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Napoleon Diary Entry

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Today, fifty-odd years later, I sit on my porch alone, swinging gently in the morning. I can look out over the yard. It looks just the same as the place were my most important moment of my life happened. I’ve kept it like that, so I never forgot. It's a large yard, that looks like a tiny meadow in a forest. It’s the height of summer right now, so all the trees are full and green. Just like it was then. I remember the year of 1778. I was in my prime, the my early twenties. The Revolutionary War, my platoon’s second year in the war. I was their lieutenant, although it hardly seemed that I was above them in rank. We were all the closest of friends, with loyalty deeper than I had ever known. We talked about everything, but like every other …show more content…

We spent around a quarter of an hour preparing for the battle. My platoon was placed in the front lines, the ones to start the battle. We lined up twenty wide, supposedly to make us slightly smaller target than the british who were spread around thirty across. Much difference that made. Everyone was still in plain sight, easy to aim for, standing like pigs waiting to be slaughtered. Even more vividly than that battle that is deeply imprinted upon my mind, is the nights before it. Each night sitting before the fire, we sat and talked about or lives in the past, present, and future. Somehow, we talked about end of the war without fail, every night, no matter how exhausted we were from the day. It was always peace. Peace, peace, and peace. It was every man’s dream, deeper than I could ever fathom for some of them. Of course I had longed for it myself, but not like some. Yet somehow, we were all there together, wishing for the same thing as we waited for the end. I remember other times, too. We played so many games of cards and dice around the campfire. So many, that by the end of our first year, all our decks of card were soft enough to sleep on. The dice that had started with shining black spots had worn down to the point where each dot was a grey blur. Those were the most everyday of …show more content…

I still doubt that it will ever change. As a reminder of those friends though, I planted a tree after the war. It took months to get the seed, but it was important to me. I planted it at the edge of the small forest on my land, where it looks just as out of place as it did all those years ago. The reason for this was that during the years after, the old olive tree had died. So now, it sits in the same place as the old one, maybe not quite as big, but and eternally sufficient reminder. And each day, I sit out on the porch and listen to the birds in the tree sing, and watch them make their homes there.
Even now, as I sit here and remember this, I’m sitting on the same wooden swing I’ve sat for years, looking at that olive tree. It is still the morning, and the birds are singing their waking songs in those same trees by the olive. And deep in the olive tree, I see a flash of the white feathers It's been so long since I saw. A flurry arises, and I watch the doves rise back into the sky. Twenty of them rising into ray of of light, coming through the clouds. A God ray, as my family always called

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