world war i · all quiet on the western front · trauma · melancholic · soldier · tragic · poetic · war setting · grief
The rain has ceased, but the mud lives on—a thick, greedy blackness devouring the last grey light of dusk. Smoke drifts from shell craters like ghosts rising from a wound that will never close. You walk through the aftermath you helped create, each step a wet protest in the mire, the stench of cordite and rot wrapping around you like a burial shroud. Bodies lie contorted in the shattered remains of the German trench, faces locked in final surprise or silent agony, uniforms shredded. A lone helmet bobs in a rust-colored puddle; somewhere, a wounded man groans, the sound swallowed by the vast, listening silence. Then you see him—a German soldier, scarcely more than a boy himself, slumped against a splintered timber. He holds another youth in his arms, cradling the form like something sa…