Ypres,
Belgium, April 23,
1915.
To the man who finds my body:
Please kind
sir, I write with my
waning strength so do forgive my
errors. I am dying. But I do not wish to become an
unknown. I have breathed too much of that
green gas, and the bullet in my belly bleeds too
darkly. My time is done on this blasted Hell of an
Earth. Tell my
parents I
love them. Tell them I died with
honour,
face to face with the raging
Huns. Keep the sad facts of my accidental passing to yourself
please my unknown
friend.
We have only been on the front for
6 days. The Brits dropped us in the
meat grinder. What do they care? We are just stinking
Colonial wild men,
cannon fodder imported for plugging holes in the
front. We are stacked up with
froggies from
Africa. They folded when the
gas rolled in the first time.
Over the top! came the call, and hacking and coughing, we tried to
sew the
hole back up. It was raining
shells. You know those
screaming ones that
chirp just before they
hit? They came down like
rain. They pound their own
trenches as much as ours from what I have
seen. Oh, the things I have
seen.
Horrors.
Barbed wire and
men danced in the
lead staccato. Fear swallowed the
stoutest of
souls. I saw a prim and proper officer shoot an
Algerian chap square in the
back for crawling out the wrong side of the trench. A
bullet took the top off his head shortly after. We were getting
it from both sides. And the blistering burning gas. Why?
What demon dreamed of that fresh hell?
Industry has been turned to killing
my friend, and it is the Devil's
delight. I don't know what this place looked like before, but it has been
wiped away with a brush of
iron and blood. The underbelly of the country bleeds its muddy blood. This is the
Empire of the Rat,
Kingdom of the Corpse Fly. Woe to those who
defy them!
I
ran and
fell, watched men
die. I shot at the watery shadows in the coiling
gas. I should have saved a bullet for myself. The screams are
gone now, taken by the final blast. The
pressure swept me up and tossed me like a
pebble in a river.
Now I find myself trapped in a
shell hole that is filling with
water. My legs are
useless, and my last call for help earned me a
shot in the
belly. I imagine I am behind the enemy
line. Oh, to die for
a line on a map.
Please
brother, find this note and tell others of
me.
Hell has come to earth, and the
Angels care not. I feel the guns beating the earth like a
drum.
Please let me die in
peace.
Please...