C: Code name Cobra

A supposed witness statement of a 17 year old city guerilla fighter

In my investigations into the truth about “the free City of Jubylon” and whenever or not it existed, I came across this document. It is supposedly a transcript of an old diary found on a loft after the author died of old age. The lieutenant mentioned seems to be the writer’s later brother-in-law based on the names mentioned in the diary, indicating that she married the lieutenant’s brother at some later date.

I was just a girl of seventeen when I signed up for service to defend Jubylon. We went through some very basic and hurried training while the train of refugees and wounded kept coming into the city. It was then that the flat boats arrived in the harbour with boxes in the middle of the night. I helped empty them and load the boxes in wagons. The rain was pouring down and we had very few sources of light, except for the waning half moon. I had never seen a snake, not even an image of one before that. But there it was. A simple light green outline of a snake with a wide hood, sprayed on a dark blue background with square white letter beneath on the same background. COBRA. Early in the morning, we woke up from the sound of shelling. The lieutenant showed me how to put on the mask, the protective jacket and protective gloves. I and the rest of the unit then opened carefully and put the pellets into bottles before filling it with pure alcohol and quickly sealing every bottle afterwards.

The shelling continued. It came closer and closer. After we had filled the bottles, we took the shortcut through the tunnels at the other side of the city from the canal. When we got to the surface again, it had begun raining. The city’s changing streets confused the enemy once they went through the empty city gates and when it rained even more. That was when we dropped the bottles and the coughing began. I can still hear it sometimes in the middle of the night. The foreign officers shouting orders stopped as did the marching drums. They just coughed and coughed some more. Then it stopped, slowly and in intervals until it all went silent except for the rain.

A few comments to add to this witness statement. The statement was Like a great deal of the supposed history of Jubylon, it seems strange, but not impossible. “COBRA” was used for a dangerous poison gas that was invented at roughly the same time, but supposedly never used in practise. It worked by mixing pellets with alcohol, which then reacted to oxygen. There was one invoice for a huge order though, but without specifying where it was shipped to. The writer’s comment about snakes also matches up to the fact that supposedly, there were no snakes in or near the city. The tunnels are by not means impossible either, as a supposed state secret. Whenever or not the entire statement is a forgery though, I have no proper means of determining as a historian, but it certainly remains intriguing.