9. THE UNIVERSAL SOLDIER

Two Christmas icons on their way to somewhere.

“Where is this?” asked Santa as he looked around him at the splendid colours of a rainbow that shouldn’t be there and a bridge with no apparent purpose.

“We’re on our way to Paradise,” smiled the lovely Mary, her shawl hanging loose and her eyes sparkling, reflecting the rainbow lights that glittered all around them.

“There’s no such place,” put in Santa’s alter-ego.

She smiled at him. Not at the fat Santa but to the shape of his other self perched on his shoulder like some amorphous and diminutive twin.

“Ah, but there is,” she said quietly. “I’ve been here quite a long time waiting for you, so I’ve heard rumours.”

“Who from?” asked Santa, suddenly curious.

“Oh, here and there,” she smiled. “Sometimes there are shadows of men and even some women. Too many to make any sense of, but they come drifting past, on their way from wars and battles, going to Paradise. They tell me that’s where they’re going, and they must know.”

“Why?” asked Santa.

“Why what?” she frowned.

“Why must they know? Dead machine-gun fodder, deceased fighters for the rich men who oblige them to wear a uniform and send them into hails of lead shot, the universal soldiers...”

“I don’t know what you mean… what are machine guns?”

He shook his head sadly. “Weapons more terrible than any you can have seen,” he murmured, “it’s what creates so many dead. Lines of them in terrifying bloody order with shattered limbs and broken bones, eyes blinded, minds numbed, lines and lines of the dead crumpled in mud … they were told they were fighting for a noble cause, sometimes a holy war, sometimes against tyranny, but it was that same tyranny that did for them.”

“I don’t understand...” Her frown was troubling.

“What he means,” put in the fat man’s alter-ego, “is that the dead don’t always know the truth or get a grasp of why they died. In fact, more often than not they are told lies. Blatant lies, foul falsehoods to get them to offer their lives in what they’re told is a noble cause.” If he could have done he would have spat, but he couldn’t. His host had no flesh, and he had less than that.

“There is money to be made out of war, and some of the rich men make it,” grimaced Santa.

“This is all terrible!” The girl stopped and looked at them, her big eyes wide open and her mouth trembling. “Surely men know why they are dying when the alternative might be that they could live a little bit longer? Surely they must see the truth?”

Santa shook his head. “Wars aren’t that simple,” he said sadly, “a man gets shot in Sarajevo and almost twenty million other folks must die as a kind of reprisal. It was the reality of it. The way unions were created and men had to defend that union to the death. You would have seen them trooping past, if they came this way. Lines of men, universal soldiers all of them, each one rewarded by death in war.”

“That was a song,” put in his alter-ego.

“What’s a song?” she asked.

“Words that are sung,” replied Santa. “Some are sung to try and make a difference, but words rarely can. It suggests that if no men became soldiers then there’s be nobody to fight and if there was a war the leaders would have to punch the living daylights out of each other instead of sending universal soldiers in their stead. But as it is there are soldiers, and the leaders are mostly safe from harm themselves, in their bunkers and hidey holes.”

“This sounds all so terrible,” sighed Mary, “and the soldiers, like shadows trooping past, were they not going to Paradise after all?”

Santa shrugged. “Who knows?” he said, “certainly not the foot soldiers who get told all sorts of things to make them leave their homes, don their uniforms and pick up their guns.”

“I will weep for them,” said Mary quietly. “I will weep that things can be so wrong. I will weep for the deaths of innocents.”

“No lass can have that many tears,” put in the fat man’s alter-ego.

“Sometimes I get to wonder,” whispered Santa, “it’s sometimes differences of opinion about the hereafter that sends men to battle.”

“You mean, it isn’t known? They don’t understand?” queried Mary.

“You’re part of the deceit,” muttered Santa, knowing it needed to be said, “the way your name and image have been used over the centuries. There are statues of you all over the place, stone effigies that purport to be you, and over the millennia since you say that you died in a ditch wars have been fought, bloody battles with mangled flesh and bleeding brains, women left without their husbands and sometimes men left without their wives. Children orphaned and even dying in streets torn up by hails of fire. And all because of you.”

“And the worst thing is none of the statues look really like you,” put in his alter-ego. “You’re beautiful, really beautiful, and they’re cold stone.”

The tears flowing down young Mary’s cheeks might have been real, but in that place they weren’t. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t weep. She could and she did.

Santa felt a surge of sympathy for the young woman, and he paused. “But they revere you at Christmas,” he said, gently, “they pray to you and for you. They honour your son. They bestow gifts on him just like the wise men of old did. Even the shepherds come and pray for him. It’s beautiful, really.”

“And that’s good?” she asked.

“I suppose so.”

“And what of you, with your tall stories and sleighs pulled by reindeer, do people ever fight in your name? Or are you more real than me, more loveable, more uniting?”

He shook his head.

“No,” he said quietly, “I’m just a fat elf who ought to mind his own business and who people stop believing in before they grow up. Now come on, let’s see where this Paradise is before I die of thirst.”

“There’s no such thing as thirst here,” she said, the tiniest hint of a smile drying her already dry tears.

© Peter Rogerson 13.11.18