WAR
There were just three of us left in this mud pit, standing knee deep in sewage and vomit, a long slit of a trench shared with voracious, menacing rats scavenging whatever food we had yet to eat, daring us with rabid teeth to claim what should be ours.
The trench we now called home used to hold thirty of us, but now, after four years of relentless, bloodied war, there were only three of us soldiers remaining.
Where the others are is not certain, but when our time comes to climb the ladders to ‘go over the top’ and move forward towards the enemy across a field that no longer grows anything, if we make it far enough, I expect we will be walking on the pieces of our comrades that will be all that is left of them.
Best not to look down, lest one sees the eye no longer part of any face looking back at us, questioning, wondering, asking, is this all, is this what it was all about?
On we will go, trudging through mire, scrambling over wire, dodging machine gun fire, that eye, as sightless now, as mindless now, as mindless, and sightless as those who put us here, will follow us on our last walk and sigh for us. Are those bullets dancing across the field towards us coming for us?
This is how wars are fought. If field marshals and generals stand a vast army with fixed bayonets on one side of a field, and if other field marshals and generals position a vast army with fixed bayonets facing them on the other side of that same field, and when the bugles blow and all the slaughtering and killing is done by both armies, if there are then ten broken men, dragging their rifles, standing alone in the mud and gore, that will be considered for time immemorial by the field marshals and generals of those few soldiers, to be have resulted in a great and glorious victory.
Future distinguished military historians will write myriad pages chronicling a grateful nation’s acknowledgement of its glorious dead, their accounts embossed in hard, leather-bound annals to be shelved in libraries across the land under the category of, Great victories won in glorious wars.
But that sad, reproachful eye, witness to the loss of a generation of men, will be sightless now, churned and trod with the nailed boots of a million other men, no longer parts of any living beings, no longer suffering, returned to the earth from which they came. No medals awarded to that eye, and no promotions either.
Kenneth Jessett
There were just three of us left in this mud pit, standing knee deep in sewage and vomit, a long slit of a trench shared with voracious, menacing rats scavenging whatever food we had yet to eat, daring us with rabid teeth to claim what should be ours.
The trench we now called home used to hold thirty of us, but now, after four years of relentless, bloodied war, there were only three of us soldiers remaining.
Where the others are is not certain, but when our time comes to climb the ladders to ‘go over the top’ and move forward towards the enemy across a field that no longer grows anything, if we make it far enough, I expect we will be walking on the pieces of our comrades that will be all that is left of them.
Best not to look down, lest one sees the eye no longer part of any face looking back at us, questioning, wondering, asking, is this all, is this what it was all about?
On we will go, trudging through mire, scrambling over wire, dodging machine gun fire, that eye, as sightless now, as mindless now, as mindless, and sightless as those who put us here, will follow us on our last walk and sigh for us. Are those bullets dancing across the field towards us coming for us?
This is how wars are fought. If field marshals and generals stand a vast army with fixed bayonets on one side of a field, and if other field marshals and generals position a vast army with fixed bayonets facing them on the other side of that same field, and when the bugles blow and all the slaughtering and killing is done by both armies, if there are then ten broken men, dragging their rifles, standing alone in the mud and gore, that will be considered for time immemorial by the field marshals and generals of those few soldiers, to be have resulted in a great and glorious victory.
Future distinguished military historians will write myriad pages chronicling a grateful nation’s acknowledgement of its glorious dead, their accounts embossed in hard, leather-bound annals to be shelved in libraries across the land under the category of, Great victories won in glorious wars.
But that sad, reproachful eye, witness to the loss of a generation of men, will be sightless now, churned and trod with the nailed boots of a million other men, no longer parts of any living beings, no longer suffering, returned to the earth from which they came. No medals awarded to that eye, and no promotions either.
Kenneth Jessett
and don't "live stream".
