Shell Shock-Another Sample

Here are 1,200 words I wrote tonight, fresh of the press. Totally unedited, so please don't mind whatever mistakes there might be.

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.

Shell Shock Update

I've crossed the 90,000 mark on my newest novel, and while I'm not finished yet, I'm getting there. Here's a sample of what I've written today, with no real editing done to it yet.

Rothary climbed up on the fire step and with little thought or hesitation crawled out of the trench. Not far from him he saw the hole created by the mortar that had recently exploded, the crater still smoking. It seemed to be in the same direction of the wounded German, and so he made his way to it. Crawling the twenty or so yards, the occasional rifle fire sounding from both trenches, he rolled into the crater. Just in time, as he heard the sound of a flare being sent up. In a moment the sky was as bright as day. He clung to what shadows he could find in the depth of the pit dug by the mortar, the heat of the rocks and the earth making breath difficult.

The brief light faltered, making the night even darker than it had been. As soon as his eyes adjusted somewhat, he made his way towards the sound that had come to dominate his thoughts, fearful that another flair might expose him to the enemy.

The way was filled with corpses. Corpses and mere parts of corpses, so that he had to crawl his way over them to make his way forward. There was no path around them, it was a maze that must be crawled over rather than walked through.

More than one of the bodies he made his way around or over still had life in it. One breathed, quietly, as if sleeping. Another whimpered like a child with a fever. None of them mattered. It was the one he had shot that was the problem. It was he who had taken over Rothary’s mind, had replaced the fear with feelings stranger still. He called him on, beckoned him to see what he had done, promising to show him what he had become. They were connected. Whatever happened to the one affected the other. Whatever Rothary would do to the German would have repercussions that would be with him his whole life.

He crept along the battlefield—a man on a pilgrimage—in search of revelation. In the distance was heard some new bombardment beginning, a part of the larger war he was part of. But he was alone, now, just the German and he.

He located by his sound the man he sought. He was just one body in a sea of others, but his labored breath gave him away. Occasional gurgling sounds coming from fluid that was filling his lungs punctuated his breathing. He was nearing the end, but his body’s struggle against the inevitable stretched out the ending like a badly written play.

Rothary crawled alongside him, placing the man’s body as a barrier against any fire that should come from the enemy trenches. He looked into the man’s face, but like Cavanaugh’s, could only make out the barest of features in the dark night. Rothary’s sight only provided a framework for his mind to impress upon its own ideas of the man.

Just pain. That was all Rothary could see in the other. Whatever he had been in life had contracted into something so small as to be unworthy of being called human. Whatever he had been—husband, son, father—had drained from him with his lifeblood. This man who lay on a battlefield hundreds of miles from home was no longer any of that. If others in Germany believed he was, it was only in their imaginations. He was merely a dying man, an embodiment of the darker realities of life. He was not German or English, he was just flesh in its death throws.

And it was up to him to put an end to that pain that spread to all those in hearing range. Whatever regret he felt in shooting the man in the first place, he felt his duty now was to end the suffering. It was his duty as a soldier, as well as his duty as the one who had caused it in the first place.

He pulled out his pistol, placed its nozzle (?) pointing at the head of the other. He wanted to kill him, and he was still not sure why. Pity welled in him, but so did a hatred that may have been illogical but nevertheless was. War caused such feelings and he was not responsible for the war. Duty too spoke to him, about the need to do the job. He wanted to know, wanted to give this man’s death some meaning so that perhaps someday he could forgive himself, make sense of his life and move on when the war was nothing but a memory and a scar carved across the face of Europe. But more than anything he wanted to put an end to the horrible, gasping sound the other made. That was paramount in his mind. Rationalizations could be found later.

He stared at the other, his proximity that of a lover. He wanted to see, wanted to know, what it was he was killing. But the darkness kept the other in shadow, a mystery except for his agony: that, he understood too well.

This was not a stranger but someone he felt he knew intimately. He understood his fear, his hopes, his disgust with what he had seen. He was Rothary, he was no different than him. He was still asking questions as his finger tightened on the trigger, still hoping for answers. But as the violence erupted from the barrel of the gun into the other’s skull, he realized he had no answers. Nor did he understand why he had killed the other. He had no idea whether he had acted in fear or in hate, in pity or in despair. The gun fell from his hands as tears began to fall from his eyes. The breathing stopped but the horror it had induced did not stop. Nor would it ever. He would hear the sound of the other’s breathing as long as life remained in him. Each breath he took the other would be taking with him. Each breath he took would be torturous, would fill him with the loathing he had felt that day.

Disturbing Research For My Novel In The Making, Shell Shock

My upcoming book, Shell Shock, involves World War I, and I have been doing rather a lot of research on the war in order to make sure I produce a work that is factually accurate. Well, as factually accurate as a work of fiction involving supernatural aspects can be, I suppose. Like a video game developer, I feel the need to build a world with depth, therefore I have had to cover a lot of ground in my research in order to make sure my story has a wide open environment in which to play itself out. And when it comes to research, I always tend to overdo it. Part of it is a desire to create the best possible final product. Part of it, too, is a way of procrastinating doing the actual work of writing. Whatever the explanation, there will be a lot of notes I end up taking that will never make it into the book. Therefore I share with you now some facts which I have noted that I found to be interesting to myself. And when I say interesting, I mean deeply disturbing. Anything in quotations was quoted by those who actually experienced it.

In World War I, shovels were nearly as important as guns. They were used to dig trenches, in which the soldiers could hide from the near-constant bombardment of artillery, and they were used to dig graves for the millions who died in the trenches and in the area between the trenches, No Man’s Land. So many died in offensives that were nothing more than thousands running out into open territory to be mowed down by machine guns, that they often sat in No Man’s Land until the opportunity to retrieve them arose, which was sometimes a month or more. The dead were buried in shallow graves behind the trenches. As artillery was constantly blowing up both trenches and graveyards, digging new trenches would often mean digging through the corpses of the fallen.

The smell of the front lines “assailed you well before you could see it—a noxious compound of excrement, urine, smoke, cordite, lime, creosol, putrification.”

Rats, when corpses were scarce, would attack sleeping soldiers. When corpses were plentiful, they became gourmands, selecting only the finest bits of the corpses, which were for them the eyeballs and livers.

Factories in the towns behind the front lines ran saws day and night in order to build crosses for the graves of soldiers.

There were “Many on both sides who took a malicious pleasure in sniping at burial parties.”

When charging the enemy trenches, stopping to aid a fallen soldier was considered cowardice in the face of the enemy.

It was not the experienced troops who were better able to weather the storm of a sustained attack but the newcomers. "Rookies expect to become hardened by battle when in fact they are eroded by it."

After an attack, the cries and pleas of the wounded could be heard in no man’s land, but there was nothing their fellow soldiers could do to help them. To stick one’s head above the trenches would be as much as committing suicide, so one would have to not only endure the constant barrages, but when the artillery finally ceased, the cries of the dying would replace the sound of shells.

When possible, stretcher crews would go out into no man’s land and retrieve the wounded. It was not uncommon for a crew to pick up a wounded soldier but if another soldier was found who seemed more likely to survive, they would set the first one down in order to take the second.

Troops were given canvas bags in which to gather what they could and “often have I picked up the remains of a fine, brave man on a shovel, just a little heap of bones and maggots to be carried to the common burial place.”

“Limbs of the dead fell off as you lifted them. Bodies covered with a coat of flies that flew into your face, eyes, mouth as you approached.”

“Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get deeper cover their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position or blew up a new mine-shaft.”

Gibbs, Philip. Now It Can Be Told (p. 50).  . Kindle Edition.

“Nobody could stand more than three hours of heavy shelling before they started feeling sleepy and numb, like being under anesthesia.” By the time the bombardment stopped and the ground attack began, they were “ripe for the picking”. When in the midst of an artillery attack, it was too loud to talk, so that every soldiers was cut off from the other, each of them entirely alone with their thoughts. At the battle of Verdun, the French endured nine days of bombing. “By the ninth day, almost every soldier was crying.”

“Lulls in shelling brought the sound of millions of flies disturbed from feasting on the dead and the high-pitched screaming of rats.

“Shimmering cloud of flies smelling of corpses…choking the combatants with its fetid odor.”

“Bodies crawled with maggots, making a noise like rustling silk as they gnawed their way through some dead man’s guts.”

In the first day of fighting in the Somme, 57,000 British and British Empire troops were killed, wounded, or missing in action. “One could walk across no man’s land on British bodies without setting foot on the ground.” The 1^st Newfoundland Battalion lost 91% of its men in the first 40 minutes of the Battle of the Somme.

Shell Shock: Another Sample

A sample of today's writing from Shell Shock. To set the scene, Doug Slattery is in search of a missing soldier, and visits George Laderoutte in hopes of getting information:

At first it appeared that Doug was alone in the room. The sunlight lit the better part of the room, but made the areas untouched by it seem darker still by comparison. There was a chair on either side of a coach which faced the fireplace, which contained a fire, and in the chair that faced away from Doug, he could see a head above the chair’s backing.

Doug walked towards the coach before turning around and facing the figure in the chair. Fearing the worst, Doug was relieved to find the man in the chair did not appear too damaged, at least not noticeably so. There was a certain unevenness to his facial features, a certain tilt to the head that was somewhat disconcerting. His shoulders were covered by a blanket, so that Doug was unsure of what damage might have been hidden underneath.

“George Laderoutte?” Doug asked. Getting no response, he continued. “My name is Doug Slattery. Thank you for meeting with me,” he said, and reached out his hand to shake with the other. But no hand came from the blanket, the unbalanced stare not really telling Doug if the man had even heard or understood him.

Doug sat himself on the edge of the couch closest to the other, trying his best to appear comfortable and genuine. There was something about the appearance of the other that made Doug look away. He found his gaze instead focusing on the mantel above the fireplace, where family pictures were displayed. He saw one that must have been George, only slightly younger and lacking the glasses he now wore. Doug turned his gaze back to the man sitting in front of him, the shadows he was sitting in more pronounced due to the bright fire beside him. Still, the unexplained unevenness of his appearance made Doug’s gaze unable to maintain eye contact for long. He shifted his stare back and forth between the man and the picture of who he had been.

“I’d heard you were in the same battalion as Peter Rothary,” Doug talked, filling the silence the other was unwilling to break. “As you know, his is missing. Anything you could tell us of him would be much appreciated.”

“Peter,” said the other, the voice coming as if through a filter. While his face appeared undamaged, as he spoke the normal facial movements were lacking. He spoke from lips that barely parted, the words somehow formed from somewhere deeper inside him

“Yes?”

“You wish to know what happened to Peter,” his voice sounding as though it were coming through a telephone. “There is only one way to know what happened to Peter, what happened to me. What happened to all of us.”

“And what might that be?” asked Doug quietly.

“To know what happened to Peter you must see through Peter’s eyes, experience what he and I and a generation of young men have experienced. You must live in the trenches, you must know war before you can hope to know what happens to the soldier.”

Doug remained quiet for a while, wondering about the best way to approach his next question. But George continued.

“You…you are not much older than I am. Why were you not sent to the trenches?”

“I am an American,” Doug began, knowing that wasn’t an answer. The U.S too, was now at war. But the other did not bother to question his response.

“I do not judge you.” He was perhaps younger than Doug and yet he spoke to him as if an old man to his grandson. “You are better off not knowing. You are better not looking too closely at the truth. You have your health, you have your illusions. Live the life humans are meant to live. Do not go searching for madness, for that is all you will find, madness and death.”

“I am only looking for the truth.”

“Madness and death are the truth,” he said, the words coming out of him as from a dusty tomb. “All else is a façade. We paint over the unpleasantness, it is only natural. Man is not meant to live with the truth, any more than any other animal. We are meant to go through the motions, perform all the duties encoded in our genes. But there are abysses that are never intended for human sight. And when those such as myself are forced to gaze into it, we are not permitted to speak of it.”

“And yet I ask you to. Whatever affect it might have on me is not your responsibility but my own.”

George shifted in his seat, a hand that had been hidden by the blanket now gathered it about him. “My position in the war for a time was as a censor, you know. It was my duty to scan all the correspondence written by the soldiers to their family, to make sure the truth did not make it back to people such as you, who could not have accepted it.”

Doug did not wish to deny the truth George had been forced to see, yet he could not accept the answers he had come to. “Perhaps the truth would have helped put an end to the war.”

“That is what I thought. I couldn’t live with myself anymore, could not live with the idea that I was keeping the truth covered. And so I gave up my position behind the lines and was sent instead to the front lines to fight.

“But I was wrong,” he continued. “The fragile façade was all that mattered, and it has been irreparably shattered. We see now what we are, killers unable to control the machines we have created. We were too smart to be content, and yet not smart enough to grasp what it was we sought.”

“So you say. I do not deny what you have seen, what you have experienced. And yet your perspective is altered by it the way any other person’s perspective is limited by their experience.”

“If you had such courage you would have been to the front and seen for yourself. Then you might have the right to question me, but you would not. No one I have ever talked to has come back unchanged.”

Doug had until that time avoided staring too directly at the other. There had been something about him that assaulted his sensibilities. And Doug wished to respect what George had been through. But he made sure now to stare him in the eye, as if to directly confront the dark vision that was truth to him. Doug had not lived through the war, but he had peered deeply into the darkness that was inside of humanity and had survived and perhaps even become stronger because of it. He would not accept the other’s answer, would not look away merely because he feared the answers.

“I do not willingly look into the darkness,” said Doug. “I look for the light, it is only natural to do so. But the light I search for now is somewhere amidst the darkness. You may deny that any such light can exist, but it is my choice to believe otherwise. Will you not help me in finding what it is I seek?”

George unwrapped the blanket from his shoulders and arose from his chair. Doug had been concerned that he had been wounded in the war, was pleased to see he still had his limbs and the use of them. He walked to the mantel place, his back towards Doug. He picked up the picture of himself that sat there, stared at it for a moment as if trying to remind of himself of who it was he once had been. Then he removed his glasses, set them on the mantel, and turned back towards Doug and the sunlight.

Doug did not immediately look at George, looking instead at the glasses sitting on the mantel. It was far more than the glasses that sat on the mantel, and at last Doug understood. They sat in front of the picture of the younger man who wore no glasses. When George had removed his glasses he removed with it a nose, an eye, and part of his cheek. Doug looked now at the man in front of him and saw something he could not understand. How could such damage be done to someone and still permit him to speak? Doug could not put the pieces of the puzzle together, could not see how such a thing could have been created from the remains of what once had been a human face. How could the war have taken it apart in such a fashion? What blueprint were the doctors who operated on him working from when they attempted to reassemble it?

Doug stared without regard or awareness, unable to make sense of what it was he saw. Where before he could not seem to stare directly at the former soldier, now he could not look away.

“You wish to look at the truth. Then let us put aside the lies that try to make the truth more appealing.” The voice still sounded as though it came from elsewhere, but Doug now understood why. How he was able to speak at all was not something Doug could understand. He could not perceive of anything that seemed to be a mouth. “Where is your light in the darkness? What do you see in me that speaks of some deeper truth that is worth scratching beneath the surface?”

“I’m sorry,” said Doug, finally able to avert his gaze.

“It is nothing. It is but the surface, and yet you would wish to look beneath. You would explore the darkness, but you will find nothing.”

“I do not do so lightly. I have questions that need answering. The evil that manifests itself on the battlefields does not end there.”

“I will tell you what I know, but it will do you no good. Sooner or later you will turn your eyes from the truth. I have seen it so often, from men far braver than you, men who were willing to go to war and face their fears. When the war became too great, they looked away, refused to see any further. Something inside them flickered out so that they would not have to deal with the truth.”

“I'll take my chances,” said Doug. “Do you know where Peter Rothary is?”

“He is among those whose mind could no longer endure the light, who live instead in the darkness.”

“What does that mean?”

“He has found himself a bunker inside of himself which provides safety. He has discovered a shelter from reality. The world calls it madness, but they know nothing of it. The doctors who try to heal men up only to return them to war are the mad ones.”