The Line
“The Line”
Cameron Reese
Down in the trenches dug years ago, a brave young soldier waits as stray bullets fly and rockets bombard overhead. He clenches his rifle with an unsteady hand as his face rests against the sand of the revetment, and he awaits his command. All of the others around him are curled up resting on the wooden floor, tired enough to die, tired enough to fall asleep to the sounds of mortar shells crashing all around and the hissing of bullets passing above. But our brave soldier, who was only two days into a ten-year war, does not yet understand the vicissitudes of the bullets and rockets which come as untimely as bad weather. In the distance, he hears the faint sound of a whistle, and he jumps to, peaks his head and shoulders over the mound of sandbags and he aims his rifle straight and fires across the line into the foggy, battle-torn field. Countless bodies lie abandoned in the wasteland marred with craters and wires of barb where the soil is topped by the stream of blood and guts spilt by the driving waves of innocent flesh. Across the field he cannot see who he is shooting at or why, but he heard the whistle sound and our brave young soldier fights to hold the line. The line continues on in both directions around the entire world.
Once his shot was fired and sent across the line, he quickly ducked back down into the trench and hid, waiting until he heard that whistle sound off again. He looked at the filthy faces of his comrades resting on the ground, and watched as some of them snored like they were back home, like their hand was a down pillow and like their uniform was a thousand thread count sheet. Before they went under, they left him no instruction other than to listen to the sounds of the boatswain whistle blowing. One-by-one they went to sleep and left our brave young soldier to fend for himself and hold the line, alone. Why bother giving him direction? No one would be foolish enough to cross the line now.
It was learned to be unwise many years ago when wave after wave of infantrymen left the trenches and never returned. The braver and luckier men who made it the furthest into the line saw their courage rewarded by an empty box being sent home as it guaranteed their bodies would never be found. The further you went, the less likely they’d ever recover the body, but still the waves are ordered to cross, and no man can refuse this order. The people who play Stratego with the lives of others, stubbornly attack over and over always expecting a different result. They fire missiles blindly, shoot their bullets frivolously, and regularly launch their mortars across the line with no regard for where it may land. No regard for human life or target—they’ll fire upon the sick and the lame, and the women and the children—they shoot—both sides—blindly at one another. The line has not budged an inch since it was established, and many of the talking heads proffer to say that the war will never come to an end.
For our brave soldier, it all began with a simple dilemma: he no longer wanted to go on living in this cruel, wretched world of conflict and turmoil. And of this feeling, he was not alone. But this is not a dilemma until it is known that he’s a man of faith and has accepted the Eucharist. Like millions of other people around the world, he believes that if he takes his own life he will be cast into the unending doom of hell—a punishment for rejecting God’s image, for it is in His likeness that we were all created. Therefore, the only way to kill himself was to find a cause worthy of death, or to find a career path with a high-mortality rate. His ambitions of death led him to the Corps where he volunteered to fight on The Line. For longer than some have been alive, The Line has been the epicenter of geopolitical conflict around the world, and our friend finds himself ensconced in a war much bigger than he and pitted on a side by proxy of his birthright.
He'd heard the figures of the reported death toll turned clock before he arrived, but he never imagined the horrendous smell of large deposits of decaying bodies; He saw videos of people being shot, but he never knew how heavy a dead body was until he caught a man who went limp after being struck in the head by a wayward bullet sent across the line; and he saw videos of bombs falling from the sky down upon the scores of anguishing soldiers, but he never experienced the anxiety of constantly peeking to the sky and mistaking shadows for angels of death… until he saw it with his own two eyes. All of his quixotic impressions, and make no bones about it, he relished in the prospect of feeling the pain of death—our last earthly sensation—they all seemed to vanish when things became real. He takes a deep breath… he can still smell the bodies. He has not been here long enough to get accustomed to the smell.
It's quiet on this side of hell, and our soldier boy is anxious for battle. It’s been two whole days and he’s had all about he can take, and, of waiting to die, he can take no more. His spirit is restless, he peeks his head up from the trench and boldly looks out at the line. He dares to keep his head above the line longer than a creep, and he stares and looks at the line much longer than many people who will never see old age. He releases all of his fears and he embraces the line.
The bullets came in sparse since the fog laid low over the field, but that did not detour sending strays. There was no grass in the field anymore. Although these plains once housed farmlands and rows of crops, by the marching of black boots and decades of artillery being laid into the earth, these lands have lost their sheen of green, and nothing grows. Smoke fills the air constantly, great black clouds blot out the sun, and the air is drier than the sands of the Great Plains, the place our soldier longs to be.
Then he heard a double whistle screech (toot-toot) faintly in the distance like a far cry. He didn’t know what that sound meant but it he thought it was a signal to charge. He looked down the traverse, past the sleeping soldiers, and saw movement down yonder. Hundreds of men scrambled and crawled out from the trenches and went with frightened steps over the line. They disappeared into the mist, and when they walked it was with great trepidation and a slowness like cattle weary of their being led to slaughter.
Now was the time to make the final charge. He threw himself over the sandbags and stumbled through the mud. He got to his feet and began sprinting across the field into the fog. He ran as fast as he could as bullets flew past, and the bombs sounded off in the distance. He ran through the mire of misty air and felt the rigid bones beneath his feet with each passing step. He ran past rusted artillery half-sunken in the sand, past large Czech hedgehogs with weathered I-beams, and then past the old church and the cracked bell which fell a long time ago. He ran through the fields in the cover of the fog and further down the line he could hear the others running in full retreat, but our brave soldier did not stop. Nothing could stop him now but the sweet embrace of death. He went on…
Our soldier went on past the vestige of a war-torn churchyard and he ran past the splintered pews covered in moss. He climbed over the stump of a tilted apple tree, and then unexpectedly fell into a burrow and found himself at the bottom of a ditch full of skulls and bones. He climbed out of the hole and up back to the field where he continued to run as bullets flew by through the fog. He ran past a crashed plane where the pilot’s remains were half slumped over the cockpit as though he’s been trying to leave for over a decade. A mortar whistled from above and he ducked for cover and it crashed down nearby, barely missing. When he got up, he saw there were wires of barb near where he fell and enmeshed in the wires, trapped, were a couple of soldiers still in uniform but their skin had rotted to the bone. He went around and continued onward, further than any man has gone before.
When suddenly he took a step forward and felt a mine underneath his foot. He looked down and saw that it was so, and then he carefully removed his foot very slow. By the graces of God, he was still alive when he lifted his foot, and he continued on running; the war had gone on long enough for the earlier mines to have expired. He ran further into the fog as the bullets continued to fly by miraculously not hitting him, until he finally did it. He came upon the end of the line and saw the opposing trenches becoming less opaque as he neared. Then, there came a stiff breeze over the land from above and the fog was swiftly wiped away from the field as if by a hand through smoke, and suddenly everything in the field became visible and they could all see our brave soldier who strayed a little too far.
But he did not die. No one fired upon him. That’s when he saw with his own two eyes that he, along with all of the men across the line, wore the same uniform. The men in the trenches opposite, who he had been ordered to fire upon, were not his enemy but his brethren. And for a moment there was a pause throughout and a silence which had not been heard since before the war began. For the first time in years the firing across the line ceased. Once they were face-to-face and could see they wore the same uniform, and shared the same look in their eyes, the war had ended. Suddenly the orders yelled at the top of the general’s lungs fell on deaf ears. They slowly rose up from the trenches, and he saw all of their faces which looked confused and wilting as the realization swept through the air. All the men laid down their arms, and the fighting stopped. In the end, they were all on the same side pitted against each other on opposite spectrums of the line.
