[Lyrics: Fagerlind]
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I remember sitting in the train.
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Though it seems ages ago, I figure that
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no more than a couple of weeks have elapsed since then.
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I also remember the thoughts racing in my mind. I'd read that before going
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into battle, even the most ardent veteran soldier feels the pangs of fear,
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and I wondered why I only felt a sense of numbness in my stomach and legs.
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Premonition perhaps?
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During training we'd been told by our senior officers always to keep our
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carbines clean of grime.'Cleansed mine for what might have been the fiftieth time, whilst rolling
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through the French countryside listening to the distant thunder.By then I didn't realise that it was the mellow booming of
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the Germans'
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heavy artillery, shelling our line. Or, maybe, ours shelling theirs?
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I'd heard that even if you're dug in, in a shelter, the big howitzers
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could get you.
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In the train I split a cigarette with a guy from back home. This was his
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second trip to the front. He told me how his former company was set to dig
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out a bombed cellar, and how the people they found had been uninjured by
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the shrapnel and fire. They had been crushed by the pressure of the
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detonation - their lungs had been pushed through their mouths.He also told me to swap my bayonet for a field shovel at any
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given moment.
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"When you're at close quarters, a sharpened field shovel can lob the head
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off a mans shoulders. And it won't break or get stuck in the ribs like a
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bayonet." That's what he said.His name is Liam, or was Liam. As I'm writing this, I can hear him
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screaming. I can just barely make him out in a crater next to the German
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trench. Horribly entangled in barbwire. He's not screaming for his mom or
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anything. Just screaming. Maybe his throat has been lacerated. It sounds
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kind of gurgling. And he's lost both his legs... Guess he won't be screaming
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much longer...
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God I wished that I had a grenade or something, so I could end his misery
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right now.
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Well, even if I had a grenade, I doubt that I would be able to hurl it to
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him.I've been holding most of my entrails back with one hand, since darkness
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fell.Irony of ironies - the German that opened my stomach knew the trick with
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the field shovel, too.Or maybe he wasn't German at all. They have a Hungarian penal legion
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posted along the line.Maybe he was one of them?
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I crushed his head with my respirator canister. Never thought of that as a
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weapon, but in the heat of close combat, anything will do... I've seen
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soldiers gouge each other's eyes with bare hands... And I saw a boy, no more
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than fifteen or sixteen, rip a Germans throat out with his teeth.
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It is madness! Mere animals clawing at each other.
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Now in the breaks between the drumfires, I can hear the enemy mustering in
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their trenches. I can hear the sucking sound of boots being yanked out of
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the knee-deep clay, and the dry clanging of a water-cooled MG being
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reloaded.The next charge can't be far off, and yet still fear eludes me. For the
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first time in weeks, I'm certain of what's going to happen.
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When the sun rises and hardens the clay, I'll be here no longer. The same
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numbness I felt in train has returned, and I know my time is at hand.
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Guess I'll be screaming no more...
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Poets Of The Trench Part II
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Iniquity |