Written after a trip to the battlefields of the Somme

The last entry of a dead man

30th July 1916

Have you ever been trapped in a bad dream, and not been able to wake up. What if you never woke up? Then you would get the living nightmare that is my life. Bursts of rattling gunfire, induces paranoia, each shell is meant for you, each bullet has your name on it. Lifeless dolls scatter the churned ground, faces twisted, wrought, damaged, yet still you know them, friends taken by the kiss of hot lead. Skittering horrors, grown fat off the bodies of the fallen, plague us in the dead of night. More and more are taken by Death, who stalks the plains, men guided into his clutches by the folly of rich toffs, groping for power in a war they don’t even fight.

The true inferno, twisted demons disturb men’s slumber, while shards of past realities distort dreams and derange minds. Truly wretched are we, the living damned, cursed to trudge through the grime of this Hell-on-Earth. For we darkened animals, humble dogs, driven blindly to the chilly embrace of death on the whim of a fool. For us death is the release, compared to this the house of Lucifer would be a Haven for our wasted souls, Satan, the saviour of us all.

What the thoughts had passed through our minds on the fateful day, when we enlisted in the armies of Hell, when we volunteered for suicide. For King and Country they said, to defend England they said, and we believed them. Don’t call me unpatriotic. I’d die for my country like any man should, but when you see what’s out here, you’d know. We aren’t saving our country, we are just men being sent to their death pointlessly, we are not winning a war, we haven’t moved a mile in a year, we are just fodder for a blood-thirsty general who is a complete incompetent. He says blood is the price of victory, fine I say, that is true, but think of a plan quickly Haig, think of one now. For it’ll be no victory if England is bled dry for it.

I right these words from the dank, rat-infested sewers that I now call my home. The smell of death is forever hanging on the air, the noxious stench wafted in by the winds of the land covered by dead, a place soon to be my final resting place. Not one of us fear death, we are too hardened to it. We see comrades fall every day, our lost souls cannot grieve in their prisons of iron and rock, held in place by the strength of death. Some of us wish we could, though, so they could still say to themselves, yes we are human. But they can’t. We are not human, we are animals fighting for our survival, the last shreds oh humanity ripped away in our desperate struggle to live. In our little world, these are dark times, dark times indeed.

So many good men lost their lives in these wastelands. My brother John, he fell in 1915. I remember it well; we were in the same platoon, under some light fire. We were hiding behind a ridge because although it was relatively light fire it was still enough to kill us if we even moved. We had no idea of where it was coming from, or enemy numbers there were. We were trying to get into a town held by the enemy, the name of which I can’t pronounce. We had spent over four hours there, and my brother, impatient as he was, instantly decided to climb the ridge to get a better view of the enemy. I pleaded him not to go, I even threw my helmet up, and he still wasn’t dissuaded when he heard the gunfire stream over us in response. He thought the enemy wouldn’t be able to se him if he just put his head over the edge. I pleaded and pleaded with him, but he wouldn’t listen. I tried to hold him down, so did the two other men who were with us, but John is a big man, well over six foot, and built strongly, and he quickly overpowered us. So there I stood aghast, watching my brother’s slow ascent to certain doom. I couldn’t stop him, I thought, “He will die, and it’s all my fault.” It’s a painful thing, to see family walk headlong into death, I was unable to speak, my mouth dry from fear, he was soon to reach the top, I tried to call him one last time but again my warnings were unheeded, dismissing them as nonsense. He reached up and pulled himself over the lip of the ridge and that’s when he was struck. The bullet struck him on the cheek, making a hole at least two inches wide. He flew back as he let go, carving an arc through the air as if it were a sheet of stone, scarring the land with his blackened blood. I reached his body and knew it was too late, his dead body lay still on the floor, his limbs wrenched into unnatural positions by the fall, but on his face a look of such calm at least I could take some consolation he didn’t suffer at all. Though something worse happened that day, the day I lost my humanity, such as happens to all of the damned cursed to this existence. He was my own brother, yet I felt almost nothing at his passing. I was sad for his folly was what brought him down, yet I felt no grief, I could not grieve the death of my own brother, such his my existence.

You may wonder why I write this now, these words, documenting our punishment for past sins. For it is my belief that we are soon to go over the top, as there as been a constant bombardment on German lines. They say it’ll completely destroy the Germans and the barbed wire. I don’t believe them, shelling never gets all the barbed wire, it usually just throws it up and down again in a worse tangle. Even worse I’ve seen German bunkers, and I know they are too strong to be destroyed by a general bombardment, it would require a direct hit to get it at least, perhaps more. So now I prepare myself for my final days, to be finally at rest, as Death finally gets me, on the fields of the Somme.