The Milito: 125 Years Later
A century and a quarter has passed since the cataclysmic war which defined the world that succeeded it. Are we losing touch of the war's lessons?
NOVA ESPERO CITY - DEKADUO 3, 125 PM
A slow and somber column of mourners trudges down the Federal Way. Methodically moving in lockstep to the rhythm of a funerary march, each participant wields a jet black banner bearing bright white embroidered text. Flapping in the brisk breeze of an uncharacteristically cold fall, Nova Espero day, the standards contain the name of a location followed by the estimated number of its residents who perished as a result of the Milito.
A woman in her thirties holds one marked Hegeliopolis - 10.2 million. A bookish-looking man in his sixties wields another marked Matailriquios - 3,001. A teenager hoists a banner reading Sherbrooke - 5.8 million.
The procession soberly inches its way toward the National Milito Memorial. The ruins of what was once the Imperial War Ministry now form an open-air sarcophagus for millions of the region’s victims of the War. 150 limestone mausolea, seventy-five feet long, eight feet high, and eight feet deep, are arranged in twenty-five neat rows. Some of the niches contain the names of individuals, their identities carefully carved into the tablets sealing them into their tombs.
The majority of the roughly four million souls interred here, however, are unidentified. Many are grouped by the location where they were initially discovered. Information boards placed throughout the memorial contain descriptive information of noteworthy gravesites. One highlights the remains of around one hundred people, recovered from a destroyed iron foundry around a mile from Hegeliopolis’ core. Another accounts for around two hundred children and twenty-five adults, discovered at the site of a primary school that collapsed about five hundred yards from a bombing site.
Representative of the bureaucracy that built it, each individual tomb is marked with a number that correlates to a record showing exactly where the remains were discovered, a description of their clothing, and basic biometrics such as height and hair color. Family members of victims have used these records as well as employee, hospital, and school rolls, and even subscription records for magazines and newspapers to connect individual remains to lost loved ones. Since the memorial was opened in 49 PM, a further 60,000 remains have been identified.
Even so, the true devastation of the Milito made it so that, save for the discovery of some sort of technology capable of retroactively identifying the dead from their ashes, most of those who were laid to rest here will remain unidentified. Their destinies are to continue on as a question mark in the family trees of countless clans scattered across the continent, with their descendants knowing only that they were unaccounted for following Deka 28, 1766.
Some sort of memorial of this kind was inevitable. The post-War government of Nova Espero, Uniguita, and the countless successor states that covered the remnants of the Hegelio-Ferrian Empire saw the Milito as their foundational event. The death and devastation wrought by that single day are inextricable in the histories of every people and nation across this continent. There’s a reason that, outside of Hegelionic or Ylrikianic temples, we are in the year 125 PM (“post Milito”) and not 1891. There is no more momentous “before” and “after” in our collective history than the Milito.
And despite the fact that there has been no more devastating, cataclysmic event in our history, we have reached a historical point where one can no longer refer to “the war” and everyone will understand what you are referring to. In the century and a quarter since Deka 26, 1766, we have found plenty of opportunities to murder each other in a significant way. The Civil War less than thirty years ago, the Uniguitan–Ylrikian and Winter wars in the 40s, the Erachnian civil wars of the 20s and 30s, the Tarangay War of the 80s, and the countless wars of conquest that the reconstituted Ylrikian Empire waged against its weaker neighbors throughout the first few decades following the Milito. Not to mention the innumerable thousands of other minor tragedies between anonymous survivor settlements in the Collapse era, and the fledgling Uniguita’s bloody struggle against the rump imperial hordes in that perilous first decade.
That being said, when it comes to war as a cause of death, historians will posit that we currently exist in the most peaceful time in our recorded history. Pre-Milito Kagzmerak was defined by constant fighting among small, pseudo-feudal states, many of which were being used as proxies by the Hegelio-Ferrian and old Ylrikian Empires. The Central Mountains were a bloodbath of tribal conflict, and Erachnia was steeped in a perpetual cycle of revolution and counter-revolution. The Collapse era immediately following the Milito was also a chaotic, anarchic series of blood feuds and slugfests over basic necessities.
Historians say, however, that things generally settled around the early 50s. Since then, the great powers of the world have not been in conflict. In the past seventy years, the Ylrikian Empire’s calamitous invasion of Erachnia in the 90s resulted in a tremendous defeat at the hands of a far inferior military power, and the complete collapse of the former’s autocracy. Our own civil war thirty years ago is the major significant outlier, though it still paled in comparison to the Collapse-era blood bath and the conflagrations of the 40s. According to a recent analysis from the University of Nova Espero, fewer people have died in all of the conflicts since the 50s combined than during the wars of the 40s. Simply put, fewer people are dying in anger and anguish now than at any point in the past one-hundred and twenty-five years.
Finding its origins in Old Hegelionic funerary processions, the first Milito memorial march took place on the first anniversary of the Milito in Nova Espero. Resources were scarce, so the original banners held by the marchers were made of old tablecloths seized from the desiccated restaurants that once served Hegeliopolis’ wealthy pre-War inhabitants.
According to records from the time, the weather that day was rainy and cold. Even so, practically the entire population of the settlement showed up to mark the occasion. Pierpont Morris, an original inhabitant of Nova Espero, remarked in his journal
A motley crew of some one hundred individuals, ranging in age from fifteen to seventy-five years, processed under the amber glow of their hand torches. They, alongside the crowds assembled, bore on their faces the pain of thousands of cumulative man-years of tragedy. The memories of lost loved ones. The continued agony of what was once and still remains the toiling class, and the newfound struggle of those absorbed into its ranks by the necessities of our present situation.
Even so, amid that huddled pain and sorrow and the pouring, autumnal rain, I saw a sort of camaraderie. The bombs did not choose to kill on the basis of income; the Emperor and an unfathomable number of parentless waifs and street urchins died all the same. Here there were no bankers or housemaids, merchants of industry or pipefitters, aristocrats or bricklayers. Here were survivors, who judged each other not on their past profession or their holdings, but on their willingness to contribute to the project of mutual survival.
By many accounts, these early marches were a form of solidarity. No one in the entirety of the Empire – especially not anyone in the shadow of Hegeliopolis – was spared some devastation from the Milito. Everyone suffered, and everyone could empathize with each other’s sorrow. Some lost only a parent, many lost entire families. But everyone lost someone.
But time has passed. Many have forgotten. At the memorial march this Milito Memorial Day, attendance was sparse in comparison to recent years. Gone are the days of thousands of people coming from the hinterlands to view the proceedings of the day and to mourn their loved ones. The Federal Parks Service reported that just under 10,000 clung to the sides of the Federal Way to watch the march. The Milito Memorial Procession Committee, the group responsible for putting on the event, claimed that it found difficulty in finding volunteers this year.
Living memory of the Milito is fading fast. Though there remain some several thousand surviving children of Milito survivors, their numbers are declining at a rapid rate as they continue to age. In the 40s, President Enrico Carmelo could use Memorial Day’s events to rile up still-extant passions against the Ylrikians. Now, the president doesn’t even deliver remarks. That President Lojaleco’s absence from the ceremony two years ago was noteworthy is still significant. The fact that he felt he could get away with doing something else with his time on that date is also telling.
We are indeed in a time of unprecedented peace. Though with the rise of an irredentist far right in Ylrikia, increasing internal turmoil in the Crescent Isles, and renewed ethnic tensions in the Central Mountains, peace is not guaranteed. Even without the same weapons the emperors used to murder each other during the Milito, war is still an entirely discrete possibility.
As the Milito itself becomes more abstract, we would do well to remember that this peace wasn’t inevitable. It was hard fought, and came at the price of the lives of millions. 125 years on, it must be our duty to remain vigilant.