Lavinia Testarossa

A girl from the rural Balkans, where industrialization was heretofore unknown, where people still inter the dead in certain ways to make sure they don't return as vampires, and the lines of control between Ausonia, Argovia and Anatolia are blurry at best. Was conscripted into the Ausonian forces in the last two years of the war. As a small but strong and nimble girl, she was considered perfect to put into the new things called tanks. She was duly rushed through a basic training course which mostly consisted of a crash baptism and a great deal of preaching in Ausonian, because one can never be too sure with country bumpkins like these. She could've been a Jew or, God forbid, a Muslim.

She joined a crew of four girls stuffed into a tankette and served out the war in the Balkan front. Both the crew and the machine survived the war but the other girls were all felled by the sleeping sickness. Since they had all talked about going to America, she took their ashes in an urn and joined the wave of emmigration after the war and found work as a maid to afford a small plot in a cemetery.