The Ode To Silence

Never Going Home

It was the end of the world as we knew it. It was the end of the world. Yet we had no idea that it was. We were oblivious.

Glory. Honor. Turned out that the so called distinctive patriotism was little more than suicide for most of the boys who signed up for it.

The great war, they called it. It's not like they said that the last one would be just that: the last. Yet there we were, no longer boys, nor were we men, we were something else entirely. Those who sat around me on the train looked human, but not quite. It was hard to tell if we were even of the same species anymore. Some faces were pale, others grimy, a few coated in a slick black layer of oil, the sort that would take more than a few good washes to remove. Their heads hung low, their hair matted and greasy and unkempt. These were not the youthful faces of 1939, their eyes were too dull, the lines on their faces too pronounced. These were the soldiers of 1945, the ones who were meant to be back at home for Christmas, the ones who were just as dead as those who lay in the battlefields from whence these walking corpses fled victorious.

The one opposite me could only have been 18 and yet he shrank away from the harsh light that filtered through the layers of glass and reflected off of his bleach white tear tracks. Scars had replaced the stars in his eyes. Grasped between trembling fingers, a price of yellowed paper, perhaps a letter from home, pressed against his nose - allowing him to inhale the sweet odor that had kept him going for god knows how long.

I saw the way he looked at me, the understanding of one another that passed in a split second, of the horrors we had both faced, the understanding that the blood encrusted on our clothes, bedecking our hands, congealed upon our faces, was not our own, but of our brothers, our friends, our foes.

We were the spawn of the war, no longer needed, no longer wanted, no more than soldiers, no more than ghosts.

The fields of home flash by and yet the brightness of the sky only reminds us of the flames that billowed from each explosion and the smell of the smoke every time we opened the windows took us all back, sending reminiscent chills down our spines. We were not home.

We were never going home.

Home was a memory, a dancing, taunting shadow that lingered beyond the barricades. Between this new existence and that dream was just one single long, immovable shot of bleak grey skies, raining soils, deafening noise and a few songs sung amongst men as an ode to the things we missed most.

And now we were going to the place we had so longed to be with heavy hearts and heavy heads and a defending silence as hundreds of witless boys and broken fathers remained fixed in their seats anticipating their long awaited destination, wishing it were further with every second that passed.

We were as equally scared of what we were to face as we were of what we had left behind. War was a bloody mess but what we were headed towards was normality, a concept inconceivable to our shattered minds. No one could remember what it was like to be warm in bed, to feel safe in a small space, the scent of a woman.

Men raised their hands to cover their ears as the wailing screech of metal upon metal began and the muttered question echoed from person to person: Where are we? A small town station appeared, grey and bleak and crowed by huddles of families awaiting the arrival of loved ones, expecting everything to be fine as soon as they were all home, together, by the fire place.

Home. There's the word again. It resounded in my brain as I got out of my seat, leaving behind the grimy things that remained. It was ironic how the perspectives had changed, how suddenly hundreds of us had become homeless as we returned to the houses that our families called home.

Amongst the bustle of those around me, I exited the train.