The silence was oppressive. It always was. All those people thinking sad thoughts, grateful ones but sad all the same. Thinking about people they had known, or people they would have known. The shuffle of feet, and occasionally a child crying because it was too young to understand the sadness all around it, but could not help but feel it all the same.
For him, it was decaying his heart to stand in an expensive cashmere coat, straight and tall with no grey in his hair or injuries left. Nearby an ancient man in a wheelchair wept, tears falling down his grey, wrinkled cheeks. Soon there would be no one who had seen the things he had seen. There would be no one who had tasted the mixture of blood and flanders mud on his tongue as a shell scattered men and earth into the air. His family had been safe in America somewhere, but he had come to fight.
There were days he'd healed so many he felt as weak as a Tudor lady after blood-letting, and still thousands upon thousands upon millions died all around him. He remembered too well the real poppies the paper and plastic ones imitated. Even with death all around them, they would grow up, waving in the wind like the most vulnerable, flimsiest red ribbons but still strong. Small signs of beauty in a world of pain and suffering, gray and brown and dull and agonising.
The last post sounded. Someone who could play bugle at school who trotted it out once a year to play to end the silence. Church bells sounded all around and the sound of a few dozen people straightening in the cold November air surrounded him.
Gently, he crossed himself, an automatic reflex that quiet contemplation never ceased to bring him. He had served in both World Wars, taking time from his search for his brother to do what he felt was right. But all the ethics in the world had not put him on the front line the second time. Once was more than enough, and the second world war had been far more exciting. Spies and linguistics, interrogation and undercover work wearing the uniforms of the nazis he despised. Far more elegant than the mud and blood and noise and rats and disease.
A man with a military handshake went around the small group in the village square, thanking people individually for coming. Fewer and fewer every year, he heard him say. A shame, but perhaps inevitable. The trouble with forgetting old grudges between nations, between forgiving the French and the Germans and the Spanish for the wars of the centuries, was that people ceased to care about those who had died. It was far easier to hate another nation than remember those who had died for your own.
It was why he could never quite hate himself for being a vampire. Humans, humans were far, far worse than he and his family on the grand scale.
People went home to their roast dinners, to watch the end of the Armistice Day parade on television, to put off their honour and remorse and gratitude for another year. To read the papers and flick through page after page of needless gossip and turmoil and ignore the wars that raged overseas. He went for a walk, aimless despite the determined speed of his stride, because it was not just three minutes for him. It was a hundred lifetimes of comrades and strangers who had fallen, and it had taken him so long to realise how precious each human was. How noble each soldier was.
How great the loss of each war was, and would always be.