Where Death Sings

six // friedhelm

I'm hunched down in a corner of the trenches. Karl and Paul are sitting next to me. We sit close together, with cigarettes in our mouths, hiding the glow with our hands. As we defy our officers' orders and breathe in the soft smoke, we look down our lines. A few kilometres away, our front is taking heavy shell fire. The explosions light up the dark sky with orange and red colours, painting it with big and soft yet wild and terrifying brushstrokes. But we are calm. Because we are safe, at least for now.

   Where we sit in safety, it easy to distant ourselves from the suffering our country men are experiencing down our lines. While they die, we smoke our cigarettes. While they suffer, we look away and breathe in the scent of wet dirt. While the shells scream down our lines, we wait for their scream to eventually turn towards us and destroy the little peace we can find in the trenches.

   Something disrupting our calmness is the wounded English soldier lying in no man's land. He's been lying there for two days now, left behind, with his own dead comrades around him. We have collected our own dead and wounded, at least those we can reach, but for all I know, one of our own might lie near by the English men and their trenches. Maybe they are lying in the dirt, badly wounded, crying out in pain just like the English soldier.

   There is a youth in the soldier's dull cries of agony. Cries that have grown more silent during the last couple of hours. Sometime during the early hours of the day, the soldier had fallen silence, and for a while I had been sure that he was dead, but then a breeze had carried his voice to where I sat in the trenches.

   The young, English soldier must be paralysed because no one has been able to spot any movement, and he must lie face down, which makes it almost impossible for anyone to determine his position. Especially with the fog that crept in over the trenches after our offensive two days ago, preventing us from making any new ones. Instead we lie in our trenches as the fog covers the dead bodies like a soft blanket, tucking the soldiers into their deathbeds.

   "Someone should give that poor soul a bullet." Paul says and nods in the direction of no man's land.

   Karl and I agree. Someone should shoot that soldier, and I'm sure we all would do it ourselves if we only knew where he was. We wouldn't do it based on what uniform he is wearing, or the language he speaks, but to end his suffering. The young soldier is not my enemy. During our time in the trenches, we have learned who the enemy is. It's not the young, wounded soldier; but the lice and trench rats, some of our officers and Death. The first three are common subjects among us, while we rarely mention the last one, but respect it a lot more. One day the latter will stop being our enemy and we will greet him with relief, as we no longer have to suffer the burden of war.

We sit in silence and listen to the sound of artillery fire and the roar of shells in the distance, and the young soldier's heart-breaking prayers for help and cries for his mother. Where I sit in what could look like safety, it's hard to not be affected by the suffering of another human being. It doesn't matter who you are, and who they are, or that you have shot at each other dozens and dozens of times. Anyone's suffering has a way of finding its way under your skin when you have let down your guard and feel a moment of safety.

   Suffering is different in an imaginary safety and in the midst of chaos during an offensive. You can feel a lot when the world isn't exploding around you, but as soon as you run through no man's land all kind of attachment to emotions, people and the world just vanishes. We don't feel a thing when we run over the battered earth. We close ourselves off to the suffering around us, there is no longer any compassion, no guilt, nothing. You don't feel anything when you know that Death is waiting for you on the other side of no man's land.

   During an offensive you act without feelings, without love for anything. We do what we are supposed to do, what we have been ordered to do. We are empty when we run to meet our potential deaths, and we don't care about the men we shot or the men who fall around us.

   It was never our choice to turn into empty shells dressed as humans, it's what the war has shapes us all into. I am well aware that I might have been the one who wounded the young, English soldier still crying out for help. Or it could have been Karl, or maybe Paul. But during the offensive, whoever shot the soldier didn't reflect even for a second whether to do it or not, just like he didn't reflect over if he should shot one of us. This is what the war has done to us.