Thank you to all of you for your comments - this is something I have wanted to write for about a year, so for it to receive such a unanimously positive response is a great relief. Thank you all.
I'll respond a little to the more detailed comments.
Delighted to see this finally come into fruition Tom - everything that I had hoped for, and quite a bit more besides!
Very dark, obviously, and a wonderful mixture of the realistic - but toyed with the hint that there may well be a higher-power at work here as well. I think that you've got Rommel down rather well here, and his internal angst and conflict is quite clear to see.
Thanks, Jack, I know you knew about this and it's good that it delivered on your expectations.
I know it says that it's just a vignette, but I think you really should think about making this a full length project. I think Hitler assassinations are such an interesting subject that you rarely see done well or with the quality of writing that you have.
Thank you, but I don't plan to take it any further - I'm not really knowledgeable enough about the mid-1943 Third Reich to do it justice, and part of the mystery of this comes from its short length and the fact we only get Rommel's perspective.
Absolutely chilling. There's not enough Alternate History/Magical Realism out there- too often timelines snap from plausibility to ASB, but this sits in the hollow, haunted space in between.
Thank you, that's exactly what I was going for - see my next comment.
That was really, really good. I especially like the way each of the signs had some kind of rational explanation behind it.
I won't deny that I feel slightly conflicted about 'god-fearing' Rommel, but that's more to do with reservations over OTL Rommel than your depiction of him.
Thanks Ed, that's exactly what I wanted to do - the rational explanation stuff. I deliberately made it a grey area - all these things
could just be outcomes of either OTL's WWII or a slightly different one (perhaps a limited deployment of Operation Vegetarian caused the cattle diseases, for example).
Or they could be Literally The Ten Plagues.
Is Vignette a one time thing?
It is, yes. As above, I don't plan to continue this, though I will be writing more vignettes and longer works - do feel free to look at my wiki page for a list of the works I've done on the forum already.
What this has shown me is that I am capable of doing something with a WWII setting. As that's something I'd like to return to in a proper way at some point, this is good news.