Love You Till The End (Robert Zussman x Reader)

59 - Y/N L/N

March 30, 1945
Near Berga, Germany

When war is declared, plenty of damage follows. Those damages go beyond the destruction of nature and architecture.

As a soldier, you see and do things that don't get mentioned in the newspapers or on the radio back home. If a nation needs more soldiers, they can't risk scaring their men. The many enlistment posters plastered on the walls of buildings as you walk down the street wouldn't serve their purpose if men knew everything about what they're actually signing up for. All they really need to know is that it's their "duty" to their country.

Others don't get the option to choose if they'd like to carry out that "duty." The decision is made for them and they receive the dreaded letter in the mail telling them to pack their bags. They leave behind their homes, their families, their lives, not knowing if they'll ever return again.

War drastically changes the everyday life of a civilian turned soldier. You learn to be grateful for things you might have taken for granted before. Being dirty is the new normal; clean clothes are a luxury. The food you're given might not be the tastiest, but you either eat it or grow weak. The ground is often your bed, but you might not be lucky enough to lay on it and rest every night. In a way, the lifestyle shares some similarities with living in poverty, except you receive a monthly paycheck to live this way along with having to worry about being killed by the enemy at any moment.

As soldiers, we are trained to kill. Some are better at it than others, but we all are meant to eventually use our training to end a life before ours can be ended first. The things we do on the battlefield would get us arrested as civilians, yet the circumstances lead to many people praising us for carrying out our "duty."

Before I enlisted, I was a civilian who praised my country's soldiers. Based on what my father told me about his war experiences, I knew that carrying out bad acts is part of being a soldier, but I understood that those acts do not mean that a soldier is a bad person. That's not to say that there aren't soldiers with bad intentions, but I think it's important to remember that soldiers aren't the ones responsible for the war. The government has the power to declare war on another nation; soldiers are left to do the dirty work. Even if they're fighting voluntarily, it's not unlikely that the posters telling them to enlist played a part in them doing so. For that reason, I still praise the many men who either lost the fight or are still fighting because they are part of the damage caused by the war.

Death and destruction are plentiful in war; it does not have many pretty sights. There are things you see more than once that may not become easier to look at. A common sight is the bodies of comrades and enemies scattered across the ground. If the bodies have been there for a while, they most likely will appear as bloated and the foul vomit-inducing stench of decay dominates the surrounding air.

Because I often helped the medics, that introduced me to even more horrible sights: excessive bleeding, head wounds, damage to the face, trench foot, raw flesh, traumatic amputations. The smells and sounds were not any nicer. The cries of the wounded sometimes made me want to fall into a full-blown panic because of how overwhelming they became, but I somehow managed to hold myself together because their lives depended on my ability to focus and help them even if there was only so much we could do to ease their pain. During all that, the metallic smell of blood normally overpowered my nose and became more chemical as time passed.

When we started our search for the camps, I don't think any of us really knew what we would find. I didn't want to believe that there could be worse things to see. As we've traveled through the heartland of Germany over these past few weeks, my faith in humanity has truly been challenged. I hadn't expected the Nazis to treat POWs very nicely, but their treatment exceeded my expectations and it was shocking to discover that POWs weren't the only people receiving it. All along, the Nazis had also been keeping certain civilians that they considered undesirable in terrible conditions and treating them with nothing but evil; the victims being not only men but women, children, and the elderly as well.