The Last Soldier

CW: Mental health, violence, war

The soldiers file into the mess hall, squeezing onto benches and finding open places away from the canvas walls to sit. Outside, the wind shrieks, whipping and beating tarps throughout the whole encampment, in some places tearing them from their posts.

Calling it a mess hall is an overstatement, since it’s all just one big tent. There are windows near the top, flexible sheets of plastic framed in velcro and wire to hold it in place. The hall is propped up on portable wooden beams, built to keep the waves of sand and mud out of the cook pots. But it fails even at that.

The soldiers in the mess hall are a mixture of men and women, dark skin and fair, short, tall, brawny and lean. There are even children. Somewhere. They’re the families of soldiers who couldn’t find anywhere to put them while they were away.

Their murmurs and cries are barely audible over the scrape and clatter of meal time in the mess hall, though today the mood is unusually subdued. A single thought occupies every conversation, every thought, every dream.

What comes next?

A ribbon of fresh, cool air cuts through the muggy atmosphere, turning the soldiers' heads. Captain Eighteen has returned, holding the battle plans high above her head, while her sharp eyes sweep over the room. Captains Sixteen and Forty are just behind her, similar plans in their hands.

“Command sent instructions.” They don’t say more. They don’t need to.

The rustle of papers now joins the depressed mutterings, the sheets making their way around the room.

The Captains never bother announcing anything anymore. Those who care will find the information, and those who don’t likely won't survive the war.

We’ll all die anyway.

It’s treason to say so, but no one follows the laws anymore. There’s no one left to enforce them.

Soldier sits tucked in a corner, out of sight, out of mind. He stays huddled behind the tallest of his comrades, keeping to himself and listening to the conversation of soldiers nearby.

They refer to each other as Two hundred six, Eight-oh-ninety, and so on.

Soldier had had a number once. A name, even, but that was before. Numbers had replaced names when names had become too common. The deaths, too common.

There had been an agreement, once the death rate topped the birth rate worldwide. When one isn’t likely to remember every soldier that dies in battle, what right does one have to demand that they themselves be remembered? That was one of the only ideas that every side of the war agreed on.

Numbers are still common among friends and relatives, but not for strangers and average cannon fodder. And so the soldiers referred to each other as Soldier, and the children as Child, and the parents as Father, Mother or Guardian.

There had been a time once when the world had cared if you considered yourself attracted to the same gender. When the world cared if you disagreed with your genetic identity. When the world cared if skin was light or dark. When the world cared about money.

The idea seems laughable now.

Soldier stays in his corner, watching the edges of the tarp flap open to admit more and more sludge, until it has covered the toes of his boots. He feels the air swirl around him, mingling with the breaths and heat of the others until it rises up, up and is replaced by a new draft, and the process is repeated.

He wishes he could join it, rise higher and higher until the world forgets he ever existed. Instead, he begins to eat.

The food tray in front of him is set with a generic sustenance pack of required nutrient pills, a scentless paste to simulate being full, and an unlabeled packet for flavor.

There’s no entertainment at meal time, no story telling. They used to gather around the largest table, laugh and drink and tell stories, but there are no stories to tell. All anyone remembers is past battles, and nobody wants to hear more about the war.

When the bell rings, no one is sorry to leave the hall. Soldier watches them, wishing they’d linger, wishing they’d delay the inevitable. But they never do.

For years, Soldier has slipped through the holes in death’s net. Incredibly lucky, Captain Eighteen says. Incredibly unfortunate, Soldier replies, for I am the only one.

Soldier meets Eighteen at the doorway. They stand together, watching the wind blow sand and mud across the barren landscape. Trees were chopped and burnt around the same time the war had been officially declared. Now the earth and wind mingle freely, with nothing to root it down, creating the nightmarish landscape they live in today.

They don’t have much to say. They’d said everything there was to say long before this, but still they stand together, waiting for words to come. The bell rings, signaling the breaking of camp. Neither Eighteen nor Soldier linger, wait for one last chance to speak. There’s nothing left to be said.

Soldier stands at imperfect attention. One of his proudest achievements is seeming just ordinary enough to not get promoted. The last thing Soldier needs is to be responsible for the deaths of fallen comrades. Once was enough.

Eighteen, Sixteen and Forty are standing on the stage. They project confidence, but Soldier knows the pain they carry inside. Their energy isn’t adrenalin or even righteous fury, but a sort of restrained recklessness that follows the floods of grief they were made to survive. Soldier stares straight ahead, but can feel Eighteen’s eyes on him. She’s always been the emotional one, in the time they’d served together. Some would call her coldhearted, ruthless, heartless, but what the other soldiers don’t know is that deep down, she cares. She simply refuses to allow herself to act on it.

The Captains begin battle prep, an exercise made of short drills and then a briefing of any new information they’ve received from the command center. Soldier remembers the whistles, explosions and fire.

There is no information.

There is no command center.

Soldier executes his drills almost perfectly, recites the briefing back with nearly complete proficiency. He doesn’t meet Eighteen’s eyes.

And then the men, women, children of the Last War march through wind and rain, to the next battle ground, the next war, the next slaughter.

Soldier has locked his heart away by the time the battle has started. Cannons boom, bombs whistle, and threaded through it all is the pop-pop-popping of gunfire. Ash rains and smoke rises, masking the sky and casting the land in a darkness like midnight.

He is positioned behind the Horse, a war machine made for more efficient killing on the battlefield. It was based on the idea that, once upon a time, captains had ridden tamed animals into battle. It looks nothing like the mythical horse, but no one aside from Soldier knows this.

Eighteen looks at him once more, and this time he does meet her gaze. They stare at each other, knowing what comes next and yet still waiting for words to come. Soldier breaks the connection first.

Soldier moves forwards in what is more a leisurely stroll than a march. He doesn't fire his weapon, doesn’t draw a knife or wrestle anyone down.

Instead, he makes his way up a hill, listening to the war and men scream around him. The draft of fresh air is gone, replaced by sulfur and smoke and what might be a trace of tear gas. All coordinated attempts at war had fallen apart far, far in the past, and all Soldier is left with is this cacophony of death.

He finally finds the crest of a hill and sits, watching the fight, the struggle. He watches his friends pass into a new world, a better one. He watches a soldier from a different side of the war charge up the hill towards him and get gunned down for the effort. He waits for the battle to slow, for the death to end. Soldier stands, letting the battle unfold beneath him, the numbness of grief leaving him near emotionless. Unwilling to kill, unwilling to be killed, inaction leaves Soldier hovering at the edge of battle.

He sees Eighteen on the Horse, progressing towards the general of the other side, General One. Soldier is the only person watching, the only person to notice the bullet shot into the Horse's engine, the only person to witness Eighteen's death.

Eighteen had never been his everything, but she’d been something, when nothing else was. Something falls down his face, leaving a track from his eye to his chin. Soldier doesn’t bother to check what it is. Soot, maybe, or ashes.

He watches the armies clash, push, shrink down to nothing, and it finally becomes real. The truth never hit him, not when he enlisted, not when his first love had gone missing in action, not when his first platoon was blown to smitharines, not even when the news reached them that everyone, everywhere was to be conscripted. Even his family.

But now he feels it, the grief and anger and raw nerves, pressing against his eyes and head and heart. Eighteen’s death was the last straw.

He knows exactly how he could have avoided this, what he could have done. In hindsight, it’s obvious.

At the beginning, there had been pacifists. A long, long time ago, back when he’d been a boy. A boy with a name, a job at a restaurant, a family and a horse.

The pacifists had said that what the world needed was peace agreements, treaties, neighborly love, acceptance. They were ignored for the most part, and when they weren’t, they were taken care of. The pacifists had disappeared, unable to fight their fight, and the world had turned to this. Battle after battle, conflict after conflict, war after war.

There are sides to the war, fighting for glory, land, riches, revenge. But it’s all the same, int he end. The first fight was Pacifists against the world. And the world had won.

Soldier had fought the wrong fight, served the wrong cause. Soldier became a soldier, and that had been the wrong call to make.

No longer shrouded in blissful numbness, Soldier finds himself at the bottom, searching for someone, anyone he could tell. He stumbles across the empty shells that once held comrades.

This had to stop, the blood had to stop. There’d never been a reason they fought. Their intentions had been to win the war, but what was the war? Senseless, irreversible.

They’d fought on the wrong side, and now everyone is dead because of it.

The smoke from the Horse's explosion is gone, wafted away. Ash still rains, but there is no gunfire. There are no bombs, no engines humming, no cannons blasting. Only a field of death.

The darkness clears just slightly, enough for Solder to see the metal shaft at his feet.

After a moment of hesitation, Soldier lifts it up off the earth. Coarse and riddled with holes, it takes extreme care to keep it intact.

Standing alone in the valley that only minutes ago held war, Soldier raises the flag of victory high and plants it in the ground.

The war is over, and Soldier has won.

But he’s lost too.

The flag stands, but only barely, banner fluttering despite the rain.

Then he falls to his knees, hands clasped behind his head as he struggles to keep himself under control. Soldier looks up once more, up at the flag, at the smog choked sky, waiting for it to end.

He watches the earth packed around the pole give away in the harsh weather, until the flag falls, sodden and torn, to the earth.

Then, in the silence, loss and grief of a pointless war fought to its end, the final soldier of the last war dies.