“It takes more courage to suffer than to die”
Name: Alfons Hanz.
Titles or Ranks: Second Lieutenant.
Race: Human.
Nationality: Sonnengard.
Age: Eighteen.
Appearance: Alfons is a young handsome faced man with blonde hair and blue eyes, with a tight regulation cut and an almost infectious boyish charm and a medium build. A long scar reaches up in a straight line from the right side of his chin, past his lip, deep into his high cheekbones and stops.
It picks up again at the curve of his supraorbital margin and continues for another inch across his skull. It's a bit unusual on such a young looking face at first glance, the kind of wound meant for grizzly old veterans, not young men.
His face is cleanly shaven at all times, with the kind of closeness that indicates either a professional barber or someone who can’t grow much facial hair yet. In this case, the latter.
The grim mark on his face helps an onlooker ignore the fact that he is shorter than average, and strikingly young looking at only eighteen.
As a professional Soldier, rarely will you find him without his blue-gray jacket with genuine silver buttons, crisp clean and unsullied as though it were brand new and yet to be coated in the mud and grime of general soldiering, a step above in quality from the standard issue for a man who was once a conscript.
Service boots show much of the same, always freshly polished with unworn soles or a speck of dirt clinging to the heel.
More than anything, he appears out of place for his position, like the son of a high ranking officer or general that was brought into the Sonnenmensch as early as possible.
Weapons: Standard issue Sonnenmensch rifle with plug bayonet and field issued knife. He also possesses a longsword, a bit archaic but not out of regulation while in uniform.
Creed: Service to the Kaiser, but perhaps even more so to the people of Sonnengard. It's the duty of a man of high station to serve the people below him, going so far as to invite them into your home and break bread with the downtrodden.
This ideal naturally puts him at odds with others, who find such a notion a bit queer.
Personality: Alfons is a man who was born into the middle caste of society, educated in the classics, arithmetic, and injected with a heavy dose of nationalism.
He is very much a boy at heart, eager to laugh and talk and share the good in a world that he doesn’t perceive is as terrible as the rest say. He chooses to focus on the good in the people he meets, rather than the bad, and can often stumble over or miss the subtleties in conversation and discussion.
He is easy to get along with and very positive, though innocent with regards to women or the true nature of the world and its many peoples. His belief in Sonnengard’s superiority goes without saying, but he is not a hardcore nationalist despite the completion of his officers training. He wants to believe everyone is inherently good, and to some degree valuable, sometimes putting his personal creeds at odds with his duty and the opinions of his superiors.
Skills and Talents:
Banes:
Biography: Alfons was born to a military family, the son of Captain Abelard Hanz and his wife, a very impetuous woman named Anya whose great beauty was only matched by her profoundly self-centered personality and hunger for fine wine and exotic men.
But Anya Hanz was far from the only unworthy parent. Captain Abelard was not at all interested, or in many ways suited, to raising a boy. For him, Alfons was more a legacy than a son, the carrier of his fathers namesake and the next to either ascend the social ladder, or die gloriously in military service.
At the age of two, Anya Hanz left their family home and moved into a vineyard in the country with access to more wine than she could drink, and the added bonus of being able to continue her affairs without bringing shame to the family name. By this time any love that had existed between Alfons parents had been extinguished. Throughout his life he would only see her once, perhaps twice a year.
Alfons education began early, as with all members of the higher castes whose livelihoods weren’t dependent on farming hoes and summer rains. From the ages of five to seven he served as a page to a bookkeeper, an older friend of his father who had been crippled during a long forgotten campaign. Taught the basics of reading writing and arithmetic by Berthold, he also served as Alfons’s father while Captain Abelard was away during a long and bloody conflict.
He returned after Alfon’s eighth birthday a far colder and meaner man than he had left, a tendon in his leg severed by a bullet. His father would never be able to run again, and was reduced to a clerical post.
He’d brought Alfons a belated birthday gift from the war, a fine longsword used by high ranking Officers like himself.
For nearly every day of his life, up until his enlistment, Abelard beat the tar out of him until he could use it properly. Abelard’s lessons were not ones of wisdom or philosophy. His military career had been defined by brutal decisive action, and in a way those were the only lessons he could pass on to his son.
At the age of twelve his father placed him into military Academy, located close enough that he could still continue teaching Alfons the finer points of being bludgeoned senseless by a cane at least once a week. He settled into a sense of relative normalcy here, amongst other Cadets. Those who were soft were weeded out, but his father's lessons had if nothing else given Alfons a tolerance to pain.
He was far from a star in the classroom, dolling out average scores in history, the sciences, though faring slightly better in philosophy. In military combat and strategic studies he excelled, often quoted as being ‘his fathers son’, calculating up until the point that nothing less than total ferocity was needed.
He completed Academy at the age of eighteen, six years of nothing but war and all the subjects needed to excel at it dripped into his brain through osmosis.
His graduation was the first time he’d seen his mother and father together in one place since childhood, but it was short lived as manpower was low on the Ussarian front. Only two weeks after his graduation, he was stationed in the frigid and hostile land of Ussaria.
It would come to be a defining moment in his relatively short military career. On the relatively quiet flank of his regiment a horde of Ussarian men rolled down from the hills, overlooked by regimental scouts, and pour over what was meant to be only the most basic of command and introduction exercises. Alfons had been Officer in Command for only a week.
All his men were killed, all his enemies dead or dying as Ussarian’s were as reluctant to retreat as the Sonnenmensch.
All that remained when the cavalry arrived was a Second Lieutenant of the Sonnenmensch, newly christened in the blood of the enemy from bloody head to gore covered boots.
Afterward, the battle came to be known as Alfons’s War, he was awarded a service medal for valor and his name was quietly jotted down on a list of military attendees for the Fading Festival, in a familiar land that now seemed so distant.
RP Sample:
I licked my lips hastily, clearing the peeled and broken skin from my mouth as I made my rounds around the narrow trench.
The same rounds I had made the day before, the same that I would make tomorrow, until I was relieved from this frigid nightmare of a land.
There were two dozen men in my trench, though I still hesitated to call it mine.
Father had always said, ‘Dont call it yours unless you own it, take pride in it’, before he clubbed me across the face with a cane for having an ineffective high guard.
These trenches could be dug a little deeper, pulled a little closer to base. Duckboards could have been thrown down the middle, a hooded fire to help keep the men warm and morale higher.
Its not as though these damn Ussarian’s didn’t know where they were, or how many of them were here.
They could have carved in a dug out, if only a small one to help the men get out of the cold. Instead they had tents. How impractical an idea was that, a row of tents behind a trench line?
Much as I didn’t want to call it mine, the fact remained that it was, and after a week it was time I sucked it up and started--
Wait…
What was that?
“You, soldier”, I called to the watchman nearest to me, staring out into the snowy wasteland ahead of our position, “Did you see that?”
“See what, Sir?”
“Something moving, out there on the snow plain”
“No sir, I didn’t”, the man replied simply, quickly. They were still testing the waters with me, figuring out when it was acceptable to drop the rank and file discipline, just as I was with them.
“Alright Private, let me know if you do see anything unusual out there”
“You’ll be the first to know, Si--”
I only heard the echo of the shot after I saw the mans head ripped open by a lead ball.
I stood there, stunned, blood and brains sprayed over my face. I hesitated for a moment.
But only for one, single moment.
“ENEMY CONTACT, ALL GUNS ON THE LINE!”, I shouted, the words leaving my mouth before I had time to register any of their individual meanings.
Another lead ball whizzed past the trench, sickeningly close by. The next tore open the other watchman's throat, ruby red blood spilling out onto the trench floor as he struggled to comprehend what all this had been for, bleeding out the next moment.
Two dozen men hit the line from every direction, the tents, the pisspots.
Twenty four rifles, ready to tear through every last Hun on the other side of the trench.
They wouldn’t be want for targets. A wall of Huns, Ussarian men and women had thrown off their snow white blankets and camouflage and brandished a variety of weapons. A few had rifles, Sonnenmensch standard issue no doubt pilfered from the corpses of our soldiers.
My men would be next.
“HOLD!”, I commanded, tasting the fear, the anticipation of the slam of their rifles back into their shoulders as the horde drew closer. Those Huns who did not bear guns brandished axes, those who lacked axes carried long knives.
“HOLD…!”, There were thirty, perhaps with more behind them, eyes burning red like hot coals, kindling flames of such bitter hatred I nearly choked upon the smoke.
It was then that I realized something, something I had not before.
This was not about Lords, or Nations, Politics or Ideology.
Those things did not drive men to charge into rifles, armed with little more than knives and cudgels and axes.
This was about survival, and as long as just one man survived on either side, there would be no end to this battle.
“FIRE!”
No sooner had the word left my cracked and broken lips than the roar of two dozen rifles tore through the frigid air, loud enough to be heard for miles around.
I couldn’t say how many hit, but the Hun line buckled. A score of men fell, maybe less, maybe more, and for one brief, brief moment their line buckled as men died or lay dying.
I realized something else, in that moment.
They were just like me.
“FIX BAYONETS!”, I ordered, a hoarse bark that each man complied with.
There was another series of pops, and the man beside me fell, cupping his stomach where blood began to pour from.
There was nothing we could do for him. Nothing I could do for him.
I snatched his rifle up, joining the wall of outstretched bayonets like the pike formations of old.
Then, the Hun broke upon us, and I ceased to be an Officer.
Ceased to be an Sonnengardian
Ceased to be a man.
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