In the Trenches

In the trenches

Fear, it’s a feeling we all know. When your heart beats faster, and cold sweat comes rolling down your face like a dozen snakes sliding down your dry shaking skin. But in the trenches, fear wasn’t an abnormal feeling. It stays with you and it was something that could kill you.
It’s six o’clock in the evening. A cool wind breezed into the trench. There were two others with me, huddled in this dark, miry hole. Fear gripped us as we waited out the night, expecting the worst to come after a hard day of fighting. The memory of that day was painful and it still sent shivers down my spine as I recalled how my comrades were gunned down before my very eyes. As each man fell, a sharp knife cut through my head, I felt my vision blur (was I crying…?), my hearing dull… then suddenly, everything turned black like I was blind….I woke up to find I was still in the trench. The sudden enemy attack was swift and destructive, leaving many casualties. I must have fainted and fell back into the trench trapped by a falling dead body.
We knew our time would soon be over as we received the ‘order’. Each one of us had been conscripted into the army since they said they were losing the war and every able bodied man is needed to defend our beloved country.
I looked up again, at the wasteland that was no-man’s-land, the grayness on the ground of rotting dead flesh left there; the medics were not willing to sacrifice their lives to retrieve their bodies. We all didn’t want to die out there, no one did. But the government said that it was noble to join the army and serve your country but what they didn’t say was how cruel war could be.
One of my mates was called John, John Makalskey. He was sixteen years old. He had dark eyes that held a long, sad history. I was told that he was the son of a middle-class merchant. They lived in Birmingham on a farm where he and his brothers usually stayed behind with their

mother while his father was always away on business trips. He...