Chapter 9: WHEN THE COUNT IS GOOD (9)
In the hearing, the action was welcomed as it should be. The coalesced were a little disappointed to have lost one of theirs but retrospectively, the action could have been dramatic and ended with dozens of deaths. Paradoxically, it was relief that prevailed.
Conversely, the joy was first intense on the side of the Grenati troops, but the feeling of frustration prevailed.
Harry had managed to regroup with the others. The soldier who sought to be substituted had joined the limits of the combat zone and finally no one had set his sights on him. He came out alive, having only lost his motor-bike.
The Grenati soldiers would not allow him to recover it. These were easy points available.
One of the soldiers, protected by his squadron, began his work. The front wheel was already damaged, by breaking a few more spokes, he managed to veil it and then tear it from the frame. After meticulously piercing the tire and the inner tube, he threw it aside. He then attacked the electric motor. It required some knowledge to destroy it completely with a minimum of time, but a good short-circuit was the most effective. He just had to be careful not to get electrocuted. Finally, the brake cables were cut and the saddle properly lacerated.
All he had to do was to use the Deburo method, according to Chaiz Deburo, a soldier who discovered a structural weakness on the frame of the motor-bikes and who was the first to have exploited it to neutralize them in the jousts. The motor-bike would be definitely unusable, because the damage was not covered by insurance, did not fall under the general conditions guaranteed by the manufacturer and the repair budget largely exceeded the cost of a new motor-bike.
Even if the result of the maneuver proved a little disappointing, it was certain that the element of surprise had worked to the full. The five-minute mark had not yet been reached. However, cut in their tracks, the Grenati team could not keep the momentum.
Harry's heroic act finally ended the Grenati advantage, and even restored a semblance of morale to the coalesced who managed to coordinate better.
Less mobile and quick, the reorganizations of the motor-bike on the battlefield were much slower than for mopeds. For a few minutes, the coalesced were safe and should not be attacked again before their enemies regained their position.
Moa immediately recognized the formation of the Grenati, the-hut-at-the-back-of-the-courtyard, a variant for the motor-bikes of the tactic used earlier during the first joust, the-little-straw-hut-lost-in-the-forest; a tactic also named after a song by the same artist Gelkeur was really a fan of. This tactic was more offensive.
However, it was a classic and the coalition knew several ways to counter it and given their current arrangement, as long as the coordination was not too bad, the formation you-hold-me-I-hold-you-by-the-goatee had to repel the assault.
It was not missing. The assault was well coordinated but too timid. The Grenati lost the initiative. In their retreat, one of their soldiers, a little bewildered by Harry's performance, a blow for the confidence for many of their soldiers who had yet to come back in the heart of the action, planted his front wheel in a small rut and fell. Fortunately for him, the coalesced had not launched their counterattack and no enemy was in direct proximity. Three of his colleagues came to assist him, but the tempo of the match was slowed down.
Finally, their next assault was not very surprising either and the coalesced were starting to gain self-confidence, perhaps inspired by Harry's bravery, they were starting to be enterprising.
After all, for once, they had no numerical disadvantage. As they put more and more pressure onto their enemies, a detachment of six men, in the formation of the-quartet-on-a-sinking-boat, even managed to isolate a Grenati soldier.
The latter was relatively close to the edge of the confrontation area and rather than being killed, he decided to leave the battlefield without even asking for a substitution.
Such a fault, Pom could not keep his eyes closed. He blew his whistle. It was anti-military conduct to flee combat without respecting the rules. For this kind of offense, generally the referees were not lenient. Often the penalty was the maximum. Here, the maximum was to travel sixty meters hopping in the middle of the battlefield, which could be compared to a death sentence.
Nervous, the soldier awaited his punishment. Magnanimous and explaining that it was the first big mistake of the day; Pom inflicted a bribe on him, which in the scale was a lenient penalty.
Strong protests escaped from the side of the coalesced. It was a golden opportunity to equalize on the line "number of dead" on this joust.
The soldier immediately paid his bribe, and in the rules, asked for his substitution.
The action resumed and the minutes gradually spread. Coalesced boldness in one side, Grenati's timidity on the other; both side neutralized the other. When the remaining time indicated 5 minutes, the coalesced began to take formation, the slide-it-between-my-legs, named after a fish farm in a village once crossed by the front. The time to set up and to launch the attack, it was the final assault and he was killed in the bud by Pom who signaled an offside.
Dubious, it railed on the side of the coalesced. If there was an offside, it was not obvious. The referee was treated as sold, little dog of the Grenati family but even if it was true and they had a proof, they had to respect the referee and his decisions. Some soldiers received a warning. It was not an important sanction, it took three warnings to receive a blame, and after three blames, one could lose one's rank. When you were not an officer, it was anecdotal.
Ultimately, those who could tell if there was really an offside were the television crews and the viewers who benefited from a slow motion replay. It was not that the rules prohibited them to have a screen, there was besides a giant screen broadcasting the jousts live in the past. Moreover certain officers preferred to follow the fighting by this means. However, some soldiers in the middle of a joust and seeing themselves on the screen knew they were being filmed at that time and could not help but say hello to the camera, distracting them from their tasks.
Also, when a shoot, who, how, why, it was still unknown, had damaged the screen, it was decided not to repair it. On the one hand, it was too expensive, on the other hand some who saw themselves on the screen as non telegenic preferred not to know if they came to appear there, as not to be too embarrassed.
During the last seconds, nothing significant happened and Pom indicated the end of the joust.
It was the moment that the rain which had accompanied the whole game stopped, as if to taunt the soldiers, who were soaking wet as they were saluting each other. They would have to go rapidly to the changing room as to not catch a cold. In the distance, a ray of sunshine pierced the layer of low clouds, producing a rainbow. It was raining a few kilometers away but on the battlefield it had become tolerable again.
The officers could do their quick debriefing outside, without having to go back to their little shed. It was a boon; the smell of sweat there was unbearable.
While the television launched the advertisements, not without having commented on the main actions of the game, the pilots and their machines evacuated the ground.
In their place entered the maintenance teams. The undertakers recovered the lifeless body of the coalesced soldier, the junkyard-workers the broken pieces of broken machines, and the road-workers repaired the damage on the ground, all in a global indifference.
Arriving in front of the corpse which had not yet been placed in his body bag, one of the road-workers, a little bit naughty, vomited, and in addition to the pool of blood which he had to sand, he now had in addition to clean a partially digested gastric bowl. It was his first day; he was very young, fresh out of training camp. In the end, it was not the same thing to see on television and in real life.
All had eyes only for the heroes of the day. On the Grenati side, the soldier responsible for the first death was congratulated. He would be a medalist, it was a tradition, the 'first kill medal', a medal in the shape of a tombstone on which was engraved the number "one" in a Gothic font character.
On the coalesced side, the honors were intended for Harry, responsible for the fact that there was only one death to be deplored. He would not be a medalist, because for the coalesced army, to decorate for a yes or for a no, this was to spend money that they did not have and then after all, was it really necessary to decorate someone one who was just doing his job?
Harry then made his way to the mixed press area where special envoys from the various media, television, radio and the written-press awaited him. A little sheepish because he was not used to it, he, the anonymous soldier of the third game, would answer the more or less intelligent, more or less annoying questions on his private life. He would make the headlines for midday, at least for coalesced newspapers and TV news.
…
Until four years ago, the third game was not the one that was going to start. The today third joust was at that time the fourth one, concluding the 'trilogy in four episodes'.
It was a tripartite initiative, specific to this front.
The third regiment was famous for its love of beautiful mechanics and on the Grenati side; they had different factories producing all types of vehicles.
Both sides found it a shame to be held back by all the existing rules and the technical constraints imposed on the equipment.
So they had together designed a new joust where the material was free. This boosted innovation in the industry's research and development departments. A whole bunch of vehicles with extreme characteristics were thereby born.
Moa very much liked this game which quenched his thirst for beautiful mechanics. It was a technical game where the pilots had to optimize the setting of their machine to get the best of it. The money should have led to the best equipment which should have led to a domination without sharing of the richest, but this contest was in fact the most balanced, each side knowing its victories and its defeats. It was going faster too, and frankly, only the expert eyes of veterans, as Moa, could manage to follow all the details of these jousts. It was not within the reach of the first rookie and sometimes, it led to errors in the reports when a newly promoted officer who believed he already knew everything about everything, too sure of himself looked at the joust with the same mindset as the mopeds' joust.
Some prototypes, particularly efficient, even had serial production for everyday life and he would have liked to make one of this models his own. Unfortunately, it was off-budget for him. It remained a temporary illusion.
Costs quickly soared and technical progress became a money black hole. The fallout had been deemed insufficient. The Grenati consortium was even starting to lose money.
They did not need more to question the existence of this joust. Finally, by paying enough money to the right people, it was possible to make the figures say what they wanted. Figures themselves were incorruptible but their analysts were easier to coax.
A large market study had been launched by a television belonging to them, a study which subsequently was analyzed by a polling institute in which they owned shares.
The study concluded that some machines were going way too fast and that camera operators sometimes had difficulty following them. Furthermore, it seemed that if in rural areas, this joust was appreciated, especially among tuned cars' enthusiasts; in certain urban areas, the joust had difficulty finding its public.
Faced with such evidence, the coalesced had to bow. The third joust was to disappear and the fourth to become the third again, much to Moa's chagrin.
A time slot was left vacant and they had to figure out how to fill it. A new survey was commissioned to ask the public. The conclusions were: 1) to the question, would you like to see advertisements?, only the incontinent had answered yes; 2) to the question, should the time gained by the disappearance of the third joust be distributed homogeneously over the other three joust or should the distribution be done in proportion to the audience by applying a coefficient reflecting the weather of the day, the number of soldiers entering in each joust and the length in centimeters of a rubber band pulled to its extreme before it broke (data obtained in normalized conditions at 20°C in the laboratory)?, the panel had replied that asking such a question so early in the morning was not very well-seen but provided that they fired the commentator of the joust on the official channel because that strident voice of his was exasperated, they could consider; 3) to the question, if the time had to be allocated to a single game, which had to be extended?, the panel had answered that this question was easier even if the choice remained difficult; the sociology of the panel being older than the population, it was so that the third game, slower, was easier to follow.
An analysis was conducted and the conclusions of the investigation had shown that increasing the time for the third joust was the solution the most in line with what war should be, by the values it conveyed, where the human had its place without the possibility of hiding behind technology and mechanical equipment.
This had led to a special situation on the front. Between the decision to abandon the third game and the arrival of the survey results, several months had passed. After that, heavy logistics had to be reorganized, which took even longer.
During this period of time, the television channels had to adapt.
If some had decided to program an old police series instead of the joust, these channels had now gone bankrupt.
Those who had done best were those who presented animal documentaries and erotic programs.
Extending the last joust of the morning was not without its own problems. This joust was operated on bicycles. Physically, it was very demanding on soldiers. No more outside assistance, all by the force of the calf, on heavy equipment weighted down with war gear, all on grounds that had often deteriorated.
The participants were athletes who had to warm up well to keep up with the joust.
In retrospect, everyone still found something to it. The savings on the budget line allocated to fuel even provided some enjoyment among the accountants of both camps.
Some adjustments to the rules had been put in place, such as the possibility of keeping a fifth of its war-force as reinforcement, the installation of musette bags of supplies all around the fighting area, a self-service pharmacy and the possibility of changing bicycles during the joust.
All the logistics associated with the game was being put in place and the soldiers were massing gradually in their dedicated area to wait for the beginning of the joust.
In view of the tactical choices of the coalesced in the second game, supplementing it with an important number of soldiers habitually concerned with the third joust, the number of cyclists involved today was low. There was not even a supporting force.
Moa imagined that the coalesced had managed to produce a new product increasing the endurance of the runners; otherwise the joust would be long, especially at the end.
The tactic was simple to guess, even for someone who was not very versed in military strategies. There was no interest in duping their enemies, even if craftiness could still produce an effect, the possibility of it breaking a standstill was low as they didn't have to resources to convert such ambitions. They would be stingy with their efforts and they would try to delay the first contacts as much as possible when the greatest efforts were required. Conversely, it was a safe bet to think the Grenati squad would start in a storm, just to put pressure on their opponents and tire them out.
Pom, who had left to take a coffee in his dressing room, returned to start the game. He was still wearing his anorak, unsure of the weather.
As soon as the kick-off was given, the coalesced started a sprint towards the suppliers to secure some musette bags that would be useful later in the game.
On the Grenati side, the soldiers were surprised by the maneuver and they reacted too late to fire counter or take advantage of the situation.
The bottles of water in the bottle holders, the energy bars distributed between the cyclists according to the respective tastes and allergies, well placed in their pockets. The first seconds of games went well for the coalesced.
Moa was laid off for operational reason. The risk of death was very low and except from the cardiac arrest of a soldier due to overdose usage of doping agents; he did not see how anyone could be killed.
The rhythm was more that of cycle touring than that of a professional soldier, and including on the Grenati side, nobody was putting their shoulder to the wheel.
The situation was escaping the referee and the television channels. Those latter were taking the risk of seeing a part of their audience falling asleep and another part zapping on another program. Pom had to intervene. He invoked a person-to-person duel.
This rule was rarely invoked. Moa remembered seeing it only fifteen times, or at most once every six months. Although rarely used, everyone knew it existed and the two armies trained some pilots just in case. In his memories, Moa knew that Harry was a specialist in this maneuver, even if he never had the opportunity to perform and that it was not today either that he would see him, given that Harry had already participated in the second joust and he was not currently on the battlefield.
The principle was not very complicated. The aim was just to grab the attention of spectators and involving a complex battery of rules would not have helped.
Keep it simple, never take people for idiots but never forget that they were.
A person-to-person duel was a form of duel where each team sent a hero, a name chosen for marketing purposes, to a dedicated area and their goal was to force the opponent to set foot on the ground. Then the opponent in question could be killed.
Simple, efficient, no fuss, just enough to regain the attention of viewers...
In order not to risk losing the newly-picked interest again, there was a time limit of two minutes. If the duel was a draw, the two heroes had to regain their peloton by making a back-wheel, a kind of small animation which compensated for the lack of bloodshed.
Each of the two heroes headed for the person-to-person duel area. The duel was distracting but none of the opponents set foot on the ground. The coalesced hero heralded a big fright at one point before having to brake, but he had managed to stay on the pedals and to stabilize the situation.
The two minutes of breathing were welcome for the coalesced, which played the watch; ultimately, they still didn't have to draw on their physical reserves.
Pom launched the joust again but the tempo remained that of an observation period. The joust was struggling to find its rhythm. It was very likely that it would not go down in history, but ultimately, it was inhuman to ask maintaining a high quality show every day, after a while, the men and the mechanics were entitled to a break, everybody could understand this point.
The match was not exciting, and Pom was miffed. He had already done everything in his power, but in vain, the two pelotons remained shy in their actions. To show that it was not that they didn't want, they tried to be eager but these were typical 'I-would-like-to-but-I-can-no' like actions. Definitely, a good half of the audience had fled by this time.
Ten minutes from the end, the Grenati team mobilized its reserve troops, achieving an important numerical advantage but the physical condition of the coalesced was barely started on, so it was uncertain this would change the situation. It was more for the gesture, just to say that the guys had not been mobilized for nothing.
With each assault, the escape maneuvers were successful and two minutes from the end, the casualties were zero and only a few punctures tires and derailleur problems were to be reported on the material side.
Pom couldn't take it anymore, and he whistled the end of the joust without even waiting for the official end of regular time, waking up at the same time those who in their living room had taken the opportunity to take a nap.
It was almost lunch time and they had to start cooking.
Everyone was relieved to hear the whistle sound. Even if a little ashamed of the show rendered today, the soldiers were happy to make it out alive. The officers, for their part, were happy that this distressing spectacle ended.
Those who had no other obligation could even go to the mess before rush hour.
To everyone's surprise, the results of the morning were not bad for the coalesced. Certainly, none of the big opportunities had been concluded, they were even led, but the margin was not insurmountable. If the afternoon jousts went well, hopefully with an esprit-de-corps in the face of adversity, the next day their anthem could be played first.
Moa had spent an ultimately peaceful morning. The work had been easy, he had little to report. He could almost, if his professional conscience did not prevent him to do so, skip the midday report and go directly to the mess. Nobody would blame him, 'one' was a number everybody could count on their fingers, except maybe amputee people, and everyone knew it was the number he would report.
His stomach problems didn't even bother him.
As he followed his colleagues towards the building which was to host the noon strategic meeting, he met Harry who was leaving the locker room.
Moa greeted him as he did each time he saw him for the first time of the day because there was no need to say hello multiple times on the same day and he took the opportunity to congratulate him on his performance.
Another day without dying, in these times of war, this was something worth celebrating. The two men discussed for a few moments, so that Moa was no longer following the bulk of the officers ready to submit their report to their superiors. He didn't really mind; the protocol was less strict at noon.
They left but only after promising to meet again at the end of the day; let's say at your place, no, no, you must be kidding, at your place, that suits me... for a small Mikado game, around a hot or cold, alcoholic or not drink; what did the bottle matter after all, as long as they got drunk.
…
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
ludo2776
ludo2776 ... to be continued in the next chapter
A few notes, because some things will be self-evident for French people, but won’t for others, because French-speaking artists are rarely world renowned…
1) "Keep it simple, never take people for idiots but never forget that they are", is a literal translation of joke from a sketch by “Les Inconnus”, a French humorist trio, where they described the attitude of advertising management towards people subjected to their work.
2) "I would like but I can no", is the literal translation of lyrics for “La bonne du curé” by Annie Cordy, a Belgian singer.
3) "What did the battle matter, as long as we get drunk", in the original version, it’s a quotation of Alfred de Musset "qu’importe le flacon, pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse", which can be translated as "you have to make the most of what you’ve got" or "pleasure of any source is always welcome".
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