Live for eternity or die trying, words framed with the grey static of my grandmother’s television in Madison, Wisconsin. Five years old, I sat cross-legged on an all-mismatched plaid quilt, only the flicker of the news interruption to light the living room from the midnight storm.

A thunder crash woke me, and I sat up under the attic roof that rattled with the storm like hundreds of china plates shattering, what I now know as hailstones on the tin roof. I cloaked myself in the quilt and ran across the floorboards to the dropdown stairs, guided by the hall light and the warm-orange floral wallpaper.

A flash from the attic vent behind me burst the hall light bulbs, three in succession, each darkening the hall more with the death spark of their filaments. I screamed, but my grandmother, her iron bedstead right under the boards I trampled and walls I brushed to get to the next set of stairs, never checked on me that night, the night before, or the night after, but I liked it that way seeing as we never shared any blood.

Downstairs, the storm flickered beyond the curtains of the window above the steel sink; teal light sprayed through broken drops and sleet to show boughs of trees in silhouette, bending and snapping to launch onto the wind. My feet scuffed along the linoleum, fingers touched the table wood grain to keep oriented, and hurried to the warn-down path in the shag carpet. A boom of thunder rattled glass animals on the two-sided wall-shelf so one duck hopped off and bounced on a yellow couch cushion.

I turned the knob on the television set so the picture grew from the center and rolled like a movie reel before settling square in the screen. A woman displayed the movement of a vacuum cleaner picking up bolts from the tile, surrounded by a haze from the storm mottling the grey picture.

Blanket spread in front of the set, I waited for the commercial to end, but the screen cut out, leaving me to stare straight ahead into the darkness for three seconds counted by the pendulum tic of the cuckoo clock, when the box of light in the TV frame began to grow. Sound came first, before clarity of picture; a baritone voice, clear and methodic as if laying bricks with his words, said amidst the crackle of audio static: Live for eternity, within his pause, the unseen crowd drew in a collective breath, not audible, but tangible in the air even through the broadcast, or die trying. For this, we strive. The shape of a man, young, strong-jawed with sharp cheekbones, broad shoulders tasseled in a general’s uniform, and head topped with a star-fronted officer’s cap, coalesced from the static.

My five year old eyes saw General Aichek for the first time that night, pulled in like everyone else, but the only one to remember his expression of tact-muted surprise and horror as he gave his first speech on the steps of the Viking I Lander monument.

These words as I say them are engraved in my memory: For this, we strive, not to die in the attempt of greatness, but to leave an indelible mark upon the annals of history, as our general has with the unity of our green colonies in the ocean of red sand, and as our continuation. We, together, can unite the colonies with our mother planet. Earth and Mars will be one again!

The taste of the red mud dripped down from the corners of my lips, and I feel our hateful oneness washed over the walls of the trenches with the downpour. I braced myself on the trench wall, hand sinking an inch from the mud and tried to rub the red grit from my eyes with my other rust-colored sleeve, only to smear more cayenne mud into the hair, once brown, now copper spattered as that of my fellow soldiers, that hung from under my side-hanging helmet.

The long barrel of a cannon recoiled back from its perch on the wall, the wood restraints shuddering and spraying mud so the gunners who did not load the back of the cannon with another shell held the wood-strengthened mud wall underneath it.

I took my hand from the wall and felt inside my jacket for the only warm, dry place on my body guarded by a steel box the size of a book held against my chest.

Another shot launched from the steaming cannon and split the orange-grey clouds. The snap of wood, gunners shouted, and I looked to the cannon in time to see the breech slap into the ankle-high canal of mud. I stood for a moment as two gunners brushed past my shoulders at a sprint, watching the barrel of the cannon stand erect, half the trench wide and twice as tall as the highest point in the wall, my hand sweating on the steel box. Then, as if a gust of wind blew in from the north, the cannon’s muzzle fell, appear against the left wall. A wave of soil thickened water irrupted from ting to grow as it came closer, but I put my bache pipe’s impact and soaked through me down from the ribs.

I leaned my helmet against the wall, mud dripping down the back of my neck, looked up and sighed more out of irritation than anything else. Shelling and thunder lit the clouds dusking to night; the raindrops hitting my face slowed to a spray, and I turned my gaze north along the narrow corridor of the trench.

I freed myself from the suction of the mud wall and, with slipping feet on the barrel, climbed atop the cannon to see down the trench. It curved over the rounded slope of a mountain and cut through the red-tinged bark of the forest; cannons and lanterned crowds pointed east at intervals until the trenches forked at the bunker where I had to deliver the steel box

A far off whistle brought a shell; the middle cannon between me and the bunker exploded, followed by the concentric ripple of mud, then a second later I felt the reverberation in my lungs. A grenade whizzed by my head, and I slid backwards to kneel in the mud between the wall and the cannon, one hand on the barrel, the other holding my helmet as blast-splintered trees flew over my trench. I stood with the last flurry of bark and slid my fingers along the barrel, continuing north.

The trench took a downturn where a ladder should have made the slope passable, but instead I slipped down the gradient, heels dug into the mud, and stumbled to the bottom the moment that a band form the Chinese regiment ran by shouting at me. After a few words, I did recognize their attempts at English: “Idiot!” “Run!” They clawed up the slope and disappeared before I could ask. An African regiment and an Italian regiment trampled past in the same way.

An hour later, I climbed a ladder of bloated saplings stuck in a mud incline and looked down from the place where my boot-ankles sunk into the soft edge of the shell crater. Men, half-submerged, wounded, dead, moving and still, littered the bowl of the crater. Antiaircraft fire popped overhead into tiny clouds. Then men shouted, but I couldn’t understand them.

In the crater, I waded across chest deep water that pooled at the bottom, reddened by the soil I could not differentiate from the men’s blood. A hand grabbed my arm. Soldier, scalp-blood flowing over his closed right eye, met my eyes with his other. He said, “La guerre est finie,” whispered as a eulogy.

“English?” I said, “Are there others living? Vivre?”

“Mort,” he said, his knees giving way, but I caught him before he sank into the mud, “beyond help.”

I dragged him by the sleeve across the pool. My legs bumped into metal and flesh as I trudged, until the other side I hoisted the Frenchman onto my back and dug my nails into the mud to climb the sloping northern wall of the crater.

“Private Gerard Caine,” I said to his rasp against my ear, hands dug into the wall halfway to the top, “Name?”

“Lamar. Private Lamar D’Anjou.”

My grip on the wall faltered; we skidded a yard or two down the wall, my face in the metallic-tasting mud. I spat, holding back a heave, and dug into the wall with the toes of my boots.

“My regiment’s the thirty-second Milwaukee,” I said; my hand gripped and pushed through the top edge of the crater, “You must be from one of the Paris ones.” I hoisted him over the top and crawled over myself. The ground pressed against my cheek, I caught my breath, and it echoed back from the ground already stale. I opened my eyes. The Frenchmen, D’Anjou, lay there, eyes closed, his arm bent back in an unnatural way.

“Lamar? Comrade?” I jostled his shoulder- his arm, limp, slumped to the ground with a small splash. I got to my feet and swallowed so a bit, maybe three grains, of grit made it down my throat. “La guerre est finie.”

After a moment, I took pvt. D’Anjou’s wrist. His arm held around my shoulders, I plodded on, mud-ice tingling up my legs, dripping, freezing with a guttural side-wind, and the haze dimming the edges of my vision of the red trench.

“Caine!” Ahead, the thirty-second regiment shifted toward me. Gallagher shouted again, “Caine, what happened?” I blinked, and he had his hands on my shoulders, and D’Anjou had vanished. “Get him some water!” he yelled back to the regiment.

Lance Corporal Gallagher treated me like a brother I never had, ever though at 6 and a half feet tall, black hair, blue eyes, he looked nothing like me.

“Jesus,” he said  and handed me his bandana, “Wipe the Mars off your face; you look like some sort of crater creature.”

“I wadded the bandana in my hands and realized I sat against the wall of the trench. “What happened to D’Anjou?”

Gallagher sat down beside me, “The Frenchman? Dead; don’t you know?”

“The first thing he said to me…” A young, tow-headed private handed me a canteen. I stared at it, unused like the handkerchief. “The first thing . He says, ‘La guerre est finie.”

“The war is over, “Gallagher said. He got up and offered down his hand. “Now, what are you doing here?”

I stood without his help. “But the war isn’t over.”

“That’s just what it means, ‘La guerre est finie,” Gallagher said, “And it is for him. What are you doing here?”

I bit the inside of my cheek. “Brush off death like that.”

“Like you wish you could?” Gallagher took the bandana from my hand and scraped at the red grime next to my ear.

I hit the bandana away with the back of my fist. “Will you bury him?” At my shout, I noticed the rest of the regiment averting their eyes to work, even in the lull of battle.

“Why can’t you?” Gallagher said. He stuffed the bandana into his pocket.

My hand touched the steel inside my jacket. “Because I have to deliver—”

“Burry him,” Gallagher said, nodding toward the soil-stained sheet over human form on the other side of the trench, “He’ll get a mass grave otherwise.”

I walked across the trench, the caked earth cracking under my steps, and slung the sheet and human bundle over my back.

“Caine,” Gallagher watched me cross back and lean a wood ladder against the wall, “I wasn’t serious.”

“You’re a Lance Corporal,” I said and braced the highest rung I could reach, “That was an order.” Bomb blasts started up again in the distance, ours or the separatists, all I could tell that they centered north of us. I lifted, brought my first foot to the rung.

“Private!” Gallagher shouted, “Leave this trench, so help me—” a small shell splintered the trees to my back, but I climbed up the ladder and into the cannon clearing.

Lights from the separatist line flickered ahead five-hundred feet. Their shouts, English, Spanish, human, rang into my ears, the last: “Lanzen grenades!”

A grenade flew, irrupted, its blast wall grazing the spot I stood three steps sooner. Pain pierced between my last two left ribs, but I continued forward. Another grenade showered soil into the trench. Gallagher’s voice mixed with the others, shouting, “Come back!” “Run!” “Caine!”

A third grenade exploded in front of me. I shielded my face with a grit-crisp sleeve. The dust snowed down a fine layer of topsoil around the crater fifteen feet ahead. The grenades forgot me and concentrated on the southern regiments, but explosions rang in my ears as if they emanated from beneath my feet.

At the edge of the crater, bottom smoking, steaming a shallow pool of water, I set down Private D’Anjou and my pack, then jumped. The water seeped into the sides of my boots. I pulled D’Anjou’s body down he side where the water lifted the army blanket off his pale face. Red soil caked around his nose and eyes as they had mine, but the water washed this away, so he floated, pale and blonde, unnatural in the muck. I replaced the blanket over his head and climbed over the side.

I pushed the nose of the shovel from my pack into the soil, layering it into the grave. The grenades exploded closer, encircling me, but without damage, and over my shoulder I heard Gallagher shout, “Don’t fire, goddamn idiots! Caine’s out there!”

Nationalist machinegun fire—running out of ammo for cannons, and the rumored tanks had yet to surface. The barrage blocked any extra-planetary reinforcements.

I patted down a final layer on the burial mound and jammed the shovel into the dirt. It stood straight as a marker. Helmet over my heart, I hummed Taps, the only thing that came to mind, as the words beat in my head: Day is done. Gone’s the sun. From the lakes, from the hills, from the skies. Safely rest, and said aloud, “God is thine.”