Gone the Tides of Earth

In the beginnings of autumn, we were stationed at an alpine post deposited in the northwestern range of Hellenic Macedonia. Its main function was as supply department, fueling station and stopover encampment accommodating soldiers between movements, those headed to the lines at the garrisons and others who arrived southbound from duty for rest. Therefore, it was mostly like what trading posts of old came to be, for settlers and natives in the early incarnation of the Americas.

The service roads were olden backroad highways, woven through wooded valleys below and up through junctures of hilled terrain into the alps. From unchecked traction the pavement was busted up, each spring the army would spread fresh gravel to conceal divots in the abused rubble. Barely wide enough for lone vehicles, it offered but a narrow laneway wont to tedious pileups anytime opposing caravans met, most hazardous come night. So, we flagged it when necessary, blocked the road at the bottom upon the departure of a crew to ensure zero rate of oncoming traffic. At the post you could see the valley beneath, past the scarps where the dusty road flattened, giving way into obscurity between green-glazed woods in the rich, unsoiled terrain, and rocky hills leading away from vast peaks into miles of government-annexed olive groves and orchards surrounding the valley. Past the woods and scratch-rock hills were the eternal patrols of the military, running along their governmental freeways back towards the city.

In the start of cold days, the road was busiest all season and often congested with military activity. Caravans arrived throughout countryside from mountain towns to the north, jagged cleft peaks which felt irregular fighting when the enemy broke through, that we occasionally heard thunderous and saw flashing upon the ridges like lightning. Most days a winding serpent proceeded lethargically down in the wooded valley, cast with station wagons bearing important personnel who, during brief visits occupied the post’s modest quarters, and canvased camions clogged with exhausted commoner soldiers eager to stretch legs and make camp in the open-air of the yard, medium trucks of food stocks with sometimes larger trucks of disrupted weaponry and fragments for redesign, lastly and finally the horse-pulled artillery carriages typically carting discharged fighters suffering aggravated wounds; the poor souls who would never see winter, who came accompanied by nurses and comrades closest in those dying days, for care and comfort.

On a mildly chill dawn late in the season came a first snowfall. Fog rolled in in great dark shrouds like tarps of canvas, hung over the landscape unyielding sometimes for days. At first light I woke, dressed and having gone out into the cold felt the snowflakes which drifted soft, slow dissolving on my eyelids. With the change in seasons fighting was set to slow into a state of attrition in coming days, silence to settle that for the last month had not scarce materialized. Yard almost deserted now, tomorrow would be completely, plots beneath trees where tents had been pitched vacated, the fallen, colour-changed leaves and autumn foliage sinewy crusts crunched under thousands of imprints. Operations frantic weeks before stymied by climate, caravans shoving off quickly for the city back south. The white noise of battle that trumpeted long, for us was reliable calm newly stasis dissipated into disquiet. With its symphony at an end, the flight of its orchestra and the sense of it all broken, each of us reeling would miss it in our own way. Only because the dying of men and women went unheard, for the time being we heard not without guilt the sound of air in the mountains, rushes of wind harsh upon trees in the night.

A last remnant of stragglers congregated at the edge of upper forest, offering adieu to the final troops’ caravan. Along the road where it led from the plateau down, we said goodbye. Four vehicles, three of them trucks bearing half a dozen soldiers each, a petite grain truck acting as a weapons mobile; these were Peloponnesians, in the two weeks during their stopover we had bonded, it felt bittersweet knowing we would never see them again. Fair minute in their dust we waved them off, cumbersome camions eased along the road and curved away and while they disappeared round the trees. In that moment most of us started back for the encampment, toward a gathering around the bonfires. Alci caught up as we went, striding the beaten foot trail into camp. Day had been overcast, still grey out and getting on to full dark. As he came, pattered, I heard his feet scuffle the matted leaves aside and slow to a gait.

‘Sucks to see them go,’ he said, in pace. ‘At least we still have the girls.’

‘You might see them in the city, sometime.’

‘At least the girls are still here with us.’

Before us went nurses, four of them walking with arms locked and two farther ahead winding their own trail in the snow. Their stay at camp had been longest, on account of being sent from western positions to tend an influx of hurt soldiers at the beginning of the seasonal retreat. About a month or so now, and given the similar secretarial nature in the lines of work collectively undertook - us former lot the camp’s default superintendents - our company felt to fill the shoes, fit the bill of some comedy troupe on a satirical ancient tragedy. Three of us men shared the officers’ cabin, separate from marquees and tents. Entering camp, I glanced over my shoulder to look back; our third, an Irishman, stood at the end of the road, watching the caravan pass below in the valley.

‘Think Cian will wish to go when Alethea leaves?’ Alci asked.

‘He might try,’ I humoured. ‘See you in a bit.’

‘Okay,’ youthful Greek winked at me cordially. ‘Bon voyage, Henry.’

‘Apochairetismόs,’ I replied, poorly pronounced.

Shoving off, he took a small jet-black comb out of jacket pocket, waved at me with it then began putting it through his hair. Alcibiades Agata was inclined to a regal maintenance of thus coiffure. Onto a different path, I strayed from the trail and main encampment. Of three nurses close I saw their bright faces laughing as I went past the cabin. The nurse called Alethea among them, she and Cian had taken up together. She was youngest of all, dark-skinned, attractive, and quite Greek-looking. Before I had gone caught the glint of her eye as she smiled at me, sweet like a baby sister.

Back at the cabin I wandered through a small grove of twisted trees, to the location of the outhouse. For soldiers, latrines had been dug a few hundred metres back into the forest. At the start, only nurses and injured had been allowed to use our accommodations. This led to the malcontent of healthful men, when they conceded to proclaim equity we were in no position to refuse. Of that populist reign its short-lived days were hell - I believed that the injured, even a few nurses took to using the woods themselves. Thankfully with arrival of officers the concept of sharing facility was not one they were zealous of, decreed that all able-bodied men not in operation of the post must go into the forest to access the latrines. Prior remigration we treated the outhouse a dozen times with miracle chemicals, an odious stench pervasive like that from portables at liberal arts festivals, mingled with the decay of dying tissue vilest. In the aftermath of an intensive cleaning regiment and sage-burning ordered by the officers, who had also taken to using the woods, we restored it to an original scent itself more like bungled cat litter.

Up at the door of the outhouse, it was closed and the occupancy indicator intact. For a moment I waited, then, thinking better of it, rapped knuckles thrice on the split oak facia, paused and then beat once again. In a swift motion the door brushed open, I smiled and honed my eyes, feeling incandescent looking at her. She smiled back with her own blues moist, sensually voracious. Covering her body, merely rather the unmentionable parts, was a quasi old-style nursing uniform bleached Hellenic white and blue. Seeing her there, I wondered indeed if Aristophanes had written us.

‘From last Halloween,’ Miss Garswood explicated.

‘I see,’ I said, again gazed her head to toe, seeing.

‘I hope you like it,’ she purred, myself finding no reason to object.

She stepped forth, I took her in with a hand around the waist, wrapped her up in my arms, lifting the beautiful charge nurse clear of the ground. Our mouths came together, tongues hot and wet entering each other’s, self-reciprocating. Next she disconnected, went down on her knees and taking it out, put it in her mouth, worked that way a few moments until I was more than ready.

‘Let’s go in the cabin.’