Every account of the crucifixion mentions the soldiers present. Almost none of them give those soldiers a name. The centurion who confirmed the death. The man who drove the spear. The officer who said, watching a man die, “Truly this was the Son of God.” History remembered the moment and forgot the men standing inside it.
Part Four of Different Roads, Same Direction, called The Nameless, is where Darrell Smith turns his attention to exactly those men. Told as a cycle of first-person testimonies, it imagines what it might have cost a career soldier, a man trained never to hesitate or explain himself, to stand close enough to something he could neither prevent nor fully understand.
As Smith writes in his closing note to readers, “these men have no graves that anyone can visit, no names carved anywhere that history troubled itself to keep.” He doesn’t claim to have recovered their real stories. He set out only to imagine them honestly, and to give men who earned a story finally one worth telling.
