Tower and Town, November 2016

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The Truth

July 3rd 1916. Do you remember? Do you remember the men who died on that day? I remember. I remember that day, the day where everything I thought, everything I was led to believe, was shattered.

Woken by the distant sound of falling shells I was reminded of my dreams. For that was the sound that haunted me; visions of the dead flung on the back of trucks like sacks of dirt. My thoughts were disturbed by a pain like no other. Burning, it felt like my skin had been set on fire. Gas-flooded trenches leaving men to fumble with their masks in a race against time; a race that I was losing. But I was one among many. We were drowning, drowning, yet out of water. The trench seemed like a blur. I could see large black splodges the size of cats scurrying around the fallen bodies of soldiers. The sound of moans echoed, moans of pain, and the smell of rotting bodies from the last attack filled the air.

I remembered what we had been told before we went to that place of hell. ‘There is no greater honour than to die for your country. You will be remembered for all that you have done. You will be celebrated, never forgotten, respected and looked up to.’ That was what they told us. Respected? Never forgotten? They presented war as a glorious thing. Tricking young boys, saying it would make them men. But instead it takes them and turns them into a shell of their former selves, watching other people, other living things, waste away in the trenches of war. The trenches of hell. But you only ever discover the truth about war and its secrets when it’s too late.

I was one of those young men. Led into believing war would make me a man. Most boys dreamt about being remembered for what they did; I did too, and I was blinded. Blinded by my ambition to be celebrated…and now look at me, dying here in the trenches. Rotting away with all the other men who had been tricked who, like me, were just realising the truth about the war.

Natasha Englefield