Tower and Town, November 2016 (view the full edition)Branches And StarsIt was cold on the ground. The kind of cold that chills your bones and numbs your fingers. The kind that forces the breath out of you with a nauseating strength. The soldier sat huddled under a naked branch, clutching a gun close to his chest as if it were a comfort. There was only a thin, curling line of barbed wire between him and the bitter world outside, and - not for the first time - he heard his mother's voice in his mind: 'You're just a boy, it is not right!' He shook his head as if to dislodge her distressed cries that lingered there from so many months ago. So many months since he had seen her face, pale, white and worried, as he had marched away. So confident he had been then, full of hope and honour, convinced he would return home at Christmas time to thanks and popularity, to love and joy. Yet here he was, sat in a corner of some distant field, with Christmas Day just around the corner. The darkness had closed in and the sky was an impenetrable mass of inky blackness, when the soldier looked up. A few stars had flickered into being and twinkled softly down at him, teasing his eyes which had grown accustomed to only the harsh light of gunfire, of bullets passing between the trenches. He glanced into the shadows ahead and saw nothing. Nothing except for a distant light, shining through the mist, showing him the place where the battery began. The soldier was so immersed in his thoughts of warmth, love and better days that he was deaf to the crack of a twig and the click of a bullet being slid into its chamber; deaf even to the shouts of Frenchmen who had seen what was about to happen, long before it actually did. A sudden pain slammed through his chest, propelling him backwards and wrenching a scream from his frozen throat. His hands flew to his chest and hovered there, rapidly awash with hot crimson. The blood continued to pump steadily from the wound in his abdomen. He could feel the sharp agony where the metal had lodged and through the blur of shock and pain, a bleakness had replaced the horror he had felt moments before. 'I don't want to die here...I want to see ...' A single pearly tear slid down his colourless cheek at the thought of his fiancée, waiting for him to return, and he realised in that second that his returning home was no longer even a vague possibility. This thought pierced him through the haze of agony and his heart throbbed with unbearable pain. As he lay, slowly weakening, other men hurried up and began to gather, calling unintelligible things to people, hidden from view. The soldier was oblivious to it all, his eyes glazing over and the ground underneath him moist and warm from the blood that had soaked slowly down into the mud. In his silent fog of struggling, he suddenly felt a touch, as light as a whisper, brush his cheek and he froze, all his attention focused on a silhouette just above the heads of his comrades. The figure of his fiancée was standing in front of him, and as he stared, she extended a hand to him. "I want to come home," he whispered, and his voice caught in his throat. "I know, my love," the figure murmured back, reaching out to run her translucent fingertips over his damp cheekbones. 'Why am I here?' he asked, unsure whether he was asking himself or the figure only he could see. 'A single moment of glorified stupidity. Hundreds of boys, their heads filled with deceitful promises of honour, of heroism. That is not what fighting is really about. It's about hiding, hiding and hoping you'll make it through to the other side...' And then his chest heaved, and he was still. The shells whined on even after the soldier had gone. One night, the stars winked into being once again and the naked branch under which he once sat, in the corner of some distant field, was laden with snow. Charlotte Walker |