Lest We Forget

There is coolness in the pre-dawn air that is more than familiar to him. He looks out at the Aegean Sea, still visible from his place up on the hills. It was still, peaceful. Down on the beach, where the sea met the Turkish coast, hundreds upon thousands of people had gathered for the dawn service. He could feel his citizens there, both young and old. Turkey and Australia were down there too, somewhere. He'll meet them later. His shoes scuff at the dusty ground, and his shoulder brushes against one of the scraggy bushes. He doesn't care, even though it means his dress uniform is getting dirty. There is something sacred about this place, this land that is still stained with his soldiers' blood.

With his blood.

There are medals pinned to his chest, and their weight is a small comfort. They are his most treasured ones; the New Zealand cross, the Victoria cross, the Pacific star, and the Gallipoli ones that he, personally, had got for his own effort. The ones he'd earned. He'd told the people he'd come with that they were his father's, his grandfather's, his great-grandfather's, but he can still remember England pinning them to his chest with a sad smile. The only family he has are the other nations, the empire, and the commonwealth. The reluctant dominion, fighting for his empire just as passionately as he had fought against him scarcely a century before. Victoria's scarf is wrapped carefully around his neck, to ward off the early morning chills. A century ago, the dying queen had wrapped it around his neck with a pat on his cheek and thanks for his soldiers' bravery in South Africa. Now, his wears it to honor all fallen soldiers on one day each year.

He almost trips, and stares at what his foot had caught. His eyesight is far better than a human's - something he had once considered a blessing - and he is able to clearly pick out details from the darkness cloaking this old battlefield. He knows what this is. A large lump of rusted metal.

Shrapnel.

His lips turn up unwillingly, even as his eyes fill with tears. How many men did he lose to Turkish shells? Too many.

A little way along, he finds what he was looking for. The trench is still obvious - it's not overgrown or collapsed in any way. He's almost certain that this was one of theirs, an ANZAC trench. But he's not sure - he's forgotten which ridges they'd occupied.

A cloud of dust picks up around his feet as he lands in the trench. It is over two metres tall, and three metres wide. He sniffs. For eight months, he lived in these trenches, fighting a war that he barely understood.

He can remember what it was like, fighting in the trenches of the Eastern front. The smell of rotting corpses still haunts him, and he can smell it still as he stands on the battlefield one hundred years on. He closes his eyes, remembering the life he had led here. He can remember the constant rattling of machine gun-fire, the explosions from Turkish shells and the curses from his men as they rushed to retaliate. His rifle would be leaning against the trench wall behind him, and Australia would be sitting nearby - if he wasn't off with his own troops on a different ridge, or gambling in one of the tunnels. England had never liked that.

He can remember what it was like to feel his insides being eaten away by disease, knowing that, unlike his soldiers, he couldn't die from it, that there was no peace in death. Not for him. He remembers talking with his men, joking. He remembers wishing so desperately for a drink of water, or something to eat that wasn't contaminated by the swarms of flies that bred in the corpses that lay bloated in the hot sun. He can remember watching his men walk to their deaths, and marching alongside them, proud to be fighting for his empire. He remembers being upset that he had to follow orders that would do nothing but kill his men, his warriors. He can remember living in tunnels tug out under the trenches that spanned the front, and the constant knowledge that they were in constant danger, that there were snipers everywhere and nowhere was safe.