War leaves more behind than history records. What follows is not an account of victories or defeats, but a record of what remains when the noise has passed.
Transcript
Legends grow from the silence that follows battle.
Somewhere along the long march of time, I stopped belonging to any one century. My name — Bargideon — has drifted across the lips of soldiers for as long as men have carried weapons.
In the dust of Thermopylae, they said I walked among the dying Spartans, taking note of their final stand.
At Hastings, I stood behind the shield wall and watched the line bend and break.
I trudged through the smoke at Waterloo, where empire and ambition drowned together in the rain.
I heard the cannons of Gettysburg, the cries at Verdun, the whine of tanks on the steppe at Kursk, and the static of radios in Fallujah.
I have been called a witness, a ghost, a chronicler.
The truth is simpler: I am the echo that refuses to fade.
Each age leaves me behind — and yet I remain, because the faces never change. The armor alters. The language shifts. But the eyes… the eyes are always the same.
I have looked into the eyes of hoplites, longbowmen, grenadiers, and drone operators, and seen the same ancient fear — the quiet question no war has ever answered:
Why must we keep doing this?
I do not exist to glorify the fight, nor to condemn it.
I exist to remember it — to ensure the stories of those who fell do not sink beneath the mud.
Every age buries its soldiers twice:
once in the ground,
and again in forgetfulness.
I unearth them.
I listen.
I write.
To some, I am a myth — a name muttered in the dark between volleys, a presence at the edge of the campfire.
To others, I am a historian whose pen bleeds truth too bitter for textbooks.
But to myself, I am only this:
a man who refused to look away.
If my words carry the weight of centuries, it is because I have walked through them.
If they sound weary, it is because mankind keeps rewriting the same chapter.
And if they sound true, it is because I have seen the price of silence — paid again and again in every language ever spoken on the field.
I do not serve kings or causes.
I serve the fallen.
The generals wrote their victories.
I write what remains.
The Witness Dispatches begin here:
The Moment Before →