Clash of Rhyfles: Crusader Lamplighter

Lamplighter (multi-part) and Lantern Models

Painted by Varundin28

The Lantern Lighters of Staengi Station

Officially, they were just the Third Watch, the unlucky sods who drew the duty of maintaining the trench lanterns through the night hours between the evening stand-to and the dawn patrol. Nobody remembers who started calling them The Lantern Lighters. Or when.

But Milwer Gareth took the nickname seriously.

"A proper light," he'd tell the new kits, "isn't about seeing. It's about being seen. Your mate three traverses down needs to know you're still there. Needs to know he's not alone out here in the dark."

The lanterns themselves were well worn, temperamental things, brass and glass contraptions that burned everything from proper lamp oil (when supply remembered them) to rendered hogrub fat (when it didn't). Each one had its personality. The lamp at Junction Four flickered in a steady rhythm like a heartbeat. The one by the latrine trench burned blue when the wick got damp. The big storm lantern at the command post, the one Gareth called "the Sylwedl", could be seen from half a mile away on clear nights.

Tending them was fiddly work. You had to time your rounds between the Crymuster sniper shifts. You carried your oil can with spare wicks in a haversack and everything clinked and sloshed with every step. You learned to trim a wick by touch, in the dark, while standing in three inches of cold water.

The Coftyrans across no-quar's-land had their own lantern lighters. Some nights, when the shelling quieted and the machine guns cooled, you could see them moving along their line, small, purposeful shadows carrying steady flames. An unspoken agreement held on both sides: you didn't shoot the lantern lighters. They were just quar helping keep the dark at bay.

On Gareth's last night, the night the big push came and most of Line 34A was buried under a Coftyran artillery barrage, he was three lanterns into his round. They found him next morning with his oil can still in hand, “Sylwedl”, the storm lantern, somehow still burning beside him.

The Third Watch still calls themselves the Lantern Lighters. They still tend the lanterns with Gareth's fussiness. And on quiet nights, when you're standing watch and feeling very alone in the vast dark of the war, you can look down the line and see those small, steady flames, each one saying the same thing:

We're still here. You're not alone.