Re: Blood and Iron

Chapter 817: No Orders, Only Consequences

Bruno did not leave the carrier until every weapon, munition, and soldier was accounted for and secured.

The number of prisoners of war taken during the war up to this point had been disproportionately small, not due to lack of combat, but doctrine.

German operational planning rarely gave enemies the opportunity to surrender once battle was joined. Encirclement and annihilation came first. Negotiation was an armistice luxury, not a battlefield clause.

When Bruno finally stepped off the carrier to meet the former commanding officer, he saw a man whose eyes betrayed his manufactured stoicism.

This was not humiliation born of submission, but of distance, forced surrender at the edge of the world, severed from any knowledge of home.

The officer did not speak at first. He absorbed the scene like a man committing a funeral to memory: foreign flags, foreign soldiers, and a fortress that had once flown the stars and stripes now standing silent under a new imperial calculus.

Across the base, German troops and their allies moved with crisp efficiency, escorting unarmed prisoners to their own barracks, now stripped of any means of defiance, to serve the duration of their imprisonment under controlled house arrest.

The radios no longer barked orders. They only echoed consequences. Panic still smoldered in the air, not like fire, but like unspoken mathematics, frantic earlier, but extinguished now by realization.

Bruno smelled the air. There were no bombardment scars, no stench of rotting corpses, nor any battlefield arithmetic written in oil and blood. The Caribbean breeze tasted tropical, sterile, neutral. A cleanliness that implied control had never been contested here, only abandoned.

“So… this is the infamous Guantanamo Bay?” Bruno said, voice strange with quiet surprise. “For some reason I expected a dismal, grisly aura. But this? It’s almost too orderly. Too clean.”

The American officer’s jaw tightened. He didn’t know whether he should feel insulted or praised by Bruno’s odd assessment.

“I wish I could greet you on better terms,” the officer said at last, tone brittle with exhaustion. “But given my full surrender, I expect you have no use for me now.”

Bruno walked past him, eyes still roving, inspecting every little thing, committing details to memory without theatrics or ceremony.

Only after a long, deliberate moment did he speak again, casual and cold, yet impossibly heavy.

“Relax,” Bruno said. “Contrary to what your propaganda preaches, we don’t execute prisoners of war. This war has been unusual. The Reichsheer has been so dominant that our enemies have rarely found the opportunity to surrender before we encircled and eliminated them.”

The words stung, not like anger, but like truth delivered too late for argument. The American officer stood firm, boots planted, eyes forward, but his composure was visibly strained.

Bruno continued, the shift in tone subtle, quieter, but heavier.

“Did your chain of command ever tell you that we have 50,000 prisoners of war stationed in Sicily, fed and cared for in conditions bordering on luxury compared to your accommodations here?”

Bruno clarified further. “Not once has your President, or any representative, reached out to negotiate their return home.”

“50,000,” he repeated. “That’s all that remains of the one and a half million men your nation sent to invade Europe and Asia.”

The American officer fell to one knee, breath leaving him, not from physical force, but from the revelation of scale, loss, and absence of command. He did not cry, but tears threatened the edges of his discipline.

“Why?” the officer asked at last, voice raw, unguarded.

Bruno looked down at him, not with disdain, but pity. A man mourning illusions he had never held himself.

“I’ve been asking myself that question for a long time,” Bruno said. “You were told this was a war of necessity, to defend American democracy and freedom. But France started this war by killing my men on the border.”

He paused for a second before continuing. “And your President sent a million of his to die in a crusade to impose his worldview on the rest of the world by the edge of a bayonet and the barrel of a rifle.”

“The truth is, you were the aggressors, and always have been.”

The silence appeared to have lingered far longer than it took to speak them.

“I accept your surrender, Commander,” Bruno said at last, breath slow, tone firm, final. “And I will make great use of your facilities to ensure the United States of America sings its swan song.”

No officer likes surrender, but Bruno understood the truth most commanders never admit aloud: capitulation is not a moment, it’s a process.

A battlefield decision becomes real only when men internalize it, and when men internalize it, they begin to behave like the conquered long before they are treated as such.

The Reich’s marines continued to pour into the facility not like a storm, but like the tide, silent, methodical, inevitable.

Their rifles were slung, safeties engaged, boots falling in measured cadence over limestone paths that had never tasted the shock of occupation before today. They did not need haste. Haste was for the losing side.

A German Corvette Captain, clipboard in hand, passed Bruno the preliminary harbor report. Numbers, conditions, stockpiles, manpower status. No triumphalism. Just arithmetic.

Bruno skimmed it once, then nodded.

The American Commander watched him, kneeling still, shame held at bay only by exhaustion. He had expected a tyrant and yet he met an accountant of empire instead.

Bruno crouched just enough to meet his eye level, not to offer comfort, but acknowledgment.

“Your President gambled on oceans,” Bruno said. “And in doing so he lost continents. Don’t blame surrender for your grief. Blame the command that never came. You have chosen wisely, and honorably. And these men owe you their life.”

Then Bruno stood, coat shifting in the Atlantic wind, boots turning toward the gates of the naval base, where the next phase of the war would not be fought, but administered.

Behind him, German soldiers and their allies snapped to attention in formal salute, not to myth, not to spectacle, but to order restored through inevitability acknowledged.