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Chapter 10: The Joys of Soldiering

The rhythm of the mercenary's life is a narcotic, as the passion of the whoremonger or gambler, which careers the shield for hire,if he answers truly to that name, collaterally pursues. Its current efface all that went before and all that will come after. First, and beyond all, fatigue. The infantryman breathes exhaustion night and day. Even in a gale at sea the soldier, returned from retching over the rail, drops to the planks and corks off with ease, beard buried in the bilges.

Second stands boredom and third hunger. The soldier is foot–weary. He treks, ever upon the march, advancing toward some object which draws near only to be superseded by another,equally bereft of meaning. The earth endures beneath his tread, and he himself stands ready to drop upon it, if not in death, then exhaustion. The soldier never sees the landscape, only the burdened back of the man trudging in column before him. Fluids dominate the soldier's life. Water, which he must have or die. Sweat, which drips from his brow and drains in runnels down his rib cage. Wine, which he requires at march's end and battle's commencement. Vomit and piss. Semen. He never runs out of that.The penultimate, blood, and beyond that, tears.

The soldier lives on dreams and never tires of reciting them. He yearns for sweetheart and home, yet returns to the front with joy and never narrates his time apart.

Spear and sword, the manuals tell us, are the weapons of the infantryman. This is erroneous. Pick and shovel are his province, hoe and mattock, lever and crowbar; these and the mortarman's hod, the forester's ax, and, beyond all, the quarryman's basket, that ubiquitous artifact the rookie learns to cobble on–site of reeds or faggots. And get her to set aright, my fellow, tumpline upon the brow, bowl across the shoulders with no knot to gouge the flesh, for when she is laden with rubble and stone to the measure of half your weight, you must hump her. Up that ladder, see? To where the forms of timber await to receive the fill that will become the wall that will encircle the city, whose battlements we will scale and tear down and set up all over again.

The soldier is a farmer. He knows how to shape the earth. He is a carpenter; he erects ramparts and palisades. A miner, he digs trenches and tunnels; a mason, he chisels a road from a sheer face of stone. The soldier is a physician who performs surgery without anesthetic, a priest who inters the dead without psalm. He is a philosopher who plumbs the mysteries of existence, a linguist who pronounces “pussy” in a dozen tongues. He is an architect and a demolition man, a fire brigadier and an incendiary. He is a beast who dwells in the dirt, a worm, owning a mouth and an anus and aught but appetite in between.

The soldier looks upon horrors and affects to stand indifferent to them. He steps, oblivious, over corpses in the road and flops to wolf his gruel upon stones painted black with blood. He imbibes tales that would bleach the mane of Hades and tops them with his own, laughing, then turns about and donates his last obol to a displaced dame or urchin he will never see again except cursing him from a wall or rooftop, hurling down tiles and stones to cleave his skull.