The Trench
I was young once, though the mirror has long forgotten it. Now my hands shake when I hold a teacup, and my grandson thinks the medals in the box under my bed are treasures. He likes to ask about stories of the Great War, though he does not know the weight of them or what the memories do to me. Tonight, as the fire crackles, I decide to give him one – one I have not thought about in years, but one that is never far from mind. It is not the kind of story told in schoolbooks, but the kind that leaves you staring at the floor.
Before the war, I had a friend. Edward was his name. An Englishman. We met in a town market before the guns began, trading tobacco for bread, Goethe for Shakespeare, laughter for laughter. He was not my brother, but he might as well have been. We talked of books, of women, of the foolishness of politicians who played chess with men’s lives. Once, he even said, “If war ever comes, promise me you’ll stay out of it.” I laughed and promised. He did the same. It was an easy promise to make. I held no hatred for him or his English brethren among whom I had lived. We spoke different languages but there was so much more in common to unite us than difference to divide us.
But the world had other plans.
When the call came, I dug my trench, and he dug his. The same earth lay between us, yet it might as well have been a continent. We lived like moles, crouched in mud that stank of iron and fear and death. The sky was nothing but smoke, the stars hidden by shells. Each day we fired into the mist, not at men but at shapes, at sounds, at the idea of an enemy – an idea that was more our own creation than fact; a façade of Frankenstein’s monster draped across men we were not born to hate. But the shroud was convincing and the monsters it projected were easy to kill.
One night, in a raid, the enemy fell upon us. They breached our defenses and dove in our trenches. A man in a long tan coat, his clothes covered in the same mud that covered me, his face obscured by a gas mask, raised his gun to bash my head in. But he hesitated. In that instance, I sprang forward and drove my bayonet through his heart. The man collapsed on me. Abandoning his weapon, he clutched my shoulders with a familiarity that chilled me. His body eventually crumpled into the mud and rain filled morass at the bottom of my trench. At dawn, when the guns fell silent and the enemy had retreated back to their side of no man’s land, I bent down and drew the mask off of the dead soldier’s face. It was Edward. No doubt he had recognized me. In the second where his compassion returned, I, blinded by the walls of my trench, had killed him.
I do not remember the sound I made, only that the earth seemed to open beneath me. I had killed my friend, the man who once shared my bread, my laughter, my words. Not because I hated him, not because we were truly different, but because we each chose to dig our trench.
That day I learned the cruelest truth of war: that it blinds you not by taking your sight, but by narrowing it. You no longer see the man, only the uniform. You forget the common ground and cling to the mud beneath your boots. “There are none so blind as those that will not see” and war – and the idolized ideologies that precede it –makes a fool of us all.
I lived. He did not. I carried that blindness for years, long after the war ended. And now, when my grandson asks me what lesson he should take from it all, I tell him this:
“Do not put your shovel to the earth. Do not dig the trench. For once you are in it, the world becomes only enemy and ally, and you will kill even your friends. Better to stay standing on the common ground, no matter how fragile it feels. Better to see with both eyes than shut them in anger and self-righteous delusions.”
He nods, though I do not know if he understands. How could he? The fire is warm, his belly is full, and the world seems far from war. But perhaps one day, when voices grow loud and men start to dig again, he will remember.
And perhaps he will choose not to dig. Perhaps he will build bridges rather than trenches.