Four years of watching as a steady stream of broken bodies and faceless men trickled through my city. We called them the faceless men because they are the ones with missing jaw bones, chins, and sometimes everything but a mouth and a gaping hole where the nose used to be. I worked several hours each day after the trading company in the makeshift hospital, once the city library. I guess it didn't matter much.
I mean who wants to read when life as you know it is coming to an end.
The warning signs of defeat flashed steadily in every home, every tavern, and every school since nineteen seventeen. The trenches on both fronts devoured men with impunity, without bias as too age. Boys as young as sixteen and as old as fifty filled the library. Where the works of Aristotle Cicero, and Shakespeare once stood, now boys and men lay bleeding and dying for a war they never agreed to fight. But fight they did for our old Emperor, and for this they paid the ultimate price. I can't say that I would have been any different.
Watching these ghosts in nineteen fourteen passing me by in the opposite direction, one couldn't help but feel a surge of Nationalistic pride, even if we were not really a Nation. They left in the multicolored uniform representing their respective province and returned in a standard field grey uniform of the Kaisers Reich. A Reich quickly solidified through war, and soon to pay reparations to the victors.
Each day I would care for these men with the same tenderness offered by the female nursing staff. I was just a boy, so there was not a stigma attached to my tender care of the pitiful wounded entering the front doors in droves toward the end of the war.
For three years I helped wash the blood-soaked bandages recently taken from the dead to be used again on the dying. As time passed,I graduated to more intricate duties like dressing wounds already black with infection and smelling like rotting cheese. Most would have to go under the knife for amputation. It is true that after caring for so many wounded, and seeing someone alive and talking one minute, but gone to oblivion the next, you become hardened inside. A numbness creeps into your soul like an alien invader and mimicking who you once were. I looked the same, acted the same, and even felt the same, but something goes missing. You just can't cry anymore regardless of what you see. Horror does not hold the same definition anymore.
This impersonation gives rise to a disturbing nondiscrimination. You stop asking for someone's name. That is until one day you see that one person who hand delivers you your lost humanity. I was just fourteen at the time, but I was about to have my first hard crush.His name was Corporal Roland Aust.
" I need you to clean these bandages and go around and wrap as many wounds as you can see that needs immediate attention," stated nurse Berlow. She was my favorite out of all the other nurses. She was smart, pretty, and sassy. She reminded me of my mother. The face of an angel with the devil's wit lurking just below the surface.
"You got it Kitty," I replied. That was her nickname. I don't know how she got it, but a cat reference certainly seemed to fit her disposition.
"Oh, and Karl," she whispered. I followed her eyes as she looked to bed number fifteen,hastily placed somewhere around where the fiction section used to be. When I looked back,she was smiling with a very motherly smile, with maybe just a hint of something I would never see in my Mothers expression,something erotic. She again whispered,
"they moved the Corporal to bunk fifteen.Go and make sure he has clean bandages." She quickly turned away as if knowing I was about to blush, sparing me any more needless embarrassment. I thought to myself, she knows. She knows my thoughts. She can see my dreams. She must have watched last night as I told Roland how I felt. That I wanted to kiss his soft lips and run my finger gently across the scar on his face and tell him that it will all be Ok .
But she couldn't know such things. I decided that this was all just a part of my imagination. I was only fourteen, and still very confused about such things as sex. I watched friends exchanging notes and glances with the girls from the neighborhood. I rounded the corner of Berlin Street one afternoon to see my best friend at the time, Hermann Gunther pressed tightly
an apartment stairwell kissing Gertrude Muller. I believe I saw his hand on her ass, but maybe I was wrong. For me, I always just believed that I was a late bloomer. Maybe asexual, or just plain strange. That is until I watched the stretcher bearers carry in Corporal Roland Aust, the hero of the Western front. At least that's how I imagined him.Math is not my strong point, but it doesn't take a genius to count the number of years that separated us. He was just sixteen,four years ago,as I watched him march off to face the horrors of the Western front. Each night I close my eyes, scanning the eager faces of the young and old marching soldiers, hoping to catch a glimpse of Roland in that sea of multi colored uniforms and shining bayonets. But would I recognize him?The faces of the young boys marching off to war on that crisp autumn day on Wilhelm Avenue. Faces of boys still caught between the states of carefree fanciful pubescence and the unimaginative world of manhood.But this was not the face I was looking at now. His face, like so many others, has aged far beyond the years. These are the eyes of shattered innocence. Eyes that gazed into the stone face of death and lived to tell the tale, even if their story is cut short by the trauma of a broken body, a shattered innocence, and a pulverized soul.
I can see that my own stage of development is not nearly as advanced as my Roland. Despite only six years difference in our age, we may as well have been twenty years apart.As my time involved boyhood pranks and the confusion of a budding realization of my homosexuality, Roland's was one of heroically facing death. At least that is my fantasy. The truth, as I now know, is that everyone who sits at the table of war and willingly, or unwillingly, tastes its tempting fruit, experiences horror, fear, and sorrow. I see the shadow of horror still embedded on his beautiful stubble chin. I see the deep lines of fear forever carved into the prominent structure of his elevated cheeks. I see the sorrow in his piercing blueish green eyes
The kind of sorrow that seeps into a person's soul and forever becomes a part of their fabric. This is the truth of war written on the faces and the soul of every person brave enough to sit at its table. Well that is enough sentimentality for one day. I know I can never utter these words to the man lying before me. But if I can't,touch his lips as my lover, I will gently dress his wounds and kiss them tenderly in my mind.