| Board : | |
| Author : | |
| Subject : | |
| Date : | |
|
Attention! Forward March! Their souls are crushed. Stare upon them as they sit with their knees to their chests and their hands over their eyes like a mass of people called upon to witness the killing of hope itself. They shiver in the cold and their breath comes through the cracks in their palms in cold white plumes. Some cry and others stay silent listening to the sound of their own breath. At the head of the camp stands a captain on a rise and he is glassing the country ahead. He sees rolling hills and a treeline far away. The captain drops the glass from his eye and collapses it into itself with the heel of his hand. Behind him he could hear the clattering of teeth like a symphony. A man comes to his arm and the captain gives him the glass and the man extends the scope and watches the country as the captain walks through the camp. Soldiers grab at his coat and they pull and the captain pulls away from them but the hands will not stop reaching. As though he were walking through a crowd of starving patrons and he were a man that could turn rock to bread, dirt to water. One man stops the captain and he asks him why they cannot burn fires and the captain says that the enemy will spot them. But there is no enemy, said the man. The captain was silent. That cold and fading day turned to noon light and the man was still glassing the country ahead and the captain was beside him. Oh my god, said the man. What is it? Asked the captain. The man handed over the scope and the captain looked through it and saw in the distance there several hundred men mounted on horseback. Their aspects deathly pale and he could not tell if their faces were painted or if they truly were things made in prelim to this sunlight. If they were things crafted in some outer dark who have never seen light, never tasted heat. Abreast of the party of riders rode men with rawhide shirts and helmets made of the skin of animals and they themselves looked like animals as they had scars across their faces and some were missing eyes and fingers. One wore plundered shirts from the country they were in. Farming pants with a jacket of a colonel. One wore a human ribcage as armor and was naked besides. A cloud of dust was left in their wake and they themselves were pale with dust from the road and they looked like gaunt ghosts come to take back what was theirs in times that had faded to ash and dust. The captain closed the glass again and he too cursed to himself the name of god. Then he turned. Get up! He yelled. The frozen soldiers rose and arrows flew as they did. Some were struck and others took cover under the bodies of fallen allies. They screamed as they went on to fight. Out of horror or excitement one could not tell. When they were done all was chaos still. A large cloud of dust from the running and scrambling on the road and field and men coughing from their wounds and some men dead but still twitching and others wheezing out their final breaths. The soldiers that lived were breathing heavily and some prayed and others cried for they had lived. Some said they had won, others looked at their dead companions, people they were getting to know, people that they loved, people they relied on, they looked at them and they saw them dead. Corpses now. Now nothing. Forevermore nothing. Soon this thought made its way to all minds and their hands began to shake and some began to vomit and others weeped for their friends and for themselves and for the world for how could they continue to live in such a place? The captain looked back at them all. He waited and said: Attention! Forward March! And they went on. Neji | |