Trevor felt lucky the rain had stopped for the moment. The cold, fickle drizzle had threatened to flood his small trench. And the bombardment, too–the rain of steel death and TNT concussions having retreated, or at least marched away to another part of the wasteland.
He was lucky indeed to get his morning ration, a sodden biscuit and a tin of bully beef tossed from an adjoining foxhole in a greasy paper, with a twist of tobacco bundled in for his pipe.
Lucky, yes, to have survived the final month of winter in this hellhole—to have made it from knife-hard frozen mud to soft, yielding, reeking mud.
And lucky, most of all, to have a buddy.
“Breakfast time, my friend,” he said to the one below. “Wish I could split it with you, but all I can spare is a few crumbs.” He began working on the tin with his trench knife…a difficult task with numb, chilled hands. But it was still a familiar, purposeful activity that promised a reward. All he lacked was a third hand to wave away the flies. A pity that his buddy was otherwise occupied.
“We’ve done it, friend. We’ve lived to see the spring.” These wretched flies were a sure sign of spring. They swarmed around his face and the half-cut can in a dizzy haze, an aerial frenzy of buzzing greed. When he reached into his trenchcoat pocket to take out the bun, they immediately covered the greasy bread, in a seething mosaic of beautiful blue-green bodies and shiny lace wings. He had to practically scrape the blighters off with one cupped hand to wolf down a mouthful. When done, he put away the biscuit and brushed the crumbs, with their pursuant flies, onto the body beneath him.
“There you are, friend. A token of thanks for keeping me out of the mud.”
The corpse, all but buried, was a Boche, he felt sure from the gray patches of coat still visible. An imposition to squat on a fellow, true, and one that might be taken as a sign of disrespect. He was the enemy, after all—but even so, a faithful buddy. Without someone, anyone, to stand on, you would sink right in and stick. By night you could be frozen into the mud, with no way to move unless some patrol risked their lives to chip and pry you out. The mud clung and crept, sapping your strength and making you heavy and damp. One could find himself rotten with trench foot, too, like most blokes out here—but for the blessing of a stout friend.
Now something new was coming…a mist, drifting down the trench line on the morning breeze. This wind, like most, brought only the smell of death from more unburied bodies—unburied because, early in the deployment, they had retrieved and respectfully interred the fallen, friend and foe alike, for sanitation and out of simple human decency. But then the shelling came and unburied them, resurrecting each one horribly and blowing some apart in the process. They would then re-bury the pieces. But again when the smoke cleared, the bodies would be unburied again in tinier fragments, so what was the point? Death permeated land and air, with the flies and stench, and the only thing that would cover it was tobacco smoke, a good pipe-bowl of the precious stuff. That killed death itself, the smells of it at least.
Or else, as sometimes happened, a fresh gust wafted in fragrance from the spring pastures just a few hundred meters away, a warm blast redolent of trees and flowers. Almost worse, that, a reminder of the living world one might not survive to see again.
But this breeze was neither stench nor spring. The mist had a greenish tinge as it moved toward Trevor and his friend across the blasted ruin of landscape. The air that bore it had a tang, a sharp antiseptic scent that made the eyes water.
Then Trevor noticed something: The flies, the maddening swarms that filled his vision, were dissipating—no, dying, he could see as the little bodies dropped to the mud bank in front of him. They lay there twitching, quivering their tiny legs in the air.
The mist was over him now, a rolling green curtain, and he flinched in agony. His eyes burned and watered, and when the tears streamed down his cheeks, they burned too. As he tried to draw breath his lungs were instantly afire, spasming in his chest. He pulled a filthy handkerchief from his pocket and covered his nose and mouth, without reducing the pain. So this was it, gas warfare, the rumor that had spread down the line in recent days.
Then troopers appeared through the mist, monsters in his blurred blinking vision, with bulging eyes and canister-shaped snouts jutting forth. The most recognizable things about them as he struggled to breathe were the points sticking straight up from their heads, the German pickelhaube spiked helmets.
One of them turned its snouted gaze on him, its weapon raised high. Choking on poisonous air, he groped for his rifle and tried to aim it; but the bright bayonet came lancing down. Remorseless it stabbed home in a wave of cleansing pain, and Trevor’s vision exploded into whiteness. As consciousness faded, he felt himself sliding down to join his buddy in the bottom of the hole.