To End All Others: A Great War Trio Page 2

  The Mandate

  September the 10th, 1917

  Slowly, idyllically, the wind blew through the grass of a lonely, populated field. Momentarily, frequently, the wind was stalled, its path gently swirling around the field's residents and their foreboding, yet simple markers. The population waited for the wind to subside. The denizens waited for the end - the end of time, the end of history, the end. Maybe, they waited for nothing. Maybe, others only waited to join them and, collectively, the wait did not matter. For fields very much like this one eventually welcome the whole world.

  Into this graveyard, walked a procession. The chaplain leading the group drudged his feet through the mud, boredom etched across his frame; he had performed similar burials innumerous times over the course of his stay in France, and the solemnity the man had once placed in the burials was gone; in its place, the chaplain only felt annoyed at being forced out into the mud and cold. He spoke the incantations and gave a nice speech as others placed the rows of boys side by side. Many, beneath their protecting shrouds, were gruesome, hideous. The shrapnel from shells and the cold steel of the bayonet had not been kind on the young generation called upon to sacrifice for the great struggle. Brushing these dark thoughts aside, the uninterested chaplain walked down the line, reciting rote platitudes of nationalism and giving whatever shallow solace he could. Around him, sparse comrades of the fallen gathered to mourn, but many corpses elicited no crowd; the soldiers themselves had also gotten bored with the funerals. The real mourning and celebration of the fallen's lives and deeds would be found in the bottles of wine the men passed about in the trenches. The toasts of those holy ceremonies carried far more weight than the chaplain's sanctified phrases.

  But, as the service neared the end of the line of bodies, the chaplain noticed a group of men waiting. Silence, true and solemn silence, waited with them, and their faces were downcast and wan. About twenty in all, the group was uniformly clothed in thickly downed leather jackets. Their buckskin boots were topped with fur, and in spite of their sadness, an air of regality surrounded each of them.

  Finally, the chaplain finished commemorating the final body, but the group continued to wait; they were not in attendance for anyone already buried. The cleric opened his mouth to speak, to ask their purpose. But before his words broke the mourning silence, a single man, barely over twenty but aged far beyond his years, stepped forward from the group. In his hands rested a simple wreath of twisted pine branches. The middle of the humble garland was accented by the purest, whitest lily the chaplain had ever seen. A single tear fell from the otherwise stony face of the airman as he knelt in the mud and humbly placed his marker into a shallow, tiny grave near the long line of fallen bodies. Then, snapping his head around sharply, he cried "Escadrille N.3, at attention!"

  The waiting group snapped their legs together crisply. Raising their hands in a brilliant salute, they honored their fallen comrade as Georges Guynemer rose from his kneeling position amid the mud and offered his own salute. Then, as one, the group turned and marched away. Their wreath, the only honor for an un-retrieved airman, slipped further into the welcoming mud as the first drops of rain fell from the looming, foreboding sky. As for the chaplain, he watched the squadron leave, his mind and soul heavy in thought.