Delusions of Grandeur

Johann couldn’t understand the soldiers.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He could understand them perfectly when they left. Driving out of town and (sometimes) into the sunset, whooping and hollering with glee and excitement. They always left that way, loud and boisterous as they rolled through the streets on the canvas topped transport vehicles, nearly delirious from the exhilaration of having the chance to gain honor and glory for themselves and the Fatherland. It was when they returned that the confusion set in for Johann.

When the soldiers returned they were downcast and miserable, despair and depression had filled their eyes where there was once the fanatical zealousness and burning passion that Johann so admired. They were beaten and battered, often needed help to disembark from the transport they returned in and sometimes even required aid just to get into their own bed. More often than not they were missing two or three of the numbers they left with, the missing members probably still on the front lines, fighting to keep the enemy back as they waited for the injured members of their platoon to return. Their self-assuredness was replaced by a quiet something that Johann just wasn’t able to place and their once strong and steady hands were supplanted by fidgety and awkward things that sometimes struggled to hold a simple glass of water. He thought of the returned soldiers every night, trying to figure out why they come back so brokenhearted and dejected. “Why are they so miserable?” Johann pondered as he stared at the rafters of his bedroom ceiling, the question gnawing at his mind as it did every other night, “They got to fight on the frontlines, I would be ecstatic when I get back home! I would probably be bragging about it to literally anyone that would listen!”

Johann’s interactions with the returned soldiers only served to confuse him further. “Sir,” he asked one that was hobbling past his house one morning, his crutches making a quiet click with every step as he made his way down the street, “How long until you get redeployed?”

The soldier stopped and gave Johann a look that he couldn’t quite decipher and answered in a quiet voice “Boy, if I had a choice I would never be going back to that hellish place.”

Johann had no idea what the soldier could be talking about, the battlefield was a glorious place! A place in which men were made into something more, something greater than they were before! Apparently his expression betrayed his thoughts, as the crippled soldier looked at him with an air of something that resembled pity. “One day,” the soldier said with a sorrowful tone, “One day you will understand, boy. War is not what you think it to be.” Then the soldier began to hobble away, the soft thud, click-click of his gait fading with distance as he left Johann to ponder his words.

It was another six months before Johann was drafted. His uniform arrived in the mail the day of his eighteenth birthday and just a couple days later he was jumping up into the canvas covered transports that he had yearned to be in for so long, cheering and screaming as he left his hometown and made his way to the trenches of the frontlines. He was lucky enough to be assigned to the same squad as his best friend, Arnim Zola, so they spent the duration of the ride talking, joking, singing and getting to know the other members of their assignment.

The happy mood only lasted as long as it took to get to the trenches.

The moment they arrived they were greeted by the sound of gunfire, explosions and a senior officer handing each of them a Karabiner 98k and telling them to start shooting. The fighting was constant, as soon as it started it seemed to never stop. Bullets whizzed past their heads all through the day, and at night the incessant RATATATATATATAT of the machine guns from both sides of the no-man’s-land and the deafening BOOMS of artillery fire denied them any sleep. Over the course of his first fortnight at his station, Johann’s belief in the honor of fighting on the front lines was beginning to slip, and it wouldn’t be long before the final nail was hammered into the coffin.

Just three weeks into their deployment, Arnim came to Johann with orders from their superior officer. They were to go out into the no-man’s land and retrieve a slip of paper containing important information from a soldier that had fallen in one of the craters. Johann jumped at the chance to play an important role in the battle, got his gear ready and left the trenches with his friend later that night. They were ten meters from their objective when they heard a whistle from the sky, quickly followed by an explosion that knocked Johann off his feet.

Fortunately, Johann was far enough from the impact that he suffered only minor injuries - scrapes and possibly a concussion from the blast. Arnim wasn’t so lucky.

Johann was quick to pull himself together and begin a desperate search for his friend, scrambling around the wasteland on his hands and knees as he looked for any sign of Arnim. His hunt ended as swiftly as it had begun, and his eyes widened when they landed on what was left of his friend.

There, laying five feet in front of him, was the severed leg of his best friend. Time lost all meaning to him as he sat there, staring at all that remained of his brother in all but blood, and the illusion was broken.

The Johann that returned from the war was not the Johann that left to join it. The excited and energetic boy that left was replaced by a reclusive and lethargic man, plagued by the things he saw and the reality he endured. It wasn’t long after he returned that he realized he had become just like the soldiers he had so much trouble understanding just a few years before when he was blinded to the horrors of war by his delusions of grandeur. He thought back to the crippled soldier he had talked to in front of his house. “One day,” he had said, “One day you will understand.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out what day that was.