In the afternoon sunlight, a general stood at the entrance to the command tent, lifeless as the withered tree beside him. Not even the sun could warm his body.
The general's uniform had clearly been tailored with care, and even on the battlefield it was kept spotless.
Yet the stubble on his face looked rather out of place. The prolonged, fruitless siege had left Benoît de Coulon too preoccupied to attend to even the most basic personal grooming.
The few staff officers left in the tent argued endlessly, but still couldn't come up with a solution.
In a nearby camp, the soldiers ate their meager dinners listlessly. The question they talked about most was whether they would still be alive tomorrow.
Without a doubt, the horrors of street fighting had placed the soldiers under immense psychological strain.
Benoît de Coulon was under a great deal of pressure too, so he didn't want to hear those sounds.
Just as he was about to silence the source of the noise, a scout came stumbling over.
"General! Your Excellency! Our observation balloon has been taken out!"
"What? How is that possible? Didn't the tether anchored to the ground break?"
The scout's report ran counter to the accepted wisdom of the era, and the seasoned Benoît de Coulon immediately suspected a problem with the tether.
After all, if the tether was too heavy, the balloon might not be able to rise at all. And making it lighter would inevitably mean sacrificing durability.
Tether failures were a common accident in this era, so Benoît de Coulon naturally assumed the scout was trying to shift the blame.
But the scout immediately denied it.
"No, Your Excellency. Our observation balloon crashed right before my eyes. Something shot it down!"
"Did you conduct a low-altitude reconnaissance flight?"
A