English Original WritingBANG! I woke to the sound of gunshots, but this was very typical of a day in the Great War

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GCSE English coursework

BANG! I woke to the sound of gunshots, but this was very typical of a day in the Great War.  I was sitting in amongst all the rats and men, some of whom were dead.  Their bodies which were decaying left a horrible stench in the air.  I was still covered in blood from the previous day and like all mornings my bones were in extreme pain which was very uncomfortable.  The war hadn’t done much for my health.

“Captain,” a muffled voice cried.

I looked up to see a small scrawny boy who couldn’t have been much older than sixteen.

“What,” I mumbled, I wasn’t really concentrating.

“Sir,” he said,” “you are needed on the front line, you must report to the person in command.”

“Ok, Ok give me a minute,” I said.

So I reluctantly scrambled up, woke a few of my men, and headed off.

The noise only got louder as we approached the front. Then there was a particularly loud bang,

“AHHHH,” I cried out in pain as a bullet sank into my arm.

I fell to my knees and shouted for the rest of my men to duck.  We all lay flat out in the waterlogged trench waiting for the coast to be clear.  As we lay there I shouted for a medic even though my mouth was full of mud from the ground beneath me.  Minutes later a youngish man crawled up beside me shaking in the cold.  He safely removed the bullet and bandaged me up and we pressed on through the bitter cold.

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We jogged the rest of the way and it wasn’t long before we reached the front line. It wasn’t a pretty sight; there were an increasing number of carcases piled up all around and morale was low. There were fully grown men sitting and crying for there mothers in the vision of hell that lay before us. However it was not all that bad. Whilst travelling I bumped into an old friend called John Hemins, he was an elderly, chubby chap with a smile that stretched from ear to ear.  I had a great deal of respect for Jon; ...

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