The Coward of the Battlefield

“It’s like being a real soldier!” I told the boys when we shipped out. Tall boys with golden hair and square jaws, something in their eyes that shined and then looked past you. They smiled when they knew what I was about.

We had three farmboys in my Decade, one herdsman from the Hinterlands. Another three boys from the city, who knew a pistol six ways to Sunday but had never touched a rifle when they signed up, laughed about it in the trenches later, disassembling them in the cold and rain next to bodies they’d left still steaming. Unburied. Little holes in their fronts, like a God’s fist tore through their backs.

And there was Sgt. Katmeni. A big man, dark and swarthy. I thought he was from the Hinterlands at first too until Hebert told me otherwise. Told me that sometimes Hinterlands men got loose in the city, saw the women, and the women saw them and that things happened then. We were sat around the fire, mess tins open between us, steaming like the corpses. Sgt. Katmeni and Miss Estelle, our medic, alone somewhere in the distance where the twilight turned to fog and more endless, dreary rain. Not kissing. They were very specific about that.

That was the first year when we still thought we’d be home by Christmas. There were still stories to be shared, then.

***

It wasn’t like being a soldier, not really. Soldiers fought and died, came and went. Shared stories by the campfire and elbowed each other in the ribs. Called each other the worst names I’d ever heard, called me things sometimes too.

But I didn’t. Come and go. Fight. The Coward’s Corp is something else. We don't make the posters.

When the war came I was the first boy to sign up in my whole school. Saw the towers fall with everyone else, looked around and heard all the questions, “Why?” and “Who?” and mostly “How?” Lots of how. There wasn’t room for me to ask, and not really any need. I knew where the recruiter’s office was.

I went to him. Lt. Kessler. A nice man with golden hair and a square jaw; I’d heard the girls talk about him. Lt. Kessler said, “What in seven hells are you doing here?” and I said, “Signing up,” and pointed to the towers on his television set, falling and falling on the afternoon news.

He brushed his hair back. Shook his head. Said, and I’ll never forget the way he said it, “Sam, go back to class.”

Then Lt. Kessler saw me run. I think he almost cracked a smile.

Running was just about the only soldierly thing I ever did in the Coward’s Corp. Men died and I ran. Ran to keep up and to see. Ran to help Miss Estelle when the boys fell down and sometimes died. Ran to carry Hebert back to our lines when she looked up and shook her head and said, “He’s gone, Sam. He’s gone.”

I ran. And at nights with steaming mess tins and Sgt. Katmeni gone with Miss Estelle, I suppose I listened. Soldiers did that too.

Turns out you can listen through a whole year.

***

There’s a motto in the Coward’s Corp: No Mission but the Truth. I like it, it’s a good motto. I whispered it in foxholes while the other boys said their prayers. Sometimes after I prayed too, or wrote a letter to my momma. But the motto first, always.

In the third year it became common for the boys to give me letters too. I guess they’d seen how I wrote mine, and when the Enemy was up and Sgt. Katmeni was shouting they'd come over with their dirty little envelopes, press the wrinkles out before they folded them (which never made much sense to me), and handed them over. They’d say, “It’s for my ma,” or “for my da.” Occasionally a letter would be for a sweetheart or friend left behind back home, though there were less of those in the third year, more casualties I suppose.

After the boys gave me the letters they clapped me on the shoulder. Said, “It’s god’s honest truth, Sam,” as they stared off towards the approaching front where the horizon broke like thunder and then kept breaking forever in every direction, even up to where the planes lived. So many planes.

“What’s that?” I’d say.

“The letter,” said the boys. Every time. Whether it was for a ma or a pa, or a sweetheart or a friend.

Once, in a foxhole after I said my motto and my prayer, I opened one. From a city boy whose city was gone now, the news had come down yesterday. He lied in the letter, it was to a sweetheart. I’d heard stories around the campfire, over those mess tins. The steam.

But he’d pressed the wrinkles out, folded it before he handed it to me.

I never understood that.

The next night I told Sgt. Katmeni that I’d opened it. He shook his head and told Miss Estelle. She shook her head, looked off towards the thundering horizon.

Then Sgt. Katmeni put an arm on my shoulders. Miss Estelle took my hand. Our Decade was somewhere behind us, scattered around the campfire’s quiet, on a night where there was no rain, and the bullets hardly fell.

They didn’t say a word. Didn’t have to. All the other boys were new.

***

When Miss Estelle died Sgt. Katmeni looked at me the way Hebert did so long ago; one leg hanging by a thread, the other gone, just gone. Evaporated where the shell had hit him.

It was a look that was nothing but the truth. Up there with the Corp motto as the most important thing I ever heard.

He said: “They killed me, Sam. Four years and they finally fucking killed me.”

He wasn’t wounded, I checked. Sgt. Katmeni still had his arms and his legs. All the boys were ranged around us, farmboys and city boys and Hinterlands boys all boiled away to what we were, soldiers, and it really was just like being a soldier then. I ran and I listened and I watched men die, and I fulfilled my mission. Fulfilled it even when Sgt. Katmeni looked around and pointed to the hill where they had shot from. Pointed and screamed, not even an order, though it sent us running. Men running and stumbling and tumbling and dying, and me there just same, close enough to see, be a part, a living record of what had happened.

No mission but the Truth. The Coward’s way.

I told the truth when the commissars asked later, even though it hurt and I remembered Sgt. Katmeni’s arm around my shoulders, Miss Estelle’s hand in mine. I never heard what happened to Sgt. Katmeni’s widow, though I’d heard other stories around fires, Cowards talking behind the lines when the war seemed a hundred miles away.

It’s always been my hope that she’s alright.

I’d heard one night that there were children.

***

In the fifth year, the war ended. I’d served with other Decades then, watched other men live and die. And when I came home, for a while I thought that I had died too. That home was another man’s dream and I’d only walked into it.

They had fireworks when we landed in the city. Fireworks.

But then a funny thing happened. They made new towers. You blinked, and it was like the skyline never changed, only got a little shinier, like the look in those boy’s eyes when shipped and we were all so young.

There were promotions for valor. Stipends. Soldiers met in bars and passed stories over real hot meals that someone made. Maybe a girl in the back. Maybe a girl.

And there were girls. Searching after men like Lt. Kessler all those years ago, golden-haired and square jawed, that certain shine in their eyes, searching harder when the men like that ran out. There were less of them in those days.

They searched so deep that one found me.

Five years of war. The commissars. Sgt. Katmeni and Miss Estelle, all those night by fires with steaming tins and steaming corpses and thunderstorms to tear open the sky, and it’s that conversation that I remember the most.

A night spiraling out, past the city lights and onto the docks where ships still sailed and fishermen repaired their nets: a quiet place that never saw the war and never would. Lanterns strung up all along the pier. A girl who didn’t mind that I was quiet, who held my hand like Miss Estelle that night, even laughed once or twice at the jokes I tried to tell, and who only made one inquiry about my pension.

A question: “What did you do in the war?”

An answer: “I was a Coward.”

A glance down and away, towards black water and red paper lanterns, the stars ranged out above. “Oh. I’d thought you were a real man.”

I ran in the war, the way that Cowards do.

I ran after sometimes too.

*****

THE END.