessly through their legs or, in the rare instance of an extremely well aimed shot, ricochet off their armor.  Damage or mechanical failures could also be repaired in the field by a team of acrobatic engineers, who would repel along every surface with ropes tied about their waists.  In fact, the only method of truely opposing a land-strider was with another land-strider.  When these monsters clashed it was like a Salvador Dali painting bent to war.  As the machines closed toward one another small black specs could sometimes be seen falling from them like fleas off an animal's back.  To the untrained eye one might speculate that they were simply shell casings or chunks of broken metal, but mixed in among such things were the bodies of men killed by bullets and shrapnel.

When land-striders duel, it was a common for both to limp away from battle battered but not broken.  However, now and then neither would back down and draw up so close that their upper works would collide.  An audacious officer clad in armor like a knight of old would gather men of the garrison into raiding party and with a cry they would throw a shower of grenades and board.  Close combat ensued with pistol, club and bayonet.  The objective was always the same - set fire to the enemy's hooded fuel tanks while protecting your own.  Once the flames appears there was no stopping them, and the only recourse for survivors was to leap into the open air and hope that the parachute on their backs opened properly.  Even if they didn't at least it was a quick death at the hands of gravity rather than a slow one from the burning heat.  Watching a land-strider topple over was both a horrifying and fascinating sight that ended in a ground-shuttering crash.  The corpses of those once great warmachines can still be found half-buried in the soil of many battlefields:

Between the triangular forts of Liege...
Half-hidden by the mists of Ardennes...
Along the river bridges of Mons...
In the forest marshes of Tannenberg...
On the floodplains of Ypres...

...and that's only in 1914.  There were four more years to go.