My first story

Well, here comes my first story. Not big, not scary, but it is true. (And I hope you'll like it, or I'll die of embarrassment )
First of all, it happened in Croatia. (That explains my English, bear with me.) I was travellling as a passenger in a car and that gave me an opportunity to watch the scenery freely as we drove down the long, wide, straight highway. And frankly, this part of country can be boring: fields, flat and green, a little bit of forest here and there, and fields again. Nice but boring. Naturally, nobody was out there. And then I spotted a man, in the middle of one of those fields, walking. His path was straight, parallel with highway. It was a little unusual, but no big deal. As we came closer, it got more than just unusual. He was walking slowly, looking down, dressed in World War I uniform. Not some costume type, but real, quite ragged, dirty, worn-out uniform. Definitively WWI, Austro-Hungarian. “Do you see him? That man in the field?” I asked my friend who sat with me in the back seat of the car. “Yes, I see him. What is he doing there? Is that a WWI uniform?” my friend replied. The car was already near enough to him I could see his unshaved, pale, sad face. At that moment he looked at me, but our car was zooming west, passing by him quickly, so he just hanged his head again and continued his slow march east. I kept my eyes on him. The car was speeding but we should have been able to see him for a while. Yet I could not see him anymore. He disapeared. Not suddenly vannished, more like he dissolved and melted with the field.
“Where is he? Can you see him?”
“No.”
“Well, he has to be there. And that clothes?”
“No, I don’t see him. Probably some lunatic.”
“Alone in a field, in that uniform? It is a small country, don’t you think we would know about somebody who dresses up like Austro-Hungarian soldier and walks the fields by the highway? And where did he go? In a hole in the ground?”
“There you go.”
But my sceptic friend didn’t sound like he’s sure about his ”some lunatic in a hole” theory. So I tried again:
“He looked kind of different, not just clothes… like he had less color.”
I saw my friend is about to agree, but then he did what most people do: ”It just looked that way from a car, it’s some lunatic.”
Right. Have you noticed how things have less color if you look at them from a car? I haven’t. And everything around except that man looked absolutely normal.
I dropped the subject, but couldn’t stop thinking about that lonely man. It was in the early 90’s, by the end of the war. (Most of you probably heard we had a war here.) Maybe this new war somehow wake that lost soul and he finally went home? Then how come he overslept the WWII? Or maybe he walked the fields than too? In more than 15 years after that I went down this highway many times, although never saw him again, I always remember that lonely, sad man.

Very good story! I am an American living in Sarajevo ( married a Bosnian girl) and wonder if I have been down that same highway while going to Zagreb ( I have seen strange things along the highway going there as well, but just chalked it up to cultural differences).
I look foreward to any more of your stories and am even now writing one about a trip to the mountains I took this past weekend. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks! I like your story too! Reminded me of a building I grew up in.
Yes, that's this highway, near Nova Gradiska. People saw things around Okucani too. There's been some fighting so it's no wonder. And please do tell us what you've seen and I'll tell if those are cultural differences or proper weirdness.

Very interesting story and I guess you just never know when or where you are going to see something out of the ordinary...I would have wanted to stop the car and go over to him..but maybe he would have disappeared faster if I did that. Very good story