The Nightmare Without End

I look out beyond the wires, may as well be bars, and saw the glimmer of distant stars. High up in the sky, I saw the pale moon. Its glow filled me with warmth, it awoke a feeling of hope within me. It was the same moon my wife was looking upon many miles from here. She was probably standing by the window sill, staring at the moon in her turquoise night gown. Her black hair would shimmer in the twilight and her deep hazel eyes would be looking for me. I reached out to grasp the moon in the night. If I could simply reach it, I could touch her again. No longer would she have to wait, alone in the darkness. It seemed so far, as I reached out, it was almost in my grasp when my hand was swatted away and I was dragged back into a room with a yellow light sitting on a rickety table.

I was disgruntled, having been pulled away from the only solace I had experienced in a long time. My family was miles away while I was surrounded with the putrid smell of sweat, blood, and death about me. I could not even imagine the sweet smell of my far off wife’s hair. With all of the grizzled, defeated faces about me, I could not remember the glow and hope in my son’s eyes.

I itched at my raw scalp feverishly. The man who pulled me back in was a burly man of about thirty. He was a well-intentioned man named Adam. His eyes were wide with fear. Yesterday, in the afternoon, he watched as seven young men looked over the sand bag walls, inspecting no man’s land, hoping to see a white flag on the other side. They had just been shipped in along with some supplies in the morning. Before he could reach them, seven shots fired off and struck each of them through the skull. Blood and grey matter splattered in disgusting chunks onto my friend. He stood in shock, shaking from his failure to save these neophytes from their untimely death.

The gaping holes in their heads were too much to look upon, but we did not bury them deep as a man deserved to be buried. Later in the day, men now numb to death and suffering, would sit upon them as if they were benches in some deranged park. Many died at the hands of influenza and other diseases, but few were buried more than a few feet into the ground. The constant fear of an artillery or gas strike curbed any sense of humanity for these poor departed souls.

Death surrounded us on all fronts. Inside the “haven” of the sand bags and wires, we would lay down beside death and sleep with it in the night. It took an enormous strength not to scream every night. The last sight I would see by the lantern’s light would be the shocked look on a cold, empty face. Beyond the barbed wires and sand bags were the Germans, waiting to kill us and all of our brethren the moment the opportunity is presented. Needless to say, we were no different. If one more German was killed by our hand in a day, it was a good day. The thought sickened me. Death, death was everywhere, touching everyone. There was no mercy and no quarters given.

An untimely death, perhaps those boys experienced a timely mercy. I did not question the existence of hell in these days for we resided in it, there was no doubt. Instead, I questioned the existence of heaven. Every day seemed like an eternal misery. There was no end in sight. For days, we would wake in the early morning to ready our bayonets for an imaginary enemy charge, for no one was fool enough to come charging through no man’s land. We ate a meager breakfast and carried on with many mundane tasks such as filling the sandbags. Boredom was as much a plague as the constant itching of lice or the numbness of trench foot.

Five men sat nonchalantly playing cards, and puffing their cigars as they itched away at their raw scalps. They were waiting, waiting for what I wondered. To be saved? For tomorrow? For the end? Would these cards bring them any closer to their wives?

Would I ever see my wife and son again or would I drop dead first as those young men had? I stand the trials of hell every day in the hopes that this war will end and my family will be safe. I remember early on in the battle, a German lad was running toward me with his bayonet raised while many of his friends, and my friends, were running in the opposite direction. At times it was hard to judge exactly who was running toward death faster.

The young man running toward me had thick black hair just like my son, and had the same hazel eyes but these were filled with fear and loathing. I hesitated for a moment as he came screaming through the dust of a mortar strike. For a moment I imagined my son before me, I smiled, but my fantasy was quickly torn away from me. A bullet screamed through his heart and he coughed up blood, wearing the most pitiful of looks on his white face. I ran to his side, barely aware that this was not my son. I cupped his head in my hands and laid it in my lap.

He was coughing up blood. My eyes blurred from tears. My son was dying in my arms, choking on his own blood. “I’m sorry, I didn’t vont to keel you… but dis ugly thing, dis inhuman monster demands it. Vat choice do ve have my friend?” he asked me with a smile. The age in his eyes awoke me from my nightmare and I realized that this man in the dirty coat was a German soldier, but I also awoke to something else. In my arms was someone’s son, and he was dying. Somewhere, a man had lost his son.

I continued to hold him until the life faded out of his eyes. What choice did any of us have? War demanded us to fight. If we ran we would be killed by the onslaught or our own, killing us for our cowardice. No one enjoyed the killing, and everyone was damaged by it. “War is natural, it is part of the human condition.” Somehow, looking at the broken faces around me, and the hollow eyes, I doubt we are naturally inclined to kill each other.

Everyone was damaged as if a part of their soul had been torn out. Every bullet was like a piece of their humanity flying away until there was little left of them. No one left those trenches the same. When my time came to leave, I left a broken man. I held onto hope for as long as I could, but hope could not erase all of the red, all of the earth shaking bangs from my memory. The gnawing of rats on my slack hand in the night could not simply be forgotten.

I would lay awake in the nights as my family slept, rocking back and forth in front of the fireplace, remembering all of the fallen. They were used as chairs for the maddened living or eaten away by the rats at the eyes and kidneys until they were nothing but deformed flesh. I wanted to scream the first time I saw a rat the size of a cat bite into one of the young men who died from a mortar strike. I shot at the rat, but soon I realized this tactic was far too costly when ammunition came in at such a slow pace. In the nights I would whack at these fiends with my rifle, but every night they would persist, except for the nights where we cowered from a mortar strike. It was as if these demons knew when the blasts were coming. Some things cannot be shaken no matter how strong you are.

I sat in my chair praying that war would be a thing of the past. I prayed that my son would not have to know of war outside of stories told by old men like myself. This unnatural abomination must end once and for all. Knowing the horrors, the truths of war, I saw further conflict as ignorance and insanity.

I reached for a pen and paper beside my chair and wrote a letter to Adam, telling him about my son’s success in school, telling him how I wished so dearly that he could visit and meet my wife and enjoy her amazing roast chicken. It eased my pain to write, it was the only way I could deal with the nightmares that forever plagued my mind. So I wrote to Adam at 1 am until about 2 am. By the end of it I was so exhausted that sleep came over me gently.

I awoke at 6 am sharp as I had been trained. My hand reached out instinctively for my cold cup of coffee and I drank it like a man before an oasis in an endless desert. I looked my letter over and smiled. I walked over to the quite embers of my fire place and tossed the letter into the fire and watched as the black and white turned to ash. Hopefully the letter would reach him on the other side in a place void of war, void of pain. Perhaps he will give my letter to an angel who will find mercy on the lost people of this world and he will abolish it all once and for all. He will free us from insanity and allow us to live as we were meant to, as brethren, as humans neighboring and caring for one another. What does it mean to be a “German man” or a “British man,” what does it mean to be a “black man?” Are they not simply men?

If I were born German, would my friends have any reason to hate me? Underneath it all, was I no longer human, no longer Edgar? The German boy, who reminded me so much of my own son will never leave my thoughts. Every night, I kiss my son on his head before he drifts off to sleep. Every night, I pray for that boy’s father. I pray that he may find strength to carry on against the weight of losing that which was most dear to him.

Someday my nightmares will end, but will the nightmare ever end? Oh Michael, Angel of Mercy, find it in your heart to end this nightmare. Remove the veil from our eyes, this veil that makes us see each other as anything but human, never force us to kill each other’s children again. May we live beside each other as fellow humans, nothing more and nothing less.