A cannon sounded from somewhere far behind the German lines,
the start of a bombardment to weaken the Allied lines. Soon a hundred other
cannons echoed the first. And before the last was done the first was firing
again. The bombardment would last an undetermined amount of time, a day or
more. A sleepless twenty-four hour time where there was nothing to be done but
endure.
It was a prelude to an attack. The goal was to soften them
up, to destroy every bit of them they could, to blow up the barbed wire and
machine gun posts that would hold up and cut down any charge. The bombing
continued drowning out any other noise. There was nothing to do but listen to
the explosions as they blasted earth that had already been blasted many times
before, to pray if one could still believe in a God that listened to the
prayers of soldiers.
Steve crawled into a small hole dug into the side of the
trench, large enough only for one man. Each of them would be on his own now.
There was nothing any of them could do to help another, save tend to their
wounds should a shell fall too close.
It was times like this Steve prayed for courage. But his
fear distanced him from any chance at real communion with either his own
thoughts or feelings or some sense of an outer divinity. But he knew his
prayers were merely a way to distract his thoughts from the reality around him.
They were no different than the babbling of an inmate in an asylum, the
repetition of empty phrases that were nevertheless useful in soothing his
neuroses.
His prayers went absent-mindedly on as his mind disconnected
from his surroundings. He was losing himself, cutting off the outside world in
order to protect his mind from the fear that sought to overwhelm him. The bombs
continued to fall but never did they establish any kind of rhythm, never did
they fall when expected nor cease from falling when he felt he could take no
more. Sometimes, as he sat in his dugout clutching his knees to his chest, he
tried to will the bombs not to fall, as if he merely thought hard enough he
could have some control over the world in which he was forced to live. He would
pray and try to will away the destruction that always threatened horrors still
worse than those he was living through.
But prayers and mental distractions could never keep away
the dark thoughts for long.
He had seen bodies, too many to count, that had been near
the spot where a shell came to earth. He had seen men, some he knew, lying
lifeless, their bodies in contorted positions that might have been humorous had
it not been so real. He had seen bits and pieces of men lying all about and it
all seemed so arbitrary. How does a man’s arm get torn from his body and still
look to be in good shape?
Other times a man could be killed by the mere force of a
blast, so that he looks perfectly okay and yet something vital deep within has
been stopped.
The thing was, the first time he had seen a man torn apart
by an explosion it affected him viscerally. But now he had seen it so many
times, it was only some new spin upon the standard death by explosion could
make him react in the same way, and there were only so many different ways a
man could be scattered by the force of an explosion or by shrapnel. The others,
those who died in ways similar to those he had seen before, well their deaths
just seemed to accumulate in his subconscious, never bothering to register in
his conscious mind.
It was only in his dreams that he became aware of the dead
he had no time to notice in his waking moments. In his sleep they were given
his full attention. They haunted him, though he did not know why. He had not
killed them, did not wish them ill. Perhaps it was that they were jealous that
they had been taken while he yet lived. Perhaps, being dead, they knew things
he did not know. Maybe they stayed with him because they knew he was destined
to join them.
In calm moments, on leave away from the front, he knew such
thoughts were nonsensical. But here at the front, there was no sense, there was
only madness. The laws of the other world, the one he had known his entire
life, did not apply here. And the world he learned of here was encroaching more
and more upon that other life, making it less real. The two worlds could not
both exist. There could not be a world of forests when his eyes stared at the
cratered wasteland that separated the warring parties. He no longer remembered
what a tree looked like with leaves on it, could only visualize charred stubs
that reminded him of the blasted men who had passed through this way.
It would only be two days before he rotated out of the front
lines, but it was quite realistic that he would not live that long. And so his
entire world was a hole in the ground and the raining missiles that were sent
to destroy and kill.
It just started. It only just started. It would go on even
when the sun had set, would perhaps continue until the sun rose again. And then
the soldiers would come, hoping to sweep away all that opposed them.
The whistling of a shell brought his mind out of his dark
thoughts and into his dismal present. It was close. But not close enough to be
a danger, he decided after a moment. The anxiety that had risen in him began to
recede somewhat. He heard it fall to earth and explode with a violence that
raked his nerves even though he knew he was physically safe. Each bomb that
fell added to the anxiety that never left him, just as each bomb did some
damage to the Allied lines, their ability to defend themselves when the attack
began.
Hours into the bombardment, he began to feel a degree of
numbness. It was the most he could hope for, that the terror eventually
surrendered to a certain emptiness within him. He felt a great weariness, as
though he might be unable to stand up should the need arise. The intensity was
too much for a human to endure for long, so that the body began to shut down.
It was only the missile that seemed to approach too closely that snapped him
from his torpor.
The earth shook when a shell hit nearby. It was at such
times that the dead earth seemed the victim of the living, that all it wanted
to do was lie peacefully but was tortured by the living. It almost seemed a
cosmic dance, wherein the living allowed the dead no peace, while the dead
claimed more than its share of those who sought to disturb them. It was hard to
choose a side, hard to know whether it was life or death who was the enemy. It
was getting hard to know what side he was on, which he was fighting for.
