The rain was beating on the window pane. It slowly lulled him to sleep.
Up to his ankles in mud. The crotch of his pants was wet, biting his skin from dried blood and earth. All around him, the trunks of the few remaining trees stood like bent skeletons or dead sentinels, witnessing silently the madness of humanity.
They had been ordered to move the line back. Reinforcements were taking their place. They traced gingerly across a plank bridge, muck and brown filling every pocket and hollow where shells had exploded, hitting or missing their targets with abandon. No one spoke. No one smiled. There was nothing to be happy about, save the fact that maybe, just maybe, they could grab a moment’s rest, sleep the sleep of the dead for just a little while, away from the front line. If they were lucky. Leave the fighting to the other poor saps for a bit. For a tiny bit.
And then, it would be their turn again. Back to the front.
‘Over the top,’ the orders would come.
And he would watch, too scared to sweat, too afraid to scream. Masking the insanity that bounced about his brain like a ball, he grimly looked ahead, looking calm and unaffected to all who stood about him.
Like fleas they appeared, over the ridge, picked off one by one, in twos or threes. Falling, dropping to the merciless ground, breathing a few agonizing moments more, or mercifully dead before the dirt met their faces. Smoke and the incessant patter of gunfire would surround them like a funeral cloth. Huge plumes of dislodged earth and the deafening boom of the blast.
Retreat!
The fleas scamper back to their tunnels of hell and misery, the scene replaying over and over again in what felt like an infinite loop.
Back home, the smoke stacks belch out their billowing plumes, sparks fly, women work with tireless energy, stoking the furnace of the Great War Machine.
And still, the men come, the fleas back and forth over the pitted earth.
And still, the blood flows.
A soldier hangs over a fence post, caught in the wire, his head drooping down as if to kiss Mother Earth. His helmet lies on the ground beside him. It will not help him now.
It does not matter which side a soldier is on. The soldier is a sacrifice to War, to the fruitless loss of human life. No one gives him a second glance if he falls in the fray. As night comes, the cold winds blow over him, howling, crying.
But the living soldiers do not cry for him. No, the living soldiers breathe a sigh of relief that they are not him.
They have been spared. At least, for now.
Fat generals, proud and tall, still give the orders to hold the lines, to move them forward, to pour the blood of their men upon this unhallowed ground, to obey at all costs.
‘Over the top!’
The orders come. They always come.
And once again, the fleas scamper across the ridge of the trench, bayonets in hand, to face the enemy who is zeroing in on them with machine guns.
The fat generals smile among themselves, smug, heavily-coated warriors.
A few hundred yards were gained, today!
Several thousand men lost, but those precious few hundred yards were gained!
Only to be lost, tomorrow.
The fat generals smoke their cigars, sip their wine, wax their mustaches, and make sure the orderlies shining their boots are doing a good job.
Over the top!
His bayonet slices through the chest of the warrior.
To his left, a man is shot.
‘One of ours’, his brain registers, and he watches as the hole in the other man’s uniform puffs a wisp of gray smoke.
The man screams in agony, dropping to the ground.
The soldier looks up at him, the mouth still open, and the dull eyes glazed with the jellied look of a blind man staring back.
PLOP!
The sound was unmistakable.
Mortar fire!
He scrambles for cover.
Was it ours?
Was it theirs?
It does not matter.
Beside him, a man is blown from his boots, scattering the remains in pieces that rain down upon him in blistering remnants of flesh and bone.
He awoke, screaming at no one, in his dark room.