Marshal Hunter

Copyright, Rise of Aester, 2009

 

Commodore FitzDonald’s memoir was officially suppressed by the government for over 20 years, his frankness about policy and his unmitigated condemnation of some of those policies and their costs made many consider this work too dangerous, some calling it outright treasonous. It is with great appreciation for those who fought for this work that it is finally brought to light. Had those who believed in the truth of the Commodore’s words not acted to save the few manuscripts, we would have never heard his words and seen the world through his eyes.

 

This insightful and uncompromising memoir of the early days after the rise of Æster allows us a view of the world of our forebears. It details the struggles, pain and sacrifices made to allow our Empire to survive and our people to thrive. These direct and sometimes raw observations allow us to appreciate the men and women who made such tremendous sacrifices in order to allow us the freedom and life we enjoy today. In these pages we can begin to understand the requirements that life forced onto the generation who helped retake our world from the Æster. It helps us understand the loss and fear of the days of panic, of the hopelessness of the days of the Quiet, and of the resurgence of the heart and soul of a nation and a world that would not go quietly into the darkness. 

 

Who does not wonder at the valiance of those who took back our world from the encroaching night and rising waters? Who does not wonder if they could make the same decisions and survive what had to be borne by those who lived during that time? Who does not wonder if when called, we could rise to the challenge as the men and women of that time did?

 

Like so many of my generation who lived through the Rise, I have begun to degrade, to mentally falter, to forget. The sickness that the Æster visits on those of us who survived, those who have lived longer than our less fortunate brethren, is the poison in our souls that slowly eats away at us. Unlike those whose fall was precipitous, who ended up in the howling houses to die in madness or become mindless slaves to work the farms and factories in the Nyx, we lived longer. Some, like me, have lived long and full lives, with the Vapors only taking us as age reduces our ability to combat its effects. Others lived a long time to suddenly descend into violence and madness. Some murdered their families, others became little more than animals to be either gathered up by the authorities or destroyed due to their violence. Still others took their own lives as they saw the inevitable facing them down. Now, I too stare into the face of the Lady, seeing in her eyes the faces of friends I’ve lost, seeing my own face among them knowing that soon I will join them. So, before my fate is delivered unceremoniously to me, I will record the events of my life. I will try to do so without bias, but there is no such thing in men like me. We have lived too long, seen too much. All we have left are our biases.

 

I am Commodore Nathan FitzDonald, this is my story.

 

As the bastard son of a bastard son, my only chance to improve my station was to join the service. Hoping to improve my lot from the hovels of my childhood, I joined the ranks of those who served “Crown and Country”. 

 

What a farce, a load of stinking bilge water. Those who were slated to give their lives as disposable tools of someone’s farce of Empire. A generation doomed to sup on sand and ashes.

 

I remember when…I remember when the world was green, when you could look north and see blue skies and the white snows of the mountains, before the creeping darkness of the Æster began to devour our world. I remember the fear during the panics as people fought desperately for the survival of their families, their countries and just themselves. I remember watching the Æster take over our world, seeing that darkness take over our isles like some cancer that precursored the certain death of the patient. Some images are forever burned into my memory only to be unleashed on me in the dark hours when my sleep is broken by my own screaming and weeping. 

 

I remember holding the line at Windsor Castle while the last of the dignitaries boarded the airship for Australia, firing volley after volley into desperate crowds surging forward to try and escape the darkness and rising waters. Fighting with saber and bayonet as we fell back to the airships and witnessing my own brethren consumed by the rage of those abandoned to the blackness of Æster and water. Seeing the young men of my command torn apart, their crimson coats hiding the blood as the rage of the abandoned was played out on them. Seeing the pleading eyes of the men we left behind when the final ship was at capacity; the men I left behind. The eyes of those abandoned men and women whose faces receded as we rose into the darkening sky, fleeing for the sun.

 

These are only some of the memories that now hold my dreams hostage at night. Years of fighting in the name of the Crown to hold onto what possessions could be salvaged and had value in the new world and  wresting the possessions of others from them to ensure the continuation of our Empire.   These are the memories of all soldiers, moments of rage and pain, times of great victory and camaraderie. But this was a new world. The Æster was an adversary none had ever battled before. 

 

Before the Æster was well understood, we sailed and marched unprotected into its sulphurous grasp.  Thousands lost their lives to the Lady in those days. Once the danger was realized we avoided it for a long time until military necessity forced us to develop ways of dealing with it. That is certainly not to say that it was safe. Repeated exposure brought on the Vapors which killed more men than disease would have in a medieval army. 

 

We who were fortunate enough to survive did so in body only, our souls forever scarred by watching the Lady take our friends and comrades in all her various ways. A friend rendered to dust within his exposure suit after a saber cut through the treated canvas, not even so much as wounding him but exposing him to the Æster which consumed him whole, another torn apart before your eyes by an Æster mad crew, another who you said goodbye to with a bullet from a Webley after they had been Taken. Constant exposure to Æster held its own effects. The constant fear of death and exposure, weeks spent recovering from burns on my eyes from a pinhole leak in a compartment, months spent in a hospital when the shakes became so bad I was unable to perform even the simplest tasks. Our proud ranks were thinned until we were a mere skeleton of our previous strength and those forces were made of hollow-eyed scarecrows. We had become dead, so numb that nothing had value anymore.

 

Officers like myself, as I had risen rapidly through the thinning ranks, had to come up with new ways of motivating men and keeping discipline. Some of these were draconic to say the least. Periods of idleness were the hardest, with soldiers allowed too much time to think and reflect on what had been lost. The suicide watch was constant with our crews, those who operated heavily within the Æster. Even with newer ships where the prospect of accidental exposure was limited, men and now women, who had been brought into the service when overall populations began to diminish and maintaining manpower was critical, often took their own lives. Those intent on self destruction were difficult to stop. Those who had lost all hope and simply didn’t care anymore were the truest threat. Those were the ones we watched for. They would simply open a hatch and walk out into the Æster. One case of this could contaminate and potentially doom an entire ship. It happened more than once in the early days when small ships fell victim to such things.

 

The years from PAe 5 to PAe 20 were harsh and brutal, everything was bent toward stemming the flow of death, of losses to the Æster. When the bands finally established themselves, things began to turn around. Hope resurfaced as the determination to retake the lost cities grew and the City of Light movement began. People had something to fight for, not just survival, but creating a new world, retaking part of what had been lost. Suddenly, there was a surge in activity worldwide and industry was reestablished and began to flex its muscles in preparation for the task ahead. Retaking the abandoned cities in the Argentum and the Nyx and making them livable again.

 

It was a strange reversal that our first landing and beachhead in the reconquest of London took us back over the same ground we had abandoned some 14 years earlier. I and many of the senior officers could not help but stand in awe and silence as we looked down from our landing ships over the bleached bones of soldiers and citizens that littered the ground where we had abandoned London so long ago. The heavy sealed-beam Fresnel lamps of the airships cast lights on the bleached white and Æster yellow fields of the dead. Common wisdom was that you could not take more than three steps anywhere in London without treading on the dead. This situation brought about the first Magpies I had ever met. Civilians whose job was to clean and clear debris and the dead to allow reconquest operations to take place. Formerly chimney sweeps, janitors, grounds keepers and general laborers, this new guild had been established years earlier to deal with other sanitation problems and had become militarized out of necessity of some of their day in and day out duties. 

 

Many would disagree with the official term of the “Reconquest” of London. Those people weren’t there. It was a fight, and we bled for every square yard of ground we took. Men and women who had been reduced to a state of barbaric feudalism battled us to hold onto whatever it was they thought was theirs. People who were little more than animals attacked us out of fear and rage, their minds having been forever destroyed by the Æster or the horrors that it wrought. And then there were the animals, things that we could not have imagined. We had heard reports of the rats, but we were unprepared for a five foot high wall of vermin flowing out of the sewers as we tried to clear part of the underground of the Parliament building. I still bear the scars of that encounter. Many of the hardened men and women under my command were literally consumed alive by sewer rats the size of terriers as we were overwhelmed by the flood of these vermin. Those of us who survived only did so because some of our engineers dumped fuel and kerosene into ragged flaming lines, giving us a line of retreat. This “glorious” type of battle typified the “Reconquest” of London. Nothing the papers wanted to hear about. We fought street to street, block to block sometimes doorway to doorway pushing back the masses of vermin, barely human savages, the Taken, and armed feudal soldiers. 

 

We had not seen a single bird since we had reentered London. It was not until we had retaken the Tower after almost two weeks of assault on the ancient fortification held by some mad former Londoner who called himself the “Tower King” and his vassals that one of the Corporals came to me on the orders of his Sergeant. He told me that the Sergeant had said to bring me immediately. As soon as we left the interior of the building I knew why. The cacophony of the ravens was deafening after weeks of not hearing the sound of a single bird. Hundreds of ravens had suddenly reappeared and lighted all around the Tower. As if in answer to some ancient call, the ravens had returned to the Tower almost as if they were welcoming its ancient owner’s home. 

 

There were victories and setbacks during the Reconquest. The battle for the Thames was long and cost me more men than any other series of engagements in my career. Many areas had degraded to filthy, disease ridden swamps and lowlands where Æster had poisoned and changed the waters to seething acidic pools. I remember the first report I got of this. It was early on a Sunday morning when my adjutant stormed into my office with a report. It stated that ten men including one of the Sergeants I had learned to count on had been crippled as they waded into one of these poisonous swamps. The Æster laden water began to burn away their skin a few moments after it touched them. The delay in effect allowed the entire squad to wade in chest deep before the first man showed signs of distress. By then it was too late for all of them. The filth didn’t kill immediately, but once they were exposed, the infection of Gangrene set in almost immediately and they all died. All the physicians could do for them was keep them drugged with Opium and Laudanum to dull the pain. I read the Sergeant’s final letter dictated to the Chaplain for his wife. It was gibberish, the pain and Opium did not allow the man to coherently say what he wanted with his final words. When I wrote the letter to his wife, like so many others over time, I lied. I told her he had been killed instantly when a saber had found its mark and stopped his heart. There was no reason to describe the slow and obscene way a good man died to those that loved him. I live with the image of those lingering soldiers who simply were too strong to die quickly. Why should their loved ones. Poor bastards. Brave and dedicated and killed by stinking water. 

 

We found that some of what we later understood to be called “Thames Lords” had found ancient sewers and tunnels beneath the city, some of which they expanded under the Thames itself. How anyone could live in the damp and partly flooded catacombs makes me wonder to this day. But they had to be cleared or collapsed. Our orders were to rescue every citizen we found, regardless of situation, only killing in self defense. We were the soldiers, not the doctors. So, we bled to bring out those who would in most cases never be recovered. As such, the most efficient method of dealing with the Thames Lords could not be enacted. To collapse the tunnels with charges and entomb the bastards like rats in their holes. This was not an option for us. But it did not stop us from losing hundreds of troops when they did the same to us. Knowing the back way out, they waited for us to get into the deep tunnels and then collapsed them above our men and women. The Thames campaign was a meat grinder that I repeatedly ordered troops into. Standard policy now for any subterranean mission was to sweep with flamethrower teams backed by regular army units to prevent being overrun by vermin. This process saved probably as many lives as were lost battling the Thames Lords. Where large concentrations of vermin were there certainly were not going to be people. So once a nest was discovered, the teams pulled out if they couldn’t eradicate it, and the engineers blew the tunnels. Let the stinking vermin burn, drown or suffocate. I didn’t care. I just wanted them dead. In one case, an entire warren of tunnels was collapsed and we spent the next three weeks finding bloated, rotting corpses of vermin lining the shoreline of the Thames. Some took to actually counting them and after reaching over 2,000 corpses, it was a lost cause. My personal estimation is that we hit the core of the vermin population of London in that explosion and that some 10,000 of them were destroyed. After that, the reports confirm we had gained the upper hand on them. Steadily we burned, poisoned and blasted them out of existence, but it took months to retake the area adjacent to the Thames. Long before the vermin problem was finished we had defeated the Thames Lords. They finally surrendered en masse on the 1^st of November PAe 18. Guy Fawke’s day that year was the party to end all parties in London. Massive bonfires built by the Magpies to deal with the dead were the order of the day, but the official Bonfire of the Royal Army could be seen by airships as far as 30 miles away. It was glorious. It was the first time since entering London that our men and women had a true sense of potential victory. A real hope of retaking the city and they let the world know. 7 months later, we had to be reinforced because of the sheer number of women out on maternity leave. It was a good time to be alive. We really had hope, and for the first time we felt we were making a difference. 

 

There were still months of hard fighting ahead, but the Engineers had been given support by thousands of civilian workers. It was safe enough in the core of London for real repair and construction to begin. Civilian citizens were back in London, taking back what was theirs. And they showed it. I’ve never seen such a huge scale work effort as those early days. Civilians demanded to have the engineers and the army retake some of the steel foundries in the north so that London would be built with British steel and iron. Mines were cleared and defended so that coal and iron production could begin again. It was a time of yelling matches that would have put Parliament to shame as civilian and military leadership went head to head over resources. And as one of those military heads, I’ll say this. The civilians were right. 

 

We only had to break open the areas and the civilians took over, even before they were secure. They say the foundation steel of the London Aeroplex was produced in the foundries while fighting was still going on outside. That was the nature of who the civilians were that rebuilt London. Tenacious as any soldier in the army, proud as the day was long and they would be damned if they would let anyone or anything take what they had worked so hard to rebuild. In one case, during the second year of the Reconquest, a force of dissidents from some doomsday cult broke into the central London protected area. Apparently they had been tunneling and reinforcing for months to bring this off. When they broke out into the formerly safe streets of London, they went on a rampage. Our soldiers were caught off guard and unprepared, it was a complete surprise. They fought and died well trying to protect the civilians, but when the civilians realized these dissidents were bent on destroying the piers of what would become the London City of Light and what they had worked so hard to build, the battle changed to an uprising. Every man and woman in central London it seemed, took up arms, rocks, wrenches and anything else they could get their hands on and went after the dissidents with a vengeance. The only thing missing were the torches and pitchforks. Before my men could get back in and restore order, the civilians had not only driven them back, but had chased them so far back into the tunnels that it took us over a day to get the civilians back. By the time the engineers and the army took control, there was nothing to take control of. The Londoners had killed or driven off every member of the force and had followed them back to a compound 5 miles outside the city. By the time we got there it as aflame. At that moment, I knew that noone, short of God Almighty himself would ever take London again. I lost 110 men in the attack. And I would lose them again without blinking an eye for the victory that it brought. And it was not an Army victory, or even a victory for London. But it was a victory for the British citizen. That victory is one that no amount of military planning and no amount of money or soldiers can ever buy.

 

When I was relieved after three years of hard fighting to rebuild London, there were 25,000 civilians living and working there. Entire families, right down to the family dog. The pug and the bulldog were the pets of choice in London in those days. Tenacious, proud and full of fight, they were the living representation of the spirit of London.

 

Fighting in the Khyber was different; there were no victories, only holding actions, a four year meat grinder throwing young men and women from all over the Empire into the teeth of the Ottomans and the Russians. It was there that the first true aerial battles in the Aester were fought. These were ugly, deadly and dangerous fights. The honor of naval battle was never there, it was a brutish slugfest of nations learning how to fight in an environment they had never had to deal with before. The officers of the Admiralty were the first casualties in most of these battles. Brilliant gentlemen with pedigrees as long as your arm could not get their heads around what was little more than an aerial gang fight. Some simply resigned their commissions; others became battle casualties themselves, losing their minds. Those who survived, learned and fought in those brutish battles became the new generation of Admirals. These were hard men and women with no compunction about sending men and women to their deaths, and no mercy for the enemy. This wasn’t about honor, it was about survival. When the Admiralty finally sent out the new Rules of Engagement in my second year there, they were simple. “Survival is our first mission, to survive is to kill. So our first mission parameter is to kill the enemy.” This brutal code was played out over and over in the skies above the Khyber. I don’t want to think about how many skeletons litter the mountains and valleys of the Khyber; the skeletons of men, women and ships.

 

It was in this environment that we met the first of the Ottoman dreadnaughts. In the soup of the Aester in the middle of the night, our battle group came upon theirs and the engagement started. In 30 minutes the Xerxes Bahadur had destroyed one of our cruisers, a destroyer and mauled the flagship, the King George. It was quickly realized that the battle group would be destroyed utterly if we could not gain the upper hand on the Xerxes. So, the cruiser I was assigned to, the Delhi, and two troop transports were ordered to assault and board the King Xerxes and seize control of the vessel. This was truly a suicide mission but everyone knew that the Xerxes has to be taken out of the fight or our battle group was doomed. In the 10 minute approach to the Xerxes the Delhi was reduced to little more than an Aester borne hulk. It was only the professionalism of officers and crew that allowed her to reach the breaching station without total destruction. She had concentrated her considerable firepower on blowing a hole in the interlocking fields of fire of the Xerxes and the Captain then decided there was no way the Delhi would survive to withdraw and so he ordered the Xerxes rammed and ordered the crew to abandon the doomed ship for the Xerxes. The entire crew’s only chance of survival now was to take the Xerxes. It was an all or nothing gamble. The captain reasoned that the crew might have a chance to survive or at least die fighting this way, to stay aboard the Delhi would mean they would end the way that the crews of her sister ships had. Blown apart, burned or consumed by the Æster. It was foolhardy, desperate and singularly brilliant. Like Cortez burning the ships when he and his men arrived in the New World. There was now no room for anything other than total commitment. It was victory or death. When the Delhi rammed the Xerxes, her life ended. The marines, naval personnel, officers and crew who survived the impact poured from the Delhi through breaches in the hull into the Xerxes. The troop transports followed her in, taking advantage of the hole in the Xerxes firepower that the Delhi had so dearly purchased. Most likely, only about ten percent of those who survived the impact into the Xerxes ever got off the Delhi, but those that did, did so with a vengeance. By the time I struggled through a breach in the hull and into the smoky corridors of the Xerxes, the marines I was with were already moving quickly forward and down to toward the command decks.

 

The Xerxes was massive and was under constant fire by our fleet. If there is such a place as hell, the inside of the Xerxes was it. My exposure suit like those of the marines I was with prevented both smoke and Æster from affecting us unduly, but Æster poured into the ship through the massive breach left by the Delhi. We didn’t think about our navy comrades who were only protected by breathing masks and goggles as we fought our way through the Ottomans. 

 

That was the first time I encountered the Janissaries. Ottoman Slave soldiers who were bred to serve the Emperor and who went into battle breathing Æster and opiates fed to them through a special mask making them fearless and without a sense of pain, but not mad, like the Taken. They were terrifying in their ferocity and skill. My good friend, Marine Captain Ed Wyster was run through by a Janissary sword, taking a thrust that was meant for me. In sacrificing himself he gave me the time to bring my Webley to the man’s face and kill him. His death as a popular officer among the marines brought a ferocity from his men that I cannot begin to fathom or describe. They became Dervishes in their own right, hacking their way forward, never allowing me that close to the enemy again. With shotguns, pistols, sabers and fists, the battled steadily downward and forward. We reached one of the massive gun turrets that had so badly mauled our fleet and the Sergeant yelled “Go on, I’ll take care of this”, grabbing a breaching charge and grenades from one of the heavy weapons men. We passed out of the area and heard the breaching charge go off. The sound of grenades and his shotgun reported for a few moments over the sound of the din and then there was momentary silence. A tremendous explosion rocked the Xerxes, throwing the entire company off its feet as a wall of flame roared up the passage behind us. We scrambled out of the passageway away from the inferno, our treated suits instantly heating and burning our skin inside but giving us the seconds to escape that we would never have had without them. Many of us simply fell down a ladder to the deck below to escape the flames. The last man, a private, finally fell down into the passage having waited and slammed the searing hot door shut against the inferno. The gloves of his environment suit were welded to his skin and his faceplate had been blown in. He died a moment later having saved our lives. Battling our way forever downward and forward through another two decks, we finally reached the bridge and another breaching charge gave us entry. We were the second group to break into the bridge. The Janissary guards fought like whirlwinds cutting through the first group rapidly. Shotguns made short work of the occupied Janissaries and most of the crew of the bridge. When the Sergeant of the first group, a heavy boned pit bull name Smythe, who was spattered in blood and looked like the very image of some kind of hell-spawned demon of rage, grabbed the Xerxes captain by the collar and put a bloody boarding cutlass to his throat the officer wisely surrendered. It took another full minute to silence the Xerxes guns as the desperate captain and the remains of the bridge crew called for the ship to stand down. Strangely enough, the Captain was an Oxford educated gentleman before the Æster had forever changed his fortunes and driven him back to his ancestral homeland in Turkey. It took still another five minutes to convince our fleet to cease fire on the Xerxes. I was beginning to think that we had taken the ship only to die on it to our own guns. With the Xerxes surrender, the Ottoman fleet fled or was shot down. The Xerxes was the only ship left flying of those that did not flee by the end of the engagement. All other ships were systematically gunned down by order of the fleet admiral on the King George. Debris from the battle littered the sky for months as gravity and Æster vied for control of the bones of the battle.  

 

I was laterally shifted to the Navy as a Marine Colonel after my tour in the Khyber. It was viewed that my talents could be better used assisting with the development and implementation of standards and tactics for Aester borne forces. I was attached to the staff of General Grey but that appointment was suspended after I was hospitalized due to “battle fatigue”; a polite entry in my military record that coincided with a complete mental and nervous breakdown. I spent eighteen months recovering in the Staff military hospital outside of New London Australia. It was there that I learned that I was not alone in my malady. Speaking to one of the senior physicians there, I learned that a new malady generally referred to “Æster Fatigue” had been diagnosed which was unique to the Æster services. It was a combination of Æster Fatigue and Battle Fatigue that I was suffering from. So, I spent eighteen months resting, fishing, walking and waking screaming in the night, at least after the first month. I had not realized that I had not been sleeping until the doctors explained to me that what I had thought was sleep was not, and that it had only been a matter of time before I fell apart. So, for the first month, they sedated me, hypnotized me, had music played for me, hell, they even brought in approved prostitutes they called “sleep nurses” to try and assist me in sleeping. Finally, I was able to sleep for about 3 hours a night. Over the next eighteen months I became able to sleep through the night with the understood nightly “interruptions”; their polite term for screaming nightmares. 

 

I was returned to active duty with an entry in my service jacket that my Æster and Battle Fatigue were being “managed”, meaning they wanted to doctors to keep an eye on me from that point forward. I joined General Grey’s command for the last year and a half of his posting there whereupon it was thought that I was the logical replacement for him and I was given the rank of Commandant. The eighteen months of isolation from current events was hard to recover from, everything had changed. Skyhooks had been invented and one was operating in Scotland for the purpose of hoisting cargo and heavier than air Æster vessels up to the Æster floor. Fixed platforms had been built and were now in use in the Æster for everything from military fueling and rearming depots to Æster processing stations. Civilians were now operating in the Æster as part of gathering and processing operations there. A new part of the service had been formed in my absence; the Æster Rescue Service. The mandate of this group was to assist vessels in trouble within their sphere of influence. Their mandate held that they would assist ANY vessel in trouble in the Æster, regardless of flag, vocation, or circumstances. This was to be an all volunteer group taking on some of the most difficult and dangerous duty in the Æster. The AeRS came under the purvue of our department and so I set out to understand the mission and requirements for administering this service. Previous to this, I had never been stunned by what the military had done. I’ve seen error, excess, stupidity and just plain short-sightedness, but this was a staggering revelation.

A massive budget, taking only the cream of the services and putting manpower and equipment into a position to be lost with regularity, along with this, the Admiralty had enacted the Æster buoy program as part of the same package requiring navigation buoys to be placed throughout the Æster that also had the capability of self rescue for some small ships. This was ludicrous! Budgetarily it was nothing short of madness. The more I thought about this, the more I fumed. What could those damn fools in Parliament be thinking? We do not have the facilities or manpower to be able to support this kind of operation. And who in God’s name would volunteer for such a thing! That was when things really turned a corner for me, when I looked at the numbers. 

 

From the inception of the AeRS eight months before, requests had flooded in from every branch of the service and civilian departments as well, such as constabulary and fire brigades, to join this service. Military recruiting had jumped by twenty one percent since the announcement went out with over sixty percent of those recruits requesting to join the AeRS! This wasn’t a farce or someone’s brainchild, this was a marvel. I thought back to the civilians in London fighting for what they had built. I understood then what this meant. It’s about taking back the world, taking back our honor and our humanity. The Admiralty’s code of battle against the Ottoman’s and the Russians had been brutal out of necessity, but it was at odds with the heart of the British people. This was the heart, hopes and dreams of the British people speaking in words so clear and so concise that only a half broken, scarred old war bull like me couldn’t see it until it was stuffed right under his nose.

 

The Æster Rescue Service, the name spoke volumes, it did not carry Royal in the title as did all other branches of the service, it was not the “British Æster Rescue Service”. It was simply the Æster Rescue Service, a branch of the British Navy that was wholly dedicated to the preservation of lives and property, anyone’s lives and property. 

 

I realized as this concept truly took hold in my mind that I had lived past a certain point in my life. I had lived past the point where brutality and simple survival were enough. I was not just a member of the British military, but I was also a member of the British people; A people with heart, honor, and at their core a better nature than my own. I believe that at that point I realized what it was to be a military man who had outlived his true vocation. I was part of that brutal, uncompromising “killing the enemy is or primary mandate” generation. I wasn’t sure if I could adapt to the world that was coming. I wasn’t sure I knew how.