They say that the trenches and no man’s land of the 1st
world war was hell on earth.
Now you cannot tell what barbarity once happened there, it
is a green and pleasant land where poppies grow...but perhaps when hell touches
earth like it did in the meat grinder of the Somme, perhaps then some of hell
gets left behind...
They still exist in this fragment of hell, undead and
undying, unaware that the war is long past, because for them it is inconceivable
that the war could ever end. They are ghost’s maybe, echo’s perhaps, partly
sentient, but too brutalised to be called human any more.
But they exist, oh yes they do, just a breath away from us
in the dark places that still linger, stand in the right place in those
pleasant green fields where the poppies grow and they could almost reach out
and touch you.
Their uniforms come in many kinds, and from many nations,
but now the only colour they all share is mud brown, scum green and blood red. The
ones that still speak, that still whisper prayer speak many languages, listen
to them long enough and you will hear French, English, German all the languages of babel...they do not
speak to each other, or even to you, only ever to themselves.
They deserted you see. Trapped in the horror and insanity of
war, they gave in to the crashing waves of destruction and lost themselves. Got
drawn together in a band of broken and mutilated men, hunting no man’s land, Any
other soldier was their prey, they stole from bodies, created corpses, they
rifled pockets for food and smokes and coin, and when their minds were well and
truly gone, they took meat from their prey, meat flavoured with cordite and
mustard gas.
Their ranks of the damned have swelled since that time,
before the poppies grew. They joined from Stalingrad with feet and fingers
black and frostbitten; they came from the camps where work promised to set them
free, they came blackened from planes and helicopters burned up by napalm from
lands far away sweaty with rainforest. They come from the sea and land and sky.
This rabble of the damned and broken and lost has been seen in Kosovo and Rwanda,
anywhere where hell has touched this earth again.
Their numbers continue to grow, grow daily, not just
soldiers any more, but the very young and the very old have joined as well,
children armed with AK47’s driven mad by all the evils the world has inflicted
upon them have joined.
They live in the dark places of the world, where hope and
humanity have become distant dreams, as hell spreads its stain on earth once again
they walk out of the shadows muttering about how it will all be over by Christmas,
about gooks and cockroaches.
Do they spread the shadow? Create it? Cause it somehow with
their presence so close to our own? Maybe, maybe not. They do not work in
concert, unless they happen to fall on a victim like wild dogs chewing, tearing
and devouring. But their existence is like a rot in this world, or a boil
filled with puss, more and more pain gets poured in, more and more the rot
spreads and the pressure grows.
How long till they spill out and go from existing on the
other side of the mirror, close but separate, to here with us? How long indeed.
How long before humanity can stop creating its own hells and stop adding to the
number of destroyed wrecks of people?
Perhaps it is already too late.
Perhaps.
Do you hear screams or bangs or people chanting sounds filled
with hate and bile? Do you hear the cries of pain? Do you feel the rot of the
world stretching its darkness around you? do you read in papers of cockroaches and infestation? do you hear the stabbing wrenching words that spew oil from mouths, words like, pakki, homo or nigger and feel the black slime splatter across you?
Maybe it is too late.
Maybe too late for us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment