The Survivor

Only one man made it out. That's what every single story of military disaster on this front ends with, every last one of them. The engineering disasters, the cave-ins, the underground ambushes that turn into desperate bloodbaths and massacres for both sides. What the grizzled sergeants that tell the stories don't tell, and sometimes don't know, is that that one man making it out is always the same one. It's been destroyed from most records, or simply hidden within the huge mess of bureacracy that is wartime book-keeping, but if you look hard enough the same name turns up on a lot more lists of survivors than it should do. In some cases, it is the list. Rarely any medals, because any battle that has a list of survivors rather than a list of casualties is not one anyone wants to remember, but the name's there, in every campaign. It might be passed off as co-incidence, as a mistake in the books, or simply a conspiracy theory or a regimental legend, except for one thing. That man is still fighting on the front line today, and most people out there have seen him, at least at a distance. Not just one regiment, either. The man's been shunted from squadron to squadron, regiment to regiment, even battalion to battalion, so many times that his uniform is no longer the brown of the engineering corps but one huge tapestry of grey designation patches, splashed with black, red and fading traces of gilt braiding. If it wasn't for the paperwork, which has always been hazy at best, no-one would be able to tell who he was serving with or where, and that's definitely a good thing. No-one wants to know that the Survivor's turned up in their regiment, not with the tales that surround him now. He's worse than bad luck, he's the death sentence to all that he serves with, and that's in an army where even the lucky seventh regiment gives its soldiers a six-month life expectancy once they set foot in the warzone. You're dead within a month once the Survivor joins your regiment, and so is every last one of your comrades. Better to desert and risk being shot than serve alongside the Survivor, that's what a lot of people say, though it doesn't stop them eventually working shoulder-to-shoulder with him when the time comes.
Two days ago, there was another tunnel massacre. He got out, of course, the Survivor wouldn't be the Survivor if he didn't get out every time. A day later, he finished his pointless court-martial, and was reassigned, to yet another doomed regiment in this endless war. This time, it was my regiment.