"Mm." It's a soft murmur, acknowledgement of the statement about them damn Nazis an' equal parts thanks for the return of the cigarette. He ain't quite sure how he feels about Germany as a whole yet. After Wöbbelin, he's still sortin' it all out, quiet horror building to an impossible anger he ain't never had to manage before. Used to be the things that made him angry were — everyday, human things. When he was a boy it was bein' asked to look after Albert when all he wanted to do was be off alone somewhere, some childish adventure. As he got older, it was his growing awareness of injustice in the world, an' in the War proper it was any damn incompetent officer who got men killed for glory.
He used to try, you know? Having sympathy for the German soldiers. Not everyone in the Wehrmacht was a Nazi. Plenty of dead boys from both sides would come to him to chat in that particular way the dead have, no language barrier to speak of, everything just being understood. They had the same hopes and dreams and fears as everybody else, mostly.
But his preference towards compassion became harder to cleave to after Oradour-sur-Glane. And when eighty of his brothers in the medical corps got slaughtered at Malmedy an' left in the snow, it was so damned close to being burned right out of him. Wöbbelin had been the last clinging thread, an' now... now, he ain't even sure he'd spit on a German infantryman on fire.
Life ain't black an' white, Lord does he know it. Still, sometimes he thinks it'd be easier if it were.
The cigarette burns down, an' he drops it, grinds it to a grit beneath his boot heel.
"Well, way I see it," he begins, already tapping out another cigarette. He's smoked more since getting here than he did before fucking Sicily. "Place like this is bound to be harder on that type than folks that're plenty accustomed to inequality."
cw: continuing that theme/mention of concentration camps and war crimes
He used to try, you know? Having sympathy for the German soldiers. Not everyone in the Wehrmacht was a Nazi. Plenty of dead boys from both sides would come to him to chat in that particular way the dead have, no language barrier to speak of, everything just being understood. They had the same hopes and dreams and fears as everybody else, mostly.
But his preference towards compassion became harder to cleave to after Oradour-sur-Glane. And when eighty of his brothers in the medical corps got slaughtered at Malmedy an' left in the snow, it was so damned close to being burned right out of him. Wöbbelin had been the last clinging thread, an' now... now, he ain't even sure he'd spit on a German infantryman on fire.
Life ain't black an' white, Lord does he know it. Still, sometimes he thinks it'd be easier if it were.
The cigarette burns down, an' he drops it, grinds it to a grit beneath his boot heel.
"Well, way I see it," he begins, already tapping out another cigarette. He's smoked more since getting here than he did before fucking Sicily. "Place like this is bound to be harder on that type than folks that're plenty accustomed to inequality."