The Years Condemn

At first he'd kept away.

The coward in him, forever quick to find excuses, pleaded the pressures of business as a defence; always more to be done, one more study to be made, so that there could be no time for standing still.

But something else- compulsion, or compassion, or some other burning, binding sentiment that he thought he'd laid to rest- tugged him slowly back.

So once a year, before the clock struck, he'd slip through the crowds and take his place among them.

No-one else from his squadron had stayed; that, perhaps, was a small mercy. Instead he stood alongside a row of strangers, who as the decades went by continued to deplete; their numbers occasionally bolstered by some new arrival in some strange new uniform, but never to the full strength of those earlier years.

Old-dead or freshly-dead, their forms remained the same; their auras torn and bloody, shell-shocked and stiff to attention.

Sykes avoided their eyes, as they did his. Here, at least, there were no recriminations. These men were his comrades as the others could never be, and under the mantle of shared guilt they had no need of words.

Instead they kept the silence.