Chapter Text
February 10, 1917
Oberleutnant Karl Horstmayer was completely and utterly fed up as he climbed the endless steps in front of the Headquarters. He had been summoned by representatives of the High Command a day before, taken away from the two-day leave in a small town close to the border he and his men so painstakingly had earned after three consecutive wins over the French troops.
He hated Military politics, especially when he couldn't understand the necessity of a low ranking officer such as himself being brought all the way to the Capital, a waste of time and resources when his Regiment was missing ammunition, medicines, and even food was being rationed. But nothing should be more important than a few documents the bureaucrats found were filled incorrectly.
It didn't help his humour either they had also denied him again permission to visit his wife, Kaiser knows why.
Visiting the Hauptquartier was always an experience that left him tense with protocols and conventions he could not wrap his practical mind around. It was also an exercise in patience; waiting in small rooms and receptions, filling uncountable forms, being polite to secretaries and assistants that treated him like his worn-out uniform and muddy boots were a nuisance to their clean and organized environment. Essentially, bureaucracy at its worst.
Commanding a platoon in the battlefront seemed a much easier task than dealing with them, he thought gloomily.
Horstmayer arrived there knowing he was to be reprimanded on incomplete requisitions regarding ammunition and provisions, that much was stated in the official letter handed to him by the agents of Feldgendarmerie who went to the board to personally escort him to the Headquarters.
But while their presence made him uncomfortable during the whole drive and brought terrible memories from years prior, he also knew they would take him directly to the right place to talk to the right superior at once, which was an upgrade from previous summons, when he was left wandering around the Hauptquartier in search for information for hours.
In the last few years, his sense of duty and analytical mind had made him responsible for more work than it should be allocated to one officer alone. He had been made unofficially responsible for a great part of the provisions for his whole platoon's Regiment.
On the bright side, that ensured he was mostly not on the battlefront anymore, the drawback being that it made the higher ups prone to bury him under more work than it should be advisable, with all the paperwork traps possible falling on his lap together with a lack of visibility and power to decide. No human being could do all that without mistakes and, in his defense, he had done all he could while filling those requisitions, but there were too many loopholes and no intelligible information available.
It wasn't as if he didn't know what the numbers should be, he was an Engineer and could put two and two together, but simply put, the problem was connected to the loops in the system: he should have certain data, but in order to have said data, he should first know he needed it and where to find it secondly. He also needed to deal with having some of it not being written or explained anywhere, available only inside the minds of bureaucrats who were not keen on sharing the information. He was doomed to fail from the start.
So, when he was finally led to Captain Hans Weintropp's office, some good hours after leaving his camp, all he could think about was how he was finally only a few minutes away from being able to leave and go back. They would slap him on the wrist and finally assign him the provisions needed, natürlich.
Of course not.