A grand collection of French soldiers stations itself level to the horizon as the sun ascends behind them, reveling in their false notions of divinity, and I want to shout at them that there is nothing divine about claiming land that has never been theirs and paying for it with thousands of precious human lives, but my voice would not carry far enough, nor would it break their wall of godliness. They are preparing to strike us and continue on to Moscow, the jewel of Russia, which is their ultimate prize to signal their victory, and we Russian soldiers are preparing to defend it.
We have been waiting for their army to arrive in the town of Borodino, thus we are ready for when they advance towards us for a long and bloody battle. Bagration, our leader, assured us that this would all end in a pyrrhic outcome, but he still doesn't precisely know how much it will take for us to win despite the fact. I can estimate that almost every blade of grass in and around the village will host at least one drop of blood from the soldiers that march towards their death upon them.
The majority of the Russian soldiers positioned in the lines in front of me, behind me, and next to me are shaking uncontrollably with fear. Their entire body clatters against itself as they pray to God that this will not be the last of them, that their body will not be wasted on a battlefield far from home. Their souls have been robbed of their clothes and now stand naked in this small town. I can see within them and pick out almost every emotion rumbling inside the soldiers like an earthquake. I look to my left and to my right and wonder if I will ever see these men again after today. A part of me knows that I won't.
Anatole is as ready as he has ever been, as if he has completely neglected what Bagration said. He has transformed into the men that he sits with around the camp, the men that I despise, but I still feel a dash of pity for the boy as I behold him next to me, his eyes burning with excitement, rushing into the pits of hell with a confident smile. His attitude will ensure that he will be the first to die, and I will have lost my only friend in the army to a foolish, short-lived dream of glory. He had said that he wanted to bring back the scalp of a French soldier, but I am afraid that it will be Anatole's scalp instead that returns to a French soldier's home to be ogled at. We can only hope for the best.
With each second, the French army draws closer and closer, and I am confident of only one thing: there will be a whole lot of prayers this day.
~~~~~
The sky does not rain water to quench our thirst, rather blood to quench our craving for mass destruction in order to achieve what we desire. The ground has turned into a welcoming family for a mixture of displaced dirt, blood, and corpses. Is anywhere safe, or has every inch of land been defaced so that the soldiers upon it are trapped here to suffer? Everywhere that I look has no promise of safety. It seems as though safety retreated a long time ago.
Therefore, every millisecond matters on this battlefield. One millisecond could be blessed by security, and the next could be plagued by death. One must be constantly vigilant in order to have even the slightest chance of making it out of here alive. I often find myself whipping my head around in every direction to ensure that I am aware of anyone and everyone that could be a conceivable threat to my survival.
My heart drums its fists rapidly against my ribcage, yelling to be let out. Sweat emerges from my skin in tiny dew drops from the morning setting. My breath is shoved out of my exhausted lungs in groups known as panting. My pulse swims up to my temples and kicks the most sensitive areas to demand that my brain do something about the insurmountable chaos polluting the air, but there is no solution to what several powerful people have done to us. Why do good men have to die because bad men can't make neat decisions?
My training has taught me how to wield a gun, but all of those tips and instructions that I've learned fly right out of the window of my mind now that I have an opportunity to apply them in a place where it is crucial that I do. Because my body and head are shifting all around the town of Borodino, my gun follows suit, swinging through the air as I go. Except this time, it lands right against the stomach of an approaching French soldier. And panicked, I do what is programmed into every child's head as the end goal of guns when one first learns about them, the natural instinct -- I pull the trigger.
And just like that, I have killed a man. I took my gun, positioned it in an accurate place, and fired, straight into a French soldier's body, and now he's dead because of me. I really just stole a human's life away from him, a crime that I always protest and always have but a crime that I now perpetrate. Why didn't I let him shoot me first when I have nothing to lose? What has war done to me?
Across the battlefield, I glimpse a soldier from the other side, a Frenchman just as terrified as I am. We regard each other for a while, not wanting to ever look away -- as if we have a special connection to each other -- and experience the same thoughts of feeling understood in this moment, of seeing each other's souls rawly. And I think I recognize this particular soul. I open my mouth to call to him but am cut short by a surprise attack hidden under the earth.
I am flung back by the sudden explosion, spending a few seconds cutting through the air until the dense ground catches me with a thud and the injury of a few locations on me and in me. A fountain of dirt sprays forth from the terrain, following my same course of involuntary action before landing on top of me. I lie in this supine position for who knows how long, attempting to figure out what just happened to me and what effects it will have on my body. The Frenchman is out of my sight now, possibly forever.
As soon as I recover sufficiently from the blast -- that is, I can open my eyes and see the world clearly enough -- I notice that an essential piece to me is missing. A sharp ring rolls through my left ear and does not cease, but in my right, there is nothing there anymore. Is this only temporary, or have I lost my hearing? There is no time to ponder this, however, as there could be another threat approaching, one much more grave than my hearing.
I survey my surroundings before standing up in order to make certain that there is no one planning to assail me from any direction, and by surprise I come face to face with Anatole, a boy rendered incapable of moving his limbs due to the overwhelming pain caused by a fatal injury in his torso. The fighting rages on in the distance, with new atrocities being committed every second, but the most atrocious thing to me is that my childhood friend is parting without me.
https://youtu.be/uarBdLJx6FQ
"Anatole!" I shriek, gathering him in my arms as he wrestles with forming words to explain his dilemma.
"I've been shot," he tells me, stating the obvious as a form of a joke that he tries to laugh at but fails to do without coughing up some more blood in the process. Even while stepping closer and closer to death with each second, he retains his inappropriate sense of humor.
Frantically searching around for something to mop up the blood and prevent it from spilling out further, I soon decide to just take supplies from a cadaver lying next to us. I'm sure he won't have any need of it in heaven. I press the cloth to Anatole's wound and apply pressure, but I'm not done talking yet. I need to keep him conscious and with me for as long as possible, but I still have an unsolved inquiry. "Fucking hell, Anatole, why aren't you dead yet?"
I'm no doctor. I know nothing about the human body, having dropped out of school early from a lack of adequate money. Even if I were willing to take a wild chance and try to fix him, I also have no supplies. Anatole is going to die, and he's going to die soon, with the bullet that killed him still lodged inside his body. This is exactly what I predicted would happen. He was too enthusiastic about a dangerous game, and now he is forced to pay the price with his life. I'm sorry to say it, but there's nothing I can do for him besides stay here and keep him company until he passes.
Anatole furrows his brow, inadvertently splitting cracks into the layer of blood and dirt coating his face. "That's a sort of...odd question to be asking. I thought I was your best friend."
"Do you have any idea what happened? Do you remember it at all?"
Anatole nods but doesn't respond to my question until he inspects his body one more time. "The soldier shot me somewhere in the torso, but some sort of ethics complex that he seems to have compelled him to help me fall gently to the ground. His hair...it was curly and blonde, and his eyes...I saw a shade of blue very close to the color of sapphires as he held me, but that's all I could distinguish. It all happened so fast, and I..." Anatole pauses, biting down on his lip as a tear slithers slowly down his cheek. All of the sudden he is moved to a sentiment that I have never before seen in him. He looks me straight in the eye, and I am forced to witness the storm of emotion within his own set. "Alexei, I don't want to die."
And this is where Anatole finally breaks. Not once have I seen him cry, not in any of the years that we've been together on the streets of Saint Petersburg, fighting back against a tough condition. We were starving and almost froze to death during the winters, yet he shed no tears through it all. I have always admired him for his strength from the very beginning. Before we ended up on the streets together, he struggled with parents who cared very little about him and took to physical violence as a twisted method of discipline and anger management, but he held himself together. He was then thrown out from his home at seventeen, and instead of feeling sorry for himself, he quickly figured out how to survive on his own. Anatole has never been complacent with his circumstances, and for that, I revere him greatly.
Since all of this is true, then who is this Anatole that quivers in my arms, fearing that his life may be captured too early? It is because his soul is exposed to me in this moment, like every man's soul is when injured in war, and I can see just how afraid Anatole really is. Not even an eternal comedian can escape his own mind.
"I don't want to die," Anatole repeats, steadying his breathing before he adds, "but I know that I'm going to."
I tenderly brush his hair back with my thumb like a mother that actually loved him dearly, like a mother whose pride and joy is being taken unfairly from her. "Anatole..."
Collecting all of his remaining strength into one movement, he places his hand on my arm as a reassurance. "It's okay, Alexei. You don't have to lie to me. A wound like this doesn't look very promising for survival, and even I can see that."
"Is it time to finally say I love you?" I ask.
"I think so," he murmurs in reply.
I rip my focus from my dying friend, which is when the tears conclude that it's an appropriate time to make their descent. "Anatole, please don't go," I beg, a crying mess, while Anatole has lapsed into calmness. He has accepted his fate.
He pushes out a sad smile, the first and last of its kind. "When the time comes, we will find each other in the place where no one starves or suffers. We will be happy there, Alexei. I promise you."
"Anatole, I love you," I divulge while I still have the chance to say it, but it appears that my declaration is only a whisper into the void. Anatole is gone, and I let myself weep over his memory.
~~~~~
A/N: well isn't that just dandy
but do y'all feel bad for Anatole now, bc I do
~Dakoterrible
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