In an instant, the whistling of a mortar was heard across the battlefield, passing through the gunfire and the smell of sulfur, casting a shadow over the entire plain. Upon hearing it, he fell to the ground; for a few moments, his vision went black, and he didn’t realize when his weapon fell from his hand, and a warm, viscous liquid covered his dirty face. A hallucination, a black halo, flew above his head. The sound of airplane propellers flying at low altitude, combined with the ringing in his ears, was unbearable. The artillery fire intensified. Suddenly, a hand grabbed his collar and lifted him off the ground. An indistinct, muffled voice full of fear kept calling out to him. He fell to the ground, over and over, and each time the same hand lifted him and dragged him along. For the last time, he fell off the stranger’s shoulder and rolled down the trench slope like a gray ball. A medic grabbed him under the arms and passed through the threshold of a tunnel into a short corridor. He heard the sound of an explosion for the last time, and right after that, he died.
“Sergeant, I’m telling you, an order is an order! When this damn radio goes off, behind every rustle that makes me curse the cause of this situation a hundred times a day, I understand why they put these damn stars on my shoulders. Don’t you get it? My authority is limited; I can tell you to go behind the trenches to dig a latrine or lick sandbags like a dog, but I can’t cancel an operation order!” The commander sat down and dismissed the sergeant with a wave of his hand. The sergeant didn’t want to leave; leaving meant accepting defeat, no different from digging a latrine or licking the trenches. The sound of mortar fire and falling airplanes was still audible. The commander looked at the folded maps showing the positions of the Nazi forces. He wasn’t aware of the sergeant’s presence. When he looked up, he saw the sergeant standing over him like a grim reaper. He shouted at him, “Didn’t you get it, you bastard! I told you to get lost, here’s a weapon, get lost, get lost! Go kill, kill or die, there’s nothing else I can do!!!”
The cold breath of death swallowed the warmth of the soldiers’ bodies; their corpses wrapped in the cold shell of mud and blood, left under the barrage and lightning. One was loudly reciting, “Do not be afraid of those who can only kill your body but cannot harm your soul. Fear God, who can destroy both body and soul in hell…” Another said, “Oh, holy father, please forgive us, and you, Steve, for God’s sake, shut up!” Another soldier, lighting his damp cigarette, hissed, “Both of you, shut up.” He pulled his raincoat tighter around himself. After that, no one said anything; only the sound of rain and the splashing of boots in the water-filled holes broke the silence. Dark drops of water drew dark streaks on the wooden body of the gun, and thick smoke swirled from the corners of the trenches. The twilight, the occasional explosions in various places that were clearly randomly targeted, had shattered the soldiers’ morale. The stocks of their guns were covered in a layer of black mud. If it weren’t for the deep, angry breaths of the sergeant pacing the trenches with a weapon in hand, no one would have realized that the situation was about to get more complicated. Even now, that soldier no longer quoted the Bible; he no longer trusted his faith, not knowing if he would be a survivor after the war or food for vultures, worms, and Nazi snipers. His faith was weak, his heart was scarred, and his weapon was cold. For the last time, he kissed the Bible and put it in his raincoat pocket.
“Does it have any effect?”
“What?”
“The book, does the book have any effect?”
He offered him a cigarette from a crumpled pack. He took one and lit it. For a few moments, he was silent, looking at the end of a path that the intensity of the rain had taken out of his sight.
“I don’t know, maybe. Just feeling like someone is there is enough.”
“So you’re not that devout, after all. Besides, what good is faith when you’re going to be slaughtered like an animal up there in a few hours?”
“Maybe you’re right, it doesn’t matter if I believe or not, they’ll gladly put a bullet in my head, whether I believe or not; honestly, faith isn’t for tomorrow, my faith doesn’t help when I’m running up there to spill a Nazi’s blood, it’s for now! This moment, right here next to you. Faith means sitting in this damn rain in the middle of the mud, smoking a damp cigarette, reading a few lines of the Bible, and hoping that tomorrow the weather will be clear, the Nazis will retreat, and I’ll go home, lie in my bed, and see my fiancée’s face instead of John’s ugly mug. Who knows, maybe there’s someone in the same situation on the other side of the barbed wire.”
John nudged Steve and said, “Shut up, damn Christ! Who knows, maybe your fiancée isn’t as pretty as me? She’s probably so ugly that you’d prefer my pockmarked face to that dying hag!”
The soldier next to him laughed and lit another cigarette. He shook his head and exhaled thick smoke. He took a deep breath, so deep that it chilled him to the bone. The steam from his breath and the cigarette smoke merged.
“You’re right, holy father, believe while you can. Who knows if you’ll wake up in your fiancée’s arms tomorrow or find yourself next to Jesus!”
