Station 1

Chapter 1 The Story of a Soldier (3)

Part 3: Training and Brotherhood

"War does not just take your life. It takes your name, your past, your self. And what it leaves behind is something you may not recognize."

The boy arrived at the training camp with the others, their faces still marked by the softness of home. They had left behind their families, their villages, their old lives. Here, they were no longer sons, brothers, or apprentices. They were soldiers in the making.

The first thing to go was their hair. Shorn down to the scalp, it was a symbol of shedding their former selves. Then came the uniforms—itchy, ill-fitting at first, but meant to mold them into something indistinguishable from the man beside them. Their names were rarely spoken; instead, they were shouted at, barked at, reduced to nothing more than their ranks and numbers.

Training was brutal.

Before dawn, they were woken by the shrill blast of the whistle, forced into formation with barely enough time to rub the sleep from their eyes. They ran until their legs burned, lifted sacks of sand until their arms trembled, crawled through mud so thick it swallowed them whole. There were no complaints, no room for rebellion. Their bodies were theirs no longer; they belonged to the army now.

The boy’s first time holding a rifle, it felt foreign in his hands—cold, lifeless, heavier than he expected. The metal was unforgiving, its weight pressing into his palms like a reminder of the burden he now carried. When he pulled the trigger for the first time, the recoil sent a sharp pain through his shoulder, leaving it sore for days. He missed the target entirely. The instructor sneered, stepping close enough that the boy could smell the bitter scent of pipe smoke clinging to his uniform.

"A slow soldier is a dead soldier. A hesitant man is a corpse," the instructor spat.

So he learned. He adjusted his grip, controlled his breathing, steadied his aim. Soon, his hands no longer trembled when he pulled the trigger. Soon, the sound of gunfire no longer startled him. Soon, the hollow eyes of straw dummies pierced by bullets no longer made his stomach turn.

By the end of the first week, the boy could no longer remember the sound of his sister’s laughter. By the end of the month, he barely recognized his own reflection. His cheeks had hollowed, his hands had calloused, his eyes had hardened. He had left home as a boy. He was becoming something else.

But war does not break men all at once. It does so slowly, piece by piece.

And in that slow unraveling, the boy found something unexpected—brotherhood.

It began with simple things. A shared curse under heavy rain, a hand extended to help him up after a brutal fall, a quiet nod of understanding when exhaustion pressed down like an iron weight. They were all strangers when they arrived, but suffering binds men in ways nothing else can.

He learned their names, their hometowns, their dreams—the remnants of who they had been before.

There was Adrien, the blacksmith’s son, his hands large enough to bend metal, but his heart too soft for war. He spoke of his father’s forge, the way embers glowed in the dark, the smell of burning coal. He longed to return, to shape swords meant for warriors rather than wield them himself.

There was Julian, the trickster, always grinning, always finding a way to make the others laugh. Even when their bodies ached and their stomachs groaned with hunger, he would spin stories of ridiculous adventures—of kings in disguise, of runaway lovers, of ghosts that played pranks on the living. His humor was their shield against despair.

There was Tomas, quiet and steady, the closest thing to an older brother the boy had ever known. He did not speak much of home, but when he did, it was with a wistfulness that lingered in the air like the scent of something long lost. When the nights were long, and the weight of war pressed down on them, Tomas was the one who reminded them why they fought—to survive, to return, to live.

They shared stolen moments of warmth in the bitter cold—stories whispered in the dark, letters read aloud beneath dim candlelight, laughter that broke through the exhaustion like cracks in stone. They fought together, bled together, survived together.

And yet, deep down, the boy knew the truth.

Not all of them would make it to the end.