If you're interested - Fiction Friday #45...Tragic waste...

 
This weeks Fiction Friday theme: Start with a fire.

FIRE!

Did  the Captain enjoy barking the order....certainly his eyes were fixed on mine, his thin lips curled into a sneering smile as he stood ram-rod straight, his tall figure a silhouette against the grey dawn of a Flanders sky.

I saw a dozen rifle barrels not fifteen paces distant...pointing directly at me...and beyond the weapons twelve faces, each one well known to me and every one proud to call me friend. Their faces were etched with fear as with trembling arms they sighted their weapons upon my bound and tethered torso.  Reacting like automatons to the Captain's orders, they cocked their weapons. Young men just like me, not one of them past his twentieth birthday and trained merely to obey without question, ready to fire on his command at the target pinned roughly onto my winter greatcoat more or less over the spot where my young heart was now pounding...racing towards its final moments of pulsing, vital life. 

We had all been happy to march to war back then, a lifetime ago, I was eighteen years old and proud to serve, yes even willing to die for King and Country...but not like this, not like vermin...not in shame at the hands of my comrades.  We were sleeping when the bombardment began...same as ever..mustard gas, munitions and low level machine gun bullets straffing across no-mans land. The shell landed in the trench and all hell broke loose...dead...all of them...blown to pieces before my eyes. I was covered head to foot in their blood..it was hot and sticky.  I screamed... ran...far away from it, into the night...that was the last thing I remember...and then the  Court Martial..Dereliction of duty...Desertion.  

"An open and shut case" he said, "Death by Firing Squad."  Sobbing, I collapsed on the floor, no longer a soldier, just a dead man walking, destined to die a coward...buried alone in a foreign land in an unmarked grave. 

As my friends fired, I saw their rifles recoil, each barrel flashing in the half-light of the misty morning and then nothing as I felt the burning lead tear through my flesh, shredding organs and spewing my essence into the mud to mix with the blood of countless other scared young men in this damn war.

May God forgive us all. 


Dedicated to the 306 British and Commonwealth Soldiers executed in WW1 for so-called cowardice...