Conscription

      A word of command has made our fellow man enemy. A word of command holds the fine line between peace and no man’s land. Such simple words. Charge. Rifle. Trench. Our ears are disillusioned with these small words that carry such tremendous burdens. None of us have gotten close enough to have seen our enemy. Whether or not they truly are savage, we didn’t know. We were made to think so.

         I grasped the murky nothingness that was once the earth, forcing my way out of the trench. How I managed to spring forward was a mystery like this war. The ground was a brown slosh underneath my boots. Stepping down in the mud was easy, pulling your foot out was a futile effort, making each step a conflict of its own. The word of command is to charge. I have to keep going.

         My footsteps kept pace with the screaming of the shells overhead. Like banshees in the summer heat they wailed. Crying for attention, finally receiving it from the anonymity of the location of its landing.

         A cry of gas pierced it's way through the chaos. Quickly, I reached and pulled out the emotionless mask, shielding myself. I fell. The muck wrapped around me with the love of a mother with her child. Others, hidden behind the false faces fixed their eyes towards to field. Whose side they were on, I didn't know. We all looked the same.

Soon the scorching air of my own poisonous breath within my gasmask began suffocating me, as the fumes cascaded down, setting ablaze to my throat. Through the glass eyeholes I looked outward into the deathly fog. Shadows danced wildly in the bleak haze. Towards me a silhouette became true. A boy, no less youthful of my self stumbled past me, tripping over his own entrails.

An order of charge broke the silence. It was washed away with the sound of the buzzing of the machine guns spitting their bullets. I have to keep going.

         I dashed towards the skeletal remains of a tree, pushing myself stubbornly against what little shelter it provided.

A leaf danced, threaded from a branch of the shelled tree. I gazed at life, mesmerized that it could find itself in the midst of madness.

         Showers of lead met the leaf’s frail, green skin as I fell with it.

         That was the day I embarked from the front. Stopping while the war held itself. The bodies sprawled, half sunken in the putrid mud whose shade, mixed with blood, appeared mahogany. The mangled intertwined with the obliterated and one couldn't tell whose trench these men once fought for. And through the clouds the sun, like us, was fighting for an untold distance.