Who's Who on the Chessboard- Part One: The Pawn

The first real party since you got back home on R&R, and it’s just your luck to spend half the night at the buffet bar, deep in conversation with a pawn. Of course, you can’t ignore the pawns, they are everywhere tonight, and some of them no doubt play a useful role, serving drinks and opening doors and escorting knights onto the dancefloor and suchlike. This fellow introduces himself with a flourish, says he used to serve under your command, and at first you feel obliged to smile along and humour the old sod. But he only takes this as an invitation to tell you all about his goddamned war- the prolonged face off at KP4, the wiles and psychological tricks of his opposite number, his vital role in ensuring the King’s Gambit ran to plan. And when you try to broaden the scope of the conversation by asking his views on the course the war is taking, you are met by a blank stare. The object of the war, he tells you straight away, is to get to the other side of the board. Which is harder than it looks, what with your oafish opposite number mounting his obdurate blockade, and your fellow soldiers- your own brothers!- standing stupidly to his left or right, cutting out any chance you might have had of progressing forward through a good clean kill. And don’t think he had it easy out there waiting in the field. No, it was hellish, he felt totally exposed, he could have been swooped upon at any moment by those gangling freaks in the enemy’s back row. Not that he’s scared of death. Did he ever say that? No, whatever cause it’s in, he would always be proud to die a proper soldier’s death- the tap on the shoulder, the hand stifling his mouth, the swift knife in the guts. That’s what he was brought up to believe in, that’s what he respects. But how can he respect these arrivistes, who shoot across the chessboard on a whim, who have no compunctions about killing a man for positional purposes alone, just to claim the space he occupies? That sort of behaviour has no place on the chessboard. The safest thing would be to do away with the whole shower of them, no offence intended sir, and let the pawns conduct the matter after their own fashion. Then (and his voice is growing louder here; is it your imagination or has the party suddenly turned quiet?), then you would see a proper battle, with gambits carried out cleanly and efficiently, with epic stand-offs, where the slightest infelicity would set the whole board ablaze, where, after titanic struggles and unbelievable bloodshed, the single survivor, the strongest and smartest pawn of all, would move unopposed to the final square and receive his just reward.
“You mean yourself of course,” you say, scornfully. “So what's your reward? What do you think you could become? A knight? A queen? That's what they tell you in the barracks, sure enough. But did you ever think we'd let that happen?” You push past him without waiting for an answer and make straight for the dancefloor. As it turns out, what you see there shocks you so much that it is almost a relief to feel the tap upon your shoulder, the palm across your mouth, as the winning pawn, the last man standing in the room, slides forward to redeem his prize.