STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Six                                                                                                              Part Four



                    I have returned to my tower.  The war is over.  My body is whole.  My life is mine.  I feared death so badly.  Every day I thought it would take my search from me so that I would never be found.  I saw the faces of the dead.  Wide, staring, rigid fear as the moment of their death showed them that they were lost forever.
                    The sky was light with no sun and dark with no moon.  Sun and moon had forsaken us.  Every day and every night there was mud.  Every day and every night there was blood.  Every day and every night there was screaming.  When the shells and the gunfire ceased, the silence was wretched, too long and too evil to bare. Our breaths and heartbeats were soundless as we listened to the black silence and while we waited for more gunfire the gas would seep in.
                    All of this we returned to the enemy.  We exchanged our deaths for theirs, our mutilations for theirs.  Our guns and their guns were made by women whose labour had been withdrawn from homes and fields.  Our gas and their gas were cruel, cunning chemicals produced by the minds of learning and science.  On both sides were men who dug ourselves into the ground and lived as rats.  If our flesh was not ripped and our blood not spilt then we waited for the gas to dissolve our lungs, and if not the gas, then we waited for the trench mud to rot us from the feet up and turn us into gangrene.  Why ?
                   One night the reaper showed himself to me.  Guns rattled.  Shells sang.  I ran crouching, ready to throw myself down.  My boots were caught in barbed wire and the ground exploded before my face.  No fire, no flash, just a wave of dark earth under which I lay suffocating.  It closed in around my face, around each limb, no part of me could move. Its weight pressed down on my ribs and chest and my breath began to empty from my body. I waited for the scythe to sweep low, for my search to end, for my life to escape me into sleep and death.  And as I lay waiting I could still hear the sergeant's commands.  Commands I had obeyed. Commands that had led me to my grave.  I heard hunger in his voice and although I was buried deep in the ground I saw madness in his eyes.  They were predator's eyes, they trembled with an intensity, a vile greed.  The sergeant had led us like a lion, no soldier had doubted him.  In our foot weary weakness his strength had made our dead limbs move.  He held his face in stiffened expressions of forthrightness, concern and even kindness.  I lay beneath my mound of earth and saw clearly that the masks his face had worn had mocked us.  It was not strength but fear he had sown and nurtured inside us.  He had disguised his devilry and confused our souls.  Our minds were inert.  Our hearts were pushed down beneath the bulk of a dark mountain that was ignorance and blindness.  The sergeant stood at its summit, wielding supremacy and power.  He gained our trust and summoned our deaths.  Our obedience was unsuspecting while he despatched his orders to the reaper, the most obedient and servile of all his subjects.              
                        I would not die for the sergeant.  My body surged up. The heavy mud flowed like the loose, caressing waters of the ocean and I rose from my burial to see that the black velvet sky was jewelled with many bright stars.  My search had not reached its end.  I had to find the girl in the woods.  I had to know her name.
                       The sergeant did not see my shadow return.  He was alone in the trench.  He looked out at all that was destroyed, his breath rasped hard and fast, his joy was insane.  I faced him.  My strength rose and burned like the sun.  I looked into his eyes.  I saw treachery, I saw malevolence. He was a soul of Satan, a purveyor of death.  I had never before seen these truths, I had never believed in these evils.  Anger pierced me like white fire.  I felt his darkness tremble, discovery was striking down his guise, his pretence was tumbling like walls, there was nowhere for him to hide.  I was killing him with white fire and black silence.  There was nowhere he could run.  Satan had turned his back on his servant.  The sergeant was alone.
                        Few returned.  Those who did had heard their misplaced deaths being called in the sergeant's command. They too had snatched at life and been reborn.  Behind their pale faced exhaustion their fires burned with the awfulness of the revelation and the terror of its truth.
                        Our small company retreated.  Days of marching followed.  The sergeant led us.  We killed him slowly.  We watched his madness writhe to our cold immunity.  The sergeant awaited our mutiny.  He tried to resume his insidious ways but his cruelty would not manifest itself in us.  We would not liken ourselves to him.  We would not blackmail, we would not persecute, we would not speak. Our anger was silent, our violence was enclosed in calm. 
                        We came to a wood one warm day.  We sat in dappled shade with our backs against the trees and we dozed.  There was birdsong high up in the branches.  I heard the snap of a twig underfoot.  I opened my eyes.  The sergeant had realised that he was a prisoner and was trying to escape his guards. I picked up my rifle and shot.  I shot him dead.  I shot him in the back.  I shot him in cold blood.  I shot him in hatred.
                        I have returned to my tower, yet I feel I have not returned.  I must leave again at dawn to continue my search.  I will not return until I am found.  May be I am the unicorn.  There is so much  I do not understand.