Sacrifice

• Parmis Amiri, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2021

Enlist in the sportsmen’s thousands!
Show the enemy what Australian men can do!

It was there that he saw his escape: on a red fraying poster clinging unto the wall, flapping in the salty, dust-filled harbour breeze. He looked at the printed soldier, his wide and confident stance and his firm grip on the rifle. Leaning in, he looked more closely. They weren’t so different, really. Both brown-haired and rosy-cheeked from the sun. Australian men. He straightened up, squaring his shoulders. . He imagined how he would look with his own proud grip on a gun.

He tore down the paper, pocketing it. He was going to become the printed soldier.

The ANZACs, they were called. He still remembers the tears of his weary-hearted mother. His limping father was taken aback, looking at him differently. He saw it in his eyes, a father that was already proud, already overjoyed to have a hero as a son. It seemed as if the rascal-good-for-nothing-bugger had been a different child entirely.

The day they boarded the ship was a splendid day. All the to-be soldiers stood tall and wide, already proud without a grip on a gun. Young girls swarmed them like swans as they waved their napkins. One threw hers at him. He clutched it in his hands, staring at the lipstick mark staining the fabric with a kiss. He grinned wide, giddy as he pocketed the handkerchief. Finally, the ship left the harbour, its horn a farewell from the departed men.

But he didn’t know what it meant to be a soldier. None of them did. They were not prepared for the people that welcomed them; a population that was limbless, diseased or one-eyed. They were itching to see the pyramids; they were greeted by the effects of war.

Oh, the scorching dreaded dawn. They’d been there for so long. Weeks upon weeks of nothing but training. Their numbers kept growing, but they did nothing but fight paper enemies and shoot printed targets. The locals, still limbless, diseased and one-eyed, became tricksters. The now-bitter beer became watered down, the willing women diseased. They thirsted for revenge.

It started with their usual loot. It was an army of them, two thousand men, marching, armed with vengeance. Glass shattered like white dust. They rammed inside the bars, throwing chairs and tables at the scamming locals. He grabbed a willinf woman and dragged her in the street, kicking her to the curb. She wept and wept, her hand clutching her middle. He moved towards her house, shattering more of its windows. Suddenly, he looked back, finally understanding her despair. She wept holding her stomach. A loose horse hurtled toward the woman. Horrified, he watched. A sickening crunch of bone was all he heard.

He still hears it. His frame still trembles with its echo.

Had he finally become a soldier? Fair-headed dawn punished the soldiers with headaches. Most willing women were rewarded with death. The locals spent months cleaning up the mess. It’s the Australian men’s doing, they’d mumble under their breaths. They finally got stationed. Most of them ended up at Gallipoli, gunned down like their own printed targets. He lived long enough to be awarded medallions, ones his father eyed with pride.

Nowadays, there's a building he visits as much as his home. One built to immortalise his deeds and the lives of all the soldiers who killed and were killed in the first World War.

In that building, there’s a statue of a Spartan warrior, laying on his shield of battle, his hands and head limp with death. The shield's atop the shoulders of his wife who'se nursing his infant child. He often stares at the Sacrifice, haunted by the wife’s tight clasp on her new-born and her tear-soaked cheeks. He is consumed by her grief, remembering that to-be mother who cradled herself, the cruelty of war and all the other lives that never came to be.

Lest we forget.