Marching

At first I was unsure of where this memory came from. I saw a documentry and I had a film of German soldiers marching through a Belgian town and it was the same type of march from my memory.  It is almost dusk and it's getting dark fast. We are marching through a town and it appears to be almost empty. The houses and building are beautiful. The road is cobblestone.

As we march, our rifle is resting on our right shoulders with the muzzle pointing to the sky. Our left arms are swinging at the elbow in unison. The only sound is our jackboots hitting the cobblestones. It sounds like a loud clap or bang. Each man's left foot hits the stones at once, then the right foot does the same.

Suddenly I feel very lonely and scared. I'm not an individual here, I'm just a cog in the machine of war.  I have no face, no name, no personality, no soul. I feel like a mechanical tin soldier who was wound up along with millions of other men and marched in the direction that we were pointed in.