Too short for a stand alone story, but not for a blog post. · 7:47pm Dec 19th, 2013
Cranky Doodle sat in his trench on Hearth’s Warming Eve, twiddling his hooves absent mindedly, if only to warm them a bit. Even though there was a temporary truce for the holiday, soldiers were not allowed to make personal fires except for cooking, and even those were frowned on by his commanding officer.
“Fires give our position away to the enemy,” Cranky recalled the lieutenant barking. “Besides, this is a war, not a gourmet restaurant. I’d rather see you mules grazing than jeopardizing our position.”
It’s not that it mattered much either way. Military gruel tasted the same hot or cold. Cranky grimaced as he considered the temporary warmth that even a small cooking fire could provide, and grumbled. He pulled a photograph out of his saddlebag and gazed into the eyes of his darling Matilda.
“Will I ever see you again?” Cranky whispered to the picture. He had already sent her a letter that very morning. It had been short and to the point, as very little he had seen lately from the trench inspired much flowery prose. Quite the opposite actually, and he was loath to send any of his recurring nightmares to such a sweet and innocent lass. All Matilda needed to know was that he was alive and kicking. It wasn’t a lie. It just didn’t make sense to burden her needlessly with the complete truth.
“If I say it enough times out loud, maybe I’ll actually start to believe it myself,” Cranky muttered quietly, slipping the photograph back into his saddlebag.
His ears perked up suddenly. He swiveled them a bit to see if he could detect the source of the odd sound. It almost sounded like… music? What sort of jackass could possibly be singing right now? He cautiously raised his head up out of the trench in an attempt to hear it better.
The words were definitely Griffish. After a few months in the foreign land, Cranky had picked up enough of the language to order a daisy sandwich or ask somepony where the WC was, but not enough to decipher what the words of the song were. The tune was familiar to him, though. Cranky hummed a few bars to himself trying to recall the words in his own language. It was a Hearth’s Warming Carol.
From another direction, he detected another voice, this one sounding more equine. A pony had joined the carol, singing in Equestrian this time, which Cranky understood a lot better than Griffish, as the ponies were allied with the donkeys in the war. An intense feeling of homesickness overcame Cranky, and with a shake of his head, he stood up in his trench.
“Are you feathering nuts, Doodle?” one of his fellow soldiers hissed at him from down the line. Cranky ignored him. Taking a few deep practice breaths, Cranky Doodle joined in the Hearth’s Warming Carol at the chorus, singing loud and clear in the language of the donkeys.
Other donkey voices followed Cranky’s lead, and the song began to crescendo with each additional singer. Some voices split off into harmonies, others were flat out tone deaf, but as they sang, a tear trickled down Cranky’s muzzle as he realized that it was all beautiful.
Out of the corner of his eye, Cranky’s war trained eyes caught a flash of movement. He turned to spy a griffon soldier, on the young side, probably one rank lower than his own by Griffish equivalence. The soldier snapped to attention, his gaze boring into Cranky’s eyes as if Cranky;s soul were on display. The griffon soldier’s front claw slowly raised in a salute. Shocked, Cranky could think of no other response than to return the salute himself. It could have been seconds, hours, or even millennia. Perhaps time had stood still altogether at that fleeting moment, but when it was over, the griffon soldier lowered his claw and quickly disappeared.
A clock struck midnight. The truce was over. Shouts rang out for every pony, griffon, and donkey to high tail it back to their trenches. The sounds of mortars, magic, and mayhem filled the air again.
Years later, after the war was over and Cranky had been reunited with Matilda, he recalled that night. Stories from other camps reported that in one similar incident on a different front, the different sides had engaged in a friendly game of hoofball (using Trottingham’s rules), with a mutual tie as the end result. Another camp had passed around flasks of potato vodka from Stalliongrad and shared some meager rations in celebration.
“It’s funny,” Cranky mused to his wife. “The moment I started singing, I forgot how cold and miserable I was. I actually thought that it was possible that maybe we didn’t need to do this, that peace on Equestria was actually possible. Apart from your photograph, it was one of the things that kept me going.”
Matilda nuzzled him as the happy couple stared at the blazing embers of their fire, the wind howling outside, and the Windigoes kept at bay for another year.
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