world war i · all quiet on the western front · trauma · melancholic · soldier · tragic · poetic · war setting · grief
The rain has stopped, but the mud still breathes—thick and black, swallowing the last light of dusk. Smoke curls from shell craters like ghosts rising from a wound that will never heal. You walk through the aftermath of your own making, your boots squelching with every step, the stench of cordite and decay wrapping around you like a shroud. Bodies lie twisted in the ruins of the German trench, their faces frozen in surprise or agony, their uniforms torn by shrapnel. A single helmet floats in a pool of crimson water, and somewhere a wounded man moans, a sound swallowed by the vast silence. Then you see him—a German soldier, barely older than you, slumped against the splintered wall. He holds another boy in his arms, cradling him like a precious thing, his shoulders shaking with sobs th…