GONE One-Shots

The Trenches

There isn't much, that I have the misfortune of knowing, more terrifying than the western front line trenches. Though I'm sure some would beg to differ, I don't want to hear of it again. And I want to talk of a certain soldier.

He was alive, it seemed, to spit lead and breath in noxious poison. He would exhale a plume of fire and bullets from the muzzle of a mean machine gun. Maybe that was why they called him the dragon. and for whatever reason, now we'll never know, Drake G. Merwin refused to let a supremely stupid kid like me get shot.

My name is Samuel Temple. And this conflict should have been foreign to me, if not for my packing up and immigrating to France. Picked a real time for it, little did i know, the most global conflict in human history would arise. I had just settled in to my quaint new home, that a draft notice was handed to me.  Happy twenty first birthday, as a French citizen. I am, was, just a kid. But not anymore.

Not long after, under a sliver of overcast blanketed sky, I found myself in the trenches. my arrival was greeted by a damp foul smelling breeze and the painfully loud bang of machine gun fire. I, a brave little soldier, shook in my army boots and contributed to the wet soupy mud they were standing in. My only thought was that one of those bullets would sink into me and mean my end.

I was perfectly content to find a damp cubby hole in the furthest trench and pretend to be dead for the duration of the war. However, before I could sulk off, Drake stumbled out of the narrow passage way leading into the rear trenches. Said he needed some direction up there, that a poor German shmuck had fallen 'cap over ass' over the bristling curls of barbed wire into the trench. No one was lifting him out, and he was so spongy with bullet holes he was seeping blood into the trench, and soldiers were tripping over his fat torso.

My commanding officer shuffled me off to the front lines with Drake, eager to be rid of such a wimpy new recruit. For good.

I did what I could, pushing the body up the muddy embankment, steep and slick with blood. The men, rallied by something I must have said, I can't recall, regrouped to their posts. I ended up getting help disposing of the Germans body, and once it was out of my hands, Drake took a seconds distraction to pass me a rifle instead. I shot.

Drake took a certain fulfillment in seeing me on the front lines. Later, huddled deep in a muddy alcove, was the calmest night I'd ever seen in the trenches, still interspersed with sporadic shots. He would tell me it was because I was braver than I knew. A muzzle flashed bright, and his mud streaked gaunt face, and those pale eyes, was an imprint like a photograph in the backs of my eyes. I was a born leader, and him, my follower.

He had harbored grander plans than I did. Down in the muddy trenches, sick and crawling, being hailed on by bullets, and Drake was looking up to the sliver of cloudy sky. A successful besiege of the German front line was something he dreamed of, when he did sleep, and he wanted a certain Samuel apart of it.

Months of toil and bloodshed later, when a sea of German dead littered the pocked earth between the opposing trenches, was when Drake took my hand. It was a record, oh how we'd mowed them down.

We clamored over the trench embankment, all of us disheartened soldiers, snagging our boots in the barbs of the curled wire. And we kept on. I cried, something forgettable, without words. It will be written that it was my boots pummeling the muddy soil, stepping on fallen bodies, that lead the rest of them.

On the contrary, it was Drakes hand, pulling me into the battle. And it was his hand clutching mine that dragged me down with the force of a bullet chewing through him. Drake was dead before he slipped and hit the mud, but his hand held mine in a death grip. We lay there, and it was the only thing that kept me alive.

Crawling through the dirt, feebly over bodies, I left him, knowing it would be ok. I am Samuel Temple, and thats no leader, I was petrified before and during the remainder of the war. If anything had ever been watching over me in the trenches, it was no god or no enemy, it was Drake. I will never forget a certain soldier.