Bayonet and Gun Butts

My friend "Andrew" and I had similar, troubled, German homes.  We fought out our pain on imaginary battlefields, as imaginary German soldiers.


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          It was bayonets and gun butts, fists and shovels. The Russians fought as Russians
do: like demons. We fought like men. And it was a very near thing.
        
          That time the victory was ours, but not without its cost. A fistful of ID tags filled
my pocket. We lay spent in the drifting echo of battle. Dark clouds hung low over us,
dark like our smoke-streaked faces. The battle had been won. But the war was lost, and
we knew it. Still, we fought on, because there was honor in just surviving. And because
we didn’t know how else to live.

          Andrew felt war like I did. We played it like a game, but it was no game. It was
a hopeless struggle, a titanic, earth-trembling combat between a warrior and a giant. The
warrior was doomed to lose. The Germans knew this. Still, they fought on, lost in the
fearful vastness of Russia, far from home. They fought to stave off Death for one more
day, and to avoid the most horrible fate of all: Siberia. To be taken by the Russians, to be
at the mercy of their barbaric passions, to vanish forever into the icy Siberian wilderness,
doomed to cut trees or mine salt forever, was the only thing a German soldier truly
feared. It was worse than death. It was to be lost forever, to be considered dead; back
home a headstone was erected over your empty grave while you toiled eternally in a hell
of harsh labor, frozen wind and Asian cruelty. Until one day, your half-naked body
finally, mercifully quit, and you were left where you dropped in a forest older than Time,
buried in snow that won’t melt until the Sun explodes a billion years from now.
Andrew was the only one who understood. In those days, we were like brothers.

          Together we hid the things we wanted to hide from everyone else. Together we saw, and
understood, what was happening in our homes. Being friends made us feel less alone in
our strange, secret lives. We had each other as allies. It was our world versus the rest of
the world.

          We were German together.