No one who has clawed their way out of this hell hole has ever come back alive or in one peace. Fear just strikes me down, I’m too much of coward to fight alongside my comrades, but today its different I must enter the battlefield. Suddenly I am struck down by panic as a solider a few paces away points out where we are to exit the trenches and enter are impending doom! I start to feel the pressure of my kinsmen around me; I’m to cover them as they go running to their certain death, how many lives will be lost today? Who’s to know, but God? The fear of totally consumes my body, I’m completely paralysed by the thought of death. It’s just too much for me to digest, knowing that my death is certain. Every nerve in my body just wants to scream and exit my body to hide for cover. No one welcomes death. No one would want this. It’s just so pointless. But no, I must get these thoughts out of my head, to even consider running away would bring great shame upon myself and my family and I’d be guaranteed to be caught and the punishment for desertion is death. I would rather die than have such an embarrassment weigh on my conscience. I soon began diplomatic actions in my mind as to make myself reach an agreement but this left crashing into a wall, as the point of dying for nothing made me the question the fact why I was here, living in complete poverty, flooded with God knows what and the occasion rat enjoying a nice swim around my feet. These thoughts alone made me sick.
As I quickly reached an agreement with myself, the fog that had been previously hanging over my head just seemed to disappear and this revealed a surprising long stretch of trenches and I realised I wasn’t alone, as many soldiers were having the exact same arguments with themselves, the war inside seemed more deadly and dangerous at one point. The internal conflicts were making my head spin; it was a never ending war out there, and another one in here. Would that be any salvation?
The sudden downpour of limbs was enough to sicken anyone but what came after was worse as are trenches were awash with rats and in an instance this caused the soldiers to come flooding out of the trenches only to be shoot down as quickly as they got out. The rats were to have quite a feast tonight, and the very thought made me sick. The aftermath of the skirmish with the rats had the floors littered with dead rats that were either dead or were dying. It seemed we had at least won one war. It seemed to me no one would win this war, as too many lives had been wasted already and for what? Nothing. You’d think I’d have seen it coming, but sadly I didn’t. It seemed the German soldiers had come quite close to our trenches and so I looked before and saw a grenade, there was nothing I could do but stare at it. The seconds of anticipating the blast made my blood boil, and then it just happened. I was shattered into a million pieces, and I was spread like jam on toast all over the place.
