Right, I can only apologise how depressive this may be. I started this last year and didn't know what to do with it. I can only give a lot of credit to the song Military Man by Gary Moore and Phil Lynott of which I have been obsessed since a kid and it totally inspired this…
The title came from that and the whole story.
The Military Man.
Jack Dawson could smell death. He had smelt it for months. The scent of blood was what he knew like nothing else, but it still never replaced the smell of the fear. But the question was, should a man even be fearful? A man fighting for a country. For his men. For a war he had enlisted himself into upon his own accord. A war which he had followed to Europe; to England, just to sign his name upon the dotted line to give himself to their military. To fight for their cause. A cause he didn't give a damn about. Truth be told, he didn't know what he was fighting for.
Mama, look at your boy. He always thought of her. Thought of her comforting him. I am a military man.
Jack would have done anything to be away from his own tormented life. Three years were too long to be alone and tortured by one's own memories and so he replaced one misery with another. He became a soldier. At twenty-three years old, he had shot a gun for the first time in his life. Cocked it and shot it. He had ended lives.
There wasn't even a point to it.
The men he had killed were no doubt fathers, brothers, sons and husbands. They would have been a friend. A lover. An employer. Someone would have written them letters and carried their pictures. But he had no one. Not a soul. He was an orphan. Never married. No children. No one. Nothing.
He was a military man. And they had trained him to kill. His eyes were colder. His arms are stronger. His stomach was still restless though…
Oh mama, the men cry. I hear them. But I can't even shed a tear for the war. For the men. Only for the memories…Jack prayed, for the children of the men out here. For their mothers and their families. Their eyes had grown colder, too. Some had grown weary. And some of their eyes had closed forever…
The war had raged on but it still never plagued his dreams like she did. That one vision that was instilled inside his mind. Loneliness had wounded him, daily and dragging out his life like one endless torture after the next.
Just end me...
Kill me.
Take me away from this world.
Mama, take a look at your boy, I am dying…
I am a soldier.
I am dying anyway.
I am not frightened.
Why can't I just die?
Jack had killed more soldiers than he cared to even dream of. Laid with their bodies. Drank beer and spirits with the enemy. Played cards with them. Laughed with them like they were brothers. Come daylight, the war would rage on. It was already too late. The front line was ablaze with torture, death and the scent of it all. He stood in the trench he was laid in most nights. The bottom was muddy and he almost sank into it as he attempted to walk through it. The rain filled up the trench and water seeped in through the sides, leaving the troops up to their knees in thick, stinking mud that made any movement difficult. There was no sanitation and rats were a problem. Diseases were rife, such as dysentery and trench foot.
He had stopped praying a long time ago. He asked for this hell, but he never wished for himself to be spared but for the others. It was useless...millions had died. More would. It would never end this great war. In time, he had thawed. Troops became his friends. The night sky, although filled with the souls of the beautiful, was lovely to see once more. The stars would shine for them, the moon sometimes guided light. The soldiers sang sometimes after a drink or two. The songs would lull him to sleep. For the first time, he didn't feel lonely—almost. Sleep was where they were together...him and her. She always wore red, like her hair and those lips and like—blood. She had died though…she was never there.
Mama, I feel older. I write to you from this war. I talk to you as though you hear me…
Where was she? His love. Jack had slipped out of consciousness clinging to her hand and then, she was gone. To where? That was the gut-wrenching problem. He never knew. Perhaps she drowned. Perhaps she had left to find help but could never return. Absolution was never offered. Absolution had driven him to drink. To hatred. To anger. No other woman would touch him and nor did he want them to. She was all that mattered. He never spoke her name for it was painful, agony, excruciating and that was when the war had been his only saviour.
Mama, the war led me here like a lamb to the slaughter. I would only be happy to die. I am a killer. I am trained to fight, to die and I ask no questions why. But I want to die…
Fighting was a distraction from his own misery and if God wasn't ready to take him just yet, then at least he was fighting for the country. He was doing well. He was—existing. It was enough for him. Time was ticking but barely much time to think of her, aside from when night time fell. The stench of death became the norm. The bodies and blood became the norm. Hell because normal. It was all just, well, normal.
One day I will stop writing to you, mama. And you'll wonder why. The men, they sing love songs, and I only sing along for you. The letters the men get from their children, with I love you's and I can only write to you, these letters which you can never receive. But I know you see me, mama. I am a military man…whatever would papa think of me?
The loud, heavy sounds of explosions and gunfire blasted across the land. The battle still raged heavily on this, the fifteenth day of April. It was at mid-morning that things suddenly changed. There had been a lull in the sounds of fighting from the trenches, followed by a series of explosions. The day was clear and still, allowing the sounds to carry for miles, right up into town. The still and clear day had given the perfect opportunity for the Germans to launch a mustard gas attack. The lack of wind meant the gas would not be blown back to those who had launched it.
I feel nothing, mama. I was marching to the backbeat. I was marching…
Some men stumbled around, blinded by the gas. Others lay on stretchers in agony, choking and moaning from the blisters which covered their body and the effects of the gas on their lungs. Doctors and nurses rushed to tend to the patients. Most had already died, but some still lived and struggled to breathe. The gas masks had been of little use to the soldiers. The doctors and nurses knew, as they tended to the patients, that they would not survive. They were too gravely ill and the effects of the gas were too powerful. Nurses did their best to help the men, tried to comfort them the best they could, but they knew that soon their time would come.
My time will come, mama.
The blood is already ankle deep.
Can you smell it, mama?
Cos all I can smell is her…
Is she near?
I will die soon…
Shrapnel had become lodged in his body at various parts.
I will die soon…
The agonising moans haunted him, joining in a symphony of those who had been left to die in below freezing waters within the Atlantic Ocean. They surrounded him, always.
They wailed and writhed in a torturous way.
He never moaned. Groaned. Uttered a word.
His eyes remained closed.
He remained silent. Still.
I will die soon.
God had decided it was now his time. He had even become filled with some sort of peace.
It had to be...
It had to be…
Her hair was still as red as it had been…
Mama, I am frightened in the dark. If I could write you a paragraph then I would…
The nurses, they gently wept into cloth. The doctors were vomiting intermittently between tending to the patients.
Death was just a heartbeat away. No colour or religion would stop the bullet from a gun. No one would stop the fighting in the streets. No one would stop them dying in their thousands…
I can't feel my body. Once I was so numb from the cold and now I am numb from the flames of the fire.
Cool hands clasped about his cheeks…
''M-mama?'' Jack's lips managed to mumble. To move. Can you hear me all along, mama?
Jack wanted to move.
He heard a response but then. The world faded out…
'R-r-ose…''
The air left him in a whoosh…
A final breath.
The whispering started but it was too far away to make out. He never opened his eyes. Knowing they were never to open again.
''It is spring.'' Her voice trembled…
The tenderness was unbearable of her touch. She cared. Holding his hand.
Mama…
The walls shattered around him; brightness came beaming in through the walls of life and it blinded him. But then, he could see. His hands were black. His body was beaten. Charred. He was…gone.
She was there then. That angel. Rain came down then, it washed away the blood, the blackness and it cleared the tears which had been cried by her and him for all of these years. A new day had come. A new day. A new dawn.
''Jack…''
''Rose…''
The voices sounded like hers and his. Theirs together, for the first time in so long. He ached to hear that wonderful sound once more.
A new day has come.
He was no longer in pain. The writhing had stopped.
One eye opened, then the other. It was dark. Dim. Soldiers rested. He couldn't smell death. There was no longer a hospital…
It was cleaner.
He wasn't black anymore.
''You were frightened in the dark…'' The voice was so clear. So bright. So alive…
Jack could make the shadow approaching. It was…soft. Uncertain.
''So I came to you. To find you.''
''Mama?'' Jack heard his voice and it cracked. The figure before him was still so uncertain. Still so…frightening.
''No, she is waiting.'' The voice was closer and softer. Cool hands clasped onto him and he blinked. Clearing out the vision. But it was too bright. His feet never quite reached the floor. ''But I am here, Jack, I came for you…''
That voice which was so wonderfully familiar, he was sure he heard it someplace in his dreams. A soft laugh came. It woke him more. Familiar. Beautiful. Feminine. There was hesitance in how she said his name. As though she had said it before. As though she was meant to say it. He listened to her voice; she was beautiful. An angel. His angel. It was her voice, as though it had grown in huskiness and a tenderness, too. There was a twang of something else in there…
''R-rose?''
The fluttering about his face was gentle. As though there was the most delicate bird, taking flight…
''You're flying, Jack…''
His body moved; rapidly. Jerking. Fast. Through an expanse of time and layers and lifetimes.
''You're flying…''
She would soothe him.
Always.
It was a recovery of some sort. It utterly, blinding white lights and a tunnel…which was never fully reached until somehow, over a span of unknown time…
He reached it.
What followed was unlike anything Jack had ever experienced. Even if he'd been given a lifetime in which to imagine what being with her would be like, he would have failed. Because when it came to his awakening. It was beautiful. The odd and unsettling combination of emotions sent them both whirling about into a frenzy of feelings.
"I love you." Rose whispered. Her image was as clear to him the day as he had met her. ''You're not a military man any more. You're here. With me.''
Rose had waited there for him. In this place. This heavenly existence…
"I love you…"
And when he blinked. He saw his saviour.
Mama…
She had heard him all along…
