Recognition

So, I have returned. The end and the beginning join together here, now. That raw recruit, blistered from training camp and the forced march from the port. The veteran due to take a pension and settle - where? I do not know. So many years lie between those two soldiers, so long a time, so great a distance, that I can hardly recognise them both as myself. Only the place remains. Memory jolts backward to see him then, to smell his sweat, to feel his queasiness after the voyage, his ears jarred with sounds. The stamp of booted feet; the slap of hand to weapon; the raucous chants of song and curse as the company moves up through the winding streets away from the docks; the rasping rise and fall of his breath. His fears of stumbling out of rhythm in the drill, or facing exposure for brass unpolished, leather dulled. The thousand insecurities of a posting abroad. Untried. Unskilled. Eighteen years old. Since then, years of soldiering and peace-keeping in dusty corners of the world, where languages fall strangely on the ear, formed of breath, or liquid like water, not like my familiar harsh consonants of tongue and teeth. Decades spent stamping down uprisings, policing riots, building roads and bridges. The routines of barrack life, the boredom, the easy comradeship of shared drinking; the terrible loneliness of danger. Miles tramped on rough and broken roads. I struggled then: now I can march twenty miles in the day and think nothing of it. A lifetime. The road swings up through the same hills. And I find that their shapes are scraped on the back of my eyes like no other, and the smouldering scent of a sun-burnt land and the crushed fragrances of herb sting in my nostrils again. A long march, and time to remember as the afternoon sun stretches our shadows beside us. That boy, hungry for manhood, paces beside me, refusing to remember his mother’s tears of farewell and his father’s indifferent shrug. In all the years since, he never knew when she died, or if she got the one greasy letter sent in those first days of embarkation. His pack weighs heavy, burdened with gear and weapons on thin shoulders, and with the secret load of fear. Mine, too, is heavy, though the familiar weight is easy, but the scent and sight of this place stirs too much that I have chosen to forget and it clamps down on me, tightening its straps around my chest and heart. Those early days are a rush and blur of duties and commands for all recruits, but in a strange city, a strange country, they overwhelm you. The people lower their eyes so that you cannot see the hostility in their flickering glances. Their talk is pitched in tones and sounds you do not recognise and the streets are full of strident cries and jostling crowds. You learn to shove and curse through them and feel brutality rise up in you to mask whatever maybe vulnerable in yourself. A uniform, a blow, a shout, do not need an interpreter to clear the way, and so you learn quickly. Within a few days the army breaks you in, hardens you, so that you can be sent on any duty without disgracing yourself or your unit with weakness. They choose a tough assignment, and send along a couple of raw youngsters with a squad of old hands to learn the realities of soldiering. For me, two weeks into my first posting, it was the guard duty at an execution. Brutal, public warnings of the punishment meted out for crime or insurrection. The stench of blood under a ruthless blazing sky, the cries torn out of men who writhed with the slowness of their dying. A jeering crowd. Silent, anguished women. I remember how I turned to vomit behind a thorn bush, sickened with the horror of it, desperate to escape the scorn of my comrades. And as I turned back, wiping my sour mouth, I saw the man’s eyes. Watching me with an expression I could not read, could not understand. Kindness? Pity? Calmness in his eyes, despite the rictus of pain twisting his face. From 'After Forty Years'