The Colonel looked out the window of his dismal office and cursed. Snow, and snow, and more God-damned snow. It was nearly Christmas, and he remembered a time when snow on Christmas was a good thing. He remembered when Christmas was a good thing.

Now all it meant was another year almost gone. Another year inside barbed wire. Another year he was never going to get back. Another year of gloom and death and misery. Another year of war. Heil Hitler, and God damn him, too.

His mother loved the holidays. Back home, there would be a Christmas tree in the parlor, he thought. She always hung tiny silver bells on the branches, and their high, sweet jingle would get more urgent-sounding by the day. By Christmas Eve, oh, the excitement was almost too much to bear, and only that delicate lullaby had any hope of getting him to sleep.

The sirens and alarms here in camp also got more urgent-sounding by the day. So did the air raids. 'Exciting' wasn't exactly the word he'd have chosen for that, but 'almost too much to bear' just about hit the nail on the head. And he didn't think he'd had a good night's sleep since he'd arrived.

And of course, even before the tree, early in December, his mother always brought out the porcelain angels, the ones she had inherited from her grandmother, and she arranged them on the mantelpiece, where they showed to their best advantage… and, incidentally, well out of reach of little hands. They had smiled down at him so benevolently, so lovingly, their hands open in blessing. As a child, he'd almost believed that they came to life and flew back to heaven after Christmas, where they could watch over him for the rest of the year.

Well, someone was watching over him now, that was for certain. Someone was always watching over him, just waiting for the least shadow of a reason to pounce. And they never smiled at all, benevolently or otherwise. Guardian demons with ice-cold hearts and soot-black uniforms.

There had been the special holiday cakes and cookies, before. Now, though, butter and flour and sugar were strictly rationed and eggs cost their weight in gold, more or less. Now it was sawdusty bread and rancid cabbage, or else the black market.

When he'd first come to this little patch of hell, it had felt as though the barbed wire was wrapped clear around his throat and tightening by the moment.

He didn't often feel that way anymore. He didn't have time to feel that way anymore. Now it was more as though the guard towers were balanced on his shoulders, trying their implacable best to crush him. Day after day after day, the Colonel squared his shoulders beneath that weight, never letting anyone even suspect how close he was to buckling beneath the load.

Nobody ever did seem to suspect. He didn't know any more if he should be proud that he was carrying it off so well, or afraid of the day he could no longer keep up his façade, the day he would let them all down… or resentful that no one ever noticed that he was struggling. Yes, he was an officer. Yes, he was in command. That didn't make him a superman. It didn't mean he always knew what to do. It didn't mean he always knew what was right, what was best. It didn't mean that the weight wasn't more than any one man should ever have to carry.

It didn't mean he could guarantee the safety of his men.

It didn't mean that, if…no, when… he made that one fatal error, that the raging black-clad monsters wouldn't swoop in and destroy them all.

He bit his lip, looked back down at the papers on his desk, and thought, as hard as he could, about gingerbread and mulled wine and lighted candles. He wasn't the only one who wouldn't be getting any of those things this Christmas—there was a war on, didn't you know—and he was certainly not the only one who would be pretending that he didn't miss them, and, in all likelihood, he wasn't the only one who would be wishing that the lack of gingerbread was the worst thing he had to fear.

Perhaps by next year the war would be over and he could go home, go back to a life where the evergreen branches in the Christmas wreath weren't being culled from a tree twenty feet away from the delousing station.

If the right side won, that is. If the wrong side won, he might not have a home to go back to.

If the wrong side won, he might never get out from behind barbed wire.

If the wrong side won, nobody might ever get out from behind barbed wire.

Two thousand years ago, a child had shivered miserably in a shoddy, thin-walled barracks—no, stable— while his poor, desperate parents frantically tried to save their infant son from the insane depredations of a bloodthirsty king who was bent on killing an entire generation. Nothing ever changed.

Why? Why did they have to refight the same battles, over and over? When would enough finally be enough? When would people realize that a piece of gingerbread shared among family at Christmastime was worth more than all the spoils of war put together?

When might he be able to even hope for freedom?

…No. He couldn't think that way. The war would end, the killing would stop, life would resume. It had to. All he needed to do was hold on for one more Christmas, to square his shoulders under the burden for just a little bit longer, and the real world would reassert itself. Someday… there would be peace. There would be carols and family to sing them with and tinsel-bedecked trees. Someday, counting out thirty days would mean candy-filled Advent calendars, not cooler sentences. Someday there would be Christmas cards with hand-scrawled messages, not coded dispatches full of bad news. Someday there would be warmth and cheer and a life worth living.

He might not live to see it. But someone would. He had to believe that. He had to.

Colonel Wilhelm Klink stared out the window, and watched the snow blanketing the inadequate buildings and blood-soaked ground with clean, glittering white. And he tried to make himself believe that someday he would be able to celebrate Christmas without remembering any of this.

*.*.*.*.*.*

Author's note: The title is from the first verse of 'Oh, Holy Night.'

"Long lay the world in sin and error pining/ Till He appeared, and the soul felt its worth."

Klink's fears about what might happen if the wrong side won the war were probably entirely justified. Which side he might have considered the 'wrong' one is left for the reader to decide; I know what I think.

Written for the Christmas Cheer Challenge. Keywords used: Light, gloom, misery, miserable, cheer, peace, raging, snow, ice, cold, sleep, blessing, curse, candle, sing.