This passage relates the horrors and madness of World War I, a horror from which we have yet to draw the appropriate conclusions:
He had read The Star Rover not long ago, a recent novel by
Jack London. London had described a prisoner bound tightly by a device not
unlike the one he had about himself now. The severity of his constriction
forced the character in the novel to turn inwards, explore the universe within
and find liberation. Whether it was insanity or revelation, he felt his
capacity to rise above the body Dr. Crenshaw had sought to restrain.
Some part of Doug knew the causes for his mental state. It
was some mixture of hypnotism, drugs, electric shock, and the constriction of
the jacket. But the combination was squeezing him out of the body he was
intended to inhabit.
Free from any identity, he was more aware of a larger
consciousness. He was more than an individual. He sensed the group
consciousness that existed within the asylum, like the blood of a community
that dripped from solitary souls and coalesced in a draining pool.
A mass of traumatized soldiers existing in an institution
that sought to cure what it did not understand. All the power of the analytical
mind attempting to understand its shadow, the unconscious. The cold,
calculating logic of science seeking answers to the random death and
destruction of modern warfare. To that end they applied powerful drugs and
electrical currents to force men to conform to the rules science sought to apply
to realms it had no business contemplating. Doug could feel it, the effects of
war upon the human psyche, upon its very soul. It was an illness, a bacteria
that fed upon the spirit, spread like a plague throughout humanity. It tore apart
men’s psyches as it did their bodies. It was not merely a phenomenon but a
living, screeching demon.
And doctors sought to understand it! Better they should send
witch doctors to help mend soldiers whose souls were blackened by war, men sent
to deal with the problems of a world incapable of solving its own spiritual
darkness.
He felt it, isolated cells containing truths no one wanted
to know. For the world to hear what they had to say would be to admit the truth
of its own sins. These inmates were the sacrificial lambs sent to the holocaust
to appease an unholy god. They alone looked into the darkest depths of
humanity’s soul, they alone were not permitted to look away. They found what
redemption they could in the love of their comrades, and when they came home no
one wanted to know what revelations they had seen.
He felt it, a thousand souls in anguish, augmented with the
insanity that had existed at Barrett Greens Asylum since its inception. He
felt, sensed it, saw it and smelled it. My God, the smell. He was surrounded by
the hell experienced by others. The collective consciousness of those who had been
bathed in war and would forever carry its stench.
He was floating again, gazing down upon a scene created from
the synthesized subconscious of those residing in the asylum. He stared at what
appeared to be a deep gash of a wound with vast amounts of blood spilling from
it. Then the picture slowly altered so that the slit was the opening of a
mouth, surrounded by red lips that smiled at him. The smile was terrifying, a
red laugh of one whose lips were stained by blood. The mouth seemed to open and
he felt himself falling towards it as it waited to devour him as it had so many
others. Within the mouth he could see the desecrated bodies of others it had
already chewed up and ingested.
As he neared it he saw he was falling to the earth, as if
the earth itself meant to swallow him up. At last his senses adjusted until he understood
what it was he saw, a trench hastily dug into the earth, a field of red poppies
in bloom about it.
His senses floated slowly downward, until like fireworks
exploding, they shattered into myriad pieces and fell to earth. Each of them an
individual in the vast war machine that sought to grind them into the same
pulp.
He was a thousand soldiers, each experiencing the same hell,
each intent on survival at all costs, like gladiators in an arena. He was an
underage boy who had lied to a draft board that was willing to look the other
way in order to meet its quota. He was a father of seven children, who had joined
in order to provide the steady income he could not find at home. He was a
million men, each with a story and a reason for living. Each of them called to
him, wanting to tell him his story, a story they dared not even tell themselves.
The voices pulled at him, overwhelmed him until he accepted their invitations
to look for a moment from each of their eyes.
Nearby birds chirped, while somewhere down the line distant
artillery could be heard. The heat of a mid-morning sun had already started its
work of drying the muddy ground and puddles that formed in the
cratered earth.
His clothing was soaked from last night’s rain, unbearably
sticky in the sun’s rays, his feet rotting in boots that never dried.
In front of him, had he dared look, were the bodies of his
comrades who died in their last attempt at overcoming the enemy, their bodies
not yet retrieved from the battlefield. So thickly did they line the ground he
felt he could walk from his trench to the enemy’s without ever stepping foot on
bare earth. Behind him, not more than twenty yards, were the graves of those
buried from the attack before that. The trench itself had been dug through some
previous graveyard, so that here and there in the trench a rotted limb or scrap
of clothing could be seen in the wall, dead comrades still unable to flee the
battleground.
A cloud of flies rose and drifted its way toward him in the
stagnant air. They carried with them the stench of the corpse they had been
feasting upon. Upon the dead soldiers armies of insects fed and bred. Flowers
grew upon the shallow graves, receiving nourishment from the dead. Rats too
feasted and grew fat on the carnage. Everywhere those that fed on death ate at
soldiers whose lives were wasted on futile attacks.
Further down the line, where the sound of shelling was
deafening. Soldiers gripping their legs tightly, the noise so loud that
communication with one another was impossible. Each soldier was left alone with
his own thoughts, each as isolated from each other as if they were locked away
in dank dungeons. There was no action to perform to increase one’s chance of
survival, one only had to endure. Looking at other soldiers he noticed them all
shrunken within themselves, crying like children with no mother to comfort
them.
Still further down. The call to go over the top is given,
and thousands crawl out the trench they had up until then been afraid to peer
over. They run into a barrage of machine gun fire, a hundred yards away from the
enemy trench. They run until they drop one by one or dozens at a time. They run
until all that they are is a single soldier who by some miracle of fate is left
standing. He runs alone until he is caught in the barbed wire in front of the
enemy’s trenches. There he sits, unable to move, awaiting the bullets that will
silence the terror that is screaming in his soul.
His consciousness is in touch with the stories of all who
have experienced the horror of it all. One after another they seek to tell
their tale. Each screaming to be heard, to be free from the isolation the war
has inflicted upon them, each a private hell. No one can understand except
those who have been there, those who know. No one would ever permit themselves
to understand, no one would ever willingly look.
The stories played themselves out in his mind, one after
another, a limitless supply of witnesses to the ultimate madness. Each vying
for his attention, each wanting to bear witness to what he had seen, voices
crying out in an attempt to make themselves heard over the exploding bombs.
The noise inside his head increased. He could hear the
screaming of soldiers until it became as loud as the artillery, until it became
the artillery. The fear that welled up inside helpless individuals became so
strong that it created a means of making itself heard. It created institutions
to give itself voice, and these institutions contrived the weapons that gave
them power.
But the weapons that gave power to some became the
instruments of torture to those who had to face such weapons, until an
ecosystem of death, not life, was created. Here the blood of soldiers dripped
from bodies to collect in shell holes. Here was a chaos without explanation—one
could experience but never give meaning to it. One could never understand why
one’s brother died while another survived.
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