“And did you?”
“Yes. I tell you though one thing drove me on besides my desire to escape the macabre nightmare. It was the idea of getting back and being in hospital with lots of young nurses mollycoddling me.”
“I can see that would have been an incentive, especially in the circumstances.”
“You’re not wrong. I crawled back after a few hours, even though I was in agonising pain and bleeding a lot. Then after yelling the password, ‘Pack of Marlborough’, I was back with the boys and being whisked to hospital. It was overwhelming. A bed and sheets. No mud. A beautiful old chateau converted into a medical facility. Food on plates and women, lovely women. Those nurses did it for me. Man, once I was there I couldn’t stop wanking. Even the old matron looked attractive after everything I had been through. If the bed had had a hole, then I would have fanaticised about that as well.”
“Well at least you wouldn’t have made it pregnant,” replied Ed ironically.
“Yeah, it wasn’t long till I was back at the front though, those fucking muddy trenches. Rats, worms and lice, that’s all that lived there. Even the trees and foliage bailed on us. Sleeping was another problem. It was virtually impossible in full uniform and with all that noise, unless you collapsed from exhaustion of course. There were positive aspects though; you didn’t have to wake up or get dressed in the morning.”
“I can’t imagine having to endure that. Even without the barbaric killing and murder it would have been hell. How did you finally get killed?”
“You know what, it’s fucking ridiculous. I had been over the top five times, penetrated into the German lines three times and spent a massive amount of time in the thick of it right at the front. As time went on I became more fearless, dehumanised and bitterly vengeful. I stopped being a person. Morality and caring became completely suspended for me. Hardly surprising when you are in a situation where two groups treat each other without mercy or compassion. Every event hardened me more and made me even more of an emotionless warrior. It started to get out of hand. Once on an advance we overran the German lines and trenches in a small sector. I stormed along the trench alone, ahead of everyone, bayoneting the enemy one by one without even thinking twice. Then I turned around a corner into a small recess in the trench system where Germans would sit and rest.
“There was a solitary German sitting there, motionless, his hands down beside him, completely resigned. I held out my bayonet towards him, about six inches from his face and shouted at him with as much spitting, screaming, frothing, ugly anger that I could muster. ‘Reach for your gun, you greasy cunt, fucking reach for it’. He looked unmoved and didn’t react immediately. After a short while he reached his right hand into his pocket. I instantaneously sank the bayonet into his head, between his eyes without even flinching. As it went in they bulged and became bloodshot before blood started flowing from them like tears of blood. I stuck my muddy boot in his face and pulled out the bayonet, wiping both sides of it on his small cloth hat. It fell from his head forwards onto my leg and into his lap. Then I reached down and realised he was not clutching a gun but instead had a picture of his wife and beautiful little daughter that he wanted to show me. I was crushed. In that moment I remembered the world I had forgotten. Trees and lawns, dogs and cats, birds peacefully nesting, colour, women, beer and happiness, sport and food, recreation, simplicity and love.”
“Christ, how did that make you feel?”
“Dead really. I knew there was nothing of me left. I had succumbed to the situation and had let the evil penetrate into my soul. My outer world had crumpled and it had led to a complete moral collapse. Everyone acted as vulgar and as cruel as one could imagine. From the various gas and fire weapons to bolts and bullets from the sky and bomb barrages that could last for weeks. It was an insane circus of horrors. I was completely confused. Soon we were pushed back by a fierce German counter attack and found ourselves back where we started. All that after a week’s fighting and God knows how many deaths. It was appalling. The scary thing was that I got used to doing all this stuff as a matter of course but could never honestly say ‘why?’ It just was not an option. You either did it and stood a chance of survival or didn’t do it and got shot by your own officers. Numerous times I saw that. I remember Johnny Briggs, a stocky little fella from Lewisham who had been a professional rugby player. He just sat in tears shivering in the trench when the whistle blew one morning, tears flooding from his eyes. The sergeant was adamant he must go over the top but he just sat there crying. I was thinking he would just leave him but he raised his pistol and shot him clean in the head, jolting his body violently backwards into the trench wall and down onto the muddy slatted wooden floor. I was already halfway up the ladder out of the trench and he looked over at me as if to say, ‘so fucking what?’ I was out of there and skipping over dead bodies like an energetic spring bunny before you could say ‘criminal bastard’. It was horrendous. That bastard was killed some days later in a gas attack. I watched him struggle with his gas mask and didn’t forward any help, even as he came towards me looking for mercy. The heavy yellow gas crept over the edge of the trench like a lumbering monster and engulfed him, causing him to cough and splutter with panic. I felt happy to know that he would die painfully over a few days, drowning from the fluid in his lungs. Fucker. How I had lost my humanity though on every level. I had decided I had had enough.”