Wildflowers In The Ruins: A 1917 Story

Chapter Three. Snowdrops

Friday April 6th, 1917:

I'm not sure what I truly expected but it wasn't this. This was nothingness.

The ground underneath our bodies consisted of mud churned up with broken pieces of artillery, tree roots and fragments of rocks and stone. Puddles and craters as well as branchless trees dotted the landscape.

The smell though was different to the trenches. This was far more of a stench and heavier rotting smell.
How on earth could anyone stand this!
Gagging, I turned my head away from the other two, then turning back I noticed where it was ommiting from... three carcasses of horses.
Poor, tragic creatures.

My thoughts travelled to the horses of farms nearby my home and how as children and even just before the war, John and myself had gone, sometimes with my nieces and nephews, and petted them, taking apples and sugar lumps. There'd been a pretty white palomino pony only six years ago I'd christened Snowdrop. She'd let me stroke her plump back with wide, even movements, her trusting eyes soothed with each stroke. John had always gone to the piebald first, cheerfully calling her 'Sally' and giving her the freshest apples in our basket. "Where was little Snowdrop now?" I wondered in my head. Please, not here. Poor Sally may have been though. All the healthy horses had been taken from farms to be used in the war effort. Maybe they were both too old now, and had mercifully been spared.

Blake and Schofield looked again at each other hurriedly as if they knew to expect the horses. Schofield rose to his feet first, Blake on his heels and bracing himself on his bayonet to stand on the unrelenting, moving ground. They breathed heavily.

I carefully pulled myself up, feet apart with hands outstretched a little in front and to my sides to maintain my balance and followed their path, instinctively stooping forward slightly.
My feet slid as though the mud were ice and I soon fathomed 'twas best to take small steps, picking my feet up by only inches.

As we approached the rotting horses I could make out swarms of large black flies feasting and hovering. Wiping my usually immaculate, now mud-soaked hands on my cape, I covered my nose with the right, keeping my left outstretched for balance. We crept round the other two, almost skeletal, creatures to a criss cross fence of black, partially burned timber covered with a haphazard mash of barbed wire.

Pulling my cape and two crossover bags closer about myself as to not catch them and be trapped, I continued to follow my two Lance Corporals, observing where they bent down and placed their hands and feet and following their movements religiously.

The fence seemed far thicker than it appeared and after what must've been only a minute but felt like an hour, we began to emerge from the other side. One of them muttered something incoherent and I noticed we were through it but between two fences. Several yards beyond, the second fence loomed ahead. Only this one was purely barbed wire hanging from narrow metal poles. By now the sky had turned a stark off-white I noticed and it just made the harsh reality of what we were facing all the more raw.

On the wire slightly to our right were the remains of a soldier standing in the pose of a bow, uniform torn and skin blackened from staying stationary under constant exposure to both bomb fire and the elements. He looked as though he'd become trapped and goodness knows how many bullets had penetrated him then! His helmet had fallen off and lay at his flat feet. Although he'd been dead a while, was he someone's father? I wondered, and did they know yet of his passing? It made me wish John, or even James hadn't gone in such an horrific way and their deaths had been swift and merciful.

Schofield stood to our left to let us through, using a straight unknotted strip on the wire to pull back a pole, his face tensing as he did so. The wire gave a vile, tinny, creak as I went through following Blake, then quietly thanking Schofield. He kept his eyes on the wire, but then the noise grew sharper and as I glanced back over my shoulder he was still in the same spot but had lost his footing and slipped backwards. His left hand caught as the wire and it's pole sprang back. He gasped, wincing in pain then balling his hand into a fist as I caught a glimpse of claret red.
"You alright?" Blake called as I started towards Schofield.
He nodded his head vigorously: "Look for cover," we're his only hushed words to us.