Upon This Waste

Chapter 6

The gunfire had died down to a low grumble and growl. They were sitting, almost sinking, down in the trench, some talking, some silent.

"How do they do it?" Isaiah asked into the breeze-blown fog.

"Do what?" Mike asked, seated facing him on the other side of the trench.

"Run like that. Run mad," Isaiah answered almost as if he were talking to himself.

Mike shook his head and David answered, "What choice do they have? They've got no choice. They've got no chance either. It's a sad thing."

"You'd think some of them would desert though, wouldn't you? Or maybe just wouldn't budge? At least some of them, don't you think? How do they all do it? How do they make something like that look so easy?" Isaiah asked in reply, looking more and more like he was talking to the ghost of some soldier perhaps, someone known and unknown.

"We all know what happens to the deserters if they spot them. Some are shot on sight. Some hanged; lynched in blackened trees. Some are honored with a firing squad." He paused. "And what if they do escape? Is that much better? Humiliation. Living like some hermit under a rock, like an animal, waiting for the army to pass. Just sitting around and scavenging, or stealing, scared and alone. It seems to me that they don't have much of a choice," David answered coldly. He went on, "Have you ever considered doing it?"

Isaiah snapped, startled, out of his fixed gaze and turned his eyes more fully toward David. "Considered doing what?" he asked him.

"Deserting. Leaving the ranks behind," David answered, and color came back subtly into Isaiah's face.

"No, I don't suppose I have."

"Then you know what I mean."

"I guess you're right."

"And if tomorrow the army points its finger at you and shouts, 'you there, up and over! On the double! Over the trench, like wild into no-man's-land!' well then that's right where you'll be. And I'll be right there beside you," David said, coughing as he spoke. "The oppressors wrongs and insolence of office duly mocked. Conscience makes us madmen, not cowards."

"Who the hell cares?" Jack called out. He was sitting down the trench some yards from Isaiah. "Let those damn barbarians come at us all damn day," he continued with cold and glossy eyes. He looked down at his rifle for a moment and then at his pistol. "I've killed at least thirty of those bastard savages myself," he said, grinning slightly. "Thirty more'd be just fine."

"Come on, Jack," Sam said with frustration in his voice, joining the conversation. "Watching them die doesn't bother you at all? Just boys?"

"Hell no," Jack replied, his grin forming into a smile. "Why should it?"

"Hard to believe," Sam said softly and sad. "That's hard to believe."

"Guilt is a strange thing," David said in almost a whisper. Isaiah didn't know if the others could hear him speaking, or if only he had heard. "A strange thing indeed," David went on. "A stranger. An enemy. An illness. Some vile pestilence. An igniter of cruel rage. A friend to some to be sure. An obstacle merely there to overcome. A bullet or a bomb. His wardrobe's hardly bare. We all feel him, I believe, some way or another."

They were all silent for a while, down in the mud, content with the dying, or the dying down of the fighting. Isaiah looked up at the sky. It was night. It hadn't been dark long. Twilight, with the broken and crooked shadows it produced, had vanished not long before, but the stars and the moon had risen quickly. Not brightly, but in amazing numbers, the stars sat calm and quiet in the sky. To Isaiah they seemed gentle somehow, those immeasurably distant flames that looked like only twinkles in some faraway eye. It made it seem to Isaiah that perhaps out there somewhere, some eye still reflected happiness, someone filled with the joy of peace. Maybe they were even filled with the joy of friendship or family. He cherished the stars for that. They always seemed to know their peace. They had it, and it was so. He wished he could feel them more fully, inside him, inside all things, burning and raging and peaceful and sure.