𝐖𝐞 𝐎𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐌𝐞𝐧 || COUNTRYHUMANS

.05

      [𝐆𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐋𝐖𝐀𝐋𝐃 1922]

In the span of a few years, everything I knew in my life shifted suddenly. The war came to a tenuous pause in the fall of 1918, and the fate of my country and people was held in the palm of foreign powers that sought to squeeze the lifeblood out of my folk. If the crippling economic embargoes and the humiliation of being cast out from the rest of the mighty European powers had not yet destroyed the spirit and integrity of my nation enough- the Flu managed to carry out the rest of the hard work.

It claimed the lives of 50 million across the globe, 250,000 of which were my people. It wiped clean the populations of Europe, ravaged upon the already cold and hungry starving soldiers that had been sent back to a homeland they no longer recognized as their own. The disease did not care if one was poor or rich, innocent or guilty, a honorable solider or a draft dodger. Illness, it seemed, was one of the few things in life that did not discriminate.

And, among those taken in a slow feverish death were my mother and father in the bitter winter of 1919.

It was the last time I would be back to Vienna until my adulthood, and so too the last time I would hold my Mother's trembling death cold hand as she reassured me in a tired quiet voice that everything would be ok. That God was with me, with my people. That I would lead them not into failure and pointless wars as she had done, but rather to peace and prosperity. She made me promise not to repeat her mistakes- if only I had heeded her warning more carefully.

My father died in the night, in his sleep, and death wrapped it's cold hand around my mothers throat the very next morning. My father went quite peacefully, but for my mother I will never forget the screaming wails she let out as she cupped my father's pale lifeless face in her hands, the desperate sobs she made for God to bring him back to her, to preserve her dear husband for someone must watch over her baby.

Slowly, I watched as her desperate fervor became more weak, more uncoordinated, and she laid her head against his unstirring chest and sobbed and sobbed until her last shaky breath left her tired lungs and her heart was seized in its final beat. And, with the desperation still alive in her eyes, she fell into an unsteady sleep.

They buried my parents no less than three days later, in graves side by side with matching headstones that sit now grown over by moss and ivy in the manor garden. The sky was overcast that chilly morning, and Switzerland squeezed my shoulders and told me that I was a man now. That I must be strong, for I now had the weight of a nation thrust upon my shoulders.

And yet, in those earliest years, the weight of the nation seemed not at all like such a heavy burden. I went back to the farm, back to my little quaint life in the Swiss Alps, now accompanied by German Empire and Miss Leonie and Reich, and nothing seemed much different for a long while.

I had many questions then, of course, in the age where my curiosity was at an all time high and my social awareness at an all time low, and more often than not I found myself as the cause for many awkward and uncomfortable conversations. Most of which included me asking some kind of inappropriate question about the war, or about why German Empire and the family had to be living with us now. Why they couldn't all simply go back to Munich and live in the manor? For Weimar and Reich's parents were both alive and well, there was not a reason in the world why they had to be living with us in the little farmhouse. And there certainly wasn't a reason in the world why I had to be sharing a bedroom with some whiny little blond haired brat that was my little cousin.

Aunt Liechtenstein would always try to hush me whenever I asked one of those rudely inappropriate questions to German Empire and Miss Leonie, always tried to shush my curiosity for the sake of decorum. But, German Empire never shied away from answering my questions, trying to explain to me in the most simple terms possible that the rules of his country were no longer up to the Kaiser to decide, and the government was now in the hands of evil foreign men who wanted to bleed his country dry. These evil foreign men had forced German Empire and many other land owning nobles like him to leave, and had taken all of their land and riches for themselves. He explained to me that the same thing was happening to my country, that the foreign men had been the ones who had truly killed Mother and Father, not some strange illness.