Interlude: War and Peace

"Some call me the Warlord 'cause I'm a god-damn bad machine, young'n'hungry." - Manowar.

**

As they lay in the muddy trenches of WWI, the sound of gunfire and explosions ringing in they ears, many ambitious young men realised that this was it. They were going to die in some Godforsaken battlefield, far from home and loved ones, with only the stench of death and decay as their companions. However, as a survivor, Hans would often come to long for the dreary horrors of the war, compared to other horrors that he would soon witness.

Hans had volunteered at age 25 by enlisting in a Bavarian Regiment. Although he was from an aristocratic German family, he had fallen foul of his relatives and went to the war seeking a new sense of purpose.

It was a young officer in the war who gave Hitler the nickname 'the crazy noble.' Hans' friend, Hermann Kriebel, who would later be known as the 'Kampfbund' leader, said Hans was called 'the crazy noble' because he was always 'at the front of the rush when the attack was being launched.' Hans, he said, had a habit of always being the first man to jump into the enemy trench when an attack was launched. It was considered surprising and amusing, given his typically aristocratic demeanour and aversion to smut and cigarettes. The other men would often trade part of their rations to him for the cigarettes in his.

He won the Iron Cross, a medal given to those who served with bravery. His bravery was never questioned, and many fellow soldiers feel he was lucky to survive the war. He was involved in a few routs of the German army, where he cheated death, and would often be only a short distance away from an exploding shell. Eventually, however, he was at least rendered incapable of continuing the war by a gas attack, and returned to living in crestfallen Germany as a painter. While his painting was considered too archaic for the academies, and incompatible with modernising movements that had become vogue, he was fairly knowledgeable at architecture and would make a modest living by hovering around landmarks giving travellers impressive, detailed paintings as mementos of their visit.

After the war, Hans was reluctant to talk about his experiences in the trenches. However, he did write extensively about the war in his journal. He wrote that he was a soldier for the first time in his life and that he had been faced with the reality of war for the first time. The book gives a very accurate description of the horror of the trenches. It describes in gory detail the mud, lice, filth, rats, and decaying corpses. He said that staying in the trenches for weeks became so sickening that he had a "sick feeling like a split open stomach." He wrote about the anxiety of the young men around him and about the physical and mental damage war did to soldiers. However, he was adamant about the war being a noble struggle in which the young men were simply sacrificing themselves for a greater good.

His account of his comrades often mentioned that they had been aimless youths before, who had little experience of the world outside their hometown. In the war, they became men, and at the same time could live out a journey more exciting than that in the novels which they had read when young. "The adventurous novels which they had read, which had spread across Germany to satisfy the youth's craving for excitement and adventure, now seemed barely to scratch the surface. Now, the bravery and honour of German blood could be lived out to its full, and not kept within the confined of a mass-produced page-turner," in his words. He said the war had changed him and made him understand the meaning of history, when before he had just lived day by day without a sense of greater purpose.

One day, in the Weimar Republic, he was surprised to walk past a local government building, and see that the German flag had been replaced by a rainbow flag. It was early morning, and there weren't many people around on the street to ask about it. He walked briskly into the government building, intending to ask about this new flag and what it was supposed to mean.

Why had the German flag had been taken down?

On entering, however, he didn't see any of the usual staff at the reception. Instead, there was a person dressed as a female, but with a penis, who was having anal sex with a gaudily-dressed gay prostitute.

"What is this?" Hans exclaimed. "Is this what Germany has become?"

The transvestite looked up, and said, "Excuse me, are you being transphobic? Look, it's 2022, drop the attitude."

Hans was thrown by this statement.

When he checked his calendar this morning, Hans had seen that it was still 1928. How would it be 2022? Nonetheless, it was clear that something strange was going on here. He knew that degeneracy was spreading in the Weimar Republic, but the extreme, public nature of it going on in a government building, where the flag had been replaced, went much further than anything he had seen before. What was '2022,' a year, some kind of cipher or slang? Well, he would probably find out in due course.

"It doesn't matter when or where it is, you are still filthy degenerates," Hans said. "Did you also replace the flag outside this building?"

"Flag?" said the gay prostitute, groggily.

"Don't be silly," said the transvestite, with more certainty. "That was changed by the higher staff, because it's Pride Month."

"Why would you take down the flag of the country, then? How does that show national pride?" Hans objected reasonably.

"National pride? What are you, some kinda Nazi? Gay pride, LGBTQIA25+++ pride." The transvestite said 'plus' three times, which made this statement seem even more bizarre to Hans.

"And what precisely does that mean?"

"To be honest, I don't even remember what it stands for. But, like, basically it means people like us, gays, transfolk, the like."

"The government sponsors your freakish abomination?" Hans said. "This is a travesty! How could the great history of mankind have come to this?"

He stormed out, before the transvestite and gay prostitute, who were the building's receptionists, could call security.

However, as he left, he found himself in a very different world.

Buildings towered high above him, and unfamiliar cars buzzed across the street. Uncertain what to do, he ducked into an alley.

Not in time to get away from the wrath of the transvestite, who was also a witch and in fact a mod of r/witchesvspatriarchy, and had cast a spell that turned him into a frog.

'Curses! Even the blasphemy of witchcraft, once stamped out forcibly, has returned! What other horrors does this age have to offer?' he thought.

He hopped down the alley, seeking to avoid any more of these freakish modern people.