Writing as Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front.
Sitting in the trench feeling cool, wet, sticky and dirty, I listen to the fire of the shells. I take a gander to my right and left making eye contact with just a young lad, no more than age 18. He looks at me with great distress, and seems very frantic. I can see the sweat pouring out beneath the edge of his helmet, causing a sheen on his forehead.
The young lad looks at me and with the softest of voices, like a bird chirping at the top of the morning, says something in a dialect of German, maybe Austrian that I don’t quite catch the meaning of.
As quickly as I hear the shrill of his voice, we are all supposed to shoot. I look at the man with a confused facial expression, and shake my head, unable to interpret what he wants of me.
As I sit there and continue eating and sorting my rations, I realize that his gun is jammed. He’s fiddling with the rifle, loading and unloading, trying to get the clip in the right position.
He fires. Nothing. He tries again, only this time puts the bullet clip in upside down. I know that this will be a disaster. The bullet won’t come out, and it will backfire right in his hands. His hands will be blown off, shreds of flesh pale against the harsh, red blood angrily escaping its place in the body. I know. I’ve seen it happen. A side-effect of our inadequate rifles.
Suddenly, I hear a roar in the distance, hear screaming getting louder as it closes in on our position. Smoke rises into cold autumn air and I see over 200 men running and shooting rapidly at us. I watch as one gets thrown 50 yards after a shell lands in front of him. He’s a goner.
I grab my gun out of the dirt shelf I made with the clay in the trenches and run over to the lad who was yelling at me. Up closer I recognize the dialect, and I can tell that he’s telling me to shoot.
Still fiddling with his gun, trying to unjam it, I groan and throw my perfectly armed rifle at him. As I take his issued gun in my hands I get to work on cleaning the barrel, hoping that the jam is because of build up, rather than a complete malfunction.
It is at that moment that I hear a crack and feel burning on my right calf. At first, the warmth is welcome against the cold damp trench. But then, the pain fans outwards to my knee, to my toes, and up through my thigh. I cringe and grind my teeth to avoid screaming. The enemy will not hear that out of me. I will give them no satisfaction.
I get my breathing under control, trying to control the pain. The man I gave my rifle to looks at me. I tell him that I’m fine and to keep defending the position. He doesn’t listen and stands up. Rooky mistake.
When he stands up I scream “NO!” hoping that he’ll crouch back down and protect himself from a wide open attack.
My shriek comes too late, and the young lad takes a bullet between the eyes, his brains covering the back of the trench wall. At least the rats will be happy.
Knowing that the young lad is dead, I look down at my calf to assess my injury. Just a graze, but enough to keep me away from the front lines. I wrap a bandage around it and fasten it with a knot.
I can see the red stain soaking through immediately. And I sit there, helpless as a duck, until help arrives.
As the sun rises, the firing from both sides stops. It's so silent that a drop of rain would disrupt this fragile peace.
Men find me and carry me to the medical tent on a stretcher, they wish me good luck as I am sent home.
***
End of Flashback
The year is 1929, nearly a decade since there was peace following the Great War. No matter, the war will never leave me. I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking of the horrors of the trenches.
I can still smell the scent of freshly putrefied flesh as it disintegrates into the earth looking for peace. There is no peace for the living. You never really survive the war.
I am a shell of myself. The shells took the lifeless spirit from my body leaving me a shell of a man. How ironic. You never really escape the shells. They keep bombarding you, hoping to kill. They say I’m lucky, call me a hero for avoiding death. Luck? There’s no luck, only condemnation to a life not worth living; my soul is buried deep within the earth in French fields, covered in layers and layers of dirt and clay which were thrown over it from shelling after shelling. I’ll never find it. The devil will be waiting, holding it captive to serve me with my penance for my sins.
Murder. State sanctioned murder. I was told not to think like that. That what I did was noble, gallant. Its still murder. Crap covered in candy is still crap.
And yet, for all the parades and cheering as we marched off to war, who is left to remember? Me, I will never forget. Neither will any other man that saw the face of death and lived to tell about it. We are walking corpses, waiting to expire, waiting for death to finally grant us peace.
But, no one remembers. People bash the war. Said it should never have happened. It shouldn’t have. Doesn’t make a difference now. It did happen. Remember it. Don’t let it happen again.
Society is all too quick to judge, too quick to say it was the result of imperialism, one of the last thrusts of a dying breed of empires hoping to gobble up the land of those which cannot exert their own being. They don’t remember. They demonize the old world. Blame it on a lack of education. We were educated. We went to war. We died.
In a last ditch effort to avoid permanently implanting my brain with a piece of metal peace, I talk to a therapist. It's a foreign experience, more foreign than the taste of chlorine gas blistering your tongue.
He suggests I write my feelings on paper. That I tell my story in a medium through which I can express my soulless emotions.
So here I write how I feel, through the character of Paul. Paul, a normal German boy who knew nothing but country and honour. So young, so impressionable. I’ve come to realize that Paul’s story isn’t one which is nationalistic. No, it is one of manipulation. It tells the story of the effects of the Great War. I contemplate not even mentioning that he German for this universal truth could easily be the tale of a French or English lad. For this is not an accusation nor a confession, but a story of how young men marched themselves to death all in the name of country.
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