The following entry was discovered in an abandoned home in New Zealand in 1980.
A darkened gradient stretched across the sky on this innumerable day. The whistle reverberated throughout the network of trenches; its tinny resolve linked other whistles in an invisible, yet audible web. Soon, a great wall of men would emerge from their earthen pits; picking their way through lines of barbed wire, and slogging across a living, crying ground—this, the creation of industrial warfare.
It was a relief to emerge from that First Battle of Passchendaele in October of ‘17 physically unscathed, but I assure you, wounds—psychic—have endured since. We were indeed demoralized by the mud, both the Allies and the Germans alike. A lad of my division once compared the mud to an enormous octopus; watching, waiting for its victim to arrive. When it did, it threw its slobbering tentacles at him, blinding him, closing him in, and burying him alive. So to was our fate sealed in a maelstrom of bullets and howling shells, so too was our fate sealed in the mud itself.
This we were reminded of daily. If not in the form of a disappearance, then certainly in the smell of the air. Like a ravaged cemetery, the soil was rancid with decaying corpses. The fallen men had been returned to nature, sealed into the Earth by a coffin lid of mud. Theirs was a fate that cheated the very honor of warfare. To die without dealing a blow to the enemy, consumed by the ground, wrestling against the Earth itself.
I am one of those fortunate souls who escaped this fate, but I question my escape ever since the day I trotted out into no man’s land. Since my return home, I feel as though I have crossed into a composite world—a doubling of another reality. The people are oblivious to our service as if it never happened, much less are cognizant of the ultimate sacrifice of those who laid down their lives for King and Country. What is the world that I have returned to? Is it different from the world beyond the mud? Or is it, in these days of careful contemplation, like the mud itself—consuming souls in their depletion?