The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (1940)

To the north of the Bastiani Fortress lies only the steppe, a pale emptiness running to a horizon where, every soldier believes, the Tartars will one day appear. Giovanni Drogo arrives at this last outpost certain his posting is temporary, certain real life is waiting somewhere else. Then he begins to watch that horizon. A year passes, then several, then decades, each swallowed by the same conviction that the great event, the battle that will redeem every idle hour, is finally drawing near. Buzzati's cruelty is also his tenderness: Drogo is never lazy and never a coward, only faithful to a future that recedes one season at a time. You watch an entire life spent in readiness for a moment that may never arrive, and somewhere in the waiting you catch your own reflection, the meaning always just past the edge of the plain, the years going by while you keep your post and tell yourself the time is nearly here.