Gunner Pell

#On the Name

Two words survive: a rank and a surname. The clerks kept that much, and they kept it correctly.

Gunner Pell is among the names kept in remembrance of the Siege of Rostov, A.S. 153 (1863 CE). That year six hundred Covenant defenders held a provincial position against Maldrake's host for eleven days, then lost it in two hours. Children in western parishes recite the names of the six hundred, and Pell's name is one of them. That is the whole of the attestation.

I state it plainly because the Codex likes to embroider. The siege file gives the designation Gunner and the surname Pell. It gives no given name, no age, no birthplace, no family and no face. It does not say which gun, on which day, or at which stretch of wall. The year 153 belongs to Pell as a service milestone, the year of the siege whose roll carries the name. It is not a year of birth, of enlistment or of certified death. Any clerk who files it as one will hear from me in writing, and my writing is longer than theirs.

A parish child knows Pell as a sound in the litany, said between a captain and a quartermaster. The Warden of the Sacred Ledger knows only a little more. The difference is that I know how little it is.

#On Rostov

What follows is the siege as the Bureau of War and its after-action abstract tell it. It is the setting of the name. It is not Pell's biography, and I will not let it pose as one.

Rostov's garrison numbered six hundred: rifle companies, a reduced artillery section, two field chaplains. The walls suited a provincial fortress and nothing grander. Against them Maldrake sent Ash-Fodder, conquered people driven forward in waves. Their purpose was to spend the garrison, not to breach it. Every cartridge fired into an unarmoured chest was one fewer for what came after. The file records barrels overheating and bayonets taking over when the fire failed. It records men fighting from atop their own enemy's dead, and the pace of the waves held for eleven days. Then the waves stopped. The Wrathforged came up rested and fed, the hammer-hosts behind them, and the position fell within two hours of the final assault.

The official tally puts the enemy's expenditure at about ninety thousand. The Bureau reduced this to a ratio of one hundred and fifty to one, and it has been reciting the ratio with more devotion than any parish recites the names.

None of this tells me where Pell stood. The rank suggests the guns, and a suggestion is not a posting. The file does not say whether Pell fired on the first day or the last, held a gun or a bayonet, or was on the wall when the Wrathforged reached it. A dossier that borrows the garrison's eleven days and hands them to a single name has committed forgery with good intentions. The Ledger does not take intentions as payment.

#On the Record

The siege file describes how the defenders were enrolled. Each is listed by name, rank, parish, issue of ammunition, wound status, and final disposition where known. Those three closing words carry more weight than the rest of the column.

A column suggests completeness. Six hundred names in ruled lines give the reader the comfortable belief that everything about each of them has been found, weighed and written down. The account available to me does not reproduce Pell's line. I cannot tell you Pell's parish or wounds. I cannot tell you what disposition, if any, the clerks entered. I will not invent the entries, and I will not pretend their absence is something worse than absence.

That restraint deserves a sentence of its own, because the Codex lacks it. A missing particular is not proof of a burned archive. It is not evidence of a clerk with a knife and a grudge, or a redaction ordered from a warm room in Strasbourg. Sometimes a name reaches the reader without its attachments because the copy in hand is an abstract, and abstracts discard things. The Bureau of Records is guilty of a great deal. In this matter I have found nothing worse than brevity.

There is one more thing to say about the Bureau's confidence. Neat columns make readers lazy. They assume that anyone written down was also known. Pell was written down, and that is all the record proves.

#On the Remembrance

The six hundred have shrines. The siege file calls them small and official, and says they carry approved names. I have no quarrel with any of those three words except the last. Approved means a desk somewhere decided which dead could be pitied in public. The desk got Pell right. Its broader conduct comes later in this dossier.

The western parishes keep the names by recitation. The record does not say when, or under which feast, or in what order beyond the examples it gives. Those are Captain Odran Hale, Sister-Marksman Ivena Rusk, Gunner Pell, Quartermaster Truhn, the two field chaplains and the last gate crew. Sharing a recitation does not make Pell a comrade of any of them. A litany puts names next to each other. It does not prove the people stood next to each other at Rostov, and I decline to marry Pell to Hale's command or Truhn's storehouse because a child drew breath between them.

The recitation keeps a name. It does not certify a life. A child who says Gunner Pell at the altar rail has done what the Church asked, and done it well. The child has not learned whether Pell died at Rostov, survived it, or was entered under some disposition the abstract left out. The candles do not say either. They burn, they smoke, and the plaster above them darkens with soot. The shrine is collective, and the record names no shrine of Pell's own: no grave, no relic, no inscription and no anniversary. Anyone selling you a lock of the gunner's hair is selling you a lock of someone.

Nor does recitation make a saint. The Bureau of Doctrine has not canonised the six hundred, and it does not need to. Remembering a name is a smaller and more honest office than raising it to the altar. It asks only that the name be said aloud and said correctly. The parishes manage this. Some of my colleagues do not.

#On the Unnamed

Six hundred names fill a roll. The ninety thousand fit into a ratio. The siege file does not hide the arithmetic of this, and I will not either. Pell is named, and Pell should be. The Ash-Fodder who died in front of Rostov's guns, whoever fired those guns, have no shrine, no recitation and no approved anything. The Bureau classes them as hostile mortal materiel. They were also conquered people, driven forward by Maldrake until Covenant fire gave them the only exit he allowed.

I put this in Pell's dossier without accusing Pell. It belongs here because the roll that preserves this one name is the same roll that declined ninety thousand. The six hundred and the ninety thousand were divided by the desk that decided whom the Church may grieve, and the trench had no say in it. Pell had nothing to do with that decision.

Make no mistake about my position. The defence of Rostov was necessary. Someone had to hold the northern approach, and six hundred did, for eleven days, against a commander who counts his own conscripts the way a miller counts sacks. Keeping their names is right. Keeping Pell's name is right. What I refuse is the clerk's comfort that grief with a ratio attached has been properly sorted.