The Vigilant Reaper

The Great War (or so they thought)

In my early lives, I had managed to elude the intense moments of the Second World War that I would later read about in the comfort of the 1980s. During my first life, I voluntarily enlisted, naively embracing three common misconceptions of the time – the belief that the war would be short-lived, that it would be a patriotic endeavor, and that it would enhance my skills. However, my fate saw me miss the embarkation to France by a mere four days. I felt a profound sense of disappointment for not being among the soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk, a retreat that, at the time, appeared as a somewhat triumphant defeat. The initial year of the war was marked by endless training exercises. We first trained on the beaches, as the nation, myself included, braced for a German invasion that never transpired. Then we relocated to the Scottish mountains as the government contemplated revenge for the failed invasion. In fact, we dedicated so much time to preparing for an assault on Norway that when the exercise was finally deemed futile, my unit and I were considered of little value in desert warfare. Consequently, we were held back from the initial deployment to the Mediterranean theatre until we could be retrained or found another purpose.

In this sense, I suppose I did fulfill one of my aspirations, as there seemed to be no urgent demand for us to engage in combat. I found myself with little to do except study and learn. In our unit, there was a medic named Valkeith, previously dismissed as a weak-chinned aristocrat by most, but that perception changed one day. Valkeith had discovered his conscience through the works of Engels and the poetry of Wilfred Owen. One day, he stood up to our tyrannical sergeant, who had wielded his power excessively and for too long, boldly exposing him as a grotesque embodiment of a childhood bully. Valkeith received three days of confinement for his outburst, but his actions earned the respect of all. Gradually, his learning, previously a subject of mockery, became a source of pride. Though he was still jokingly referred to as a weak-chinned toff, now he was "our" weak-chinned toff, and through him, I began to unravel some of the mysteries of science, philosophy, and romantic poetry. At the time, I refused to acknowledge my burgeoning interest in these subjects. Valkeith met his end three minutes and fifty seconds after we landed on the beaches of Normandy, succumbing to a shrapnel wound that tore open his abdomen. He was the sole casualty from our unit on that fateful day, as we were stationed far from the action, and the artillery piece responsible for the fatal shot was taken out two minutes later.

During my first life, I took the lives of three men, all in a single act, all at once. It happened in a village in northern France, where we had been informed that the village had already been liberated and no resistance was expected. Yet there it was, nestled between the bakery and the church, a tank, seemingly out of place. We were so relaxed that we didn't even notice it until the tank's barrel swung around, resembling the eye of a muddy crocodile, and it released a shell that instantly killed two of our comrades. Young Tommy Kenah succumbed to his injuries three days later in a hospital bed. I recall my actions with the same clarity with which I remember all things: I dropped my rifle, slung off my bag, and ran, shouting relentlessly down the middle of the street, screaming at the tank that had claimed the lives of my friends. I hadn't fastened the strap on my helmet, and it tumbled off my head about ten yards from the tank's front. I could hear men moving inside the armored beast as I approached, glimpsing faces darting through the slits in the armor as they struggled to pivot the g*n toward me or reach the machine guns. But I was already there. The main g*n was still hot; even from a foot away, I could feel its warmth on my face. I dropped a grenade through the open front hatch. I could hear them shouting, scrambling within the confined space, attempting to deal with the grenade. Later, our captain speculated that the tank had likely become disoriented. Their comrades had turned left, and they had turned right, leading to the deaths of three of us and their ultimate demise. I received a medal for my actions, which I sold in 1961 when I needed funds to replace a boiler. I felt a great relief once it was gone.

That was my first experience of war. I didn't volunteer for a second. I recognized that I would likely be conscripted and chose to rely on the skills I had acquired in my first life to keep myself alive. In my third life, I joined the RAF as a ground mechanic and sprinted for the shelter faster than any man in my squad when the sirens wailed. Finally, when Hitler began bombing London, I could begin to relax. It was a relatively secure place to be in the initial years. The majority of the men who perished did so in the air, hidden from view and mind. The pilots didn't particularly interact with us mechanics, making it easy for me to consider the plane my only concern while regarding the pilot as just another mechanical component, to be ignored and repaired. Then the Americans arrived, and the bombing of Germany began. Many more men died in the air. My only concern was the loss of their aircraft. But eventually, more of them returned, wounded by shrapnel, their blood pooling on the floor, just thick enough to hold the shape of the footsteps that had hurried through it. I pondered what I could do differently, armed with my knowledge of the future, and concluded that there wasn't much. I knew the Allies would emerge victorious, but I had never delved into the details of the Second World War through academic study. My knowledge was entirely personal, a life lived rather than information to share. The most I could do was warn a man in Scotland named Valkeith to remain in the boat for an extra two minutes on the Normandy beach or whisper to Private Kenah about a tank in the village of Gennimont that had mistakenly turned right instead of left, waiting between the bakery and the church to bring about his demise. However, I had no strategic information to provide, no knowledge or expertise to impart, except to declare that Citroën would create stylish but unreliable cars and that, in hindsight, people would wonder why Europe had been divided.

In my opinion, I was thoroughly unexceptional throughout that war. I oiled the landing gear of the planes that would later devastate Dresden. I heard of boffins attempting to design a jet engine, and I observed how the engineers ridiculed the concept. I listened for the moment when the engines of the V1s ceased, and I waited for a brief period to hear the silence of a V2 that had already fallen. When VE day finally arrived, I got spectacularly drunk on brandy, a drink I didn't particularly fancy, with a Canadian and two Welshmen I had met only two days prior, never seeing them again.

But this time, I learned. I studied engines and machinery, men and tactics, the RAF and the Luftwaffe. I examined bomb patterns, noted where the missiles had struck, and committed this information to memory for the next time. Although I felt 60 percent confident that there

would be a "next time," I wasn't privy to any grand strategic secrets. My knowledge was deeply personal, a result of living through the same events multiple times.

As it turned out, the same knowledge that had shielded me from the world would later place me in considerable jeopardy and, by extension, introduce me to the Cronus Club, and the Cronus Club to me.