15-04-1921

I dreamt of my nightmare again. It was about that night. I sometimes wish I could just erase my memory, living without the constant reminders…it would be easier. Not having to remember them, screams almost drowned out by the constant drumming of the shells. Seeing my platoon, comrades, friends lying in the mud, staring at me with pale and empty eyes. Accusing me as more continue to fall to the rattle of guns, dropping down into the black wetness, into an eternal black void. It haunts me every night. Tracks me down, slings its slimy arms around me, and drags me down into the suffocating depth of muddy trenches filled with greenish smoke, thick as the darkness under my feet and all around me are those pale eyes. I am drowning. The smoke calling forth stumbling disfigured bodies, skin hanging like the half rotten corpses laying at my feet and eyes seeing nothing, but still I feel them on me. Accusing, begging me for answers I am unable to give. I try to flee, but the black slime and smoke drags me back again. It crawls its way inside me, sliding down my throat, choking me, digging itself into every corner of my body and burning it away, melting it like acid. It always leaves me as nothing more than an empty shell, numb to all, but those eyes. Remembering in the night, where I am condemned to witness it, again and again, and wishing the void had taken me too.

20-04-1921

I met Frederick today. He looked well. We talked a bit about the things that have happened since the war ended. I don't feel like it has and I think Frederick feels the same way. We didn't speak it, but the thought was there: "It will never be over." I'll always remember the nights spent in the trenches listening to the wailing and rattle above, forcing my thoughts to stay oblivious to seas of men dying for nothing more than a childish spat. "We die for our country!" We tell ourselves, clinging to the illusion that we are more than cattle herded off to slaughter. That our deaths will be more than just another life taking our place, condemned to the same numbness of war. A numbness not real, but more bearable than reality. The reality of being but a piece in a game that continued for nothing more than the players pride. A foolish game that cost not only the lives of the now dead, but also the living.

07-05-1921

"Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori" I think it only applies if you actually die. The fighting, surviving and living while no longer alive, makes it the lie you would like to have died for. My thought is this, when I hear the praises for the dead while I myself have been thrown out, left to rot in the gutters, sinfully wishing to have shared death with the ones who have saved me from it. I feel guilt for my thoughts, but I cannot make them untrue. I wish for it every time I wake from the numbing slime, slithering around me, drowning me as the eyes remind me of a battle long over, but never-ending. A constant reminder of the lives sent out by foolish cowards to fall at the hands of others who suffer the same fate. And me standing there in the midst of a battlefield surrounded by young corpses. Corpses of enemy and allies both, indistinguishable if not for the uniform they bear. Their empty eyes asking why, why are we here? Why are young men robbed of their future for a cause no longer true? And while I know the questions I cannot see answers, for the dark bloody mud is covering my senses. All I can do is hope. Hope that the dimming illusion that brought us there was more than just that, an illusion.

*Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. - It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.