I. I never thought that it would be quiet like this- an overwhelming silence that chills you to the bone. I've heard of too many a night like this, where a surprise attack from the enemy comes forth from the darkness. Every whisper that a fellow soldier mutters, every footstep in the sticky mud that squished in a nauseating squirt, is heard throughout the trench. I'm scared to go to sleep. I'm scared the echoes of blasting shells will fill my head and my dreams with the horrors of the world around me. The sounds: the screams of my dying comrades, the sickening whistle a falling shell makes as it plummets from the sky, filling you with panic and dread that in a few seconds your life could end, the alarming siren that sounds, screeching at us soldiers to put our gas masks on or die a terrible, painful death, drowning in your own blood, filling our minds with the paranoia that we would be next. It is too much for one soldier to take! Silence is the open door to the terrors of a broken mind. Broken minds are as common as broken bones on the front. I doubt the higher ranking generals know what its like to lose one's mind. "Fight and protect your country!" They say. Oh, but they are all the way back there in England where they are training more of us expendables to come and take our places when we are dead and dying. We are nothing but the pawns of the upper ranks. Sweat drips down my cheeks as I bite my lips. The hunger. next to the sounds, the hunger was enough to make a soldier break his mind. The rotting food they give us. they expect us to eat. Fit for only rats! But the rats. Ohhh, the rats. The giant, enormous, FAT rats. With their long, wiry whiskers and their filthy, jagged claws, they eat not only what we don't, but also the dead bodies strewn across no man's land and all through the trenches, getting fat off the flesh of our comrades, our friends. My friends- they're dead. All dead. Or dying. They don't have to think about this anymore. They don't have think about anything. They must be in heaven, forgetting about the hell of the war. I must endure this hell. This hell, where the living envy the dead.