Where Death Sings

one // william

I tiredly stare up at the sky. It's still dark from the nightly hours, but the sun's bright rays have started to shine through the darkness, and colours of pink and orange are fighting to push through the dark blue blanket covering the sky.

   I wish I could say that it's completely silent, and that I'm lying in the soft, fragrant grass in a big, beautiful and somewhat idyllic field somewhere close to home. I wish I could say that the colour green is visible wherever I look, along with the bright, vibrant colours of flowers, but if I say that I would be lying.

   The colour green doesn't exist where I am, and there is no smell of grass lingering in my nostrils. If I take my eyes from the sky and tilt my head down, there's nothing but a brown mud wall in front of me. I am lying in the trenches on the Western front, somewhere in France. Beyond the trenches are a few hundred meters broad no man's land. It's just a mass of mud and blown up dirt graced with barbed wire and dead men. Some of the dead men are still in one piece, simply shot to dead. Some of the men lie tangled up in the barbed wire, with its sharp edges buried deep into their bodies. And some of the men have had their bodies ruined my shells, and body parts spread out across no man's land.

   There is no smell of grass, even if there might have been once. Now, there's only the distinct scent of rotten flesh, smoke and wet dirt. The scent lingers around you at all times, even when you leave the trenches behind for a couple of days. The scent is stuck in your nostrils, in your uniform, and on your skin.

   I don't know what day it is. Every now and then, when we leave the trenches for some rest, it's possible to find an old newspaper. A newspaper is often enough to at least tell us what year and month it is. That's really all I need to know, whether we are heading towards colder or warmer times. I don't need to know the date, knowing the exact date is the same thing as knowing what possible date you might have on your gravestone. Death is around me enough as it is, I run towards it all the time, and it falls along with the shells every day. Death is something I am very much familiar with, I stand eye to eye with Death every day at the front. So far I have been able to avoid it, but a lot of men have not. I would be able to fill paper after paper with names of men we have lost since the beginning of the war, but I don't, instead I let them rest peacefully in their graves in France or back home in England, or in the stomachs of the trench rats.

   "Moore!" The voice of one of my friends pulls me from my thoughts. "I've been looking for you." It's John Smith, a scrawny but tall boy from Hull. He sits down next to me, trying to avoid getting dirt on the small piece of bread he's holding. When he has found a comfortable position next to me he closely inspects the bread in his hand before he carefully peels of a mouldy corner and throws if over the trench-wall.

   "Have you seen Adams?" Smith asks. Then he takes a bite of his bread before breaking of a piece which he hands to me. I gladly take it and thank him.

    "He's dead." I say these words in a very nonchalant manner, something that might make people who haven't seen as much death as we have wonder; do we even care about each other? We do care. The men around me, the men I went through training with, the men I have fought with since the first day I came to the front, are all I have. They know more about me than my family. And I know more about them than their families. A strange and foreign bond is formed in the trenches, a bond that no one of us knew existed. It's a bond between soldiers who press their bodies close together in a dugout while the shells are exploding over their heads. It's a bond between men and boys who run towards Death together. It's a bond that is only created in the midst of chaos on the battle field.

    Every death of any of these men are heart-breaking, the bond is painfully snapped in the middle when the man on the other side from you falls, but too many men are dying and mourning them for too long can get you killed. It does sound quite harsh, but when you take your attention away from what lies ahead you put yourself and the rest of your comrades at risk. It doesn't really boost moral either. But, every now and then when I have to face another sleepless night I give them a few seconds of my time. A few moments of their faces inside my mind, their laughter in my ears. Then I leave them to rest until the end of times, and get ready for the night and next day and the death they will bring.

    Smith sits silently for a couple of seconds, processing the death of another friend and comrade. Then he says the simple word 'okay'. In a couple of seconds, he has received the information, processed it and accepted it. If he will put more thought into Adams' death later, I don't know. Maybe he will speak some silent words to thank Adams for his time in the trenches and the months they served together, the shared dugouts and shared bread.

 Whenever the autumn wind blows our way, it carries a few German words with it. The wind holds the words and sentences close to itself and delivers them to us. Commands in a language we don't understand travel over the dead land between us, and reach us on the other side.

    "What do you think they are talking about?" Smith asks me. He stares up at the edge of the trench as if he can see the words wandering over our heads.

    "I don't know." I reply, and follow Smith's example by tilting my head up slightly. "Us?"

   "There are words going around about an offensive from their side." A new voice says. In a hunched positon, Frank Elliott approaches us and sits down to my left. He's the same age as me, twenty, and his brown hair has grown long during his months in the trenches. A few dirty strands of hair are hanging in front of his bruised face, and his blue eyes seem almost grey in the dull trenches.

    Although Elliott is young, he is a married man. He told us during our training how he had married his childhood friend and love not too long before he left. He said that he couldn't leave England, or go to war, without knowing that the girl he loved would be his until death do them part.

   There is something beautiful about Elliott's story, but there is also something incredibly sad about it. Most of us don't have much in our hometowns. We are too young to have much of anything. Jobs, goals, roots. Some don't even have a family to go back to. And definitely no girl to come home to. But Elliott somehow managed to find love before leaving, if that makes him lucky or not I don't know. I do know that he has one more person at home who can lose him.

   "Hey Moore, what do you think?" Smith asks me, making it clear that they have kept talking about the offensive and the war while I lost track of what was happening around me.

   I think a lot about things concerning the war. I think a lot about offensives, and the Germans. I think a lot about a lot. During the calmness between artillery fire and attacks it's hard to not think. Your mind rushes to places where you don't want to go. Some days you think about death, while some days you think about home. Home, where they probably still talk very highly of the young men who march towards war, and towards their deaths in a god's forsaken place. They glorify our sacrifices and portraits us, broken and lost souls, as heroes to boost their campaign, to get people to support the war, and to get more men to enlist and march to their deaths. We are not brave. We are not heroes. We are lost. We are ruined. The war has ruined us all. English men and Germans, French and Russians, we are all the same. And we will never be able to escape what the war has done to all of us.

   I rarely share my thoughts with anyone else. I let them nag in my mind and haunt me in the calm moments, so my friends don't get a very elaborate answer.

   "I think that if neither side launched offensives or bombed each other's trenches to bits there would be no war to fight."

   "If it was only that easy." Smith mutters.

   I sigh and move my glance up to the sky. It's no longer dark. The colours pink and orange stretch wide and far across the sky, and nicely blend together with a light colour of blue. It looks like it's going to be a sunny day today. And I wish that it will be just as good as it is sunny, because we could need a few good days.