Hooves thundered across a grassy field. Hundreds of hooves for a hundred riders. A rider and his horse. A man, and his beast.
If any man pretended to know what task truly laid ahead of them, no man said.
Jamie let out a war whoop, and his men followed suit. To strike surprise and terror into the hearts of the enemy...
What was it about the heat of battle? The roar of gunfire would echo in the beckoning, hollow calls sent across the plains. The smell of sweat. The sensation of fear. It all seemed surreal. As if... A terrible dream had suddenly forced its way into reality. War. Pain. Destruction.
And all that came with war... Eris... Discord. Phobos... Fear. Deimos... Dread. And the hardest worker of them all, the final of the three Fates, Atropos... Death. They were there, too.
For some, like Nicholls, war was a distasteful thing. What men would avoid. Because it chained men's hearts in hatred and malice, refusing to release them until its insatiable thirst for blood was temporarily quelled.
Yet, to men like Jamie... It was when they felt real. When they felt alive. When they deprived others of that same feeling, only perhaps in a more permanent manner. In a definitively more permanent manner.
Jamie dispatched a German foot soldier with his cutlass. He felt a slight smile grace his lips.
Such men fed upon the discord. They lived for the rush of adrenaline, the liquid fire that lit their hearts aflame in patriotism, and desire for more. More death. More destruction. More fear. Panic. Terror.
But why? Why was it that the only time they felt alive, was in the act of depriving life? Why did they feed upon it?
The sentiments of war that would send liquid fire pulsing through their veins, and made them rush headlong into victory, or to defeat. Perhaps it was that sense of finality. One or Zero. All or Nothing. Victory or Defeat. Life, or the loss thereof.
Or perhaps it was something else. Perhaps they had simply become calloused to the horrors of it. The fact that in the heat of battle, you would simply lose yourself. To rejoice as your enemies fled before you. To feel pleasure as the light leaves their eyes for the last time. Caught up within the moment. In the whirlwind of terror and panic and destruction. To desire for more.
Perhaps that was the source of it. A frightening thought, but a reasonable one, nonetheless. The feeling of losing oneself to war insatiable. To lose focus, to lose reason.
Jamie gave a simple flick of the wrist, and another German fell.
And yet, perhaps it was not that, either. Perhaps the desire for war... Stemmed from a different Source entirely.
Perhaps it was the feeling of the killing. Not the finality. Not the loss of self. But the feeling of supremacy, in any form. The feeling that you have the power to grant life, or to take it away.
The feeling... that perhaps you are a god.
With the power to kill, and the ability to lord it over your foes.
The glory of heroics... The pride that comes with declaring your kills.
In the heat of violent, bloody battle is when men believe themselves to be gods. True gods over their foes. True gods of War in which they kill and save, and declare, and assert.
And still, in an instant, the truth is revealed. The illusion shattered. The idea put to rest, once and for all.
Ahead of him, machine gun fire rang out from the woods. And in an instant, Jamie realized, a terrible error had been made.
That moment of Truth is what defines 'men' from 'gods'. When men realize that they are not gods, and never were in any way, shape, or form. The illusion of power and ability no longer clouds their vision. When they realize that they are precisely as fallible as other men.
Some realize it in more unfortunate ways than others.
Jamie watched in horror as Nicholls was shot off of his horse, Joey, and then trampled (likely to death) by the horses following.
That defining moment- when men truly realize that their place is, albeit higher than the beasts, lower yet than even the Angels... That is the moment a man is broken. When his pride and his arrogance come to a head.
The soldiers boxed Jamie in, and soon there was nowhere else for him to go. The German commander screamed at him, asking if the Major were truly so arrogant as to make such a horrific error in tactics.
When men believe themselves to be God is the day they will be proven wrong, and then in the most humbling of ways.
Jamie sighed and threw his cutlass to the mossy ground.
Because I thought myself to be a god. And I am not.