Get In Line

I had never imagined that the sun would look as pretty as this.
Even covered by the clouds and the dirt it was the most beautiful thing in the sky. So eternal and tranquil in the trembling land in which I lay.
My ears rung and buzzed and for a while I felt or heard nothing. But I saw.
I saw my friends torn to bits, tossed into the air or turned to mulch by a barrage of never-ending steel, explosions and mud. So much mud.
It was so cold, and I blessed and cursed the numbness in my legs for refusing to give me rest. They were blue and tainted with the cold. The mud soaked them wet. It allowed the rats to gnaw on them and nasty illnesses to come in. Some legs were stubs.
Then my hearing returned, and I could feel my heart beat again and my hands tremble. They gripped something tight. An instinct.
Attack.

I smell smoke and dust and mud and blood and guts everywhere. And vomit too. The boy beside me, he can barely be older than sixteen, just threw up. I smell urine, streaming down their pants.
They would rather not be here.
No one deserves to be here, for this is worse than hell.
The sounds were like something from hell. Everything is loud. I can't even hear myself think. It was an assault on every sense. The shelling. The shells. The howling of bullets and cannons, artillery, and the screams. The short shots of simple metal bullets piercing flesh and tearing bone, ripping life from a body like how the grain was harvested every summer. I missed the grain. It had been days since I ate.
We had no more food. Our supplies had been cut and we'd been holed here for days. No food, barely any water, no medicine for our wounded, and the constant fear of freezing, or losing our grounds. Because of them.
Them.

I don't know where they came from. I don't know why they want so much of what is ours. But they'd come, and the country tasked us to defend our homes, and defend it we did.
At the cost of only millions of lives and land lost.
The ground is cold and the sky is cold, heated only by the fires of piles of burning corpses after a barrage, but the smoke and the gas is everywhere.
The gas, an unseen, deadly ghost who lashes and eats away at everything it touches, corrupting them, killing them slowly and painfully.
How I miss them.
I hear the screams all around me again and look, sitting up. I forgot where I was. I lay against a heap of something, hard mud, with my jammed rifle in my hands. My hat is somewhere on the floor and my scarf is still tight around my neck. The scarf makes me feel safe.
I drift away for one more moment. The scarf reminds me of my sister.
A sharp pain in my arm reminds me that it's time to go.
I've been shot. People lie beside me, clutched to the mud like their mother's breast. A man yells at them to do things but I cannot hear him.
Not with all this screaming. Not with the howling of the artillery and the cries of a distant friend for their mother, before a sharp shot ends his pleas.
We hear a whistle. I understand only one word of what he says. We have to go over this hill, into the forest where the enemy has a camp. We need to take that. A fort.
They shout something at us I don't understand and the moment my officer yells at us to go, we go. Clutching our rifles and trembling, some yelling a valiant battle-cry. I hear the commander shouting behind me to "Go!" before a loud explosion rumbles the ground beneath, and we lose our balance and roll over the hill.

We land with a hard crash on the ground, groans unheard over the barrage. Some are fortunate enough to land in a ditch, others scramble to reach a nearby haybale or a fallen log. Others are shot on sight. I hear a loud rattle of a machine gun. It must be close.
The explosion's dust hasn't even settled before chunks of the officer fall at my feet. That's his ear... I think.
My stomach churns and I resist the raw instinct to escape this hell. But it is all we have seen so far. It can't be like this everywhere, but I don't know where it wouldn't be.
My bones ring with the booming of another cannon-shot. These are different than the ones long ago. There are more of them. Endless. They turn anyone or anything to pulp in fractions of a second. And they feel so heavy, too heavy.
Blood is stuck on all of us, but on the artillery the most.

Under the buzz of my aching head I hear the rattle of the bullets and then a thundering of many, many boots. Horses trampling. Neighs. Whinnies. Cries as they are shot. More commands. More people crying for their mother. Cries gargling with blood. Coughing.
And that never-ending thunder of the bombs, and the guns, and the cannons.
We have to go.
And go we do, barely able to keep standing under the rumbling floor. We don't know where we are going... I don't. I follow the rest.
With the hunger, and the illness, and the fear, and the shock of it all, it is hard to feel or know anything.
We don't know how this will last.
We don't know if we will ever get home.
We don't know if we ever will see our families again.

That sharp pain down my arm is back, but I ignore it. I walk on, two hands on the rifle, step by step, in line with my comrades before more loud shots are heard right by my ear.
German screams on the far end, Russian screams on mine. And Latvian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian.
Maybe in another time we would have been friends. I wonder who decided that all these deaths needed to be dealt.
I aim, with trembling hands.
Click.
I didn't know it was jammed. I didn't know anything. I shrug and keep walking, not sure who to fire at anyway.

The sun shines in my eyes right after a rickety plane passes, and I stop and stare at it. I forget everything around me in exchange for this fraction of peace.
The sun is beautiful and tranquil in this land of all hells.
As I feel another sharp pain in my chest and I fall down, leaving my shivering allies behind in this maelstrom of blood and misery, I look at the sun, feel the softness of my favourite scarf and breathe in deep as the world falls to black around me, silent, still and peaceful. My scarf smells like sunflowers and mint. I think of home, of my sisters.
I had never imagined that the sun would look as pretty as this.