The Eternal Soldier

 In a temporary mess hall in Mille, France on September 1st 1944, it seemed that every table belonged to a different nation. General William “Dark Horse” Ramsay (who was then a Brigadier) was seated in the back, and would remark in his autobiography this date and location. Also present was a young Vasco Remy with his fellow guerrillas, future international trainer in irregular warfare whose memoirs from Spain are now a bestseller; but at the time Gen. Ramsay honestly did not know who these men were. Generals did not often see hand-to-hand combat; the most interesting rumor that passed his way was about a man outside the ranks, a man with no name.

He passed through the bombed-out doors, probably the only time he was seen on a base in the entire war. He was six-foot-four and extremely lean with a brow that looked as hard as a helmet, and a sallow expression along with the sleeveless brown shirt of an irregular. (“Camp followers” were a Spanish tradition that had migrated from their own Civil War to the French Resistance to this war, who mostly dug trenches and buried the dead.) His long arm was holding the hand of a French girl who was as tiny and destitute as Cosette in Les Miserables.

The tables grew quiet as he got something to drink and handed it to the girl. Someone whispered to the General for the first time a story he would come to know as “the bear”, a man who defeated an entire regiment in Italy who were terrorizing a village and saved their women from being molested by Turkish mercenaries.

But the young corporal whose army unit he was attached to knew him as “The Frenchman”. They had acquired the remnants of a French Resistance unit who survived behind enemy lines on account of one fighter who could not be bested (though suspicion always surrounded him). They would end up serving together the entire inland campaign, where he heard this nickname in the wrestling pools not as a combatant but a man to be avoided, even though it seemed to him he wasn’t French but a Spaniard. Señoir Remy however was already familiar and rose slowly from his chair, muttering to his expatriates “El Ruso! Es el Ruso!” (the Russian).

THE ETERNAL SOLDIER

These same men would cross paths many years from now in peacetime after writing their memoirs. Gen. Ramsay had read Vasco Remy’s road novel (he was now an instructor for British Intelligence) and had an opportunity to meet him. The General was a thick man with a close-shaved gray head while Remy weighed perhaps 130 pounds with bushy black eyebrows and an enormous nose with a mole.

They remarked on the similarity between myths from entirely different theaters of the war (the Bear, the Frenchman and el Ruso). A man who fights for no particular side but is known to all sides, living solely for combat under various identities to find worthy opponents on the battlefield and right wrongs; a ghost from soldiers’ imaginations during the fog of war.

Ramsay had tracked down the young corporal who served with the Frenchman and read his journal. Despite his nom de guerre, the other French survivors from his fragmented unit did not know him even though he was their savior. The corporal noted what broken men they were (broken by war or something else) and soon not one of them was left except the Frenchman. As a year passed, the General began to realize the corporal had seen more battles in the inland campaign than any man in his company just by being at the Frenchman’s side, and yet he describes him constantly disappearing on foot drawn by the sound of other engagements or impoverished people in deserted towns. Eventually their own division had lost so many men, the Frenchman was the only comrade left that he “started” with and they were absorbed into another division.

The General posed to Remy what if the man was also a survivor of a Spanish Republican force before he was auxiliaried by the French? Then he plotted a map based on the corporal’s accounts, adding any other nearby engagements a man could conceivably participate in, and soon he had every non-contiguous battle in the campaign.

The last thing he knew about the man in Italy known as “The Bear” was that he fathered a girl (who would now be in her twenties) as he moved east trying to make it back to Russia. At the end of the war he was rewarded by both the Soviets and the Western powers for bravery despite having no rank, and given rare access papers to all of Europe.

Ramsay met the young corporal who was now a civilian, but at the mention of the Frenchman noticed that he too was slightly overtaken by some sadness or mystification. He said that everyone believed they were "friends", but in reality there wasn't a single conversation with the Frenchman that did not mystify him despite his kindness to all living things. He was a man of such few words, or at least had such considerations that were unknown to other soldiers, like letting a linnet perch in his hand and then fly away.

Then he added some surprising details. It was his belief that the same man fought in World War One and was in fact American. He was wounded and captured by the Russians and participated in the Russian Revolution of 1919, then left for the States but only made it as far as Spain. After WW2 when he returned to Russia no one there knew him, so he eventually retired to Argentina where he helped the Allies track down war criminals.

Looking at a globe the men speculated he might be currently involved in the Central American wars. They were able to locate the Frenchman’s daughter in Italy and from there the retired corporal tracked down his approximate location, where Gen. Ramsay sent him sparing no expense.

After months of searching, the corporal found himself looking up at a run-down tenement building in Guatemala, and there in an upper room he saw the silhouette of a tall man in worn clothes.

--

But this moment in 1944 was fleeting, for Brig. Ramsay’s father had been permitted to visit the troops that day for the liberation, an eighty-year-old veteran of the Spanish-American War in the Philippines forty-seven years earlier. He too rose slowly in astonishment, clutching his pained chest and grumbling “It can’t be him!”. He stopped the taller man in his tracks, but the man looked back at him with bleary, war-weary eyes that no longer recognized anyone he knew, and the young girl led him back outside by the hand.