Our Infinite Fates

OVER THE CONGEALING TRENCHES of the Western Front, there was a sunset of peach and pink and purple smudged across a canvas of gold. It never failed to amaze me, even after all these centuries, that the elements cared not for human pain. That the sky and its stars paid no heed to the obliterated corpses below. That the birds still sang each morning, no matter how many men had fallen the night before.

Sometimes that sense of insignificance was a comfort. But here, languishing in a rotten maze carved into the ruined earth, I felt nothing but despair.

How simple and beautiful life could have been. How far from that humanity had strayed.

Existence had become barbed wire and stacked sandbags and stepping over the lifeless corpses of your friends. It was reeking mud and unwashed bodies, the metallic tang of gunpowder and blood, the scratch of lice and the perpetual dampness, the echoing patter of bloated rats between ground-shattering drops of random shells. And, when the weather was bad, the sensation that we were at war with the world itself – with rain and wind and sliding earth, with the booming sky and the crimson ground.