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The Final Words From a Doomed Soldier To His Love

Short story By: michelo

Prior to a major battle a soldier writes a letter to a girl back home who he feels it is time to tell all he has hid from her and kept from her during the last five years away away on campaign as well as kept from her during the preceding years when he first met her.

Knowing his hours on Earth will soon be over before the inevitable bloody battle of Jena he sees this as his final opportunity to let her know how much he loves her....

Submitted:Mar 28, 2011    Reads: 111    Comments: 0    Likes: 0   

The Final Words From a Doomed Soldier To His Love

*****A young soldier ranked as a private sits alone in his tent, the tent is a small white tent. Inside is his bed which is positioned at the back of the tent and is neatly made. Also present is a small cupboard which has his weapon leaning up against it and on his hanger is his survival kit. Outside, it is getting darker and the ocean waves at only 1 mile away can be heard very faintly over the silence of the many tents in the battalion group. The only light from his tent is a small lantern he has had with him throughout the last 5 years of his campaigning, around this lantern light are five small mosquitoes who flutter around soaking up the rays of the candle inside.
He intends to write a letter to a girl he has not seen in many years to tell her prior to a significant battle how much he owes her. He lifts up the felt tip pen and looks at the paper, closes his eyes as he now allows his deepest and more personal thoughts to be transferred to paper*****
Dear Nina
I am writing this letter to you to put your mind at ease over what I understand has been relentless rumour and hearsay on the home front about an impending attack by my particular battalion the 521st Light Dragons on the town of Jena within the forthcoming days. Writing this as I do on a chilly summers evening in a small tent overlooking the distant ocean and knowing you are somewhere beyond the waves in the faraway horizon gives me a certain degree of comfort that you are close. I write this letter to you Nina surrounded as I am by five mosquitoes that have chosen to share with me on most evenings the comfort of a dim lantern flame that flickers and breathes in the gasping wind as I while away my free hours thinking solely of you.
The rumours Nina are true, I have been informed personally by an officer that our battalion will be moving Westwards within literally hours to begin the first stages of what is being named operation preliminary, so therefore I am taking extra pains this night to make sure my every word is heartfelt because words is all I have to give you at this moment and the words you are about to read I write under a cloud of secrecy and understanding that when you receive this letter then the news of the success or failure in attacking and capturing Jena will be known to you and the rest of the world.
Jena itself is a strategically important town for the rebels and it is the basin from which they are launching frequent attacks which have been mercilessly killing thousands of non-combatants in the city you live for years. Why this decision has been taken by our leaders now and not earlier I do not know, perhaps they realise time is running out in this war and if they do not take out Jena immediately then the prospect of allowing our forces to open up the rest of the West in a full scale invasion of their main cities will be lost as they are consolidating more Eastern battle wins more rapidly, and I believe only by our forces going into the very heart of their land will this war be brought to an end.
Yet what has compelled me to write this letter to you Nina after so long of not writing is an anticipation or a perhaps a feeling unlike no other I have ever had during my five long years of constant campaigning throughout the terrain of this strange and beautifully mesmerising foreign land is my own sense of impending doom over my potential fate in this battle. Please Nina do not trouble yourself over the words I am writing because I am trying to be honest and open with you as much as I can and I am treating this letter as a last testament of a foolish boy to a girl who gave him so much, and I see this letter as my last chance to tell you how I truly feel about you before my time on this Earth comes to pass.
My intention is not to fill your heart with a sense of dread nor invoke in you sadness due to the tone what you will read as I am merely writing this as my way of saying thank you sincerely for allowing me the privilege of knowing you so intimately and so personally. Nina I never forgot the time we first met, how much of a mess I was and how kind you were to look upon me not with the eyes of common people who usually reserved scolding judgement and indifference at the state of my plight. Instead, you were different Nina from all I had met during my years of homelessness and perverted addicted because of the way you looked at me made me want to change, you made me want to become a better man and you restored my faith not just in humanity but in me.
You walked up to me dressed as you were in your chic clothing, coming did you from a different class of people and an entirely different walk of life, you walked into the most poorest and down trodden area of the city, and I recalled seeing you from afar and thought I had been killed and was seeing an Angel enter the most grittiest part of a broken down humanity of the pitiful kind, there was a certain degree of truth in this belief of mine but you came as Angel to give me awaken me.
You were so beautiful Nina when I first saw you walk down the alleyway, you came so graciously to be amongst the vulnerable, the poor, the weak, the damned, the lost and the isolated and all of those labels which at that time applied to me and some of those labels in a way still do apply to me. I observed you from near the many bins I had made into a makeshift bed, laying was I in a cardboard heap and coughing violently from the alcohol I had consumed the previous evening, but when I raised my head to see you standing before me holding a cartoon of "soup".
Your extended arm to me represented so much more, for you looked past my dirt covered face and my grated top with so many holes and stains and you ignored the foul stench I emitted from my person to extend your arm of warmth and humanity to me. As you stood there so young and selfless and I laid there so young and selfish, I knew upon looking in your eyes you sang from a different song sheet from the rest of the people I met during my time on the city streets, and you as you went to college and the university you never once stopped visiting me and giving me your time, listening to me and talking to me Nina like I was a human being.
Where I would be if it was not for you Nina I dare not think, I could not even write or read when you found me, I did not think or wonder nor did I hope and dream prior to meeting me but afterwards you reinvigorated me and you inspired in me so much desire to improve and learn and imagine and hope. To think Nina years later I would be here filled with a sense of conviction at fighting in such a noble cause as to defend the country I once hated and to defend the people in the country I resented so much is still unbelievable to me, but I would be being dishonest if I were to say Nina the reasons I volunteered for this war is to defend the sovereignty of the country and to protect the people in a noble cause. The only conviction I had for joining up was to protect you and the only noble cause I saw was the knowledge if this war is lost then your safety and your freedom would be compromised and my greatest repayment I see towards you for all you did for me was to safeguard your way of life.
I will die in this forthcoming battle Nina, and I know this is so because as I look around I am noticing the beauty in life far more. The soft wind blowing the trees, the way the sun touches my flesh and the way the flowers blossom so innocently. To me I am seeing similar things like this more often and they are slower and more meaningful, and I cannot help but think this is the last hours of my life and so subconsciously I am trying to take in as much in as I can before my final second. Nina I am not afraid of death for if there is a God then I have seen God and God is a Goddess and you Nina are my Goddess, and if there is a heaven then I have been to heaven by every blissful moment I ever spent with you.
The thought of leaving this earth and never seeing you again pains me like no bullet wound or stab wound ever could, the idea of never seeing the wind blow your hair around your angelic face or holding your hand as you brave the cold strikes me down with a sense of hopelessness and dejection. Only what drives me on is the knowledge of how my sole contribution to a cause far bigger than I to protect you fills me with such conviction as to say I did something which safeguarded you and gave you something I could not personally give you due to myself seeing myself as not being good enough for you.
I was never good enough for you Nina, and how I would have loved to be the one who expressed his spiritual and mental love to you physically in an act of love I cannot tell you how much I would have wanted to but you Nina truly do deserve someone far better than I, when I told you I was going to runaway to join this fight and you pleaded with me not to go you must have thought I was running away from you, Nina this was not the case, this was all I felt I could offer you as a man and I hope as you read this letter you will see my motivations were far from selfish and more to do with a philosophy that was entirely centred on you, you Nina were and are and will always be the narration to my life, to my death and to whatever may come thereafter.
I imagine by defeating these rebels and by helping to bring an end to this conflict then all the fear I observed in you when this conflict began will disappear and then you Nina can live as you were intended, free and in peace and able to bring the rest of your warmth and goodness to scores of other people who were just like me at one point.
Know this Nina, when I am laying down and the blood leaves my body I will only think of you and I will whisper your name so softly and tenderly so that what I say will be carried by the wind all across those oceanic waves and into the horizon so my voice will be heard by you as it drifts your senses caressing you and protecting you from all the harms of the world. You did so much for me Nina just by being there, you had the most impact on me as you made me look upon the world with less hatred and less bitterness, Nina you made me get up in the morning and want to be better man and excel at all I do.
I will return to you Nina, I will return to stand beside you and to surround you in guardianship as you walk this Earth from here on in, but I will fall on a knife Nina before I let any harm ever come to you, and that is why I am here. Do not cry over me, do not shed one tear for you took my cold heart and you wiped away all of its coldness and all of its blackness and you restored it to how it should always have been. I love you Nina, I love you so much it hurts, live on and never forget me because no matter where I will be following this battle Nina I will never allow myself to forget you.
Private Dwight. A Carmarc
Dwight A Carmarc
521st Light Dragons.
*****"Dwight put down the pen and placed the letter into the envelope. After doing this he sat gazing into the lantern watching the mosquitoes fly around its dim flame, he sighed heavily and turned his head outside the tent door to see the distant ocean. After gazing into the horizon for some time, imagining out amongst those waves what Nina was doing, and thinking about her like he always did. He just hoped the words written would do justice to all he felt he needed to express. He now lifted up a picture on the desk and brought it up towards his gaze, a picture he had drawn of Nina with a pencil, a perfect drawing capturing every part of her face, there was no glass to this picture it was just in a frame, Dwight now stroked the cheek of the pencil drawing.
After seeing so much death over the last few years and knowing he would not see her again one solitary tear dripped down from his left eye, it was the first time he shed any tear for so long, the tear landed onto the drawing and as it was pencil it looked as though Nina to was crying as Dwights tear landed on the picture drawing near Nina is eye. He stroked the tear away from his eyes and gazed on it some more, savouring every moment. The silence and moment was then interrupted as outside he heard the trumpets and the whistling indicating the troop movement Westwards towards Jena was imminent. And so he stood up, took his gun and put on his survival kit as well as taking the rest of his equippment, making his way towards the tent exit Dwight stopped, with his back turned towards the smiling picture of Nina he turned slowly and looked upon the picture as if taking his last look at her.
There was nothing for him to say, all he had wanted to say was in the letter, the letter which would be posted by him prior to going out on his last march to the last battle, for death was coming for Dwight and he knew death was coming *****




