Where Death Sings

eighteen // william

I carefully observe the bright, red flower in my hand. I don't know a lot about flowers, but its beauty has me in awe and its bare existence in this cold has me fascinated. Such a delicate flower shouldn't be able to bloom this time a year, not when the late-autumn breeze bites your already cold skin as it embraces you. The flower should have bloomed along with the rest of the flowers this spring or early summer. But the red flower, that is just as beautiful and vibrant as an entire field of flowers in the summer, makes me wonder if maybe it's the nature's way of telling me, telling the world, that despite the death and the suffering, there is still beauty.

   I have spent enough hours pressed to the ground, breathing in the scent of the earth, to know that this planet, the nature, is very much alive. Maybe this flower, probably the last flower of the year, is meant to remind us of the beauty in this world, even here where everything is dark. Maybe it's meant to motive us to keep fighting, to be able to see that beauty again. There are so many conclusion that can be drawn from the life of this one flower, or maybe I have just spent too many months, too many years, by the front. Maybe my mind is trying to find any excuse to see something good in the world, to see that everything isn't completely lost even though it often feels like it. The flower has survived the winter, so maybe that means that we can survive what winter is to the flower; the shells, the bullets, the gas. Everything that is trying to prevent us from blooming, or in this case, growing up.

   The most logical reason is obviously none of which I think, but the thought of the flower being a symbol of strength in harsh conditions is a whole lot better than just seeing it as a meaningless coincident. Right now, I need all kinds of convincing that the world isn't going to end in darkness and despair, and the flower is doing a good job.

   I only have a couple of days left in the reserve trenches before they move me to the front-line trenches again, and I would like to think that if this flower can survive the cold then maybe I can survive another couple of days in the trenches. After all, if I do survive the trenches I get to sleep in a bed again. At least for a couple of days.

   I open the chest pocket of my uniform and take out one out of the two envelopes I have in it. The letter to my family; my parents and my two sisters. It's the fourth letter I have written to them, but it an almost exact copy of the three previous one. That's because I never send the first three ones, they weren't meant to be sent, at least not yet. But they didn't survive the action in the trenches. I lost the first letter in no man's land when my pocket was torn open by something. The second letter got soaked in both water and blood after I fell into a crater. The third letter survived longest of the first three, but in the end my pocket wasn't enough to protect it from the conditions in the trenches.

   The fourth letter is just a couple of weeks old, but it contains everything I want to tell me family in case of my death. There is a possibility that they will never receive the letter. I have asked a couple of my comrades, including Cook and Elliott, to send it for me if I die, but I know that they might not be able to send it. Not all of us die among comrades who can transfer your dead body away from the front, and take your letter before they do so.

   Suddenly distant shouting reaches me where I sit in the reserve trenches. The shouting travels with the wind, and when I can make out the word that is repeated being shouted, panic and fear arise in me.

   "Gas! Gas! Gas!" The words move closer to me with each second that passes, so does the gas. I can see the gas just beyond our front trenches, a yellow-green wall of gas heading our way. I swiftly, yet carefully, place the vibrant follower in my envelope along with my letter and put it back in my chest-pocket, never taking my eyes of the approaching gas as I do so. Then I pull out my gas-mask and pull it over my head.

   As the gas fills our reserve trenches, and I sit curled up against the wall, there's only one thought spinning in my mind: Is the gas-mask air-tight? Is it air-tight or will I end up like those poor souls in the casualty clearing stations who spend day and night coughing up their own lungs. Or as those who doesn't cough, and just lie in bed struggling to breath as they come closer and closer to death.

   It doesn't take long until my breaths are strained inside my gas-mask as I breath in the same, hot air I breathed out a second ago. It's an almost suffocating feeling, and the lack of oxygen in my mask causes my head to pound and my lungs to burn. I want to rip off my gas-mask and take a couple of deep breaths, but the air around me is still dominated with gas, and the wind is not strong enough to carry it away from the trenches.

   It takes at least a couple of minute, although it feels like hours, before I can see someone taking their mask off. I observe the soldier closely, waiting for him to react to the possible poisonous air around him, but he remains on his feet. When he doesn't collapse, or react in any way that indicates that the gas is still present, I push myself off the ground and pull off my gas-mask. It's still possible to smell a faint scent of the gas that just passed through our trenches; a combination of pepper and pineapple. A scent I have smelled before, and probably will again.