Dead Reckoning
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 3
I want to be precise about why I joined the army.
It was not patriotism. I had no particular feeling about England or her wars or the various kings and princes whose ambitions sent men into fields to kill each other over borders that meant nothing to the men doing the killing. It was not adventure, though I would have said it was if anyone had asked. Adventure is what you call necessity when you want it to sound like a choice.
It was mathematics. The same mathematics my mother had taught me without meaning to.
A soldier had food, pay, a defined place in a hierarchy I already understood, and a weapon he was trained to use and permitted to carry. That last part mattered more than the others. A young man alone on the roads of Europe in 1708 with no weapon and no affiliation was prey. A soldier was not prey. The uniform was another kind of disguise and I had been wearing disguises my entire life.
I enlisted first with the navy, briefly, and found it too confined. The quarters were smaller than a merchant vessel and the hierarchy more rigid and the opportunities for the kind of dangerous miscalculation I spent my life avoiding were constant. I transferred to the army at the first opportunity and found it suited me considerably better.
Flanders suited nobody.
I want to be honest about the war because I have noticed that men who survive battles tend to speak of them in one of two ways. They either romanticize them into something noble and clarifying, all drumbeats and courage, or they refuse to speak of them at all, which is its own kind of lie. I will do neither.
The fields of Flanders were hell made geographical. That is not a figure of speech. The mud was a living thing that swallowed men whole, boots first, then the rest, and it made no distinction between the living and the dead because after sufficient rain there was no meaningful difference in what it contained. Artillery fire did not sound like thunder. It sounded like the world ending repeatedly in short intervals until the sound became simply the texture of existence and you stopped hearing it as something separate from yourself.
Men died in every configuration imaginable. Quickly and slowly, violently and quietly, alone and in groups, cursing and praying and sometimes making sounds that had no name. I watched all of it. I catalogued it the way I catalogued everything, because understanding what killed people was the most direct path to not being killed yourself.
I was good at not being killed.
My commanding officers noticed. Not because they had any insight into what I was but because competence is visible even when its source is invisible. I followed orders precisely and executed them efficiently and never created problems in the ranks. I was promoted twice in eighteen months. Neither promotion required anyone to look at me too closely. Armies in the field have very little interest in philosophy.
What they noticed was that I did not hesitate.
Hesitation kills more soldiers than bullets do. The moment between decision and action is where men die, that fraction of a second when the body argues with the mind about what is being asked of it. I had trained that hesitation out of myself years before I ever held a military weapon. Every day of my childhood had required immediate accurate response to changing circumstances. Every day on the merchant vessel had required the same. By the time I stood in a Flemish field with a musket in my hands I had been making rapid survival calculations for years.
The other soldiers thought I was fearless. I was not fearless. I was afraid constantly, of different things than they were afraid of, and I had simply become very efficient at continuing to function while afraid.
That is not courage. That is practice.
I met him in the winter of 1710.
His name I will not write here. Not to protect him — he is beyond protection now — but because his name belonged to him and writing it in a prison document feels like a violation of something I cannot fully articulate. I will call him what I called him in my mind during those years, which is simply the Soldier, which is insufficient and the best I can do.
He was Flemish. Dark haired, serious, not particularly large, with hands that were always slightly ink stained because he kept a journal, which no one else in the regiment did and which they considered eccentric and I considered remarkable. He was twenty two. He had a quality I had encountered rarely in men, which was that he listened when people spoke to him rather than simply waiting for his turn to speak.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.