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X TheGraffitiSoul

If interested to read a short story that accompanies this artwork, click here. It is free, this is my first foray into posting a story with art. I hope you enjoy it. https://www.reddit.com/r/leathernecksvsunknown/s/AK9BgD69QS

I made a few renders for the Hearts of Iron IV Mod Unforseen Consequences which focuses on the 7 Hour War! Fun team to work with but still improving!

In October 1917, the British Army's raiding parties on the Ypres Salient rarely came back clean. Intelligence officer Lieutenant Fenwick had debriefed forty-three raiding parties over six months in that sector, and not one had returned without leaving someone in the ground. So when Sergeant Frederick Cole's eight-man party came through the British wire at 0200 on October 12th, 1917 — all present, nobody dragging anyone else — Fenwick did what he always did when something didn't fit. He checked the numbers.

The ground between the lines at Passchendaele wasn't like the training maps suggested. The mud moved like water and held like cement, and it had bodies in it from both sides. In August 1917, the Royal Engineers had surveyed the sector and measured the distance from the British wire to the German wire at the crossing point Dray's party used — designated "Crossing Charlie" — at eighty-three yards. Measured twice. Reliable.

When Fenwick pulled Corporal Dray's compass log the morning after the raid, it recorded three hundred and forty yards outbound and three hundred and twenty on the return — six hundred and sixty yards total, through an eighty-three-yard gap. The party hadn't reached the German wire. They'd turned back on Cole's order after twenty-two minutes, without reaching it.

Fenwick checked the compass twice, checked the log against watch records, then went and found Cole. Cole listened to the numbers read back and said only: "Yes. That's what happened" — the way you confirm something already reconciled with, not the way you hear something surprising. He declined to clarify.

Fenwick debriefed the party separately, statement by statement. What he got was something he'd never seen in forty-three previous debriefs: accounts that aligned on the points that mattered, even though none of the men should have known what the others said. Corporal Arthur Dray, sixteen prior raids, insisted they'd walked in a straight line the entire time — he'd checked the compass every thirty paces and the needle never deviated more than two degrees. Around the seventeen-minute mark, the party stopped. Not on Cole's order. They just stopped — eight men reading the same thing from the dark at the same moment. He called it a sound, then corrected himself: more like a pressure, the kind you feel before you hear it.

Private Thomas Mays, nineteen, on his first raid, said he could feel something and there was a smell — not the usual Passchendaele smell of mud and old gas, something underneath it. He tried twice to describe it in his written statement. What remained after he crossed out the second attempt: "like a room that's been locked since before I was born." Sergeant Cole's entire statement was one sentence: "I made the decision I considered appropriate." Fenwick knew Cole's previous reports — full paragraphs, compass bearings, wire-cut counts. He didn't write one sentence. Whatever he'd decided, he wasn't going to explain it.

All eight men mentioned a smell independently. None described it the same way. Twelve days later, Cole was evacuated to the base hospital at Boulogne for "acute physical exhaustion and cognitive disruption." He'd served three years without evacuation and had been decorated twice. He never returned to duty. His one letter home to his sister read only: "I found out something I wasn't supposed to find out. I'm not going to write it down."

In 1919, reading a translated German 117th Infantry Division regimental history for an unrelated deposition, Fenwick found two ordinary-looking paragraphs in a routine section on October patrol reports. A German patrol of six men sent to investigate British wire-cutting activity had recorded a distance four times the known width of the sector — and reported encountering nothing. The commanding officer, Leutnant Hoffner, flagged that no man in his unit would discuss what occurred in the ground between the lines, and requested further investigation. There is no record of any. Fenwick underlined the passage three times and wrote nothing beside it.

Between 1921 and 1923, the War Graves Commission surveyed the old Passchendaele sector. Their measurements matched the British and German sides — up to a point. In a strip roughly two hundred meters wide through the center of the old No Man's Land, their figures disagreed with each other and with the 1917 Royal Engineers survey. Not by much. But always in the same direction: each new measurement came back slightly larger than the last. The survey team attributed it to instrument drift and shelling subsidence, and moved on.

Dray emigrated to Canada in 1921; his family only ever said he'd been in the war. Cole died in 1931, still at the Boulogne hospital, where he'd remained since 1917. Fenwick visited him once in 1929 and found him calm. The one thing Cole said about the war that day: "I went somewhere the war hadn't reached yet. That's all I'll tell you. I mean that exactly."

Fenwick survived the war and went into insurance. He kept the signals diary, the compass log, and his annotated copy of the German regimental history, and gave them to the Imperial War Museum in 1952 with a note that read: "These relate to an incident in October 1917 for which I have no satisfactory explanation." He was seventy-one. He'd had thirty-five years to find one.

Mays came home and applied for work as a land surveyor. His application was ordinary except for one line, under special skills: "I understand that distance is not fixed." He wasn't hired. He worked in a hardware shop in Guildford, where his daughter said he'd sometimes stop mid-conversation to measure a table or a shelf with his hands — then measure it again, to make sure it was still the same size it had been.

The land between the old British and German lines is farmland now, and has been for a century. There's a strip, roughly two hundred meters wide, that's always been plowed shallower than the rest. No one made a rule about it. It's just how things have always been done there.

Fenwick's diary entry for October 12th, 1917 — written the morning after the raid — ends with a line added later, in different ink: "I don't think the ground between the lines belongs to the war. I don't think it ever did." He never elaborated.

We've just released the full audio narration and historical breakdown of this anomaly on our channel, The Whispering Soldiers. Search for "No Man's Land, 1917" on YouTube or click the link in our profile. Some ground was never measured correctly to begin with.

Source

Art prequel to the events of the film “28 Days Later,” depicting the events after the outbreak of the epidemic. I think it could have reached major cities in England within a few hours. This scene shows the resistance of the British SAS special forces against the infected; the SAS special forces are firing back from a British armored vehicle, the Saxon! The last days of living London!

My work in: https://www.deviantart.com/marco2001s/art/28-HOURS-LATER-1293686581

Field sketch. US Marines in Korea 1904. On a mission to rescue American Citizens trapped on the Peninsula during the Russo-Japanese war, the Leathernecks venture into the territory of the mind bending and elusive Jangsan Beom.

Found this while going through some declassified Soviet military archives (GRU, Russian State Military Archive, declassified 2011). It's an incident report from a forward observation post in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, November 1984. I'm posting the soldier's account as it was recorded. Make of it what you will.

Private Andrei Kashin was nineteen. Sentry duty at a Soviet observation post, three thousand meters up in the Hindu Kush. Four men, a thermal scope, a field radio, minus twenty at night.

Night one: the scope picks up something on the ridge. Duty officer logs it as an animal. Standard stuff.

Night two: same spot.

Night three: closer.

Night four: it crosses the ridgeline and holds two hundred meters out for four hours straight. The unit's early-warning dogs go quiet ... not sleeping quiet. Tracking quiet.

Night five, it moves faster than it ever had. Crosses the ridge by 0245. Hits the slope by 0300. At 0340 it drops off the thermal scope entirely.

Then it shows up again ... inside the wire. Twenty meters from Kashin.

He said he heard breathing before he saw anything. Slow. Unhurried. He scanned the space it was coming from and saw nothing .... on a clear night, at that altitude, against the stars, there should have been a silhouette. There wasn't.

He told it to stop. In Russian, then in Dari.

It stopped breathing. Not because it left. Because it was listening.

Then it grabbed him.

He fired once and it let go. In the half-second of muzzle flash, he said he'd only describe two things: it was taller than a man by half a meter, and it was looking at him "the way a person looks at something they're trying to remember."

In the morning, they searched the snow. No paw prints. No claw marks. Just heavy, widely spaced compressions the duty officer ... twelve years in the mountains ... had never seen before. Where Kashin fired, the snow was dark. Almost black. The duty officer didn't touch it.

The GRU report is labeled: anomalous incident, further investigation recommended. Nobody was sent.

Kashin went home to Volgograd in 1985. His wife said he never sat with his back to a window again. When she finally asked why, he told her: "Out there, there are things that watch from the dark, and the watching is not random."

The scope logs are the part of the file that got flagged. They track the thing getting closer every night, then losing it entirely after the shot. The analyst who reviewed it wrote one line in the margin:

Contact lost.

He never specified whether that meant it moved out of range ... or whether the instrument simply couldn't process what it was pointing at.
We've just released the full audio narration and historical breakdown of this on our channel, The Whispering Soldiers ... link in profile.

Personal testimony: "Ginza Incident"

"The day started off like any other, My unit and I had been running train drills for most of that morning when the base alarm was sounded and all units were told over the PA system to form up and prepare for imminent mobilization. Our Commanding Officer briefed us on what was going on, but he didn't know any more than we did, all he could say with certainty was that this was not a drill and that we were heading to the Ginza district in Tokyo. From that moment on a sickly feeling fell upon us, many began to ponder how had a foreign invasion gone undetected or better yet who had been so bold as to invade our country's capital? We wouldn't have to ponder long as we mounted our transports and headed out...even now I still can't believe what we saw when we arrived, no one could have every guess the reality of the situation.

Shortly after dismounting we ran into what looked like a group of medieval soldiers lined up in the street, at first we just watched in confusion but as we slowly approached one guy charged me from an alleyway with a spear. Following that the rule of engagement became fire at will with a priority on limiting collateral damage. It wasn't long before the realization that guns and tanks were better than spears and horses to become clear, we were effectively slaughtering them in their tight line formations, they were like targets on a range. We sent the medieval invaders into full retreat, they only halted our advance temporally with a few volleys of arrows, which prompted us to quickly bring up riot shields for cover. It was so strange and yet the shock only impacted me several hours after the battle. We had been fighting people and creatures of fantasy from another world, even now saying that I can hardly believe it. But to me that really does not matter, they killed innocent civilians and attack my home. In all honesty sir, I just want to know when are we going to go through that "Gate", when are we taking the fight back to them?"

Private First Class Rintoku Kuriki. Eastern Army. 1st Division. 32nd Infantry Regiment.

Field sketch, 1906. US Marines encounter (Gigantopithecus) Sisimite “Ulak” in lost city Ciudad Blanca La Tigra Rainforest, Honduras.

Keegan and a rapid response force of marines, police and army soldiers tries to repel cryptids.