Soldiers on Leave

By Matthew Parish

Thursday 24 September 2026

There is something peculiar about meeting a soldier on leave from a war that is taking place only a few hours’ drive away. He has not returned from war in the conventional sense. He has merely stepped outside it for a while. The front continues without him. His comrades remain there, the drones continue flying, the artillery continues firing and eventually, unless circumstances intervene, he must go back.

In Kharkiv this temporary migration between worlds is part of everyday life. Soldiers arrive from positions farther east and north, sometimes filthy and exhausted, sometimes surprisingly immaculate after acquiring a shower and clean uniform. They eat proper meals, sleep in beds, meet wives or girlfriends, drink with friends and rediscover the extraordinary luxury of being able to walk down a street without continuously considering whether somebody is trying to kill them. Yet the transition is incomplete because the front remains close enough to be heard, imagined and summoned through a telephone.

Leave in these circumstances is not quite a holiday. It is an interval.

The civilian imagination tends to organise war into geographical categories. There is the front and there is the rear. The front is dangerous and the rear is safe. Soldiers inhabit one and civilians inhabit the other. Yet modern war, particularly the drone-saturated war being fought in Ukraine, has made these distinctions increasingly artificial. Missiles reach cities hundreds of kilometres from the fighting. Long-range drones attack infrastructure deep inside the country, while reconnaissance and strike drones make areas immediately behind the line hazardous in ways that would once have required artillery superiority or air power.

The psychological frontier is even less distinct. A soldier may leave his position in the morning and sit in a Kharkiv restaurant that evening. His surroundings have changed completely but his nervous system has not necessarily received the message.

Civilian life requires a different set of instincts. A slammed door is merely a slammed door. A vehicle parked beside the road is merely a vehicle. A person standing on a balcony is not observing troop movements. A telephone signal is convenient rather than potentially dangerous. The sky is something to look at rather than something from which death may descend.

People who have spent extended periods close to combat learn habits that make sense there. They notice sounds. They observe roofs and windows. They calculate routes. They develop strong opinions about where vehicles should be parked. They may become uncomfortable when too many people congregate in one place. They acquire an instinctive interest in the sky.

Then somebody hands them a restaurant menu.

The contrast can be absurd. A man who has recently been making decisions involving life and death is suddenly required to decide between two varieties of pasta. A soldier accustomed to sleeping underground discovers that his hotel room has decorative cushions. Someone who has spent weeks eating whatever is available is asked whether he would prefer still or sparkling water.

Humour thrives in this dislocation. Soldiers laugh at civilian inconveniences because the scale of them has become ridiculous. A delayed taxi, a slow waiter or a malfunctioning coffee machine cannot easily compete with artillery. Yet soldiers are still human beings and therefore remain perfectly capable of becoming furious about trivialities. The mind does not operate according to a consistent hierarchy of objective importance.

This is one of the mistakes civilians make when imagining people at war. We expect exposure to catastrophe to confer permanent perspective. It does not. Someone who has watched friends die may still become irritated because his chips are cold. A person who has survived a drone attack may argue with his girlfriend about a forgotten message. Heroism in one environment does not abolish pettiness in another.

Nor should it. To demand that soldiers remain perpetually elevated by their experiences is another way of denying them ordinary humanity.

Leave therefore involves a return not merely to safety but to insignificance, and insignificance can be comforting. Nobody wants every conversation to concern death, Russia, military strategy or the condition of his unit. Sometimes a soldier wants to watch football, flirt with somebody, eat too much, complain about music or spend an hour discussing something completely idiotic.

The desire for normality can become almost ferocious precisely because it is temporary. There is a difference between ordering a steak because one is hungry and ordering one because tomorrow’s dinner may again come from a packet beside a muddy position. Pleasure acquires urgency when its duration is known to be short.

Alcohol can acquire the same urgency. So can sex, sleep, expensive food, hot baths and reckless spending. None of these phenomena is unique to Ukraine. Soldiers throughout history have responded to proximity to death by compressing pleasure into the periods available to them. A person uncertain about the future discounts it heavily.

This produces a distinctive wartime economy around military leave. Soldiers spend money differently because tomorrow has a different value. Restaurants, hotels and bars become temporary stages upon which people try to reconstruct ordinary existence before returning to extraordinary circumstances.

Relationships are affected even more profoundly. Wartime romance has always moved quickly. The ordinary assumptions of courtship depend upon the expectation of time: another date next week, a holiday in several months, perhaps marriage several years later. War interferes with the premise. If somebody may leave tomorrow and be unreachable thereafter, emotional decisions accelerate.

This does not necessarily make wartime relationships superficial. Sometimes the opposite is true. People disclose things rapidly because elaborate social caution seems pointless. The ordinary rituals by which intimacy develops can appear faintly absurd when one participant may soon return to a place where survival is uncertain.

Yet intensity should not be confused with stability. The person encountered on leave is living in an exceptional emotional state. He may be exhausted, exhilarated, frightened or simply grateful to be somewhere warm. Promises made during such intervals must later survive the less dramatic demands of ordinary life, assuming ordinary life returns.

Partners of soldiers occupy an equally strange position. They receive someone they know intimately who may nevertheless have acquired experiences they cannot share. They may want to ask questions but fear the answers. The soldier may want to talk incessantly or not at all. A reunion imagined for weeks can become awkward within minutes.

There is no correct way to conduct these encounters. Some soldiers need to describe what happened. Others resent questions. Some want sympathy. Others cannot tolerate it. A person may tell horrific stories with apparent emotional detachment and become distressed by something apparently trivial. Human beings do not process trauma according to literary conventions.

There is also guilt. A soldier sitting in a comfortable room knows that somebody else is occupying the position he left. His comrades may be cold while he is warm. They may be eating badly while he orders another course. If the unit suffers casualties during his absence, the knowledge can become particularly difficult.

Rationally, the guilt makes little sense. Soldiers require rest. No army can keep people permanently at the front without destroying their effectiveness. Leave is part of maintaining a fighting force rather than an abandonment of it. Human emotions, however, are not military logistics.

Survivor’s guilt can operate in similarly irrational ways. Why was one person wounded and another untouched? Why did a drone strike one vehicle rather than the next? Why did somebody swap positions shortly before an attack? Combat produces questions to which there is often no morally satisfying answer because chance plays an enormous role.

The mythology of war dislikes chance. It prefers courage, skill, sacrifice and destiny. Soldiers know that these things matter, but many also know how often survival depends upon something banal: leaving five minutes earlier, standing behind a different wall or deciding for no particular reason to sleep somewhere else.

That knowledge follows them on leave.

So does the telephone. The smartphone is one of the defining objects of this war. It connects soldiers with commanders, comrades, families, maps, warnings and an immense electronic world surrounding the battlefield. On leave it prevents the clean separation that soldiers of earlier generations sometimes experienced. The unit remains in the pocket.

A message can transform an evening instantly. Somebody has been wounded. A position has changed. Leave has been shortened. Equipment is needed. A friend has disappeared from a group chat. The civilian companions around the table may not know what the soldier has just read, but they can see his face change.

Then there is the prospect of return.

The last day of leave must be unlike the first because time has reversed its meaning. At the beginning, every remaining hour represents freedom. Towards the end, each hour is an hour closer to departure. Bags must be packed. Equipment checked. Transport arranged. Messages answered.

People develop rituals around these transitions. Some become quiet. Some drink. Some joke relentlessly. Some behave as though nothing unusual is happening. The ritual is partly a defence against the obvious fact that nobody can guarantee another leave.

For families, departure may be harder than reunion. They have briefly reconstructed the presence of the absent person. His shoes are by the door. He occupies his usual place at the table. He sleeps in his own bed. Then the machinery of war takes him away again.

Ukraine has repeated this domestic scene hundreds of thousands of times. It is one of the largely invisible burdens of a prolonged war. Military casualties can be counted. Missiles can be counted. Destroyed buildings can be photographed. The cumulative emotional cost of repeated departure is harder to measure.

Kharkiv is one of the places where these departures become visible. Railway platforms and roads carry people towards opposite realities. A soldier may travel west for leave while another returns east. A civilian evacuating from a threatened settlement passes a serviceman travelling towards it. Their journeys cross for a few minutes and then diverge.

There is an uncomfortable moral temptation to romanticise all this. The soldier returning to the front makes a powerful image because it contains courage, sacrifice and uncertainty. But war should not require romantic embellishment. Much of military life is waiting, discomfort, bureaucracy, exhaustion and fear. Much of leave consists of sleeping, washing clothes, repairing equipment and dealing with administrative problems.

Even courage becomes routine. A person may return to the front not because he has experienced some grand patriotic revelation that morning but because his leave is finished and his unit expects him. Duty often looks mundane from the inside.

That mundanity is perhaps more impressive than mythology. Societies like stories about exceptional heroes because exceptional people place fewer demands upon everyone else. The reality of Ukraine’s defence is more unsettling: enormous numbers of comparatively ordinary people have repeatedly done things that ordinary civilian life would regard as extraordinary.

They become accustomed to them. Then they come to Kharkiv and order coffee.

One day, if Ukraine obtains a durable peace, there will be no return journey to the front. A soldier will come home and discover that he does not have to pack again. The telephone may ring without producing dread. Military equipment will gradually disappear from apartments and car boots. Leave will become simply a holiday.

That moment will bring its own difficulties. During war, the rhythm is imposed from outside: deployment, position, rotation, leave, return. Peace removes the rhythm and asks the individual to construct another life. Some will find that liberation exhilarating. Others may discover that the clarity of military existence is difficult to replace.

For now, however, the soldiers passing through Kharkiv inhabit neither war nor peace completely. They occupy an interval between the two. They sleep in clean sheets while remembering dugouts. They sit among civilians while listening differently to explosions. They embrace people they love while knowing that another separation approaches.

Then leave ends.

The uniform is put on again. The bag is lifted. The messages become shorter and more practical. A vehicle starts or a train departs eastwards. Kharkiv recedes behind them and the ordinary world becomes temporary once more.

For those left behind, the temptation is to say something profound at the moment of departure. Usually there is nothing adequate to say. War has already made the important facts obvious.

Come back.