Such panic and death continued to spread across the wasteland north of Carnford City for several days.
The thousand Sauron soldiers first sent in for a probing attack had long since been almost entirely killed or wounded. Like firewood thrown into a furnace, they were swiftly consumed by trenches, mines, sniper fire, and sudden artillery barrages.
Harald then gritted his teeth and sent in more than five thousand additional men in succession, pouring them into this life-devouring quagmire as though pouring in oil. He drove more slaves and Auxiliary Army soldiers forward, forcing them to endure increasingly precise and ferocious attacks as they dug, advanced, and filled the ground inch by inch, paying in flesh and blood.
Thomas's men had already been replaced several times. With his own eyes, he watched those compatriots driven here by whips and blades, their faces numb or terrified, get felled by bullets from nowhere while digging, torn apart by ricochets while hauling earth and stones, or cut down by the Supervisory team when they tried to curl up and hide.
Death came calling in every guise, yet spared him alone, this trembling little overseer.
Like a rat that had somehow survived at the edge of a slaughterhouse, he had miraculously lived through it on an almost instinctive sense for danger, a pitiful scrap of luck, and the obsession buried deep within him—I have to make it back alive. Though several wounds had been added to his body by flying stones or stray bullets grazing past him, none were fatal.
That day, the gloomy sky seemed as though it might come crashing down at any moment.
Einar hunched over as he came to the bend of the relatively rearward trench where Thomas was stationed, then kicked the curled-up Thomas with his mud-caked boot.
"Hey, Thomas!