I could never have imagined my life to be a chronical – a horror story of unimaginable nightmare and none of it my own making. Childhood was carefree, happy, even the ‘terrible teenage years’ were an absolute breeze, no problems within our family, nor troubles with the law. Disaster arrived on the doorstep with a letter from the Ministry of Defence – at the great old age of sixteen years, I was conscripted, my friends likewise, we were destined for war, unintentional canon-fodder at the front, the great military war machine was rolling across Continental Europe and we were to become it infantry wheels.
Wrenched from town, country, and city alike, green young men of all walks of life were kitted-out, packed on trains in sardine-fashion and shipped of in boats, across the English Channel, to fight the good fight for King and Country, to annihilate, maim, and kill, if at all possible, our neighbours across the water.
Quite literally thrown in the deep-end we landed, stumbling into a morass of mud, blood, and guts. There was barely time to wade ashore before pieces of our troop were raining down in bloody chunks. Carnage - total merciless, bloody carnage from on-high. Novice soldiers lucky enough to reach the trenches suffered shell-shock, and not even the regulation gas-masks could prevent inhalation through hastily manufactured, inefficient rubber seals, of the deadly seepage of throat-clogging, mustard gas. Almost immediately trench-foot toes, gangrene, poor sanitation, and incessant cold rain took their toll - recruits suffered and died.
Officer’s whistles, commands unspoken, blind leaps of faith, over the invisible wall, deafened by exploding shells, whizzbangs; sightless in impenetrable stinky fog, riddled full of bullet-holes, bleeding in the quagmire, mortally wounded, prostrate in a nightmare world of exploding shells and gagging yellow gas - I was blasted to smithereens.
My bodily remains were not repatriated - no way to identify the mortal remains of so many soldiers: young, experienced, commissioned officers, raw recruits, seasoned soldiers, or war correspondents, we were all one in the general soup of muddy, rat infested broth of decay. Unrecognisable as men, human- beings, friends, or foes, once Marshall Death raised his killing scythe, we became one and the same – no differentiation between flesh, blood, race, or creed.
Bodies of the glorious dead were left where they fell, to feed the postulating covid populations, to nurture the fields of proliferating poppy flowers that blanketing bones. The tufted hillocks, scaled and scared, deep trenches where soldiers lay prostrate: injured, trampled, in death - covered – a living carpet of proclaiming life ever-after greening.
Time passes, atrocities are forgiven if not forgotten. Body residuum lie quiet and at peace beneath the beauty of skies that stretch to distant far horizons - many such field are places of pilgrimage, devoid of markers, names, graves, filled with a poignant sadness.
Before the beginning, before the war, before the end of everything, life was golden, blessed, worth living, even if it was sixteen short, precious years.
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Please Remember Me.
Bio:
Janet Stoyel is a Practicing Wordsmith. After a long career in Textiles, Janet now focuses her attention upon Creative Writing. Janet writes for the pure appreciation and joy found in language: in letters: words, sentences, she chooses, organises, weaves, and constructs, her written vocabulary into her distinctive freeform language.
Janet lives in a small Somerset Village in the UK. It is a sleepy, rural area of Wetlands noted for the growing of Willow and the making of baskets – a great place to write!
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