Writing Over the Years

Alexa, Zach, Samantha, and Alison
From approx 1987 to the present

Sunday, April 8, 2007

"In the Trenches" soliloquy never given

Six days in the trenches – that’s enough for me! Too much, actually! I’m glad it’s not 1914 though – took the British Army almost a year to figure out soldiers needed to be issued several pairs of socks. Can’t begin to keep your feet dry if you don’t have dry socks. I don’t know who came up with the idea of the duckboards they have down overtop all the muck and mud. If I knew, I’d sure shake his hand and thank him.

I can’t wait to get rid of these clothes – they’re full of lice. The critters breed in the seams. I’m so itchy all the time – it’s impossible to sleep. I take this comb and run it along my skin to rake ‘em off. Ya know, I saw a fellow once down in the trench was about to go crazy with the itching. He tore off his shirt and threw it on the ground and the thing practically walked away! It was alive with those lice!

Boy, it’s good to be outta that trench! The only thing that ever helped was having a cigarette. I’d just hold onto my cigarette, take a few puffs, and pretend like everything was okay. Then, all of a sudden, the shellfire would start up. I was sitting smoking my cigarette and talking to this other guy one time when a shell blew up right behind him – the front of him seemed okay, but he took a big piece of shrapnel in the back of his head. I thought it was funny how he didn’t say anything else – then he fell forward and I saw. Like that everyday, you never knew if you were about to breathe your last.

Not that the air smelled that good – with the pit-toilet down in the trench, and the muck and the mud and dead bodies – stinks. The rats sure like it though.. They like us too. Heh, he, he, - my buddy woke up one time and found he was hugging this rat – it was the size of a teddy bear! Oh, my gosh, what’s this? I told you those rats like us!

I’d rather have the rats than the lice. Ya know, if I hadn’t gotten out of the trench today, I was wondering how one of them would taste. All the food they manage to bring up during the night tastes the same – and it ain’t good! I want something to chew – sure can’t chew the biscuits. I took a rock I found and tried to bust one into small enough pieces that I could just kinda suck on. Wonder if you couldn’t cook and eat one these rats?

You think all this sounds pretty bad? That’s all the easy stuff. Night patrol – that’s what I don’t ever want to do again. But, we gotta know what those Germans are up to. I only had to go once – on my belly, took all night, cause you gotta go so quiet and slow. Fortunately the patrol I was with knew the land, but one time we had a partrol go out and this one guy got hung up in the barb wire. He couldn’t get lose, we heard him crying out there all night. Nobody could get to him cause the Germans kept sending up those flares on little parachutes that light up the sky. In the morning, they shot him.

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