First descriptive essay ever!
This is part of a brand new series I'm working on. All consist of one word titles and not all are related to WWII. Welcome the change? They'll all be about war though. Hopes falling yet?
***


Boom. BOOM. The distant, continuous roll of the artillery barrages seemed out of place in the quiet, peaceful countryside; the bright, huge ball of fire that was the sun blazing down on the lush green grass that hadn’t yet been ravaged by the horrors of the war. Animals – rabbits, squirrels, mice and various other creatures of all sizes – scurried around in an intricate maze of tunnels dug through the rich, healthy earth. A couple of cows mooed and chewed their cud thoughtfully, staring at the two figures strolling down the hard, cobbled road that was usually used by horse drawn carts. The two men were out of place in the countryside. They carried guns and helmets, and numerous belts of ammunition were wrapped around their shoulders. The two were decked out in uniforms, the British flag proudly displayed on the younger man’s uniform.

The younger man looked blissfully unaware of the war raging on the other side of the country. He had the very obvious look of a greenhorn, a rookie who was itching to fight and probably hadn’t seen battle before, let alone killed a man. Bits of curly, sun streaked blond hair peeked out from under his helmet and his light blue eyes were wide with wonder as looked around the tranquil field, probably wondering how such a place could exist with a war going on at the same time. He was but a baby to the veterans, barely seventeen, with round ruddy cheeks and a sprinkling of freckles across his cheery, perpetually smiling face.

The older soldier, nearly half a head taller than the boy, was this year twenty one – young, perhaps, but he had seen the battles. He had seen the bloodshed, the terror and the fear in the men’s faces, the plain stupidity of the charges across no-man’s land, the doggedness with which the men did their jobs, the cold bloodedness with which they killed. Before he had gone to battle he had been exactly like the boy next to him; bubbling, happy, lively. Now he was cold, silent, withdrawn, solitary like an oyster. He had no friends – all had perished in the battles that he had fought in before. His grey eyes, set in a tired, gaunt face, looked like fighter fish, darting around rapidly, nervously, waiting for something to happen. His helmet was stowed in his heavy rucksack, and his black hair was ruffled by the wind and unkempt. It was apparent that this man was missing a razor, for his square jaw was covered in short stubble.

The two men walked on in silence for a while more, oblivious to the farm animals which were looking at them imperiously from the safety of their own fields. Presently the younger one spoke.

“I say, Charlie, when do you think we’re going to meet some of those awful Huns and get a chance to take a pot shot at them?”

Corporal Charlie Richardson regarded him solemnly. When he spoke it was with none of the enthusiasm and cheeriness with which the lad had uttered the taboo words. It was dull, flat, hollow, and quite dead. “Don’t ask me that, Tommy. I’ve told you before. Don’t you go hungering for a fight and get yourself killed needlessly. Battle is not a pretty sight. Once you’ve been in a battle you won’t want it back. You’ll see what I mean.”

Tommy Atkins, still a Private and proud of it, snorted. “I don’t believe you, Charlie,” he said. “Battle can’t possibly be that bad. Glorious charges, brave heroes, victory is ours, hurrah!” he punched his hand into the air, startling a nearby chicken who squawked and waddled away as fast as it could.

Charlie was silent. “There’s nothing like that in this war, boy,” he said quietly, with a steely edge to his voice, his eyes glinting dangerously. “This war is all about attrition. You sit in the trenches, facing no-man’s-land, facing the enemy. You wait for them to move and when they do you shoot them. Or sometimes it’s your turn to move and they shoot you. It’s just waiting, waiting, not making the first move. And the gas, oh, the gas!” his face contorted at the memory, and for a moment he looked quite frightening. “Mustard gas, chlorine gas. Doesn’t paint a pretty picture, lad. Can you believe I was once like you? I was. Happy and cheerful. When I got into my first battle…” he let the words hang and sighed. “You’ll see.”

Tommy didn’t talk after that until they got back to the camp. Then he walked stiffly towards his good friend, fellow Private George Roberts, and sat down slowly. You could almost hear the bones creaking as he did. George looked at him. He was a young lad too, just a year older than Tommy, with startlingly green eyes that twinkled with laughter and merriment, and an oval chubby face with a mop of red hair on his head, falling into his eyes in a devil-may-care way. Unlike Tommy, born in one of those large Victorian estates in Britain’s countryside and fed with a silver spoon, George had been born in London’s east end, and was used to the hardships of trench warfare.

“Oh dear,” George said, for Tommy’s face was rather pale, “Something gone wrong?”

“Charlie’s been telling me stories again,” Tommy sulked, sounding like a spoilt child throwing a tantrum. Before he could say anything else, though, the order came from the Sergeant Major. “MOVE OUT!”

They didn’t know where they were going, as usual. No one ever told the mere foot soldiers anything. Sometimes even the Sergeant Major only found out the destination halfway there. All they knew and all they ever did was fight and march, fight and march, fight and die even. But most of the time it was huddling in the cold, muddy trenches, living in perpetual fear of a German charge or a gas attack.

Charlie was one of the first into their new trenches. “At least their any rats here,” he said approvingly, surveying the gloomy place. “Not yet, anyway. Mark my words, when they find us here they’re going to migrate in hordes.”

George looked at him and grinned, amused. “Now I know why they call you ‘Mister Pessimist’,” he said.

The three soldiers – Charlie, George and Tommy, busied themselves, setting up their guns, supposedly facing the German side. Tommy embarrassed all three of them by being over-vigilant and pulling the trigger on a dark figure who turned out to be the Sergeant Major, who had been coming to tell them that Tommy’s gun was pointed the wrong way. George laughed, Charlie looked sympathetic, Tommy flushed and the Sergeant Major was furious and gave Tommy a good telling off.

When the Sergeant Major left Tommy scowled, black faced. “What are we doing here, anyway?” he asked.

Charlie looked at him, a look of amazement on his face, before smiling for the first time in a very long time, and his smile was not unlike that of a proud father to his child. “You’ve hit the nail right on the head, lad,” he said. “Why do we fight? I’m not doing it for Jolly Old England, they’re the ones that got us into this accursed war in the first place. I’m not doing it for my family seeing as I got no family left. I’m certainly not doing it for my duty because as far as I’m concerned, I don’t have any duty to fulfill. So why am I here?”

***

Four days on the front line and the Germans hadn’t attacked, and neither had they. The two sides were just staring at each other over machine guns, barbed wire and a whole lot of mud. Then one day the Sergeant Major came down to their trench, his face uncharacteristically pale, like he was not in control over anything anymore. The Germans look like they are preparing to break through, he said, and we must all be prepared. Then he scampered off to the next trench. No sooner had he left then a cry of “GAS!” went up, and Charlie had his mask on in a flash as the can of yellow gas erupted, and Tommy rapidly pulled on his, but George was still fumbling with his mask as the smell of chlorine hit him. And Tommy yelled “NO!” and made to put on George’s mask, which had dropped from his fingers, but he stopped, paralyzed in shock and a certain amount of morbid fascination – how could you do this to a man and how could the Huns be so barbaric? – as George’s eyeballs rolled until you couldn’t see his pupils, and he started to choke out blood and his skin turned a sickly yellow color and Charlie knew that at that moment his lungs were shriveling up inside. His face was covered in blood and as he turned his head slowly to look at Tommy, Tommy squeaked and jumped back. George’s hands flailed about and he fell over quite suddenly, dead.

The chlorine gas came and went and Tommy removed his mask with trembling fingers, not able to tear his eyes off his friend’s body. Charlie was still wearing his mask, but Tommy no longer saw the need to call him paranoid because he now saw that Charlie had a very good reason to keep his mask on. Would anyone complain “I don’t want to lug this big, sweaty, smelly, stupid gas mask around” after they saw what chlorine gas could do to them?

Two minutes passed before Charlie unstrapped his mask. “You see, lad?” he growled hoarsely, looking at Tommy whose eyes were still riveted on George’s dead body. “You see? War isn’t like your glorious charges and whatever rot you came up with. War is hell, lad. It’s hell. And you can’t do anything about it. Just remember that in this war we’re as good as dead already. Don’t expect to go home, and that way you’ll pull through it. You’ll see.”

***

Gone was the terrible year of George’s death and in came the year of the new starts. Tommy had grown up a good deal now, finally believing all the stories that Charlie had told him. He had seen a man die, but he hadn’t killed a man yet. Charlie had, of course, and every time he did he grimly carved another notch into the wooden stock of his Lee Enfield rifle. One day Tommy saw him notching yet another one – he now had nine – and asked, “I say Charlie, what are you doing that for?”

Charlie paused for a while before replying, “It’s so that I’ll know how many murders I’ve committed.”

Tommy looked at him. Charlie’s face had become dirtier, haggard, and he unconsciously reached out a hand to touch his own face. It felt different, foreign to him. He didn’t look like a baby anymore. Slowly but surely, what with all the replacements and all the fighting, Tommy was becoming one of the ‘vets’.

“Oh, I see,” Tommy said, not really seeing. “So that you can tell the Lord when you die?”

Charlie stopped carving. Some of the men in the trench stopped doing whatever they were doing. Others continued to dig or talk, although you could tell that they were straining to listen. Tommy had the feeling that he had jumped into the ‘atheists’ foxhole” and had said something very wrong.

“Nobody talks abou’ the’ Lord ‘ere, kid,” the Sergeant Major, a non-believer himself, said. “They may go on abou’ th’ Lord bein’ on our side an’ all, but if th’ Lord wus so kind, he wouldn’t ‘ave dragged us into this blasted war in th’ first bloody place.” A couple of men nodded in agreement.

The argument would have had continued if not for the Lieutenant who chose at that moment to jump into the trench suddenly and yell, “They’re advancing! We’re advancing! Get out, out, and charge! We’ll win this war yet!” and he jumped out again, losing his helmet in the process.

No one had understood him really; he had been incoherent and gabbling non-stop. But enough knew what he meant to grab their rifles and jump over the trench walls. Tommy was among them. “Come on, Charlie!” he hollered at the last soldier still huddled in the trench. Charlie snorted. “Nothing good’ll come out of this, lad. I’ll be dead by the time you get into that trench.” But obediently he forced himself out of the trench because, after all, what good was a soldier if he didn’t fight?

The soldiers struggled across the marshy, muddy ground as German machine gun fire raked their ranks. They couldn’t stop because if they did then the machine guns would get them for sure. So they slogged on, never hesitating, never halting, pressing on like the well oiled machines they were. Tommy saw a German helmet bobbing in the first trench that they were nearing. The German, he saw, was just a young boy of eighteen and looked positively frightened out of his wits. Tommy raised the rifle, but hesitated, and that gave the German enough time to fire a single shot which hit a man behind him, and the man fell over, a single shot to the forehead. Only then did Tommy fire his first shot and kill the German, killing his first man. And then he pressed onwards and they took the trench. But Charlie wasn’t with them.

The found him later, a few metres from the trench, dead, a single shot to the forehead. And Tommy knew with a sickening feeling in his gut that Charlie had been killed by a certain eighteen year old that was in that trench, and who Tommy could claim as his first man killed.

In Charlie’s pocket was a letter addressed to Tommy. Tommy took it slowly, and opened it. A mere five words were scrawled on the letter:

We’re here because we’re here.

As Tommy read it, a tear dripped down his cheek and landed on the words. They began to dissolve, finally rendering the last words of Charlie Richardson illegible. But Tommy kept the note.

***

The next day the replacements arrived. One was called Richard Cooper, and Tommy took him under his wing, just like Charlie had taken Tommy under his wing. Tommy was the veteran now, and he taught Richard everything he could. Both of them survived the war. When he got home to England Tommy settled down, married, had a kid called Charlie. And he never threw away the note.

Finis