Ludendorff fumed as he returned the salutes of a pair of sentries guarding a fortified bunker deep in German-occupied Belgium. It had been a long drive and he had been delayed several times. On one level that could be amusing, given who he was. But he was not amused.
Pushing open the door, he entered the bunker. The ceiling was low, and the members of the War Council stirred as he made his appearance.
“You were absent at the Council meeting, General,” Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg said by way of greeting.
With concealed fury, Ludendorff glared at him. “I see you’ve begun negotiating the terms of the Armistice.”
“On the Kaiser’s behalf,” von Hindenburg said pointedly.
“On your insistence.” Ludendorff addressed the rest of the council. “We can easily win this war still, if only you have faith.”
As if to forbid any discussion, von Hindenburg rose to his feet and said, “We don’t. There are shortages of food, medicine, ammunition. Every hour we delay costs thousands of German lives.”
“One attack,” Ludendorff said with emphasis, “and the war is ours. As we speak, my chemist and her team are…”
The general field marshal cut him off with a wave of his hand. “We stand against you and your witch, Ludendorff! Enough!” Von Hindenburg gathered his dignity and continued in a more moderate tone. “Twenty-four hours from now this war will end. It is over.”
Ludendorff looked von Hindenburg in the eye, then the other generals one by one. I gave you a chance, he told them silently. You have sealed your fates with your cowardice.
“It is over for you. For all of you,” he said.
With that he turned on his heels and exited the bunker. Outside the door, he gave the signal for Dr. Maru to proceed. She opened the door a crack and tossed in a canister of gas. Ludendorff stopped her from shutting the door. Leaning in as the metal cylinder rolled along the wooden floor and came to rest under the table at von Hindenburg’s feet, he threw in a gas mask. He and Dr. Maru watched the eyes of the general field marshal and the members of the War Council follow the arc of the mask to the floor. Then he slammed the door and put his back against it, holding it shut.
The canister exploded with a dull thump. Poison gas billowed into the small space and sounds of coughing and fighting came from inside the bunker.
“The mask won’t help,” Dr. Maru reminded him.
“Yes, but they don’t know that,” Ludendorff said. They both laughed.
Instead of rushing the door to get out, the choking men were wasting precious seconds battling over a mask that would save no one. The irony was delicious.
Perhaps finally realizing that, the men trapped inside threw themselves at the door, but they could not budge it. Their screams of pain and betrayal grew more and more faint, until all that could be heard was the steady hissing of the canister.
Dr. Maru watched through a window, transfixed by the effect of her creation. The beautiful biology of it, the chemical reactions that to her were nothing short of miraculous. This, her first field test, had produced precisely the intended result. She laughed with delight.
Ludendorff reached into the pocket of his great coat and took out a small glass capsule of an altogether different sort of gas—another of her inventions. He cracked it open between his thumbs and deeply inhaled the contents. The effect was a blinding rush of energy and power. It made his veins swell and pulsate, and for an instant his eyes bulged as if they would pop from their sockets. He had come to crave the sensation, and this blend was even more potent than the last one. She had not shirked in her duty to him.
If only I had possessed this elixir long ago, he thought. Then he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away, though she was loath to leave until she had confirmed a one-hundred-per-cent kill rate “Let’s go. It’s time to stage our demonstration for the Kaiser,” he said.
* * *
The sun was just breaking over the tree tops as Diana and the team advanced down a narrow unpaved road. The Chief was in the lead, his eyes searching the ground ahead. “You’ll want to walk behind me,” he told Diana.
“And why is that?” she said, challenging him.
The Chief stopped and gestured for Charlie to hand him his beer bottle—Charlie and Sammy were having beer for breakfast. Charlie shook his head, clutching the bottle to his chest. Sammy handed his over without protest. The Chief then hurled the bottle in a high arc. It landed about a hundred feet ahead of them, bounced once, then bounced again. When it hit the ground a second time, there was a loud explosion and a puff of smoke.
Everyone ducked as bits of hot metal sang overhead and clipped small branches off the trees on both sides of the road.
“That’s why,” Steve said. He went on to explain that the Germans had put land mines on many of the roads, this to keep their forces from being flanked by the English and their allies.
Diana fell into line behind him. She nodded at the Chief, who had once again resumed walking. “He’s not frightened of death?” she asked.
“Chief says he’s had a vision,” Sammy said. “He doesn’t die in this war. He goes to Russia and drinks vodka with the Tsar.”
Diana glanced at Steve and shook her head. “And you think I’m crazy.”
Steve cracked a smile.
* * *
The hell of war.
Ochre clouds, rusted farm tools, broken bricks in piles.
The sound of Diana’s heartbeats melded into the clatter of gunfire, the boom of cannon, and the flat crack of distant explosions. The muddy field they were traversing offered scant cover, and bullets whined close overhead. Diana kept her eyes on Steve’s boot soles as he trudged ahead of her. As they advanced in a daisy chain, the team shambled through a sloppy furrow in the muck.
The gunfire wasn’t aimed at them. Both sides were dispiritedly firing back and forth at each other across a wasteland of devastation at least a quarter-mile wide. The desiccated tree trunks gave testament to the fact that this once had been part of a forest. Occasionally there would be a scream as a soldier was hit, in the deep trenches cut into the plundered, exhausted earth.
“What is this?” Diana asked Steve.
“You wanted me to take you to the war. This is it. Front lines,” he said grimly.
They climbed down a ladder into another world. The bottom of the trench was clogged with muddy-faced Tommies—British soldiers. Some were so covered that their eyeballs looked unnaturally white, their mouths and tongues red as raspberries. Charlie and Sammy joined them. Flurries of bullets nipped at the sandbags along the top of the ditch, and shells screamed down from high overhead, exploding in the muddy field so close that they made gobs of blown-up mud pour down on them. It was difficult to hear—and to think—because of the repeated, violent concussions. A red sign read:
DO NOT STAND ABOUT HERE. EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT HIT SOMEONE ELSE WILL BE.
“Where are the Germans?” she asked.
Charlie hooked a thumb towards the source of all the incoming small arms and shellfire. “Couple hundred yards that way. In a trench just like this one.”
The Chief waved for them to follow him. Diana and the others began to move through a seemingly endless narrow passage carved deep into the earth. Clumps of soldiers, obviously exhausted, sat on crates or leaned against sand bags. The wounded were laid out on stretchers, the lucky few wrapped in soggy blankets.
One of the soldiers brightened as he saw them approach. “Chief!” he exclaimed. He shouted the news down the trench. “Oi! Chief’s back!”
A pair of officers rushed up to greet him. One of them said, “Chief, welcome back. In the nick of time!”
The Chief reached into his coat’s deep pockets and began passing out packs of cigarettes, matches, and candy to the grateful soldiers. Despite his introduction to Diana as a smuggler, he waved off their offers of money. Gentleness and sympathy softened his features as he gave all he could to the warriors, some of whom accepted his kindnesses with tearful eyes. Diana’s heart filled with compassion; this suffering and privation must end.
“All right. Let’s move,” Steve said.
Then Diana heard what sounded like a woman weeping.
A young mother holding her daughter rushed forward, beseeching the Chief in French. Standing by, Steve clearly didn’t understand what was being said, but Diana did.
“The Germans took everything—homes, food—and the ones who couldn’t escape they took as slaves,” the distraught mother reported.
“Where did this happen?” Diana asked her.
The woman pointed beyond the trench, into the indeterminate distance.
Diana turned to Steve. “We need to help these people.”
Steve looked across no man’s land and shook his head. “We need to stay on mission.”
The Chief agreed with Steve. “And there’s no safe crossing for a least a day away.”
Charlie took his flask from under his jacket and knocked back a quick swig. “Then what are we waiting for?” he said as he screwed back the top.
“We cannot leave without helping them. These people are dying,” Diana said. “They’ve nothing to eat. And in the village—enslaved, she said. Women. Children.”
Steve faced her. “This is No Man’s Land, Diana, which means no man can cross it. This battalion has been here for more than a year and they barely gained an inch because on the other side there is a bunch of Germans pointing machine guns at every square inch of this place. This is not something you can cross. It’s not possible.”
Diana gave his argument no credence. “So what? So we do nothing?”
“No. We are doing something,” he reminded her. “We just can’t save everyone in this war. This is not what we came to do.” His expression was earnest. She knew it cost him to say it—that he had had to harden his heart in order to press forward with his mission. But her heart was not hard, and she did not believe that the heart of an Amazon could become so. She had been created to bring harmony to the world—not to turn her back on it. So be it.
Diana turned away from Steve to prepare herself for battle. When she faced him again, her hair streamed free over her shoulders and she had put on Antiope’s headband. Beneath her cloak her shield was strapped to her back, and her lasso hung from the right side of her waist.
“No, but it’s what I’m going to do.” She moved past the astounded team, climbing up the trench ladder. As she ascended, she dropped her cloak, revealing the armor she had taken from the armory on Themyscira—a crimson breastplate of the same metal as her tiara, a golden waistband, her short Greek warrior skirt in blue, gauntlets, metal foot guards and shin guards, and leggings that came up past her knees. Steve, the Chief, Charlie, Sammy, and the Tommies in the trench looked at her in astonishment—and awe.
She reached the muddy verge and readied herself for action, finding the core of strength inside herself.
The power.
“Diana!” Steve cried.
She stepped onto the battlefield and surveyed the ground ahead. Her armor gleamed against the colorless stretch of No Man’s Land—the Princess of Themyscira, defender of the people, majestic, magnificent. Driven by compassion and her commitment to justice to save the villagers of this town.
On high alert, she strode down the space separating the trenches—a quiet, lifeless plain of mud and shell craters, empty except for the coils of barbed wire attached to wooden crosses that stretched across the hell-blasted landscape. They were meant to ensnare soldiers as they tried to advance and make them easy targets for the waiting machine guns. With each step Diana took, her foot squished into the ooze.
From the German trench opposite there was a quick flash. A soldier had fired at her. She tracked the bullet as it crossed No Man’s Land at a crawl, and when it came close enough for her to see it spinning, she swatted it aside with her bracelet. The bullet zinged off at a steep angle and it was only then, what seemed like an eternity later, that the sound of the distant shot caught up to the action. There was another flash from the same spot. Another block as the projectile slammed into her bracelet.
From the trench behind her she heard Charlie exclaim, “How the hell’d she do that?”
Diana continued to stride across the battlefield; at every step she met and deflected new bullets. The flashes from the opposing trench were constant and spread out in a line thirty yards wide. The Germans thought they had an easy target; they thought they had a chance to take her down. But they were wrong.
With each impact Diana learned more about absorbing the force directed at her. She walked as the fusillade ricocheted off her gauntlets. What they sent at her, deflected back in a torrent that stitched along the sandbags on the trench’s rim. Her pace began to quicken, a fast walk, then a trot, then she started to run. Over the rattle of gunshots, Diana heard Steve’s shout.
“She’s taking all their fire!” he said. “Let’s go!”
Without hesitation, Steve led the others over the top, leaving the stupefied British soldiers behind. The Germans were determined to hit Diana; she raced for the German lines, making the staccato tack-tack-tack stream of bullets spark off her bracelets. Nothing could stop her, nothing could even slow her. She ran faster and faster, straight into the teeth of the storm of lead.
Out of her line of sight, panicking German soldiers, unsure who or what she was, lifted a mortar into position. As their comrades fired shot after shot until their gun barrels glowed red, the mortar team rained high explosive warheads down on the lone sprinting figure.
To the others on the battlefield who were seeing and hearing events in real time, the mortar shells screamed in a high soprano as they fell on their target. To Diana, they moaned in a baleful baritone. She used her shield to bat them away, and they exploded in the mud on either side of her.
She was within two hundred feet of the German trench when a heavy machine gun opened fire on her from a fortified nest on her right. She blocked the barrage of bullets with her shield, ducking her head behind it and driving forward with her shoulder.
A second machine gun opened fire from the other side. She continued to advance, but the sheer force of all the bullets striking her shield slowed her to a crawl, her feet slipping in the mud. She dropped to one knee, protected by her shield from the hail of bullets, and glanced behind her.
Steve and his team were crossing the field, closing the gap. Steve rushed up and took cover in parallel a few hundred yards away from her. They exchanged glances, comrades in arms, defenders of the people. He had a warrior’s heart, like hers.
Steve shouldered his repeating shotgun and fired. He pumped the slide and fired again and again. Buckshot swept across the front of the German trench, knocking the soldiers back. She could hear the pellets ping! as they slapped against steel helmets and the smack! as they struck flesh and bone. Steve’s shotgun blasts gave her a bit of breathing room, but the machine guns still had her pinned, pouring lead against the front of her shield, trying to find a weak point and exploit it.
Charlie used his sniper rifle to lay down covering fire as the Chief tossed Sammy a hand grenade. Sammy pulled the pin, picked his target, released the safety, and pitched the bomb overhand at the machine gun nest on Diana’s right. It was a long throw, but perfectly aimed and timed. The Mills bomb landed next to the MG 08 and before the soldiers manning it could move, it exploded in a bright flash and puff of gray smoke. The blast knocked the weapon off its base, and sent the Germans flying in all directions.
The Allied forces rose out of the trenches, shooting as they charged after Diana, Steve, Sammy, the Chief, and Charlie, freed from years of fruitless struggle. The second machine gun continued to unleash sustained fire on Diana, hammering her shield, but it lacked the force to hold her down. She rose from her crouch and began to run, taking the full brunt of the automatic fire as she picked up more and more speed, closing on the enemy position. When she was fifty feet away she jumped high into the air, leapfrogging over the sandbag fortifications. The gunner kept firing—at empty space. The German soldiers’ upturned faces as she descended were full of shock and horror. The shock was only beginning. She landed in the middle of the machine gun nest. Spinning in a blur, Diana used her shield like a bludgeon, smashing it down on the machine gun, breaking it in two.
“Steve, let’s go!” she cried, leaping back out of the trench.
On either side of her, the allies poured into the enemy trench. The din of gunfire was one-sided. The Germans fell into a frantic retreat down the narrow passage, abandoning their wounded comrades and in some cases their own weapons, trying to avoid being overrun by the mass of British troops.
Diana turned toward the village of Veld, which lay on the far side of enemy lines, beyond a low hedge row. Leaving the Tommies to clear the area of combatants and hold ground, Diana took off through the cold, slanting rain and the sucking black mud, heading straight for the village. Steve, the Chief, Sammy, and Charlie raced after her.
Diana advanced to the edge of the little town. The buildings that faced them were pocked with bullet and cannon holes. A lot of the windows were missing glass and boarded up. The cobblestone streets and the sidewalks were covered with mud and the debris of battle: pieces of masonry blown off the facades, broken glass, scraps of wood, and shell casings from thousands of spent bullets. The villagers had vanished; there was no one left to clear it away.
As she advanced, gunfire roared at her from second-story windows on the far side of the street and from ground-floor doorways on that side. Bullets gnawed holes in the brick walls behind her and sparked off the cobblestones at her booted feet.
She raced towards the gunfire, sword at her side, shield on her back. It seemed that every bullet fired at her made her stronger, quicker, more agile. Her power was growing and it felt amazing, as if there was no end to it, as if she was tapping into something immeasurably vast, as if she was a conduit for an elemental force.
She didn’t bother slapping the incoming bullets aside—she dodged them. Moving at tremendous speed, she outran the blast effects of the grenade explosions. She traversed the entire gauntlet of small arms and grenade fire without receiving so much as a scratch and yet the street was choked with swirling clouds of cordite smoke.
Diana took off running to build up speed, then sprang ten feet in the air. She hit the side of a building and vaulted off of it. Using the full power of her legs, she jumped even higher. High enough to crash through a second-story window in the building opposite where most of the concentrated gunfire was coming from. She landed in a crouch in a stripped room with a rough wooden floor, in the middle of a group of armed German soldiers. Before they could raise and aim their rifles at her, she kicked a heavy table that screeched across the floor and slammed into two of the soldiers, pinning them against the wall.
Unable to believe their own eyes, the terrified Germans began firing at her at close range. She ducked under the slow-moving bullets, some of which sailed past and hit the soldiers behind her. Their bodies fell to the floor.
A soldier snapped his rifle across her back; it shattered and she kicked him through the window. She moved so fast that sparks flew from the soles of her boots. She skidded across the floor on her knees and slammed a soldier with her shield, flipping and twirling high into the air, an Amazon in full-strength combat mode. Sword and shield, fists and legs, she threw kicks and punches to clear the rooms. She swept the feet out from under a soldier and before he, too, hit the ground she swung her shield, batting him like a ball through the broken window.
Diana was like a whirlwind in their midst, a force of nature that could not be stopped. The surviving soldiers backed away with empty hands, then broke for the door.
Diana heard the receding bootfalls of the men who had escaped. She raced out of the room and down a narrow hallway. The Germans were still shouting at each other. Then they suddenly went silent. But she had already honed in on the source of the sound. It lay behind a heavy wooden door.
No doubt they were ready for her on the other side. Or thought they were.
Bracing her feet, she threw herself shield-first at the door and shattered it like a cannon shot, sending splinters and sawdust flying around her as she burst through the doorway. The room full of Germans attacked her as one, using their steel-shod rifle butts as clubs.
They didn’t realize that she, not they, had the advantage, but that quickly became all too evident. They were too slow and too weak to keep up with her. She swung her shield left and right, using the edge to crush the sides of their helmets. The impacts snapped their heads back and sent them toppling to the floor. They tried to raise their rifles against her, but, with fists and feet, she beat them to the floor before they could get off a single shot.
And when she finished, there were only two people left standing in the room.
Running full tilt, she hit the last soldier in the chest with her shoulder, driving him backwards. The impact’s momentum carried them both across the room and through the glass of a big window. For a second they were soaring, then she landed on top on the roof one level below and raced from rooftop to rooftop toward the center of the town.
As she ran, she looked for Steve and the others, but they were not yet there. But she was confronted with an unexpected arrival: an armored tank, roaring toward her on its steel treads, maneuvering its 57 mm cannon to bear. Diana jumped down from the high rooftop like it was stair step. She lowered her head and headed toward the tank.
The tank shot; Diana deflected the cannon fire with her shield, then dropped it as she charged the tank. And it yielded. The bonds of gravity, the inertia of its thirty-six tons, none of that mattered. She flipped the tank. It went flying end over end across the town square, and as it did, pieces of it sailed into the air; the steel treads snapped off. The soldiers who had stood behind it were suddenly without cover themselves.
At the moment, she became aware that Steve and the team had arrived, and were seizing the opportunity to advance. They poured fire on the Germans who, instead of standing and fighting, ran for the square’s nearest exit. The ones caught flat-footed absorbed multiple hits and fell where they stood. Steve waved for the team to follow him. They chased the soldiers down the street, firing on the run.
* * *
Steve sent the others to free the prisoners and burst into the square beside Diana. She was surrounded by German soldiers who were firing at her from all sides. She blocked their bullets with her bracelets, moving in blur, spinning, ducking.
He pulled the pins on a pair of grenades. A handful of Germans was shooting at Diana from behind a crumpled armored car. Steve underhanded one of the grenades, skipping it over the pavement and under the car. When it exploded, the soldiers were trapped between the side of car and the wall of the building.
The blast stunned the other soldiers in the square. They stopped firing and looked at the armored car, which had burst into flames. The Germans firing from behind the fountain stood up to get a better view. Steve lobbed the second grenade in a low arc that ended in the middle of the ruined fountain. When it exploded it sent not only shrapnel flying, but pieces of masonry that cut down the soldiers like a scythe.
Diana smiled at him as they moved in unison.
More soldiers poured into the square. One of them started climbing up the ladder to the village bell tower. Steve fired at him, but he was out of the shotgun’s effective range. Diana charged into the German reinforcements, snatching them off their feet and throwing them like rag dolls, bouncing them off the sides of the buildings, off the sidewalk.
Steve looked over his shoulder; a German was aiming a rifle at him and others were closing in. The soldier’s finger was already curled around the trigger. Before he could fire, Diana was on him. She tore the gun from his hands and, swinging it by the barrel, broke the butt stock over the top of his helmet, putting a deep dent in the steel pot, driving the man into the ground like a tent stake. Whipping out her lasso, she snared one of the others by the foot, jerked him off his feet, then used his body as a sledge hammer, swinging him around and around, and smashing him into his slack-jawed comrades.
Covering the town square, they fought together, moving in concert, each reinforcing and supporting the other. Diana unleashed her lasso, using it to wrangle the soldiers, spinning them, as Steve laid down covering fire. Lessons they had learned together on the beach of Themyscira and in the trenches of No Man’s Land— combining strengths, adopting each other’s strategy and tactics—proved the advantage as they fought for the freedom of the village.
Fierce volleys barked as more Germans entered the square and once again Diana deflected bullets with her bracelets. She and Steve worked side by side, she blocking, he shooting. He saw the rest of the team hurrying into the square to back them up, taking position along a row of storefronts. Suddenly Diana jumped behind Steve and thrust up her hand. The bracelet knocked aside a shot that came from above them. That was intended for his head.
Steve looked up and pointed. “Bell tower,” he said. He could see the sniper at the top of the tower. No one in the square was safe.
“Charlie?” he said, motioning for the man across the square to take the shot.
Charlie dropped the safety on his rifle and leaned against the building’s wall, peering through his telescopic sight. His hands were shaking and he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. Sweat began to pour down the sides of his face. Seconds passed. More seconds. He could feel Sammy staring at him. He put the crosshairs on the German silhouette crouched below the bell.
But he couldn’t squeeze the trigger. He was frozen in place, captured by his own fears as surely as if he had been taken prisoner.
The soldier’s weapon flashed again, and the round hit the sidewalk in front of him. Then bullets were flying down at Sammy and the Chief. All three were pinned where they stood.
“You don’t miss,” Sammy said.
“Bloody scope,” Charlie said. “Lens is cracked.”
When Sammy tried to get a look at it, Charlie covered it with his hand. It was not the scope, of course. It was him. He had cracked.
* * *
Diana watched Steve rise from cover, then duck back as a bullet from the sniper zipped by his head. There was no way to return fire from their position.
Diana looked up at the tower, gauging the distance between herself and the target. Frustrated, she told him, “It’s too high.”
Then Steve spotted the tank door, which had blown off. He remembered Antiope’s heroic leap on the beach. He said to the team, “Follow me. Give me some cover. When I say ‘go’ lift hard.”
They did as he asked, and the four of them raised up the sheet of metal as Steve called, “Diana! Shield!”
She understood at once. With a running start, she thrust her feet against the angled surface as they hefted it hard and she soared into the air. She rocketed up, and farther up, and crashed into the bell tower. It seemed to hover in space for a second, and then it tumbled down in huge waves of bricks and mortar, metal and glass, utterly demolished.
A roar went up from directly below her. The townspeople had emerged from hiding and gathered to cheer her heroic victory and their restored freedom. Diana looked down at them from the great height. She could see Steve looking up at her with awe.
Thank you, Antiope, she thought. What I did today, I dedicate to you.
* * *
The jubilant townspeople surrounded their liberators, shaking Diana’s hand, thanking the group for saving their lives. One of the villagers was a photographer and he insisted in broken English that he be allowed to photograph the liberators of Veld—pour la postérité.
“You must stand very still, very still,” he admonished them. Diana, Steve, Charlie, Sammy, and the Chief posed standing on the rubble at the edge of the square. Steve looked at Diana, but turned his head toward the camera before the flash powder went off. His expression hinted at something more than admiration.
“Thank you for this honneur,” the man said.
After the photo was taken, Diana walked with Sammy to survey the damage the battle had caused. She looked back at Charlie, his head hanging low, clearly shaken, his mind turned inward. He fumbled with the screw top of his flask, then dropped it.
“For all his talk of murdering people from afar,” Diana said to Sammy, “your shooter can’t shoot.”
“Not everyone gets to be who they want to be all the time. Me, I wanted to be an actor, not a soldier. But I’m the wrong color. Everyone is fighting their own battles,” he concluded. “Just like you are fighting yours.”
Diana considered, then noticed the Chief standing with a small group of Belgians who had taken cover in the allied trench, including the young mother and her daughter. All of them looked ragged, sleep-deprived, and starving, but hopeful. The Chief dispensed bread and cheese to all with a big grin on his face. Again, the so-called “smuggler” was the benefactor. She was touched by the man’s generosity. She remembered her dismay at the pub when she had first met Sammy and Charlie, brawling and lying. Her opinion of them had changed dramatically.
Across the square another cheer went up from the villagers, who were busying themselves in preparation for a party to celebrate their heroes and their liberation. The square was being swept and cleaned, evidence of the battle removed, and men were stringing up party lights and setting out tables.