We had been here for months and almost every day was the same. The clouds were black, bursting with ash and smoke. The onyx beads of rain that fell in waves smelled like pieces of copper. They slid down our skippers, little black streams pooling on the marshy ground. I kept on spitting to keep it from dribbling into my mouth. It had a sharp metallic taste, like when you bite open your cheek and blood drums out. The black water ran down my back, trickling along the ridges of my spine, running along the crack of my ass. I felt seedy. My hands didn’t look like my hands anymore. They had deep, weathered lines in them, like long dried creeks on a desert bed. My fingernails were cracked with whiteness, save for a thin film of shit colored crud that protruded from the edges.

Hollow men with vacant eyes rushed by all day carrying shells and rifles. In the complete absence of warmth, they were machines oiled on instinct and powered by fear. They stomped here, dashed there, their frantic energy never dissipating, unless stopped cold by the other side. All around them the air popped and crackled and burst with violent energy. Sometimes they burst too.

But when they didn’t die they had no recourse but to endure for days and weeks and months, reliving the same monotonous routine over and over again. Hell is not just blood and death, but spending all day wallowing in frozen streams of mud and human waste, thousands of miles away from anyone who cares about you and being so hungry you can eat the vermin that scurries over your boots. You lean against the sandbags that separate you from the unknown and try to imagine what awaits the other side. One day you will find out, but you have no idea when that day will be. Hell is waiting for that day, but that day never coming. Hell is Belgium. No one knew this better than the stout, but muscular soldier who slumped down next to me that day. His piercing eyes recalled the grassy knolls of his Irish homeland and as they were too big for his face, they were pretty much all you focused on when you talked to him. “They told us it would be over by Christmas,” he grinned slyly, a hoarseness obscuring a slight brogue. “I know that’s what you’re thinking, lad. But I bet your parents didn’t get you everything you wanted for Christmas either!” he let out a smooth chuckle, but I didn’t think it was so funny. “My name’s Quint,” his hand shot out for the expected shake. I took it limply and told him my name. I asked him when he thought it would be over. “Who knows? Probably when we kill every German there ever was. Or they kill every Englishman there ever was,” his green eyes widened as if he had stumbled upon some stroke of brilliance and he couldn’t keep his lips from curling into a mad grin. “On second thought, that doesn’t sound so bad. Maybe I’m on the wrong side,” he laughed hysterically at his own joke. He mussed up my hair as he stood up. “Anyway, who knows? Maybe it will end by Christmas. We still have two days.” 

This trench had been dug with the utmost haste under the cover of darkness, so there was no undercover shelter, only a crude scar that we sliced through the earth with our shovels. And this was where we had huddled down to sleep for the past week. That night as the guns fell silent, I dreamt I was paralyzed. While struggling against this impotence, a dark figure peeked his head over my trench. In his hand he held something long and sharp, that glistened under the moonlight. He climbed down the slick muddy wall and approached me. Everyone around me was asleep. Still I couldn’t move. I opened my mouth to scream, but only a soft gurgle, so soft almost to have never existed, squirmed free of my lips. He sat on my chest and for the first time I saw his face. Shimmering under the moon’s golden light, my enemy’s face was revealed to be the same as mine, except slackened and distorted. His tongue lolled around comically, unanchored by anything. He glared down at me with white translucent balls of jelly, punctuated by black pits. His skin was as yellow and creamy as the ancient moon above us. I realized he was not some monster from the beyond, but what I would become nurtured and raised on the fruits of this badland. I felt the sharpness of something awful and cold slide between my ribs and wriggle around next to my lungs. Pressure. When I woke up, I could still feel a dull pain in my ribs. As I rolled over, with that imaginary bayonet wound still giving me phantom pains, I pressed against something frozen.

When you’re really cold that’s all you can think about. There’s no refuge in the trenches. In the trenches, there is only mud. The mud is cold and it gets in your boots and soaks into your feet, squeezing between your toes, leaving your skin waterlogged and desensitized. At night, you can hear the wind howling over the mouth of the dugout. Sometimes the trench will create a wind-tunnel and it will whip like a train through our quarters, blowing our things everywhere, everything just littered all over the place. A table topples over and makes a loud bang and we think it’s a shell. But it’s only the wind. Some mornings, a man won’t wake up. His body will be as stiff as the ground it lays on, his lips purple and pursed tightly together, eyes frozen shut, frost hanging from his hair and fingers coiling around nothing. This was such a morning. “Medic,” I rasped, the saliva in my throat still dried out from the winter freeze. Then I yelled it. They came stomping over, throwing some raggedy, grey blanket over his body and carrying him off to parts unknown. Major Howe’s duty is to write a very comforting letter to his mum telling her he died valiantly in battle against the Germans, in lieu of a death that seems so utterly pointless. But they would be wrong. It’s all utterly pointless. 

 
His death wouldn’t be entirely in vain. He could no longer catch a bullet for us, but he would help us through his warm socks and feed us with his biscuits. His cigarettes would calm our shot nerves and his love-letters lend us a brief escape from this nightmarish place. He wouldn’t need them, for he had something of much greater value, a ticket home.

By mid morning, my routine has resumed and I found myself once more wedged between two frozen stalks of pock marked clay. A grey mist had settled in the air and cast its pall over everything. In war, even the air is heavy and I felt its weight crushing me, grinding me down into the dirt. My gun was sheathed in a thick brown crust of debris and soil. When I touched the butt, the clamminess of my hand reduced it to a slippery coat of mud and I knew then it would fail me when I needed it the most. I saw Quint appear in my peripheral vision, a blurry figure invading my lonely meditation. He told me the dead bloke’s name was Billy something and tossed me a tin of biscuits. On the front of the dented tin was some smiling boy, splotchy with faded colors, marching merrily along to the tune of his oversized novelty drum. The red banner underneath his feet gave a rousing order to “March towards Victory”, but each letter was fainter than the previous one. Either the lid or my fingers were frozen, because it took a minute before it opened with a cold snap and a hiss. Inside the biscuits were hard like bricks. The ends looked chewed as if a rat gnawed at them. ‘Impossible’, I thought. ‘How could a rat get into an air tight box of biscuits?’ I placed one of the hard biscuits on my tongue like a holy sacrament and bit down, but my teeth did not make a dent. I was forced to nibble feebly on one end like the rats, and the thought crossed my mind that perhaps those were Billy’s teeth-marks.

 
I heard a crack and immediately thought one of my molars had shattered on that slate of wheat. I was relieved when I saw a chap fall all the while clutching the sputtering red mess on his throat. He rolled around on the dirt, thrashing his legs. He made one small deliberate sound, confused and afraid, and it reminded me of the sounds that the sheep would make on Uncle’s farm just as their throats were being slit. Guilt naturally followed when I absorbed the fact that my tooth meant more to me than that boy’s life. Then my cold, harsh reality set in. Why should I care? He was not my friend, just some fool who couldn’t keep his head down. The trenches demand a sacrifice and better he goes, than me. That’s one way to look at it, but perhaps I’m hiding the real reason. Perhaps... I’m jealous. You endure one moment of searing pain and terror and then you are rewarded with nothing, but a peaceful, black bliss that never began and never ends. There is no visible emotion present as they methodically carry his convulsing body off to die some place quiet. The medic’s eyes were glazed over with indifference and his shoulders slumped with resignation as he stumbled after them. Murmuring broke out among the trenches, until it was interrupted by some Tommy’s hacking cough, the first sign of influenza. They always cough like that before they die. Throughout the day we traded shots. No one else died that day, not on our side anyway. The bullets whistled over my head, and I listened for different pitches and tried to guess how close they were. The lower the pitch, the closer it was, I reckoned. Out of boredom, I impaled the biscuit tin on my bayonet and lifted it above my head. Ten seconds later there was a ding and it spin around like a weathervane. As a cobalt dusk of gun-smoke fell over us, Teddy sidled up next to me, grinning. “I got one, mate,” he squealed, his voice wavering between churlish excitement and nervous desperation. “I saw him in my sights, and blew his bloody top off! I heard him too. Did you hear him? No one screams like a German screams.” As the wind picked up his fingers trembled slightly, like dead leaves on their currents. I told him all screams sound the same to me.

We pressed against one another at night for body warmth, our sense of dignity overridden by survival instincts. Once in a while you would wake to see a stranger’s face nestled against your ear, whispering his girlfriend’s name. When people started dying, we stopped caring. Before the war, I was a light sleeper. My mum said she saw me walking around the kitchen once, buttering bread in my sleep. I would wake at dawn when the birds began to sing. Now, the cold lullabies us to sleep, and we hang between life and death for eight hours. A shell will burst ten feet from us and we won’t know until we see the scorched hole in the morning. While once I woke to birds, now I sleep through bombs, so I can’t say exactly why I woke that night to the soft hum of seasonal hymns wafting towards my ears. The melody was light like the smoke that had settled on us, but alien like an oasis in the middle of no man’s land. There was supposed to be no music here. No songs. The words were German, but the tune was unmistakable. It was ‘Silent Night’ they were singing. We stirred one by one, our minds refusing to believe what our ears were telling us. Tentatively, one of us, Ralls, lifted a mirror tied to his bayonet. No bullets zinging. There in the reflection we could see a flickering orange light in the distance. One by one, hesitantly and then curiously, we poked our heads above the line. The night was black and the stars sparkled. The fog of war had lifted. Across the shapeless black void, a glowing fire beckoned us with its promise of warmth and comfort. Against that blazing sun, silhouettes danced gaily.

“What- What is this?” Teddy sputtered, his rifle shaking in his hands, as he struggled between the hypnosis of this beautifully human moment and his orders to shoot anything that moved. As he wavered, our officer emerged from the quarters and gently planted his hand on the rifle barrel and lowered it. “Not now, lads. Not now,” he whispered through that walrus tusk mustache. Horace Howe was a man bigger than life. Even while crawling through the dirty shafts, he carried his head as high as he could without it peeking over the line. He was a man of a different century, a stoic giant who would pat each of us on the back before sending us off to die. He prided himself on being a gentleman first and foremost and struggled to maintain a sense of human connection and fair play in a war that had neither. We admired him as a person, but found his humanity naïve and dangerous. His glassy eyes reflected the light from across the gulf. Between him and them, lay the twisted bodies of his men. They were not able to go home yet. Their rotting corpses clawed out for God, for a mother’s embrace, for a friend. Just meters away, the Germans belted out their songs and shouted to one another merrily. The insensitivity of the situation was astounding. These were men on a battlefield, acting as if everything were all right. They were acting as if they weren’t surrounded by death and disease. And yet, there was something so reaffirming, so pure about it all. The whole spectacle filled me with envy and longing and hope all at the same time. It also filled me with a feeling I came to recognize as guilt. My cheeks were hot and red flushed with something amazing.



Major Howe started to sing in a gravelly voice. It was a song my older cousin, Belle, used to serenade the family with at our gatherings. I hadn’t heard it in years. She was beautiful, precocious and impish. On Christmas Eve, after our pudding, we would wait patiently in the trophy room, filled with relics of past lives. She would stomp in the room with her black little dance shoes and do a curtsey bow. With my drunken granddad egging her on, she would almost coo the song, rather than sing it, as if she wanted to finish the job that the bottles of sherry had started. She was not the best singer in the world, but those moments of her singing were so innocent and fleeting it was to the point of tragedy. My uncle would cry. At the time, we thought it was a father’s pride that reduced him to such a state. He kept her condition hidden from us. After Belle died, there were no more songs at our Christmas parties. Now, as if from beyond the grave, I heard the song once more, this time as a guttural roar that seemed to shake the foundations of our fragile trench more than any shell could. “Let nothing you dismay, for Jesus Christ our savior, was born upon this day,” his Herculean lungs paused to inhale and when he continued others joined in, “to save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray…”

A chorus of hoarse voices echoed into the night. As we sang, a serene feeling washed over me and just for a moment I felt as if I were back home. Across the divide, the Huns fell quiet. Then they attempted to sing their songs louder than before, the Germanic words rising from their trench sharp and happy with a playful dare. Earlier in the day we had been killing each other. Now we found ourselves immersed in a singing competition. We were all chorus boys at the Church again, or more accurately young men just trying to have a good time. They had killed our friends and reduced us to animals, but now that animosity had washed away, replaced with low notes, cheers and a roaring fire. The fire that Quint set was so warm and we gathered around it quickly like pigeons fighting over breadcrumbs; Some of us with fingers so frostbitten that the flames licked at them, but we could not feel it until we smelled burning flesh. This was our first fire since we had trotted into Godforsaken Belgium all those months before. The hours passed almost dreamlike, a surreal experience, and the dawn of a new Christmas shed its golden light on our pit. There was something new and fresh about this day, as if all the yesterdays could be dead and buried and we simple soldiers were finding a way to end this war through our common humanity. The biggest shock came just before noon when one of our numbers worked up the courage to climb out of that muddy trough and wave his arms to the Germans. We begged him to get down, but he ignored us and continued to shout at them. An amazing thing happened, as one of the Germans proceeded to climb out of his fortifications and meet him halfway on the shattered land where so many of our dead comrades lay. We could not hear the words we spoke, but we watched in awe as they embraced each other tightly. No one spoke. There were no words. We were forging a peace that our leaders could never dream of. We were also breaking the rules.

The rest of the day passed as a dream. One by one, we climbed out of our bunk, and walked sheepishly on the same ground men had previously sprinted and died on. The frozen orange earth crackled and gasped under our boots as we staggered over its pores. Peppered over this hallowed land, were hollowed trees, their insides broken and charred. An unknown mist wafted out of these dead trees. It smelled like roasted almonds and sulfur. To our left, a body tangled in barbed wire languished under the winter sun. A crow perched on his twisted shoulder cawed loudly at us and ruffled its inky feathers. To our right, there lay the skeleton of a dead cow that had the misfortune of wandering into a man’s war. Fat horseflies floated away from the cow carcass they had been feasting on for weeks and sluggishly made their way towards us. The horizon was a desert of ghastly shapes and shadows, contorted in physically nightmarish ways. In front of us, a man in a heavy coat and pointed Kaiser helmet grinned and welcomed us with outreached arms. “Merry Christmas!” the call rang out. “Merry Christmas!” we shouted back. One by one, we hugged these men, gripped them, stifled cries against their shoulders. They were our enemies, our kindred spirits. The only ones, who could understand what we were going through, were those who had done this to us.
Rolf was my friend. He was from some village that bordered the Rhine and he was like me. We were both twenty-one. He enjoyed painting watercolors, his brother died of the same affliction that took my cousin Belle, he had no interest in politics and he had attended a bogus university in which a patriotic professor encouraged all the boys to enlist in his stead, for his flesh was too old and weak to do it himself. “Do it! You must! You must fight and die for your country, not for yourself, but so your children and your children’s children can reap the fruits of the fatherland.” 

 
Actually, there was a difference. Unlike Rolf, it was not an overzealous professor who had demanded I answer the call of my country, but my father, a man who still lived the Anglo-Zulu War every day. He had come back from Africa with dark, ringed eyes, an unquenchable thirst for brandy and one arm. My town lauded him as a war-hero for surviving a month long siege. In the sweltering African sun, he stood sentry on the outpost of a small wooden garrison, picking off dark savage after dark savage from afar. His rifle would track their movements as they darted across the red rocks and yellow patches of grass. He was a patient hunter and would not fire until the white eyes of these black warriors stood out. The sweat would drip into his eyes, flies would buzz about his lips, and the sun would beat against his canvas shirt, but he would not move. Sometimes he would track a lone figure for hours, waiting for the right wind, the dropping of the guard, the perfect moment to squeeze that trigger, for a missed shot would mean a day’s work down the drain. He would keep a count for the day and tally his score at the end of the week. The boys in his company were amazed by his proficiency and toasted him as the “Gamesman.” His score was legend, but like all great things, the siege had to end and one day he was horrified to see shapeless shadows crawling over the wooden spikes that divided him from his prey. His war had been so orderly and now he was inundated with unbridled chaos. As they ran rampant through the outpost, hacking and slashing everything in sight, he could smell their sweet sweat and hear their grunts and war cries and feel the hot spray of African blood against his face. The siege did not last long, as the Zulus were completely outgunned. But it seemed as if they had targeted one man in particular in this raid, and that was my father. They were so far away when he would pick them off, there is no conceivable way they could recognize him as the man who hounded them for so long, but as he tried to scramble away one Zulu stomped on his arm. My father looked up in abject horror at a proud warrior dressed in animal skins, decorated in animal bones and face blackened by an unforgiving sun that had weaned his people since the beginning of time. “You shoot us, eh?” he asked. “You never shoot us again!” With that he brought down a machete on to my father’s forearm. The last thing he remembered was everything going red and then black.

He had woken in the field hospital to a staggering pain that pulsed through his right arm. It felt as if that huge knife was still embedded in his flesh and bone. When his bleary eyes looked over, there was nothing there but a stump dressed in bloody gauze. The nurse told him he was lucky, that the man who hacked off my father’s arm was shot in the heart before he could hack anything else off. He was told that relief swept through and secured the area, that every barbaric darkie was dead and that my father now had a free ticket home. “There is nothing for me at home,” he told the nurse. This, my father told me.

This all happened before I was born of course. In the grand scheme of military history, few will remember the Anglo-Zulu war, but for those it destroyed, it will always be as raw as yesterday and as important as tomorrow. I don’t have any memories of my father being a happy man, only his bitterness and regret over a past life I never knew. He was in his forties when he had me, because for years my parents couldn’t conceive; not due to any fertility problems, but because at night the moonlight would cast shadows against the wall, triggering his anxiety and making intimacy impossible. This, my mother told me.

This, I know. My memories revolve around him wallowing in a den with a grand mahogany desk, long and sharp. On this desk were photographs of him and his company and above his desk hung paintings of British cavalry on horses blasting pistols in the face of gaudy dressed savages, their feather headdresses billowing with the gun smoke. He had some medals in a box and there was a sharp-shooting trophy he had won in his school days. The one thing missing was any photographs, memento or souvenir of my existence. He was indifferent to me in the best of times and abusive to me in the worst. I should clarify that he never beat me, but I don’t know if this was a conscious choice or only because he felt powerless without his good arm. We never went out to the park or the shops together, and my mother would take me to cricket matches and teach me to swim and do all the things a father was supposed to do. If my father drank too much, he would lock his den door and not let anyone in. If by chance we crossed paths while he was in this pathetic state, he would let me have it. He would wonder aloud why he saw good friends and noble enemies alike die in war, while ungrateful snot such as myself lived. “What is your worth?” he would inquire to me. “What have you done in this life, except soil yourself and cry and suckle at life’s teat, while giving nothing in return?” he would snort through his pipe smoke. “I have infinitely more respect for those savages I shot, then I do for a petulant runt who will contribute nothing, but take everything,” his remaining hand would shake the brandy glass and the brown liquids would slosh back and forth. Through the crack of his study door, I would see a wooden mockery of an arm resting solitary by those paintings and photographs. So you see I didn’t join the war because my father actually told me to do so, but because I know of no other way to win his approval.

I told all this to Rolf. I don’t know why. It all just kind of spilled out. I guess he was someone I could finally talk to, someone who wouldn’t judge me from the suffocating confines of our trenches. If Teddy knew, he would always know. If Rolf knows, he only knows for a day.


“Why would you want to win the approval of one who was so cruel to you?” he asked in heavily accented, but not broken English.

I had no answer for him. 

 
The soldiers had congregated in the middle of No Man’s Land. There were exchanges of gifts. We gave them English jam and they gave us smoked ham. Instead of tasting acid rain and stale biscuits, I bit into dark chocolate and drank of a deep red wine that was from a vineyard in Ahrweiler. Rolf was equally happy to drink of my British brandy and smoke the cigarettes I had taken from Billy’s body the day before.

“A dog followed me home once,” Rolf told me in a quiet, almost sedated voice. “It was a little terrier. I saw it on the way home from school and it didn’t have any owner. I tried to get rid of it, because I knew it couldn’t stay with me. My father didn’t like dogs in the house. He was obsessed with neatness and order. When it came to my front step, I asked my father in what I knew was a futile attempt, whether this pathetic beast could stay with us. It was ragged and black with tufts of fur sticking out of it, and I knew it wouldn’t survive the winter. It had dark red scabs from where it had been scratched or bitten by other animals. Its tongue hung out with a happy ignorance of its situation. My father grimaced, his face scrunched up like it did when he was displeased. ‘No’ he said simply, and I knew that was the end of the conversation. ‘Get rid of the dog,’ he told me. ‘Every time I see that dog again, I will beat you.’”

I listened with rapt attention and wondered whether Rolf had a worse father than mine. Mine treated me terribly, but he never laid a hand on me.

“So I told the dog, ‘hey, get out of here, stupid mutt.’ I even gave him a little kick. He yelped and slinked away, disappearing into the snowy pines that surrounded our property. I didn’t think much about it after that. Two days later, I was at home peeling potatoes for dinner, when I heard a faint scratching sound at the front door. I opened it and there he was, his black fur even more unruly than last time and I swore he had a fresh cut for the red on him had a stickiness that glistened under the sun. His tongue still hung out, a desperate willingness to please plastered on his face. I heard my father bellow from the top of the stairs, ‘I told you, Rolf! If that dog came again, I would beat you!’ He stomped down the stairs, a black belt wrapped around his knuckles. ‘Get rid of the dog, now!’ He whipped the buckle at my face and I felt my lip split open. Fat droplets of blood spilled on to the carpet. I felt angry, but who to take my rage out on? I could not hit my father back. He would kill me. So I hit the mangy dog. And I hit him again. And he yelped and he yelped. And then I screamed at him. I told him to go away and never come back. Tears were in my eyes. My father did not care. He just watched passively, that thick strip of leather dangling in his clenched fist. After the dog had limped back into the woods, he hit me as I had hit the dog. ‘So much blood on the carpet’ my mother sighed the next day, as she rubbed soap into the twisted tufts. The stains are there to this day... big brown spots,” Rolf took a long drag off of dead Billy’s cigarette. I noticed a faded white scar on Rolf’s lip that ran up towards his nostril, slashing a clear path through his overgrown stubble.

He hesitated as he spoke. His white speckled upper lip bit into his lower one, and the whiteness spread. “The next time the dog came, my father was not home. There was that pitiful animal, covered in deep cuts. He scratched lamely at my door and when I opened it, his head dropped down and his tongue did not hang out. His tail coiled under his hind legs. He whimpered as he peered into my warm house. He took a few shaky steps towards the blood-soiled carpet, three of his legs dragging the one. There was a mirror by the door. In the mirror, I looked as a monster did. My face was a swollen balloon ready to burst, its edges blistering with purple welts and fleshy lumps inflicted upon me by my own father. I could feel myself lose control, but could not stop it. As I beat him, he never tried to bite me, never ran away. He looked up at me with large brown eyes, bewildered eyes that couldn’t understand the situation, but accepted it with a miserable resignation. I heard a crack and there was a sound that shouldn’t come from any kind of animal. I couldn’t stop myself. I....” he stopped and he shut his eyes. When he opened them, they were damp. “I buried the dog by the pines and my father didn’t beat me that night.” 

A few meters away from us, Major Howe was ordering his men to collect the dead. Soldiers were dragging the sodden, grey corpses of their friends, their limp feet scraping against the ashen ground. They were piled one by one next to Quint and Bailey who were busy breaking up the frosted crust of earth. Steam rose from the earth with each thrust of their spades.

“Rolf, why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“This situation. It reminds me of the dog.”

“What does?” 

 
His watery eyes didn’t return my glance, but stayed affixed on the carrion that was being ripped off the metal brier patch like an orange peel.

“Oh,” 

 
“It’s not just the war. It’s all of it. Your father, my father... what chance were we given?”

“The same chance he was, I guess.” The mess of body parts was hopelessly ensnared in the labyrinthine barbs. Every time they attempted to pull the body away, the tangle of rusty wires would pull him back. Watching them go back and forth in a never-ending game of tug-of-war was almost amusing. Almost.
Later that day, after we had collected our respective dead and buried them under mounds of worm rich soil, we joined hands in a solemn prayer and recited psalms, our languages mingling into one mass of indecipherable noise. There were British lamentations over the German dead, and German epitaphs for our dead boys. We were mourning the very men we had killed. Was it hypocritical or ironic? If it doesn’t matter, then perhaps that means it was neither. During the course of the day I saw small signs of life creep out of the woodworks, as if awoken after a long winter. A flock of birds would swoop out of the clouds, a rodent would peek its head out of a hole, a deer would gallop in the distance, its’ eyes fixed on us all the while, wondering maybe how long this lull in the horror would last. I wondered the same. 

 
We played a game of soccer amazingly enough. Major Howe had organized it with the German Sergeant-Major. His name was Hertz and he was a small man almost lost in the layers of grey wool he wore. He kept pushing his spiked helmet up and it would keep sinking down his face, comically really in the futility of the action more than the actual appearance. It reminded me of a Vaudeville act I had once seen in London. I could not believe this mild, bumbling man was a purveyor of death and destruction. At one point, he looked directly at me and smiled and nodded just like my uncle would at our Christmas gatherings.

I have no idea where the soccer ball came from, but I would just have to add it to the list of things that mystified me that day. A stocky German soldier stripped down to his undershirt, white save for a mural of dirt and sweat stains. He thrust the checkered ball down into the middle of the field and I heard the same whistle that on darker days commanded us to go over the top. Today it initiated a friendly sports match, where a mistake would merely cost a point, not a life or limb. Our trench was now our goal post and their trench was their goal post. We split into our two teams and kicked that dried-out piece of leather up and down the lacerated land, still marked with blackened bone and white ash. There were no shells, only a soccer ball for which we dived and ran and screamed. 

 
The ball rolled towards me. “Kick it! Kick it!” Ted bellowed. He was playing a little more aggressively than everyone else, swatting away and tripping any Germans that came near him or the ball. I punted the ball and it skipped over the ground, rolling into the German trench. “Goal!” the cheer went out. Everyone was clapping and laughing, English and German, save for Ted who ran past me and whispered that I had “shown those bloody Huns how an Englishman plays the game.”

The ball shot back and forth, from German to Brit, bouncing off of charred tree stumps and rolling past discarded helmets. Seeing everyone smile and enjoy themselves felt surreal only for a fleeting moment and then you just played as you’ve always played, as if the years and war meant nothing. That is, until Teddy did what he did. A German player had been running with the ball down the field towards our goal, when Teddy’s foot sprung violently into his bended knee. The ball slipped away as the German fell into the rocks and dirt and empty bullet casings. “Stay away from our trench you dirty Hun!” Teddy screamed as he stood over him. The German’s face was contorted into a pained grin and his eyes clenched shut as he rolled around on the dead sod, clutching his knee. Major Howe grabbed Teddy by the scruff of the collar and dragged him off our playing field. “What the hell is wrong with you, lad?” he rasped in the disappointed tone you would hear in a father. He didn’t answer him, but he didn’t have to. We all knew. What’s wrong is that even on a day in which we all strive to be the best we can, some of us simply are who we are. Teddy is Teddy. Whatever lurks beneath the carefully guarded surface will always find a way out, no matter how bottled up it may be. 

 
Our game more or less recovered from this violent reminder of our natural inclinations. We began by timidly kicking the ball back and forth and then after a minute or two, we were back in form, playing as if almost nothing had happened. However, there did seem to be a little less laughter, a little more distance between the players, like a seed of distrust had begun to sprout. The game concluded around dusk. The score was a tie, 2-2. Some were happy that no team came out on top, because we wanted to retain our feelings of good will. Quint rather cynically grunted that it was a perfect analogy to our entrenched stalemate. “No one ever wins. No one ever loses. Every day is just a tie.”

We shared a dinner of jammed biscuits and some tinned meat. Both of our platoons were too nervous to let the other dine in our trenches, so we ended up eating in a huddled circle in the middle of the No Man’s Land. Every day is cold, but this night especially, because there was none of the usual defenses like the trench wall to blunt the onslaught of the snarling winds. We maintained a roaring fire and that worked to keep us warm for a while, but as we ran out of dry wood, it waned and soon we were trying to salvage whatever heat we could from a few glowing embers. The Majors had become quite friendly, and chatted amicably to each other over the course of the night, comparing colonial misadventures from the past century. Howe had fought in the Boer War and I overheard Hertz mention that he had advised the English as an envoy from the Imperial German Army during that conflict. It’s funny the direction life takes us, in which two former comrades can suddenly become enemies.

“Hello, Rolf,” I smiled through a mouthful of sticky crumbs.

He looked at me as he sat. His mouth smirked, but his eyes told a different story.

“Hi...”

“I was thinking about what you said earlier, about how each of us has been pushed into a violent existence that runs counter to who we truly are...” I trailed off. I could tell he was barely listening to me. He sipped at a cup of brandy and gazed directly at the rosy cinders as they drifted aimlessly into the murky sky.

“Tomorrow...” he finally whispered “... It will be as if today had never happened.”

I looked around and saw German laughing with Englishman. Quint was telling some bawdy pub joke and the stocky German was slapping his knees in unrestrained hysterics.

“Tomorrow, you will be a target. They will direct me to kill you. And you will try to kill me. And that’s just the way it will be.” He threw a splinter of wood into the red pit and it flared up for barely a second.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was this the same man I had talked to before? Wasn’t he the one who lamented the futility of this war and the puppetry that we had allowed ourselves to be a victim to?

“Rolf! It doesn’t have to be like that... You’re my friend. We can do something. We can make a run for it. We...”

He stood up abruptly. “It’s best if we don’t talk anymore. Really, I just came to say goodbye. I truly hope we don’t cross paths again, for both our sakes.”

And Rolf was right. After that dreamy Christmas ended, we retreated back to our respective trenches for sleep. When we woke, there was no golden sunlight and seasonal hymns, only a gloomy, grey quiet that was all too familiar. No one climbed over the trench that day. Not our side and not their side. We did not try to kill our newfound friends that Boxing Day, but neither did we rush to embrace them. What happened on Christmas was not a revolution, but an anomaly, which the high command had rectified with their telegraphed warning that anyone fraternizing with the enemy would be shot. On December 27, Major Howe received an order to charge their position, but he ignored it. It was too soon for him and his men were not mentally prepared to kill people they were playing soccer with only two days ago. High command sent a follow-up message telling him he would be reprimanded when he returned to England for his refusal to follow orders. Howe scoffed at this and got drunk off the last of the brandy.

Around New Year’s Eve, the gunshots and exploding shells had returned. First, the artillery came in sporadic volleys that would fall a dozen meters short of our trench, perhaps misdirected in order to avoid us. This courtesy lasted a day. By the start of 1915, we were once again locked in a struggle of us versus them, and we cursed the Huns and shot at them and buried our memories of Christmas as we buried our friends. And so it went on.
Some nights I wondered if Rolf were still alive. Some nights I would kill him in my dreams.


September 1915

I stood in the mouth of Hell. 

 
A monster in black slick-ware was killing us all. His face clad in a midnight mask upon which lay two soulless, glass eyes and a rubber elephant trunk. Strapped to his back a canister and spooling out of that a hose that sprayed an inferno deep into our trench. Men squealed like rats as their eyes blistered and their hair flared up in blinding hues of orange and blue. Quint shrieked my name and gripped my arm with an impossibly hot hand. At first I thought he was ripping off his uniform, but it dawned on me that those brown sooty shreds were layers of skin. His face carried an emotion that was alien, something I had never seen before and have not seen since. It was like he was telling me that he didn’t want to live, but didn’t want to die either, and while his skin darkened his Irish eyes remained as green as ever. A second or a minute later, Quint’s blackened fingers slackened from my sleeve and he fell to the ground in a smoldering heap. The man in the rubber suit lumbered over towards me. His opaque eyes locked my gaze. I saw intense waves of heat ripple the air. I felt the hair on my forearms singe and coil. I tasted the sting of petroleum in the back of my throat. I smelt burning flesh. I was prepared to die. Some people believe your life flashes before your eyes in times like these, but I didn’t think or feel anything except a numb resignation. While around me blazing men screeched for “God” and “Mother”, I stood there still. My boots had sunk into the molten mud and even though my gun was in my hands, I could not raise it, for it suddenly weighed more than a cannon. I stared into the dark abyss of the fire hose and waited patiently for it to spew flaming death in my direction. Nothing happened. The monster slowly lowered the hose. I blinked away smoke.

“Rolf? Is that you under there?”

There was no reply. He began to raise his hose again, but then stopped and turned away. He shuffled down the wasteland in his demonic gear, burning funeral pyres left in his wake. The black haze swallowed him, leaving only an echo of crackling skin.

....

Our faces smothered in handkerchiefs, we buried those broiled bodies throughout the night. They did not smell of the normal decay that we were so used to, but rather they reminded me of the times my mum would leave a roast in the oven for too long. Was this burnt roast reek better than the usual rot, or did the halcyon familiarity of it make it all the worse? I closed my eyes for a second and I was home, with mum scrambling to pull out a tray of smoking brisket. I opened my eyes and beneath me stared Quint’s green eyes, caked in the ashes of Hell. The answer was obvious; an assault on your senses is one thing, an assault on your memories and feelings is another.

Major Howe glanced over at me solemnly, as my arms wrapped around Quint’s shrunken, fragile body. There was a disturbing sterility to the whole thing that made me feel like an archeologist excavating a bog-body. “You okay, lad?” he asked in a voice as hollow as the blackened shell I was cradling. I didn’t answer him, because I was struggling with yet another feeling and that was confusion. Was that Rolf? It was impossible to tell, for he was covered head to toe in that rubber shroud. The man I had met during the Christmas truce would not volunteer for a task burning men alive. But if that was not Rolf, why was I allowed to live while Quint was turned into a fossil?

“Poor bloke, eh?” I heard Teddy’s tremulous voice behind me. “Never though he’d get taken down by the Huns. Was just talking to him this morning,” he paused. “He was telling me about his home. He had a mum, a dad... a dog. He was telling me he wanted to go. He... I...” he paused again and his words turned into bubbling sounds. “I want... to go... ho- ... ho-...” I heard a boy cry behind me. I didn’t look at him. I had enough problems without playing pastor to a man that in all likelihood would be dead by next month. Once they break down, they don’t last much longer. Teddy had been on a downward spiral for a few weeks, saying stranger things and acting odder by the day. Gone was his boyish bravado from last year, replaced with the façade of a man who came of age in a tunnel of mud under a torrent of shells. Before he had enthusiasm and energy to compensate for a lack of confidence and maturity. Now he had none of those qualities, his energy and enthusiasm merely replaced by listlessness and despair. In the candle’s light I saw Howe’s shadow embrace Teddy’s, and I heard the soft hush of whispered consolations, sweet little lies to help us endure another endless night.

Quint’s death left me feeling empty. I couldn’t remember his jokes or anything about him, just those green eyes and how they stood out so brilliantly from the soft cinders of his face. That night after we had buried what we could, we sat huddled around a fire. I felt sweat building under my armpits from the heat and when I closed my eyes I would see the monster standing there with his hose. Was it Rolf?

I poked at the ground with a stick and to my amazement saw some cinders move. I realized it was black ants that had crawled to the surface. Just like us, they hid in a network of tunnels, away from the unforgiving horrors of this world. I saw one scampering back and forth frantically, its feelers twitching in confusion. I was going to squash him with the end of a stick, but I stopped and let him live (just as Rolf let me live?). The ant eventually calmed down and burrowed back into his tunnel. I longed to be small, insignificant like him. I wanted to disappear. I was afraid to die, but terrified to live. Disappearing into anonymity was the only way I could think of to reconcile those two contradicting fears. I could try running away in the dead of night, but Major Howe would have to shoot me if he caught me, or he would go to the brig himself. And while I didn’t care much about my father’s reaction, my mother would be shamed to an early grave. I wished at that moment my father had died in that war. I would not have been born into a life so utterly devoid of hope. This hopelessness wasn’t just rooted in the war we fought daily, because even if the war ended that day I knew I would only return home to a hateful one-armed drunk and a lifetime of nightmares.

Major Howe plunked down next to me. He looked heavier, grayer these days. He was still a gentleman in all facets of his conduct, but there was a weariness about him, as if he had glimpsed behind the curtain of his “gentleman’s war” and couldn’t accept what his eyes told him. “Lad,” he huffed as he placed a plump hand on my shoulder. I could smell whiskey on his breath and his eyes were ringed in moist redness. “I worry about you. You don’t talk these days. You don’t talk to anyone. I know what you’re going through, son. I know Quint was your friend.”

“Quint wasn’t my friend,” I interrupted him. “I barely knew him.”

Howe was a little taken aback. “Yes, well... You were Quint’s friend. He looked out for you, you know.” I remembered him tossing me dead Billy’s biscuits. It didn’t mean anything. Quint was nice to everyone. “Is it that you barely knew him when he was alive, or are you trying to forget you knew him now that he’s not?”

Howe thought he got me, but it was a simplistic conclusion drawn by a simplistic man. “Yes, you’re right,” I told him to get him to leave me alone. “I see now.” The truth was I had formed no emotional connection to Quint until I saw those deep green eyes blazing through his death mask. Howe wasn’t sure he had convinced me, but he moved on to a new topic. At this point he became squirrelly, wiping away the fat beads of sweat that glistened under the fire’s crimson glow. “We’re charging their fortifications tomorrow at the crack of dawn,” he coughed. He waited for me to say something, but I didn’t, so he gave me his justification, which I’m sure he had deliberated over all dinner. “We can’t risk another attack like what happened.... today. Unless we get on the offensive now, they’re going to wipe us out. Are you prepared to go over the top?”

I was surprised by the suddenness of this announcement. I survived today, just so I could get cut down by bullets tomorrow? At first I thought it was ironic, but irony would dictate something unexpected and this fit perfectly with the futile madness of this war. It wasn’t ironic, but rather a natural conclusion to a series of events. “Rest up, chap,” he told me in a voice that sounded as dry as the smoke rising up from the ashes. “Get a few hours of sleep before dawn.”

“Have you told the others?” I asked. I looked around. At this point, the “others” consisted of Teddy, Ralls, Bailey, Davis, Coleman and myself. They didn’t look miserable. They didn’t look like anything, except how I imagined Roger Winthrop looked like. My father, in one of his few candid moments when he wasn’t berating me, told me how old Roger tried to sneak out of the encampment one night. He hated the service, despised the conformity and routine of it all and dreamed of escaping into the vast African jungle and living among the natives, hunting game with spears and sleeping in a dung-packed hut with some Nubian princess. This ill-conceived plan never even had a chance of coming to fruition, because my father saw him straddling the spiked gate that night and shot him in the shoulder. Roger Winthrop fell all twenty-five feet from the barrier into the dead grass and jagged rocks. He suffered heavy loss of blood, nerve damage from the bullet-wound in his shoulder, a fractured clavicle, a broken leg and a major concussion. Unluckily for him, he survived. After being nursed back to some semblance of health at the on-site infirmary, he was immediately tried by the on-site court and found guilty of desertion, the sentence being death by firing squad.

So one deep blue morning, as Roger’s old mates watched, they dragged him out under that bitch of a sun and tied him to a wooden post. Roger leaned against the post kind of funny, because he no longer had feeling in his right shoulder. My father and the four other men, who once joked with Roger, ate with Roger and got drunk with Roger, now aimed guns at Roger. To mitigate their guilt, only one gun was loaded. Roger would never know which of his friends shot the bullet that would end his life, and neither would they. So they aimed their rifles squarely at his heart. My father tells me that Roger had a calm look in his eyes, like a cow that doesn’t know it’s about to be slaughtered. His mouth on the other hand, had a small, almost undetectable smirk that seemed dismissive of those pointing guns in its direction. It was a strange expression, my father told me, lying somewhere between acceptance and defiance. The order was given to fire, so they shot him. And then Roger died, with that quiet smirk still on his face. And that’s the same expression that Teddy, Ralls, Bailey, Davis and Coleman had that night. They were empty and calm and defiant, just like dead Roger Winthrop.



...

I was having a nightmare about a green-eyed monster chasing me through Ireland, when Howe woke me up. I looked up at him and his old walrus tusk mustache nodded at me. “C’mon lad, today’s the day.” His face was awash with purple shadows, the soft pink sunrise only twinkling in the distance and still speckled with stars. It held the promise of a new day, perhaps my last one here on Earth. “You’re scared, I know. It’s all right. I won’t let you...” he trailed off abruptly and glanced away towards that last remnant of darkness in the west, where our enemies lay in wait for us. “You won’t let me die?” I asked. He looked back at me; his features collapsed into a mess of emotion “Ye- Yes, I won’t let you die. Of course not.” It went unsaid that we both knew it was a lie.

The boys huddled around as Howe slammed his dog-eared map down on our broken timber table. It wobbled precariously, until Ralls placed a tin of canned meat under one of the legs to steady it. “As you’re aware, the Huns are dug in to this sector here,” a fat sausage finger prodded a square of faded coordinates. “It’s an isolated outpost. Due to the offensive going on down-river, they’ve been cut off from their supplies just as we have. We think there’s probably about thirty or so of them.”

“Thirty? We have a bloody half a dozen men!” Bailey sputtered, spittle flying over the map. “Yes, lad, I’m aware,” Howe gritted his teeth. “But like us, they’re hungry and we have something they don’t, which is the element of surprise. We hit them with some artillery, and we could wipe out ten of them and maybe cause some panic and confusion. This would create an opening for us to get in there, kill the bastards who killed so many of us yesterday. We would be safe at their outpost, the lads from the Third would eventually meet us here.”

“Major, this will be a massacre,” Coleman interjected in that cool eloquence indicative of privileged upbringing and an Oxford background. In this year of savagery it hadn’t lost its arrogance, but it had shed some of its formality and reservation. “We might all be killed in such an offensive. Do you really wish to accept responsibility for such an outcome?”

“Right. Surely we can wait this out until reinforcements get here,” Davis said meekly. This was the first time I had heard him say anything in about three months and even Howe raised an eyebrow.

“Look,” Howe sighed, his shoulders higher than his once proud head. “The bastards have the flame thrower. They killed ten of us yesterday, including our medic. We can just wait for them to hit us again, which I assure you they will, or we can take the fight to them. It’s not much of a choice, but what can we do?”

“I’m not waiting here to burn,” Teddy volunteered darkly. “I’m not ending up like Quint. We die, we die, but at least we die on our feet bringing it to them like they brought it to us, not cowering in some rat-hole ready to be smoked out.” Howe smiled, his eyes wet. He clutched Teddy’s shoulder. “Good lad, good lad.”

I had to admit I was impressed with Teddy. Maybe the impossibility of the situation had allowed him to be the brave warrior he always dreamed he was. Perhaps when there’s absolutely no hope of survival, you lose all fear. When the worst scenario is the only scenario, what exactly is left to fear?
The boys quieted down, shamed by Teddy into silence and listened to the weary Major’s instructions. “First, we’re going to pound them with artillery. Ralls, you’re going to man the howitzer. You’ll have to load your own shells, mate. We don’t have a man to spare. I want to hit them up and down their line. Only when the boys appear in your line of sight do you stop. We only have about twenty-five shells left, so use them wisely, right, lad?”

Ralls attempted to hide his smile, but it was in vain. “Yes, Major!” He was happy, because he now had the best chance of everyone to see the light of another day.

“Why? Why the hell does he get that assignment when the rest of us are rushing to our deaths?” Bailey screamed, clearly losing it. “Because,” Howe said in a voice that sounded a hundred years old, “Ralls is the strongest. He’s the best suited. I’m sorry, that’s just how it is.”

“Right, we all die today, while Ralls goes back home to fuck his wife in London,” Bailey, his eyes bulging with bloodshot anger, slammed his fist down on the table. The tinned meat shot out from its supportive position and the table collapsed. The map fluttered down the mud alley. “You idiot,” Howe muttered as he watched the map get caught against a sandbag. “Bailey, you’re not going over either. You’re the best shot, so I got you on the Lewis gun for suppressing fire. Any of those kraut eaters peek their heads over the top I want you to give them what’s what.”

“Oh, I see,” a chastened Bailey looked down at his boots.

“The only ones going over the top are Davis, Coleman, Teddy who’s braver than the lot of you and ... you, lad,” he ruffled my hair. He did not say my name. I wondered for a moment if he had forgotten it, or if he had ever bothered to learn it. How much did I mean to the man I was about to die for?
Coleman objected. “This is absurd! I’m running over the top? I’m the most important man here, the smartest. You’re sending me to die like cattle? You’re having me run out there with expendables like Davis, who will never amount to anything? Major Howe, I demand you have me on the Lewis. You stupid, stupid man, are you listening to me?” For once his elitist class status could not buy its way out of the fate that all men must eventually face.

Howe’s face went red. He slapped Coleman in the face. “You will address me as sir, you petulant little whelp. You will serve your country honorably, or I will do what the Huns should have done to you a long time ago. Is that clear?” I had never seen Howe express the famous temper that had supposedly catapulted him to major in the first place. I had seen despair more times than I could remember, but this was the first time I saw rage. The display made me wonder if our present situation would have been different if he had been more emotionally assertive and taken more chances over the last year. Coleman held his face in shock, a red handprint pressed into that pale milky flesh. “Yes, I’m... I’m sorry. My emotions...”

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to Davis,” Howe instructed. Coleman whispered “sorry”, while avoiding eye contact and that was good enough for Howe who nodded at them. “None of us are in our right state of mind today, but we have to stick together, because the moment we turn on each other it’s over,” he walked over to the sandbag and snatched the flapping map. Studying it, he told us that Davis and Coleman would be flanking the sides of the trench, while Teddy and I would be driving up the middle. All this while shells dropped around us, and guns burst in every direction. “Let’s get to it then, eh?” Howe shielded his eyes from the bloody red orb that had crept above the horizon.

Somber and stone-faced, we dragged our rusted howitzer out from the corner where it had been slumbering. Its old wheels fought valiantly against the dirt, kicking up clouds of dust. Ralls rushed out holding a crate of shells. “Careful with that,” Howe rasped as they clanked around. Bailey lay out alone on a perch, tinkering with the Lewis gun. He was haphazardly jamming a belt of ammo into the wrong opening, trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole. Davis ran over to help him. After the howitzer and Lewis were in place, with heavy hearts, Davis, Coleman, Teddy and myself made our ways to the red, bullet riddled ladders that climbed out into the world. We had tried to make our preparation last as long as possible, but the whole process took less than six minutes. I gripped a cold rung with sweaty fingers that would not hold. My eyes averted their gaze from the ghastly structure, refusing to look at it, attempting to deny the undeniable. My heart beat against my ribcage and spots danced in front of my eyes. I was feeling faint, when Teddy called my name. He had raised a mirror taped to a bayonet above the line. Nothing happened, save the faint sound of wind whipping around it. “It’s okay, they’re still asleep,” he grinned, “you can look.” I slowly peeked my eyes over the last sandbag. The dawn’s early light had revealed a multitude of colors and shapes across the gutted landscape that I had never noticed before. From a distance you were blind to the history of carnage that had unfolded here. The splintered trees playfully bounced rays of golden light across the endless plains of dust. Under a crippled birch tree, there seemed a shadow of a boy holding on to his mother, but upon closer inspection it dissolved into a soulless black mass. As my head peeked dangerously over the ridge, a stiff breeze carried the familiar taint of dead flesh past my nose. The landscape was a Claude Monet painting, beautiful from afar and ugly up close.

“I’ve seen enough,” I shuddered, shrinking back into my muddy womb. I looked at Ralls positioning the howitzer. “A little higher, lad. You have to account for the wind,” Howe cooed in his ear. As I watched a metal canister slide down the sleek barrel, it finally dawned on me how real everything was. I no longer felt detached or quietly defiant, just sheer terror. Thoughts of my body squeezed between bulges of cheap velvet and tucked in a black cedar box played out in my head. My father would stand over my coffin casting judgments upon me and denouncing me with a pointed wooden finger. He would deem me unworthy of Heaven or Hell, fit only to rot in purgatory for eternity. My mother might be sad, but she would stifle her tears, so as not to upset my father. I had imagined this scenario countless times, but it never seemed inevitable until now. My stiffened body would be lowered into the black, encompassing earth and the world would go on as if nothing of note happened. If men perish by the thousands every day, then to assume the world would pause for even a second to take note of my death would be the height of arrogance.

“All right, lads,” Howe called out. “Cover your ears. Baby Bettie’s about to have a tantrum!” There was a thunderclap and a whoosh as the rocket sailed through the vermillion sky. It came down in No Man’s Land, causing a brown haze to mushroom into the air. It had fallen about ten meters short of the German trench. “Shit,” Howe yelled. “Point it further up!” As Ralls hastily shoved another shell down the mouth of the howitzer, we could hear the faint stir of the Germans across the divide. Our morning wake-up call had failed, but we could still take out a lot if we acted quickly. There was another crack of thunder and this time the shell fell squarely into their gulch. There was a white flash, a barrage of dust and I saw black shapes fly through the air, but I don’t claim to know what those shapes were. A chorus of screams wafted across the morning breeze. “Yes,” Howe grinned victoriously. He vigorously shook Ralls’ shoulders and told him to stay on those coordinates. Ralls wasn’t smiling. As he went to put in another shell, it fumbled out of his hands and rolled down the alley.

Howe turned his attention to us. “Lads, I don’t have a lot of time and I’ve never been good at this sort of thing.” He stood before us, a slumped caricature of the proud warrior I had met a year ago. His eyes were grey and tired, and they looked at the ground instead of at us. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think things would get this bad. But they are this bad, and what I’m asking you to do is not easy, but I know you will...” he bit his fist and attempted to fight back the wetness that threatened to drown those grey and tired eyes. “I know you will, because you’re all the damned finest men I’ve ever known.... and each time one of you dies, I feel it and ... and I am so sorry,” he whispered again. He pulled a scrunched piece of paper out from his pocket, and studied the scribbled pen marks. Wet drops fell on to the ink. “Rudyard Kipling wrote ‘We be of one blood, ye and I.’” In the distance I heard another shell fall into the German trench and more screams that made my mouth dry and my skin cold. “What Kipling was saying is that we’re all one, we all breathe the same air, bleed the same, live the same and die the same. We’re all brothers and when one of us falls, he lives on in the memory of others. Whether you live or die today, I’ll never forget you lads.” He nodded his head at each of us. “I’ll see you on the other side.”


Howe wiped his face down and then instructed in a starkly different, uncompassionate tone, “pace forward.” In formation, we took a step towards the ladder. Teddy glanced over at me and his skin was so white that he already looked dead. “Stand ready,” I heard, but it was fuzzy and distant like someone talking over a garbled telephone line. I had the same bubbling anxiety in the pit of my stomach that tormented me the first time I went to bed with a girl, with Rachel. I wondered how she was. She had probably forgotten about me. Our first time together was clumsy, unmemorable and all too short, just like my life itself. I held on to the rungs of the apple-red ladder, but my hands were numb. “On the signal,” a voice boomed definitively “company will advance.” I felt a clenching in my bowels, the sudden inconvenient need to defecate. Then I heard the whistle, the same whistle that had kicked off the Christmas game the previous year, and time stopped. The whistle shrieked like a banshee, the pitch so high it sent a jolt of electricity coursing through my body. I felt my body instinctively scramble towards the top of the muddy mound, a black ant crawling out of my tunnel at last.

..................

I ran under the golden dawn, and for a few steps I felt free. I was free of my fear, for everything was now out of my hands and I only had to go through the motions of my remaining minutes. There was nothing I could do from here on out that my father could blame me for. In my peripheral vision, I saw Teddy running just next to me, and Coleman and Davis on either side. I heard the muffled bursts of Bailey’s machine gun and the crunch of fresh sod underneath my boots. The air smelled of nothing, only my own sweat and breath. My arms and legs robotically moved back and forth, under command of something other than myself. The ground vibrated for a second. A geyser of dirt sprayed over me. I kept running. Pockets all over the ground erupted now. The rocks in front of my boots shattered into fragments. Something scalded my thigh. I felt the air split in half. I kept running, even as the sun was blotted out by a grey tide that washed over me. As I drifted through this void, I could not see anything except the shadows of Teddy, Davis and Coleman running by my side.

I heard a cry to my right and saw Coleman crumple into the embrace of this grey lady. All his family’s estate could not secure one more sunset. I kept running.


The booms of weapons behind me had ceased, so I figured we must be near the German trench. The alternative was that everyone in our trench had been killed, but things moved too rapidly for such a thought to linger long. As our guns faded, the guns of the Hun increased, a building crescendo of drumbeats that sounded deeper and closer together. It was as if they beckoned us, searched for us, played just for us. This moment was all about us and for a second I believed I might actually live. Could I be the hero of a war I never believed in? Would my father love me then? Would Rachel remember me?
We emerged from the leaden mist, and saw the German trench was within twenty meters. The tips of their pointed helmets reflected sun into my eyes. They peeked above large black barrels. And then I realized it wasn’t the sun that was blinding me, but the flashes of their guns.

A loud yelp broke through the din of gunfire. I glanced to my left and there was Davis caught on the barbed wire, his arms and legs contorted in the unnatural stance of a scarecrow. His sad eyes locked with mine. He opened his mouth to say something, but before he could his body convulsed under a salvo of bullets. He slumped dead over the corroded coils and I kept running.
Now it was only Teddy and myself. The static of gunfire faded from my ears as we inched closer, replaced with hot vibrations. I could no longer hear the bullets; only feel how they sliced through the wind. So near was their trench, I saw the first inkling of their decrepit interior. And before my brain had processed it, I was already hurtling past their machine-gun and leaping into their sanctuary.

Everything that followed happened so fast. The trench was mired in chaos and neglect, almost equal to our own. The shells fired on the trench seemed to have killed many men, as the corridor was still thick with smoke and screams. Through the carbon fog I could see a German leaning against the dark engine that had mowed down Davis and Coleman. Disbelief was set in his face. I felt the blade of my bayonet sink into his fleshy neck and blood rushed out to greet it. I remembered my uncle carving a goose for Christmas dinner all those years ago, and how I envied him, how I wanted to be the carver. The German gargled and out came a stream of his burgundy insides. His eyes rolled away from mine and he started twitching. My bayonet felt wedged in his throat, so I had to press my boot against his chest to pull it out properly. He collapsed against my legs, splashing me with his scarlet letter. At first I felt numb, then giddy. This was the first man that I knew had died by my hand and mine alone. The power was intoxicating. I had knelt to touch him, when Teddy leaped down into the trench next to me. “You’re alive!” he rasped in awe. “Come on, what are you doing? We have to go!” he grabbed me by my arm and pulled me to my feet.

I followed Teddy through the bombed-out maze, but it seemed abandoned and dead. Had we truly killed them all? Could we have been so lucky? I clutched my gun feverishly, expecting death around every corner we turned. There was death, but not ours. As the fog of shell smoke lifted, we saw a mess of body parts strewn everywhere. We passed a severed hand still clutching a teakettle and a foot half inside of a boot. The body parts had strange red tubes coming out of them and black gunk seeped out of one man’s disembodied head. As we shuffled through the narrow alley, I saw Teddy clutching his mouth. His lips were caked in yellow mess. He gulped hard, swallowing the vomit that had threatened to erupt all over us. An amazing sense of relief was about to overtake me when I saw a man stumble from behind a bend, stained in blood and looking down the barrel of his gun at us. He screamed in German. The features seemed familiar but the dimpled cheeks were hollow, the skin jaundiced and the brow furrowed with lines that belied the man’s young age. It was Rolf.

Teddy had already raised his gun towards Rolf’s heart. “No!” I screamed, and turned my gun towards Teddy. His eyes widened with surprise, he looked at me and mouthed ‘why.’ I could not stop my finger pressing softly against the trigger. The crack echoed throughout the trench and my heart. Teddy staggered towards me, his mouth still silently asking why, his hand stretched out for my hand, until finally he wilted and sank into the mud. His blood pooled by my boots, further marking me for my sins. I felt no giddiness this time, only confusion.

I was struggling to comprehend what I had done, when I turned my attention towards Rolf. “Rolf, it’s me. I couldn’t let him kill you.” I lowered my gun and immediately regretted it. The hollowness in his face ran deeper than just his newfound wrinkles. His eyes carried no warmth, his lips were clenched and above them his white scar spread all the way up to his flared nostrils. Bayonet pointed towards me, he rushed to greet me. I felt the sharpness of something awful and cold slide between my ribs and wriggle around next to my lungs. Pressure.

“I told you never to come back!” Rolf screamed leaning on the steel blade. I closed my eyes and saw fire and blood and wooden arms. I opened them and realized I was laying on the ground now, Teddy’s bloodied Royal Army helmet pressed against my face. “I told you if I saw you again I would kill you!” My fingers tingled with a numbness that spread to my hands and traveled up my arms. My chest was hot, and I thought I would explode under this cruel autumn sun. It glared down at me, Rolf appearing as a shadow cast against its light. He was my Angel of Death come to take me away. My heart pounded at my ribcage, attempting to burrow out of my dying body. I could hear my own breathing, but it sounded like a distant memory from a past life. Why was he trying to kill me? I thought we were friends. He said something else, but my ears were too flushed with fire to carry the words. I shut my eyes and saw a soccer ball roll down a grassy hill. When I opened them, my world was shifting out of focus. The edges of the sun were white and then red and then they grew darker as if night had already set in. Rolf’s shadow engulfed my vision, blacking out any light that remained. That was the last thing I remembered. In my dreams I could hear my father’s voice.

...

..........

Despite Rolf’s best efforts, I did not die. I woke up in a field hospital thirty miles behind the front-line, somewhere in the French countryside. There was a nurse tending to me, her perfumed bosom heaving over my face, when my eyes flickered open. She looked down at me with doe brown eyes. She had the look of an angel, not one of death, but like the porcelain ones we used to balance on top of our pine trees during Christmas. Her hair was pulled back into a neat bun, although frayed around the edges. She placed a cool hand against my forehead that reduced me to a shudder.

“Belle?” my dry lips smacked.

“My name is Marie. I have been watching you for three days. You lost a lot of blood. You are lucky to be alive,” she breathed through full red lips and impossibly white teeth. She had a French accent and all her words flowed as a lyrical stream, unbroken by the pauses and sighs that I’d grown accustomed to in the trench.

I looked to either side of me, and dozens of men groaning in pain, wrapped in white bandages lined the length of this facility. It was a never-ending gallery of misery and trauma. All of them had a beautiful French nurse watching vigil. White sunlight shined down through the windows warming me. I peered at my body. Tubes of blood and clear liquid hung out of my left arm. Gauze was wrapped around my mid-section. There was a brown center, ringed by shades of red and yellow. I tried to sit up, but a sharp stabbing pain reignited my memory of the sinking bayonet.

“How am I alive?” I asked.

“The bayonet that German stabbed you with did not pierce any internal organs. It came within mere centimeters of your heart. Do you have any recollection of what happened afterwards?”

I shook my head.

“The beast that was running you through with the knife was shot dead. The Third Army had finally caught up with your platoon,” she told me matter-of-factly.

It made sense now. The Third must have been bombarding the German trench just as we were charging them. By the time we had reached their trench, it had been decimated and nary a man alive and we were so arrogant as to believe we had wrought that hell upon them. But the damage was too vast to have been accomplished just by us. I should have been relieved by this intervention, but all it really meant was our charge was in vain. If we had waited a mere one hour longer, the Third would have caught up with us and our charge would have been cancelled. Coleman and Davis would be alive. And I never would have killed Teddy. I felt something hard in my throat. Did they know? As the French nurse smiled and I felt her saintly hand brush my hair, I knew they did not. But I knew.

“A Red Cross truck brought you back here,” she cooed, placing a cup rim to my lips and pouring warm life-giving water down the back of my mouth.
I fell asleep after that and dreamed I was walking through a field and I was alone. Large blades of grass swayed with the wind. Willow trees hung over me, their branches protecting me from the cloudless sky above. As I walked, I called out names. I called for Quinn. I called for Coleman. I called for Howe. I called for Teddy. I called for Rolf. There was no answer, only the low ebb of cicadas. I walked to a large tree and sat down in the grass. The limbs of the tree cast a shadow of a mother embracing a boy. It was only then I realized this patch of heaven was the same land where I had charged the German trench. But it was here in its natural form, as God intended it. Was this the field at the beginning of the time, or at the end after the rain has washed away all the blood and fresh vegetation has grown from the compost of long dead men? The cicadas lulled me to sleep and I awoke from the dream.

....

My father was sitting by my bedside. I had slept for a day, because outside there was no sunlight, only a dreary grey. Some of the beds to my left and right had new people in them. Some would recover and live for years to come, maybe start a family. Some would expire by nightfall, leaving their last imprint on those sheets. And some would recover and go back to fight and relive the same horror that brought them here.

My father grimaced, as he had when I barged into his study unannounced as a child. But now the face was heavier, weighed down by the years, and the grimace was not of malice, but something else.

“What are you doing here?” I asked in a voice that no longer feared him.

“I still have connections in the army. They informed me of your situation and I hitched a ride on the next supply truck that came out here.”

I felt pity for him as I looked at him, an old man with parts broken off of him and replaced with wood. He was wearing the uniform that he had worn during the Anglo-Zulu war, perhaps to show we were now equals. But he was a mockery, fit only for a clown-show, and I had to stifle a smile. The suit was redder than Marie’s lips and Teddy’s blood. There were missing buttons where the seams had burst open in opposition to his bulging stomach. The rusted medals and frayed ribbons were pinned on haphazardly. His white hat couldn’t hide his wisps of thinning hair and the chinstrap cut through a sagging neck. On one arm his red sleeve wrapped tightly around his fat skin, while the other hung loose around a piece of dead kindling.

Still I felt some strange solidarity with this sad creature. I wanted to tell him about Rolf, about Teddy, about everything. I feared his reaction somewhat, but after the hell I had endured, what was the worst that could happen? Would they march me out under the sun and shoot me like old Roger Winthrop? And for that matter, what made Roger’s death any more justified than Teddy’s? Why was Rolf’s life worth less than my life? Why was anything worth anything?

So was it Teddy’s worth or my own worth that compelled me to talk? I realized I could not run from the truth now. I would tell him and if his inner beast emerged again, I would calmly spit in his face and defy him to raise that wooden hand towards me. There was nothing the brute could do to me now.
“Dad, there’s something you should know...” I mumbled.

“No, don’t say anything, boy!” he cried, clutching me tight. I felt hot tears soak into my scalp. “Don’t say anything.”

My father’s wooden hand gently caressed my face. And he sobbed, as he told me how proud he was.


"Irrespective of the uniforms we wore, we were all victims." 

-Harry Patch, the last surviving British veteran of World War I