Re: Blood and Iron - Chapter 956: Dreadfully Boring

It was a week after the Kaiser had told Bruno that Wilhelm formally abdicated his throne. Or at least in a way that the public was finally made aware. A grand ceremony had been prepared for the transition of power.

And for the first time in over sixty years, a new Kaiser had been crowned. Some were apprehensive, after all, the last time a Kaiser had been crowned a second was crowned not long after.

But for most, this was considered a sign of a brighter future. Wilhelm II presided over Germany during its most turbulent era. One where the Reich was actively involved in wars around the world and consolidating power.

The hope was that his son, the new Kaiser Wilhelm III, would preside over an equally long period of peace and prosperity.

As for Bruno, the day that Wilhelm II announced his abdication, he stood among those close family, friends, and advisors to send him off. Bruno would later look at the photograph, particularly unsettled by what he saw.

Not because it was a scene worth lamenting. But because it showed him, and the Kaiser old, decrepit, and far from their former glory.

For days Bruno found himself secluded, looking at the photograph of himself standing next to the Kaiser, they wore the grandeur of past glories. Of battles that were already on the verge of being forgotten.

The lines on their faces heavier than they had ever been. Wilhelm II was no longer Kaiser, Bruno was no longer Reichsmarschall, and though he had spent the first few years of his political career overseeing the largest diplomatic acquisition of land in the Reich’s history.

He could not help but feel he was already one foot in the grave. He sighed heavily and shook his head, staring intensely at the photograph in the paper.

It wasn’t until the knock came a third time, and a troubled voice followed that Bruno finally realized he had ignored something important.

“Bruno, dear… Are you going to sit in there all day again”

He placed the paper down, deigning it one last glance, before looking towards the door where he knew that his wife stood on the opposing side.

“The door is open….”

His voice was unusually heavy, not with pain or grief, but with the weight of something he had seldom feared in this life or the last. His own mortality.

Heidi did not stand on pretense and instantly opened, where she found her husband there, sulking over the same day’s old paper that had put him in a sour mood to begin with.

There was a beer in his hand, which for once she did not instantly reach to refill. Instead, she sat in front of him, a bitter smile on her face as she posed the question neither of them wanted to ask.

“So this is it, huh?”

The question was simple, and yet provocative all the same. Bruno raised an eyebrow at the woman he loved, his tone tightening as his words slipped past his teeth.

“This is it? I don’t follow….”

Heidi sighed and leaned back in her own seat, raising one leg over the other as she rested her dainty chin on her the palm of her hand, all while peering at Bruno as if she were gazing into his soul.

“After all you have done, after all that you have endured. You’re going to sit here and spend the final years of your life looking to the past, for glories hard fought and harder won. As if the future you’re building now bears no relevance because it’s not with blood and iron, but with gold and grain. You know Wilhelm retiring isn’t the end of everything, right?”

Bruno was just about to raise his stein to his lips when he suddenly stopped after hearing Heidi’s words.

Was that what he was becoming? A bitter old drunk who looked to the past as the best years of his life….

If so, then why? He had lived an entire life bearing the sins of an entire nation, pushing through mud, blood, bodies, and machine gun fire, just to emerge on the other side and find it so utterly… boring.

He couldn’t help but break out into laughter. The way Heidi looked at him, it’s as if she had known all along.

She didn’t say anything, she simply smirked as she swiped his stein away and stole the remainder of its brew for herself. Then and only then, after it was drained entirely, did she speak again?

“I’ve been wondering for a while now… If you thought you had no place left in the world you built… Or if you were simply bored with a life of peace. And I think we both know the answer don’t we?”

Bruno chuckled softly, nodding his head. It was absurd, I mean… he had never thought he of all people would end up like Erich… end up incapable of living in a world without war.

He sighed heavily and shook his head.

“You know something, I’m starting to think it’s a little of both…. I miss it, Heidi, not because I particularly enjoyed it. But I was good at it… too good. And here I am, riding a desk and pushing out paperwork.”

Heidi didn’t dismiss Bruno’s concerns, but she did clarify something he was missing as she leaned forward and grabbed his hands into hers.

“You’re good at this too… If Wilhelm is to be believed, you might even be better as the Chancellor than as the Reichsmarschall.”

Bruno sighed and shook his head, leaning back into his chair, nodding his head, Wilhelm quite frequently babbled to anyone willing to listen that he was as exceptional an administrator as one could be.

But in the end, it was the same thing that gnawed at him these past few years.

“That may be true… as good as I may be at the job, it is so dreadfully boring, now isn’t it?”

Heidi didn’t need to know the ins and outs of the job to understand the truth of Bruno’s words, because it didn’t really matter. He found the task of running the Reich far more cumbersome than running an army. And to that she could only have one response.

“That it is….”