Bruno did not leave the carrier until every weapon, munition, and soldier was accounted for and secured.
The number of prisoners of war taken during the war up to this point had been disproportionately small, not due to lack of combat, but doctrine.
German operational planning rarely gave enemies the opportunity to surrender once battle was joined. Encirclement and annihilation came first. Negotiation was an armistice luxury, not a battlefield clause.
When Bruno finally stepped off the carrier to meet the former commanding officer, he saw a man whose eyes betrayed his manufactured stoicism.
This was not humiliation born of submission, but of distance, forced surrender at the edge of the world, severed from any knowledge of home.
The officer did not speak at first. He absorbed the scene like a man committing a funeral to memory: foreign flags, foreign soldiers, and a fortress that had once flown the stars and stripes now standing silent under a new imperial calculus.
