"No other choice" by Zen Karp (excerpt from H.L.I. and WWII)

9 July
With a white field dressing wrapped around his head, Lt. Doug Barrie left the Regimental Aid Post to find what was left of his platoon; filled with a sense of urgency he might never have felt over come him before. He had to know what had happened; and who may be dead or wounded.
Early in the battle, as he approached the anti tank ditch, he had been struck in the head by shrapnel and knocked out. When he woke up, he was lying on a stretcher at the Regimental Aid Post with the bandage around his head. The shrapnel was still there, imbedded underneath his scalp, but the wound meant nothing.
Doug made his way towards Buron, traveling past the battlefield littered with destroyed vehicles and unrecovered bodies. Inside Buron he found headquarters, and was instantly promoted to acting captain and appointed as a company 2iC; a grim promotion.
Hearing from the others about who was dead for sure and who was wounded caused an overwhelming grief, but those feelings had to be tucked away. Now was not the time, they were still on the battlefield. He had already seen others completely fall apart, and it was heart-wrenching. Those people had to be taken away quickly or the combined fatigue and sorrow would spread through the ranks like a disease.
They were all physically drained and filled with an unimaginable sadness. But the vast majority of survivors carried on. Some of them were at work with the tanks, clearing patches of bush, orchards and anywhere else enemy survivors could be hiding out. Acting Captain Barrie saw some of his men guarding a few SS prisoners, recently mopped up.
He looked at them, his enemy. Youths, dressed in camouflage of the SS, their thin half child faces framed by big helmets; wearing expressions of contempt. They had no sense of being lucky to be alive, and the only information they had so far shared was their belief that Germany could never lose the war. Doug began to feel his anger boiling over as he looked back onto them with his own hateful glare.
When one of the guards produced cigarettes and proceeded to hand them out to the enemy, he=d had enough. As the prisoners waited for a light, smokes screwed into their lips, Doug marched up the line and swatted each smoke out of their faces.
"I didn't feel they deserved a cigarette. I was so furious."30
No one was the same after Buron. But the war would not stop for them on this day to mourn the loss of comrades; not even a brief ceremony to recognize what had happened on the 8th of July, 1944 to the Highland Light Infantry of Canada. No matter how justified the war was from the allied standpoint, there could never be glory in it, even when every man acted like a hero. It was simply a terrible job which had to be done because there was no other choice.
Sixty two dead and 262 wounded, which left roughly half of them standing. Like the thousands of other battles that took place in Europe, Buron was the epitome of war; and when it ended there was nothing but the living history, told by survivors. As the troops marched on to Caen, they left behind an orchard filled with rows of rifles stuck bayonet first into freshly churned ground, crowned with a dead man=s helmet.
With rifles slung they marched down the road like zombies and eventually one could not look back to see Buron anymore. For the ragged survivors, it became merely a memory; a window of time and space to peer into a piece of man-made hell where the human experience left the bounds of sanity and reduced a soldier=s senses to receive nothing but pain, fear, anger and even hate; followed by an enormous empty void in the soul. It took only a glance at the remains to see the war as nothing but a mass slaughter, and they were the pigs.
But the war was far from over. As they marched into the ruins of Caen, the sound of sporadic artillery and gunfire continued. Up ahead more death awaited the HLI of C.