Waiting

Or: Three Soldiers on the Somme (a short story)

Private Red is seventeen, a brawler miscreant from the streets of Birmingham.

He’s missing a few teeth and brain cells from his back-alley pugilism. He sleeps balled up under his great coat exposed to the rain and snow. He doesn’t feel the cold, or much of anything else except the pain. And even that has lost its impact under present circumstances.

See him place a mud-caked boot onto the parapet, the men around him trembling as they wait for the lieutenant to blow his little brass whistle. Overhead the shells shriek toward the German trench, softening things up. The men around him think of barbed wire and machine guns. 

Sergeant Red thinks only of his mum. The smell of her perfume drifts through the acrid smoke, along with grassy notes of Sunday whiskey.

The infantile lieutenant blows his little whistle and Private Red is the first over the top. The machine guns strafe the lines but he weaves through the hot lead and reaches the German trench, two grenades clutched in his hands. 

He tosses both just as a bayonet pierces his guts. The grenades explode, shrapnel felling his killer with him.

As his blood seeps into the muck, his mind drifts across the fields of France and the foggy English Channel, to Birgmingham’s catacomb-brick streets 

The mud consumes his body, the remnants of which some Belgian amateur archeologist discovers a century later.

***

Private White returns to the front after a week of respite. His friends are dead and buried somewhere out there in a shell hole. It rained in the night and they floated to the top, rank and bloated. He prays for them and something like a god lays a warm hand on his brow. 

It could be God. It could be some projection of a god. He’s not sure. He wonders if God could even stand the mud here, but stifles the thought. Private White knows he needs all the help he can get.

One night, he’s manning a redoubt that guards a communication trench and he hears the creaking of barbed wire somewhere out there. It’s windy, so he doesn’t pay much mind. 

But then he hears the unmistakable crunch of boot leather on frozen dirt. 

He slaps the gunner’s helmet and the gunner starts pouring lead into the vacuum of the night. With every muzzle flash, he sees parts of men leap into the air, and whole men inch closer. Someone at the rear sends up a flare and he can see that six men are still on their feet, coming at a dead run.

The gunner makes quick work of all but two who plunge into the redoubt where the machine gun is God. 

Pistol shots end Private White’s reverie and the gunner is taken prisoner.

***

Sergeant Black wakes up somewhere on the Somme. Frost cracks and sloughs off his mud-caked great coat as he fumbles through his pockets for a cigarette and matches. He composes a poem in his head—something about the moldering earth and the moldering bones. He’d write it down but his fingers are too cold and his blood too devoid of nicotine.

He inhales the smoke and with it the decay of two soldiers, whose rotting bodies had floated to the top of a nearby shell hole.

The cold and the nicotine hit him at once and pass right through. He shudders as a machine gun shudders somewhere across No Man’s Land.

His grief is profound. He feels its jagged edges grind around inside him like shrapnel as he moves down the trench. 

Sergeant Black knows what’s coming because he’s seen it before. This is his place and time as it has been the place and time of other men like him, long before artillery. Long before gunpowder. 

It’s not bravery or courage that Sergeant Black feels. It’s the weight of something like knowledge. He knows a lot for a man who just turned 19.

In his home village, they’ll dedicate a church bell in his honor and it will ring for centuries. 

But Sergeant Black doesn’t know this. He just knows that the cigarette is a bit of comfort. He knows that France is not like it once was, but then again, what is? He knows that existence is a liminal space that wavers like No Man’s Land. It can’t be held.

But he can hold onto his grief. So he does. 

And he waits. And he grieves.