The Weight of War

This was a short scene/story I wrote from a prompt...I tacked the prompt on at the end so it's not given away :)

I bear the weight of war on my back. The nights and days have been long, the roads have been long, the Winter has been long. With each step, the mud of the blood-soaked torn earth has held a tighter grip on my feet, but now here we finally stand. I search the eyes of those who stand among me, and I try to find courage and purpose for our cause and for why we stand here now. But my balking and trembling comrades provide no courage. My equals stand across the field, my opponents, just as hesitant as we are to arrive at this appointment. But as we stand, waiting to charge or to die or to retreat, we can only feel resigned apathy to lives and deaths and purposes we did not choose. A common grey day with soggy ground beneath us, and we wait for death or to inflict death or for an abolition of this war that we know will never come. My body itches with anticipation of either one.

I'm under the command of a general that has inherited his father's and his family's hatred that was fostered by travesties against his ancestor in revenge for his further ancestors' crimes. He's a fierce mane with a love for the subtle morbid arts of war. His brutal pride commands submission, and so we have brought him here today. Together, he and I, we pace our ranks and share the burden of his own hatred. The burden of passionate hate and revenge and justifications of violence that my comrades and I have carried so far in the cold over this scared sinking ground. 

His commands and words are harsh. He issues out courage to charge into the bloody storm of battle only by inflicting a far worse terror in us at the thought of retreat.

The moment arrives, and his order is called, and with a bellowing scream under the spur of my general, I charge into my fate with my comrades and their terror thundering behind me. My general bellows as the battlefield shrinks between the opposition and my comrades and myself and my burden. I bear the weight of war on my back. My general and his reasons. My hooves release themselves from the grip of the earth and I gallop, carrying the general into his charge. A gallop so fast that the wind laid it across the low grass and said that this shall be the fastest piece of gallop. A gallop faster than time. I carry the weight of his war into his glory and our own demise.

**Prompt**

"Write a scene from the point of view of an animal, but don't make this obvious until the end."