The foxholes of Mars
Fritz Leiber
The wars of the far future will be fought with giant spaceships, but it will still take the infantryman to hold down the planets. And some of the thoughts bred in the foxholes of Mars or Alpha Centauri Duo or Rigel Tres will be fully as bitter as some of those dredged up in the foxholes of Earth.
Ever inward from the jagged horizon the machines of death crept, edged, scurried, rocketed, and tunneled towards him. It seemed as if all this purple-sunned creation had conspired to isolate, to smash him. To the west—for all planets share a west, if nothing else—the nuclear bombs bloomed, meaningless giant fungi. Invisibly overhead the spaceships roared, distant as gods, yet shaking the yellow sky. Even the soil was treacherous, nauseated by artificial earthquakes—nobody's mother, least of all an Earthman's.
"Why don't you cheer up?" the others had said to him."It's a mad planet." But he would not cheer up, for he knew what they said was literally true. Soon they would fall back and the enemy would retake the mangled thing they called an objective. Was it the sixth time? The seventh? And did the soldiers on the other side have six legs, or eight? The enemy were pretty haphazard as to what troops they used in this sector.
Worse was the noise. Meaningless, mechanical screeches tore at his skull, until thoughts rattled around in it like dry seeds in a dry pod. He started to lift his hands to his ears, then checked the gesture, convulsed with soundless laughter and tearless weeping, bitter memories and searing hatred. Once there had been a galactic society—a galactic empire—and he had played an unnoticed part on one of its nice quiet planets ... but now? Galactic empire? Galactic horse-dung! Perhaps he had always hated his fellow men as much as he did now. But in the prewar days his hatred had been closely bound and meticulously repressed. It was still bound, tighter than ever—but it was no longer repressed.
The deadly engine he tended, silent for a moment, began again to chatter to those of the enemy; its voice was nearly drowned by their booming ones, like a spiteful child in a crush of complacent adults....
It turned out that they had been covering a withdrawal of Martian sappers, and must now escape as best they might. They began to retreat. The officer running beside him fell. He hesitated. The officer cursed a new, useless joint that had appeared in his leg. All the others—including the black-shelled Martians—were ahead. He glanced around, fearfully, tormentedly, as if he were about to commit a hideous crime. Then he lifted the officer and staggered on, reeling like a top at the end of its spin. He was still grinning in a spasmic way when they reached the security of lesser danger; even when the officer thanked him with curt sincerity, he couldn't stop grinning. Nevertheless, they gave him the Order of Planetary Merit for that.
He stared at the watery soup and meat-shreds in his mess-tin. The cellar was cool, and its seats—though built for creatures with four legs and two arms—were comfortable. The purple daylight was pleasantly muted. The noise had gone a little way off, playing cat and mouse. He was alone.
Of course life had never had any meaning, except for the chillingly sardonic one perceptible to the demons in the nuclear bombs and the silver giants in space who pushed the buttons; and he had no stomach to aspire to that. They'd had ten thousand years to fix things, those giants, and still all they could tell you was go dig yourself a hole.
In the old days the possibility of relaxation and petty self-indulgence, against the magnificent sham background of galactic empire, had permitted him to pretend life had a meaning. Yet at a time like this, when such an illusion was needful, it ran out on you, jeered at you along with the lesser lies it had nurtured.
A three-legged creature skipped out of the shadows, halted at a distance, and subtly intimated it would like food. At first he thought it must be some Rigelian tripe
