Chapter 9: The Highest Form of Healing Is to Treat the Mind; The Supreme Tactic in Warfare Is to Conquer the Mind

The first day after crossing over had finally passed.

Lelouch was fully awakened by the thunderous cannon fire outside the cellar and found himself unable to fall back asleep. He reached into the chest pocket of his uniform and pulled out a pocket watch, glancing at the time by the faint light of the telegraph desk lamp.

It was only half past four in the morning.

Today was October 26.

The pocket watch had been given to him yesterday by Lieutenant Barrack of the cavalry, who had scavenged it from the body of an enemy officer while clearing the battlefield. It was said that the original owner was Colonel De Joka, commander of the 3rd Regiment of the 4th Division, who had been struck down by a direct hit from a 77mm field gun just yesterday evening.

From the intermittent cannon fire throughout the night, Lelouch could tell that the Franco-Belgian forces’ assaults came in relentless waves. Especially in the latter half of the night, the artillery fire from the Belgian side to the east intensified. If Colonel Lister’s analysis was correct, that meant Major General Victor’s 6th Belgian Division had finally arrived on the battlefield.

Victor would certainly not repeat the mistakes and pitfalls that the 4th Division of De Gisel had suffered just moments ago. Hoping that Colonel Lister could trick Victor’s artillery into a trap and annihilate them was nearly impossible. So the latter half of the night’s fighting was destined to be a brutal showdown, with neither side able to afford any flashy tactics—pure strength and willpower would determine the outcome.

Lelouch tidied himself up briefly and waited for a lull in the artillery barrage, a moment when the enemy’s current offensive had subsided. Only then did he open the cellar door and step outside to see if he could be of any help and to get some fresh air.

No more than a few dozen steps away from the cellar, he saw a row of makeshift huts hastily constructed from wooden planks salvaged from the ruins, leaned against a broken wall to create stable triangular cross-sections. Beneath them lay two long rows of wounded soldiers, sparse but stretching all the way to the street corner.

In the distance, several large bonfires burned brightly in the pre-dawn darkness, visible from several blocks away.

Unable to hold back, Lelouch stopped a passing medic carrying a medical kit and asked, “Aren’t those fires inviting artillery strikes?”

“That’s cremation,” the medic replied without recognizing him. “The people piling the corpses light the fires and then run far away.”

Lelouch stared at the pyres resembling funeral mounds for several seconds, deeply shaken. Each pile seemed to be burning nearly a hundred bodies.

He then looked toward the wounded soldiers on the other side—there were hundreds of them as well.

In just one night, the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 12th Division had lost nearly twenty percent of its strength!

A regiment of almost four thousand men had seen casualties numbering in the thousands.

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