A dirt brown Bulldozer is pushing bodies into a pile. Walking behind it soldiers are picking up the pieces it has missed. Arms and legs. Heads and faces.
The sky is smeared black. Burning oil stings my eyes and throat as I cough up lungfuls of what it is we fight for. I walk past a wall of corpses. Arms and legs poke out of the heap. Shattered faces gaze at me. The wall moves and squirms as flies feast on the newly dead.
I am 13 years old. We are watching the Holocaust. Black and White bodies are stacked high. Walls of flesh and bone. I look at the new wall. High Def Colour has arrived at the slaughter.
A wounded soldier sits in silence. The stumps where his arms were are covered with socks and his feet are naked. A dead kid in a Foxhole reaches out to me as helicopters swarm above the destruction. His mouth ripped open. White teeth smiling. In my pocket a letter tells me my son has cut a new tooth. I touch it as I look at the dead boy.
We dig in. My spade biting lumps of sand out of the ground. I crawl into the hole and think of the dead boy and read my letter. All around me Artillery pounds at the unseen enemy. The constant shelling hurts my ears so I put cigarette butts in them.
Daylight comes and we drive through the fresh dead. I try to write to my Grandmother but can't. The words are childlike and make no sense. I kiss the paper, sign my name and send it back home. The radio tells me Nine of my comrades just died. I turn it down and my Walkman up. Don't worry be happy plays and I laugh. I laugh until I ache. Then we dig in...
Excellent blog. We need to care more about the war & the terrible toll it takes on the living as much as the dead.
ReplyDeletePuts Cumbria in it's place. A one off.