To think of the two of them in the ship out in the harbor, waiting out the night. They could still catch glimpses of the flag from the lights of the shelling into the long night, and paced the floor and strained to see it, all night. What they did that the flag was struck many times - the pole splintered. And the dead soldiers and tiwnspeopke who fell out to help defend, were piled at its base along with sandbags and gabions and chunks of broken wall and whatever else they could find, to keep it from falling over.
Sometime in the latest part of the night, the shelling stopped and all was quiet. Neither man could sleep and they waited with held breath for the first light of false dawn.
One gives a leg up to the other, to peer out of the porthole. Eyes straining. Waiting. Scared to breathe. Did they still have a country? Or was it gone forever after such a new and tenuous beginning?
Choked and barely able to speak, the man holding up the other asks tenuously,
‘Do you see it? Is it still there?’