No Regrets

Pierre was a veteran.

It was strange to him, because the word “veteran” always made him think of bad-tempered old men, not men in their mid-twenties. But the war was over, and Pierre had fought and survived, and so he was a veteran, at least in everyone else’s eyes.

Coming home had been wonderful and terrible, and all at the same time. Pierre’s little half-sister, Claire, had greeted him at the door, but she wasn’t as he remembered her. In the few years Pierre had been at war, Claire had grown taller, and her fair hair had darkened with age. She was now six years old.

His father had died while Pierre was gone; a heart attack was the presumed cause. However, Pierre’s mother still lived. At Claire’s shouts of “Pierre is home, Pierre is home,” she had raced down the stairs, hugging him tight and not bothering to wipe the crystalline tears from her eyes.

Pierre hadn’t really known how to react. It didn’t seem right to cry with her, nor to hug her back just as tightly. After spending so long around young men in good shape, Pierre thought that his mother just seemed…delicate. Too delicate.

That was what trench warfare did, he realized later that night while he was trying to fall asleep in his bedroom for the first time in years. He would always have the entire Great War in the back of his mind - all the machine gun fire, all of the explosions, and most horrifyingly, all of his friends dying around him in situations that, by all rights, should have killed Pierre himself.

His family would never be able to understand that about him. Maybe he had changed, over the course of the war, and maybe that couldn’t really understand him at all anymore. Things like war made no sense, in that context. Why destroy thousands of people, minds, and families for the sake of a little land and revenge for one man’s life? Pierre just couldn’t wrap his head around it, although he’d been living it for years now, and that night he fell asleep to images of warfare and bloodshed spinning in double-time across his thoughts.

When Pierre awoke the next morning, it was to the noise of Claire yelling that breakfast was ready. A warm, home-cooked meal after so long on the frontlines of a war sounded amazing. Pierre pulled himself out of bed and changed into fresh clothes, then went downstairs to greet his mother and younger sister.

Their breakfast was nothing special, but after living on military rations and food cooked over tiny campfires, Pierre couldn’t get enough of the home cooked meal. His mother smiled at him as he took thirds, and all three of the family members made meaningless small talk that carried much more weight than it normally would. It was all painfully normal, but at the same time it was the best feeling Pierre had ever experienced.

After they had finished eating, Pierre somehow managed to shake off his little sister and his mother long enough to talk a walk around his hometown. Things had changed, he realized as he passed familiar storefronts that were now boarded up. Places that once had held trees were now the sites of houses and little shops, and people he did not recognize milled about everywhere. He did recognize some people; these he waved to, but avoided the small talk as much as possible. It was no good to talk to the families, the wives and children of people he had fought alongside, especially not when he could very well be the one who finally gave them closure.

Honestly, giving somebody closure frightened him. Always being remembered as the one who told a mother that her son was dead frightened him. Both of these frightened him much more than any kind of enemy soldier or advanced weaponry he’d seen since joining the French army.

Pierre’s feet barely touched the ground as he walked. The civilian clothes he wore now were lighter than his military clothing, and he felt strangely exposed without his military fatigues, his heavy boots, and his gun slung across his shoulder. It would take time to get used to, he knew, but he could do it.

He could do it, he finally processed, staring up at a clear blue sky and a sun shining over his little homeland in France.

No matter how many people had died fighting for his country, he had been one of the lucky ones to survive, and he would continue to do just that.