The Tale of the Hero

As the sun rose on a changed landscape, all he could see was red – a brilliant scarlet and darkened patches of reddish brown interspersed with a few burned patches littered around, accentuating the hellish red hue. His huffs and pained gasps were all that was audible in the vicinity. Only a few fires burned now – the rest had died down, leaving only charred corpses and battery smoke behind. It had been all black and grey and he couldn’t comprehend whether it was the darkness or the smoke suffocating him.

It was the smoke, probably.

It was sweltering hot. The uniform was uncomfortable. It was painful – no, it was positively excruciating. There was a bullet-sized hole in his left shoulder – untidily dressed – but it was the best a one-armed man could do. His entire uniform was blotched with dirt and blood – his and others. His hand was swelling at an alarming rate. He briefly entertained the possibility of it being infected. The thought soon excused itself into a dark abyss in his brain.

Nobody cared about a septic hand on a battlefield, especially not when on death’s door. The trenches were muddy and putrid and dingy and stuffy. It even added the risk of suffocation from an avalanche of loose mud and rocks. That would indeed be a bad way to go.

The smell of his comrades’ corpses would kill him if the blood loss did not.

Tsk, tsk – evil thoughts, blasphemous thoughts. You aren’t supposed to think that way. Right, it was an honor - a great honor - to die for his motherland.

Unfortunately, try as he might, he couldn’t see what was so romantically honorable about death by asphyxiation amidst unrecognizable corpses.

A sharp throbbing in his shoulder made him hiss. He shifted his gun with a soft grunt. This was enemy territory. Even a whisper could give him away.

That was what he was taught. Still, he did not think they could possibly hear him over the cackle of fire. His shifting was of no use, though. The pain did not go away. Gosh, this would give him some severe trauma when he was rescued. If he could be saved before he died, that is. Did corpses have trauma? Something between a scoff and a grunt escaped his lips.

The emotion did not last though.

Kim – dead. He died of a gunshot wound in his leg, which turned septic. He was the first.

Then James, Jim, Jim2, Arnold, Tom, Hayden Harvey and Gong. All had fallen in quick succession, like a pack of cards tumbling in the breeze.

Tom’s death was the most heartbreaking – he was a little rainbow that life at the barracks had failed to dim. One headshot was all it took. There might’ve been a bang, who knew, but it had been indistinguishable amid the incessant firing.

Tom had died to a nameless bullet.

Tom had fallen - his broken body a puppet with its strings cut – and he had seen it.

And it had broken him.

Something in him had snapped, and all he saw was red. Everything else had fallen away. It had just been him and his enemy - the one who had shot the bullet. The bullet he fired had raced through, across the land and sailed through the trench straight into the head of the offender. Blood had

splattered, and he had seen it and relished it. He had reveled in the gruesome justice he had exacted.

A deathly calm had engulfed him. It was a focus of the highest order, unbreakable, unshakable, all-penetrating. He had fired seventeen shots after that. Fifteen had been killed, and two more had been injured grievously. And he had taken a bullet to the shoulder.

The cannon took away five more.

Harry died in his arms. He had reached Harry - crawling on all fours - because the pile of dead bodies had left so little room to maneuver. That man, no boy, was the youngest, yet the biggest of them all. That did not help with his wounds, though. His passing was the most painful.

His engagement was just around the corner. They had relentlessly teased him about that. His massive build did little for his cherubic face, and the blood which rose to his cheeks on the mere mention of his beloved made his face seem so boyish and shy that it invited even more teasing.

He still kept Harry’s dog tag. “Keep it safe”, Harry had breathed, as he died.

That he would, he would; he would... It was a promise, a whispered mantra that gave him strength and a purpose to live on, to survive. He fingered Harry’s dog tag. It was no more a mere means of identification – it was a talisman containing Harry's soul and strength. A little fire lit inside his heart. That kept him warm. He grunted and shifted again, easing into a slightly more comfortable posture.

His mum – his innocent, naïve mum, would be waiting for his promised return. His father was no more, and now even he was going away. Anna would be heartbroken. He could not buy her a hairpin anymore. How that hairpin on display in the shop had twinkled when it caught the light! How the longing for it had shone on her face!

And Emma, what would she be doing? How he wished he had told her, one last time, that he loved her, that he missed her… He wanted to feel the electrifying touch of her fingers on him, wanted to take in her lemony scent, one last time….

A tear escaped his eye.

He felt betrayed. This was supposed to be an easy victory. It was supposed to be a sweep. They were – they were… His pain destroyed that line of thought. His shoulder was throbbing; each nerve was on fire, sending sharp jolts of stinging pain all through his body.

He had lost all sensation in his left hand. With a humongous effort, he willed his fingers to close, and they obeyed, but with all the grace of a feather falling in the wind – so slowly that he feared they would stop working any time. He made them into a fist, but it could not exert any strength. The fist was useless, just like him. He hated it. This feeling of powerlessness, the politicians who clamored for war, the terrorists who instigated the war… all he hated with a burning passion, resented them with every fiber of his being. He hated himself for fearing death and the scythe of the Grim Reaper. That was not what he had been taught.

His commander had always shouted, “You die when you fear death!”

Yes, then he was dead hundred times over.

Gunshots had started blazing again in a raucous disharmony, the only tribute the dead would get. He peeped out, and in that brief moment, he saw it – the ball of fire coming straight at him. He stared it down till the very end.

No realization hit him; no profound thought came to him, no deep enlightenment engulfed him.

His only thought was that it was beautiful. But, the price of that beauty was his life. Emma waited and waited. Anna wept. Mum held in hot tears for both their sakes.

Not every hero lived to tell the tale.