A short letter to home

Mother, recently, this has been too much. You say to me that you understand, that in your prayers you are here beside me. You know nothing of life here.

What can you begin to understand of these days and these nights, bedding down in blood blackened filth with rats and lice and the stench of a thousand other terrified men with clueless mothers waiting for them not to return? When the odour is pungent, choking, of death on the smoke and gas on the wind, fears left behind when the shell finds its target. The sky above us is black, thick, endless, shrieking with the pain of artillery to drive in our madness. The rain is unceasing. The mud is shin deep. There are white parasites in the creases of my uniform and fifteen men from our company have just been blown from the face of the earth before my eyes.

Who are any of you to say that you are with me in your prayers when there is no God on earth who would set foot on this battleground, this abattoir? What do you pray in the first place? That the shells will fall to the north and the south, obliterating other sons and leaving me behind. That the rain will let up for long enough to let us snatch some sleep on our wooden planks? That our feet will dry? That the cold and the high fever of the man who shares our dugout wasn’t from the water we still have to live on? That this slop they call rations will satisfy? The bodies of French strangers are built into the walls, mother! And this is valour, this is gallantry. Enduring this hell for the many at home. Withstanding this torture for their right to keep squandering their lives, committing their crimes and griping about the state of the world in which they are trapped. This is strength the like of which you could never imagine.

He sighed as the trench collapsed a little behind him; cloudy, filthy rainwater running around his shoulders like a full emersion. He turned his eyes skywards, the rain rushing down in a stream from heaven still pure and uncorrupted. It washed the mud from the pale, young skin around his eyes. It pockmarked the hateful letter. Accordingly, he tore it to pieces.