Abandon All Hope

The hand-painted sign above the dugout read: “Abandon All Hope”.

The man standing in the trench outside narrowed his eyes as he read it and tutted to himself. The attention of the guards slouching on either side of the entrance remained dully fixed on the opposite trench wall. They offered neither salute nor greeting, instead radiating a kind of bone-marrow deep resentment.

The man took a deep breath, removed his cap and tucked it under one arm, ran a quick hand through his hair and ducked inside the dugout.

Half a dozen men squatted in the dank, dark squalor. Four were clustered about an upturned crate, with loose mounds of betting tokens and a set of three brass dice. A fifth man methodically ran a whetstone along his bayonet blade with fingernail-shrill slowness. The last lay half-sprawled on a cot, snoring loudly.

“Long live the empaaaaafuck!” The newcomer drew himself up, and promptly smacked the crown of his head on a low beam, drawing a startled curse as he clutched his scalp. The others watched him silently and expressionlessly, without so much as a smirk.

“I am the new Commissar, Gaius Volantis,” the man tried again, still rubbing his head. He squinted at the six in the gloom but could see no rank insignia. “Where is your Colonel?”

“Dead,” one man said, still hunched over the dice game.

“The Major then?”

“Dead.”

“The Captain?” Volantis asked through clenched teeth.

The one with the bayonet leaned over to nudge the leg of the sleeping man, who snorted, opened his eyes and pushed himself up on his elbows. He glared at the one who had woken him, who shrugged defensively and waved the bayonet in the Commissar’s general direction.

The Captain frowned and squinted. “What?”

“Commissar Gaius Volantis.” He saluted.

“Oh, you poor sod.”

“I—pardon?”

“Captain Gnomon. Welcome to the 997^th Combat Replacement and Attrition Platoon.”

“I—ah—I thought this was the 105^th Citadel—”

“We know what we are.” Captain Gnomon rummaged in the cot’s sheets, and came up with a slim silver flask, which he unstoppered and lifted to his lips with a contented sigh. He seemed surprised to find Volantis still there when he lowered it. “Is there anything else?”

“I am here to do my duty, Captain.”

“Try not to get killed. That should be your main duty. Won’t have time for much else.”

“There is the matter of morale,” Volantis said stiffly. “The sign above your dugout, for example.”

“Do you like it?”

“I hope you will take the matter more seriously. ‘Abandon hope’? A less generous man might view that as heresy.”

Gnomon rolled his eyes. “Oh, I’ve blasphemed again, have I?” He tipped a few drops from the flask into his palm, then splashed them over his forehead. “There, by these blessed waters I have been absolved.”

“Hope is the bedrock of courage. We must have hope in the Emperor’s—”

Gnomon laughed, short and dry. He thrust himself to his feet, clamped a hand about Volantis’s upper arm and steered him towards the dugout exit. “Let me show you something.”

They wound their way through snaking, slimy, slippery mud trenches, past clusters of hollow-eyed and gaunt-cheeked men more in rags than uniforms. Helmets were daubed with bullseye targets encouraging the foe to ‘Aim Here’, black camouflage grease was smeared thickly around eye sockets to turn living faces into skulls. Here and there dismembered and decomposing bodies lay half-submerged in the muck. Vermin wriggled underfoot or hissed and spat until Gnomon idly kicked them aside. He pulled a lho-stick from behind one ear, lit it and drew deeply.

“Captain Gnomon I have never seen such—”

“Where are you from, Volantis?” Gnomon kept walking.

“Er, Volantis.”

Gnomon threw a disbelieving smile over his shoulder. “They named the planet after you?”

“No, just the opposite.”

“Well, Commissar Opposite from Volantis, let me show you something else you’ve never seen.”

“Where are we going, Captain?”

“Almost there.”

A short spur of trench jutted from the main line, ending in a plascrete and sandbagged culvert where a squad of men huddled around black, insectile antennae and ridged periscopes that undulated like vertebrae.

“Sergeant Dioptra,” Gnomon called. “Let the new lad have a look.”

One of the troopers shuffled aside from the periscope eyepieces. Gnomon tilted his head towards it. “Well, go on then,” he said to Volantis.

Volantis pushed his cap back a little on his forehead, leaned forward and fitted the eyepieces. He filled with the magnification for a moment. Green-hued images blurred and wavered and resolved into coherence. He sucked a sharp breath.

“Count the flags,” Gnomon said behind him, then laughed. “No, don’t. Waste of time. Too many.”

“Are they—”

“Battle standards? Yes. One for each tribe. There’s one that cuts the genitalia from the dead and nails them to a pike. The ‘dicks on a stick’ tribe, we call them. Hard to miss. Then there’s usual assortment of skulls and bones. A kind of wind-sock pennant made out of the rotting intestinal tract of some type of leviathan. Another that seems to be a gigantic cancer tumor, just a massive swollen ball of diseased, still-living tissue. The greenskins can be creative when they put their maggoty minds to it.”

Volantis swallowed hard, and stepped back from the periscope. His hands visibly shook as he readjusted his cap.

“I trust our little slogan makes more sense to you now?”

“The Emperor protects,” Volantis said, drawing shaky breaths. “We must not lose hope.”

“Hope for what?” Gnomon blew a derisive stream of smoke high into the air. “For victory? What does that even mean? I, personally, Captain Thales Gnomon, will never live to see any kind of victory. This is a war the Imperium has been fighting for ten thousand years. It isn’t going to be over any time soon. Hope for survival? Compared to its initial strength, this regiment has taken 326% casualties in this season’s campaigning alone. You understand—2,608 dead or wounded, against an on-paper strength of 800 men. We should install revolving doors at each end of the trench to slide the live ones in, the dead ones out. No, Commissar. Clutching at hope will only lead you deeper into despair. The only way to function here is to accept your death as inevitable."

He tossed the stub of his lho-stick into the mud, and ground it with his boot heel.

“We don’t fight because we think there’s a chance we’ll win,” he said. “We fight because…” A shrug. “Well, you’ve seen them. What else are we going to do?”