the Trenches; a description of WWI Trench Warfare.

I can't hear, and yet at the same time I can hear too much. The resounding explosions of mortar over No Man's Land make my ears ring, but over the ringing I can still hear the yells and shouts of a hundred men. That's not all the time though. Normally we sit in a cramped room, so small that we lay to sleep almost shoulder to shoulder. It is for this reason that none of us freeze in the night. Rats gnaw at our ears and noses, the sizes of which rival that of a small dog. The smell overpowers the most iron fortitudes, reducing most new recruits to fountains of bile, spewing their insides over the walls and floors of the thin, muck ridden trenches. The smell rises from the urine in the soil, the rats and their feces, and the bodies on which they so ravenously feast upon. Bullet wounds the size of quarters apear in the skulls of the unfortunately curious fools who dare peek over the edge of the trenches. Those who do and do not get shot see the endless stretches of No Man's Land, barbed wire coated in dirt, or blood, and the craters from mortars. Sometimes he can catch the dust jumping from a bullet that, more often then not, was aimed between his eyes. We cannot bathe, because the water is better for drinking. Bathing becomes unimportant. But what really drives us mad is the impending doom, the boredom of sitting in the small room, nothing to do, no chance of escaping alive... It's maddening. One man ran over no mans land and died from the bullets of the enemy, blood peppering the ground underneath his broken body, as he cringed on the ground moaning weekly. I had no choice but to put him out of his misery. He had bullet holes all over his stomach, chest, and legs. I had to put one in his forehead. His body went limp after that, and lasted about five minutes before becoming a schmorgesborg for the voracious black rats that littered the craters and trenches, infecting our food and water, and being an overall nuisance. The charges were no better. A comander would call a charge, and a thousand men would run accross the expanses of No Man's Land, which could have been a hundred meters wide. Two hundred made it to the enemy trench. Nobody who ever led a charge, or even participated in one, survived. They all died. Their bodies littered the fields, soiling them with blood and gore. Parts would be scattered everywhere, rotten entrails torn from bodies that exploded because of a mortar or grenade, or bodies that bled from bullet wounds that covered their whole body, mowed down mercilessly by the enemy machine guns. But the worst were the ones with only one wound, those who still weren't dead, those left to die from exposure out in no mans land, getting eaten by the mice, slugs, bugs... To die painfully, slowly, in a drawn out fit of agony, unable to scream, and no salvation to relieve them. But some didn't die from their wounds. They died from diseases, passed by fleas, or rats, that caused severe pain and fevers. Or trench foot, the infamous fungus that rotted your feet to the bone, reducing you to a crippled husk, whose pain could never be comprehended. But enough about the past. Now is more important.

I'm shooting from the trenches, aiming for helmets, anything that moves. But nothing moves, for nothing that wishes to live ever moves. My brother stands next to me, also aiming. He talks of home, and I'm almost sick with longing. I tell him to shut up, and he does. War is grim buisness. A wind blows over and suddenly the shooting stops. All is momentarily silent. BOOM! and my hearing is gone. I touch my hand to my ear, and it comes away warm and red. I cannot hear anything. I cannot hear my brother yelling about the incoming mustard gas. It fills the trenches from the bottom. My brother makes to climb out of the trench, but he goes down with a bullet in his leg, falling into the trench, coughing and screaming, a gurgled and warped cry of agony. I, too, begin to feel the pain, like someone has filled every part of my body with hellfire. My eyes burn and I cannot see, my hands begin to blister. I briefly see the shadow of someone standing over my brother. I see him get shot in the head; probably to be put out of his misery. Then the figure steps over to me.

kill me, I gurgle, the words burning as they escape my tortured throat.

The pain disapears, suddenly. All is silent and dark.