The young man—no, he was but a boy thrust into the rough and calloused hands of manhood, yes, the young boy stood in rank with his comrades in the still morning air. His heart hammered and his palms were slick as he cradled his rifle, his father’s old smoothbore musket actually, but a weapon nonetheless. The tattered flag, the brilliant blue “X” pocked with stars and holes against a crimson field, lay limp and unfurled on its pole in the standard bearer’s hands. The boy gazed through bright blue eyes across the field and into the hazy wood where the occasional flash could be observed, flickering like fireflies in fog. But the boy knew better.

He heard the delayed crackling and thunderous groan of rifle and deep cannon fire. This was it. After months of marching and drilling, of flaming hot days and frosty frigid nights, this was it. He was here. His stomach tightened. His patriotic fervor swelled in his breast. All were silent now, awaiting command. The officer on his golden steed saw something and straightened, poised, and raised his saber as if to slice the smoke drifting over from the wood. He nodded to the drummer beside him, a solemn bow to proceed. The boy tensed as the drum roll began. The officer shouted a curt set of syllables and the regiment began to flow forward, uncertainly at first, but with the officer’s calm visage of aural control, their confidence grew. The boy marched in step with his row towards the wood line as his thoughts began jerking excitedly in his head.

A battle! Such excitement he had never experienced in his young life. What would it finally feel like to stand and fight and to defend his homeland, to strike down the oppressors of his people? Energy seemed to course through his body and reverberate with every footfall. But his boyish grin faltered as his attention was drawn to a lone figure as it emerged from between the charred trees. The specter walked in a slow straight line, unfalteringly towards the ranks. Something dark brushed the boy’s confidence as it approached him and he saw it was a man, dressed in blackened blue stained with darkest red. He had no right arm, and a chunk of something metal stuck rigidly from his chest. With each rasping breath, blood trickled from the wound. He looked uncannily calm, accepting. The ranks parted, as if of one mind, and he walked through. As he passed the boy, his eyes, white spots in a field of muddy red, looked directly into the youth and seemed to say something. The boy turned sharply away and held his breath; his stomach even more unsettled. He pushed down that dark feeling and marched onward, his regiment wrapping around him in layers, as the wood line drew near. Behind them all, the figure stopped and gazed upward, smiling at something only he had heard, and then toppled to the ground. The boy paused for just a brief moment to look back, but saw nothing of the man but a heap of dirty blue cloth among the weeds. Someone cursed as they trod upon the boy’s heel and he turned away, jogging back into position as the regiment, marching to the drumbeat, entered the haze.

The smoky brume grew still as they proceeded and the crackling was reduced to pops. The ranks began to tighten with anticipation. The boy tensed at every crinkling of underbrush, every snapping twig. The officer, as stern and solid as always, doubled the pace. The drum rattled off, tat-a-tat-tat, tat-a-tat-tat, tappity, tappity, rat-a-tat-tat. They began to jog, a mass of men and cloth and metal, with rifles clacking and canteens banging off hips. Suddenly, the officer on his golden mount held up his hand and the drumbeat finished. The ranks stopped, straining their eyes. The boy peered through ghostly wisps torn by the jagged claws and stumps of shattered trees and remembered the scabrous stump of arm on the dying man from the field. The man’s eyes flashed unbidden into memory. The boy squeezed his own eyes shut and fought the image away and when he opened them again, he saw the enemy. Among excited hushed voices, rasping with anticipation and knotted with tension, he watched the forms weaving towards them in and out of the smoke. He saw the flapping striped standard and swallowed. The officer rode before the ranks and spoke into wide eyes with quivering hands. Men prayed, smiled with false ease, slapped one another on the back, and shook hands. Well, this is it. Good luck, they all seemed to say. After a few hearty exchanges, the boy checked his weapon. It was ready. The air grew silent again. The officer nodded and a drumbeat rolled, but differently this time. The officer raised his sword to the foliage above and gave sharp command. The boy snapped his father’s musket to his shoulder as his whole row raised their guns in unison. He could see them clearly now, not organized like his own ranks, but in ones and twos and threes, swarming around their flag like bees to their queen. A few of them fired, the explosions louder and shorter than before, pouring fresh smoke into the haze. But their shots were off, snapping branches above the boy’s head. He trembled and tasted gunpowder, but held his fire. A man ran into his sights, head bound in a red-white rag, mouth bared in a snarl, eyes bright and daring. The boy aimed at his center mass as his target paused to rally his fellow soldiers. The wait was but an eternity, and finally the order was shouted. Flame spat from metal as the whole row fired. It was thunderous, a whirlwind of noise and fire and smoke. The boy pulled his trigger and his musket bit into his shoulder as powder fell across his sight. The man with the rag turned, his gaze changed, now unbelieving. He stood alone among the collapsing and writhing shapes of blue-coated soldiers. The boy stared. His aim was true, but still the man stood. Had he missed? The rag-headed man in blue looked up, showed his teeth, raised his rifle, and gazed down the barrel. Right at the boy.

The boy closed his eyes and waited, his pulse slamming blood through his temples. Nothing. He looked up to see the man with the rag open-mouthed and wavering. He had dropped his rifle. Then the boy saw the blooming crimson flower on the man’s chest. He hadn’t missed. The man looked him clear in the eye, squinted, stepped forward, and leaned over, as if he were trying to scrutinize something that he couldn’t quite see on the ground. He sank dead, fallen across his crumpled banner. The men went rushing past the boy, the officer shouting. Unblinking, the boy stood up and began to move, still gazing ahead, looking past the mounds of bodies, past the man with the rag lying on his fallen flag. He ran and ran and never looked back. The whole regiment charged and the boy with them, leaping over smoldering bodies and through shot-blasted trees. His body bounded in rhythm with his fellows in their mad dash forward, but his mind was still with the rag-headed man he had killed, and with the calm figure from before who had escaped the dead only to join them in the clearing. They had awakened that morning same as he, and now they had left it in a dirty heap of blood, bone, and cloth. Their eyes, their gaze persisted. He shook his head to clear it and became dimly aware of more explosive pops in front of him. He heard shouts, screams, saw shadows, and was blinded by a sheet of fire to his left. He turned his face away and heard stomping feet pounding through the brush. Frantically, he rushed on, not seeing, not hearing. The dark feeling had returned, somehow touched him, infected him, and was filling him to the brim. He vaguely saw the golden horse galloping by, mad and foaming. The officer, the rock, the very foundation of the regiment lay sprawled across the horse’s back. He was limp; his face contorted and locked in a silent scream. He faded away, his corpse bobbing in sickening rhythm with his horse’s endless motion.

The boy barely registered that he was alone. It was delirium, insanity. Excitement was replaced with numb, exhausted horror, expectation reduced to regret. There was no glory here. The boy ran until he felt he would collapse and he did, crashing to his knees in the underbrush, his lungs burning. He looked up to stare into the shocked face of another. He was in blue. There was one moment, just one, where the two youths froze in their paths and the battle stopped and the war stopped and the whole world ground to a halt just to open a window before the two to let in a single ray of the simplest cosmic truth: on any other day in any other place, the two could have gone fishing together. But with a mad primal cry, for some predetermined cause, the boy flung himself forward, heaving his musket like an axe. The window closed and the ray was choked as the other, his eyes wide pools of exhaustion and terror and rage, fired from the hip. Something brushed the boy’s chest as his torso was consumed in smoke and heat and confusion. But his blow connected and the stock shattered upon the other one’s skull. The boy blundered on, stumbling over his fallen opponent as his useless musket dropped broken from his hands. He felt increasingly weakened and sick. His chest convulsed, he couldn’t breathe. He had to get out of the smoke, the hell, that place of madness and carnage and death. He felt trapped, hemmed in, suffocating. He fell, tripping over the tangled bloody brush and coughed, retched, spat blood from bloody lips. He looked up and saw light between the trees. A way out! He tried to bring his body back under his control, straightened his back to the battle din and death behind him. He tried to regulate his gasping as he began to walk away with as much weak confidence as he could muster. A way out. His steps fell heavy on the earth, which still trembled with cannon fire, as he broke through the underbrush and stumbled, passing through the wood line into the bright sunlight beyond.

He stepped out into the field, distantly processing that it was the opposite side from where he had begun. On the verge of his blurring vision, he perceived fresh ranks of soldiers. They were coming towards him in blue, the enemy. But he didn’t care. He wanted past them, wanted away from this place, never to return, never. He approached them; saw their faces in neat rows. They regarded him with flashes of shock and confusion, an alien being in an alien condition. He passed into their ranks and they parted, quickly stepping aside. Then he saw the boy. He saw himself. He wanted it all to stop, wanted to make it stop, wanted to warn him of the fate that awaited him. He understood now what he hadn’t before; the things he’d seen. The eyes. The figure, the man had wanted him to see in that field and had tried to warn him. So he turned now, to this new boy who tried to shy away. No! He seized the new boy by his arms, leaving bloody marks across crisp blue sleeves and locked his gaze, staring deep into him, and tried to tell him something. Something that couldn’t be told, had no way to be shared, but something he tried nonetheless. The new boy, eyes young and dismayed, pried him off and skittered away, rushing to join his comrades in blue marching beneath their banner. Maybe that one would be spared the madness, maybe he would escape the hell he was marching into. Maybe he would live. As for himself, he looked down in sudden surprise as he tasted fresh blood in his mouth. He looked at his chest and saw three bloody holes, the darkest red against the butternut brown of his uniform. He understood now, understood it all with the ease and acceptance of one who is crossing the threshold into death. He stopped walking and craned his neck, gazing heavenward to a sound only he could hear, and then peered back. There was one moment, just one, where he saw the new boy staring back across the field at him and then his strained and beaten heart slowly and finally, stopped. And so he fell and left to join those he had slain in their final peace. At rest, at last, free and far from the beat of the drums and the thunder of the guns and the screams of the wounded and dying, the boy had become a man. And across the field at the wood line, another boy had stopped to think.