Thirty kilometers east of Dunwich City's main urban district.
They had been crouching in sewage mixed with activated sludge for half an hour, scarcely daring to breathe.
The air was filled with the scuttling of rodents and the chirping of insects. Some of those sounds came from animals; others were disguised signals.
But Desmond Doss, as a new recruit, could not tell them apart.
He was only a medic, and two weeks earlier, he had been an ordinary dentist in Dunwich.
But when the first Ork shell landed in the main urban district and destroyed his clinic, he enlisted and became someone he had never imagined himself becoming.
A battlefield medic, assigned to the Green Devils, a unit renowned for its brutality.
For someone of merely average height and build, being surrounded by a bunch of muscular brutes made him stand out far too much. Even his work seemed dispensable to them.
Minor wounds did not need treatment. Major wounds could not be treated.
That was the common view among the Green Devils.
At first, Desmond Doss did not quite understand it. It was not until he treated his first casualty that he realized there was nothing wrong with that assessment.
Because the Green Devils specialized in infiltrating and closing with the enemy, they often fought at close quarters. The wounds inflicted by Orks were either minor enough to ignore or monstrously lethal.
Sometimes Desmond did not even know what purpose he served. The thing he did most often in camp was still dealing with cavities and rotten teeth. It was as though he had become a battlefield dentist.
It sounded rather absurd.
"Up ahead is clear."
Suddenly, the soldier at the front waved for those behind him to advance.
Desmond could not quite remember his name. People in the