Where Death Sings

sixteen // william

I lie face up in the trenches, staring up at the sky. It feels like the sun is out for the first time in days, and the blue sky is only adorn by a few white clouds. Although the temperature has dropped, I try to imagine and remember how it is to lie in the grass during a sunny summer day. I try to picture it before me. The sun's warmth caressing one's cheeks. The lingering scent of grass and flowers in one's nostrils. The cheerful laughter of children traveling with the wind. The birds singing their songs. The happiness.

   I can almost see it all, but it's a somewhat dull picture. It is not as vibrant as I wish it to be. I'm so used to the dullness of the trenches, a world without colours, that all I want is for the images in my mind to be bright and colourful. They are not. They are faded. And for all I know, the world might just always be dull and colourless to me. Everything is grey, brown and black here on the western front, and they might just be the last colours I ever see. I might not ever see a vibrant summer day again; the green grass, and the red, blue and white flowers.

   We rarely speak of what we had back home, and the memories we have from where we are from. The summers, the winters. Perhaps it's because we know that we might never go home again, or maybe it's because we want to hold on to our own memories. In all this chaos we don't want our memories to blur together with someone else's. Instead we save them for ourselves, hide them away deep inside of us and hope that we might see days like those again. Our memories are, after all, everything we've got left.

   I know that I want to keep my memories as stainless, pure and unaltered as possible, but there might be a chance that I paint them up to be even more vibrant than they really are. Or I don't, because in a world like this everything is more vibrant. Everything has more life. In my mind, my mother's food consists of more flavours. The nature is filled with stronger scents. And the soft words spoken by my parents as they tucked me in as a little boy are filled with more emotion and more love.

   Suddenly the shriek of a falling shell reaches my ears, and I throw myself down onto my stomach. I press my body close to the ground, breathing in the scent of the wet ground, and listen in fear as the scream of the shell continues. I beg, I don't know who I beg, but I beg someone to let me live. I beg them to make sure that the shell doesn't explode over my own head. In a way, I'm begging the shell to kill someone else than me. I beg it to spare me, and kill someone else in my company, just like they probably beg for it to kill me instead of them. We all hope that it's someone else. That it's not us. That today is not our day to die.

   There are days when we are lucky enough to be able to rise from the ground, unharmed. There are days when the shells kill someone close to us. And there might be a day when the shell kills us. When that day comes, and when that shell falls, death is inevitable; but today is not that day, at least not for me. The shell explodes, but not over my own head. I can breathe out and feel some relief.

   Someone who has never been in the trenches, who is safely back home in England, might have said that a soldier would feel happy about being alive, but I never find myself feeling happy anymore. I only feel relief. Relief that I'm still alive, relief that my comrades are still alive, relief that I don't have to suffer too much pain today. Happiness and war is a combination I don't quite understand. Happiness almost seems like a waste, and like something that can be taken away from you in a second. I can't feel happiness when I know that I can die when the next shell falls. I can't feel happiness when I know how many of us have died, how many of us who have been left behind in no man's land. I can't feel happiness when there is so much pain and sorrow in the trenches, but I can feel relief that for a moment I am well, and my comrades are well. That is enough to at least give me some comfort.

   I will never be free of the darkness provided by the war, or the pain, but the relief I feel in moments like these can sometimes be enough to keep fighting.