There's no stopping for food. They don't need it, but if they did, there would be no time. Night, day, twilight, dawn, it doesn't matter; they can't stop moving. Phantom whispers of the wind caress their faces, and still they walk. If anyone looks at them, they are unseen; eyes pass through them as if they don't exist. As if their troubles, their pains, their desperation, don't exist. Like the burden of traveling without end is not real.
Cursed: that's what they are. Forever forced to stumble along, shouldering their rifles and hoisting up ammunition belts, waiting for orders that will never come. Still they trudge along, thinking, "Just one more hill."
Once, they felt love, grief, fear; anything anyone would feel. Now, all that remains is longing. A cruel, vicious emptiness that tears them apart and pieces them back together as shells of themselves, a feeling that destroys and scatters anything individual. They never dwell anywhere for too long, haunting no site twice if they can help it. An eternity of road waits for them.
Doomed to walk the earth, the ghosts of the soldiers march on.