The sky had died. There was rain, there was thunder, and the full moon burned its insidious candlelight, but there was no sky. The void that stretched above the battlefield was no romance of stars and planets, but a scar upon the heavens punctuated by nothing but the white rift of the moon. The gory brown dirt of the butchered field lay soft and wet, tilled by countless charges and retreats and seeded with moldering bodies, their screaming faces buried and unearthed as stampedes of bootfall churned the soil. The unholy incense of stale blood and fetid flesh crawled along the ground with the cold air, sinking into craters and dribbling into the long, narrow trenches that scared the earth. Muffled wheezing and the crack of gunfire punctuated the lifeless silence.

                From behind the grimy lenses of his gas mask, a nameless soldier stared at the misshapen graveyard that stretched onward into the darkness. Through the crinkled black cloth and the echoes of his own breath, he could hear the whispering of the huddled forms around him. “A night assault? That just means we don’t know where to shoot,” the dead winds wrapped the grim message in the scent of blood and raw skin, the wholesome smell of fresh earth long departed from the cursed trenches. “Those machineguns don’t need to see their targets.” The soldier clutched the barrel of his rifle, the bite of cold steel and rough wood all too familiar for comfort. He pressed his back against the runny dirt wall, the gory mud and cold rain baptizing him in a trickling fountain of filth and death. As he closed his baggy eyes and drew in a deep, dying breath, he could hear the whispers of panic and fear as plainly as the aimless gunshots that rang like funeral bells. Even after filtering though the tube of his gasmask, the air tasted like coal, as if all that was left to breathe were the lingering sighs from the dead and the faint smoke of gunfire. The charnel sludge beneath his boots sucked voraciously at his feet, its insatiable hunger for flesh and pain as palpable as the faceless glare of Death waiting for them all.

                “Get up, men!” a nameless voice called down the crooked length of the trench “The boys behind us are gonna carpet this place in gas, so get your masks on and get ready to charge!” The soldier shared a skipped heartbeat with his damned fellows and opened his eyes. All was placid, as if every jaw behind every mask were gritted and grinding, the silence of hate and acceptance accented with the clicking of weapons loading and the drum roll of rain. Lightning licked the tumerous smoke across the deathly sky, the mad archs and angles of the electric hellfire setting the lumpy field alight with a chilling glow. As if born of the hellish gaping maws of the dead, thunder rolled across the field and down the narrow canyon of trenches, its blare a grim bell tolling for the inevitable.

Like specters racing to possess the dead, artillery shells fly through the dead air. The blurs of wild motion leapt from behind the trenches and dove down into the battered earth, each hammering blow flashing hellfire and leaving a noxious cloud of yellow gas behind. The soldier turned to face the matted horizon of decay and hellish mustard, the billowy tufts of gas forming a wall of lethal mist. He gripped his weapon firmly, the rough contour of wood and steel the only reality in the nightmare of thunder and explosions. “Charge! Hit ‘em before they know we’re in the gas!” And with the faceless voice came the splash of boot in mud and the muffled battle cries of the lost and the damned. The soldier clamored up to the field with the tide of panting and desperation, his rifle thrusting up and down with his arms

and his boots churning the fleshy sludge beneath him. As the yellow cloud before him drew nearer, the sound of his heart’s gasping pumps and his lung’s unconscious heaving filled his gas mask and sent stinging adrenaline to his malnourished limbs. All was silent in his mind. The screams of his comrades and commanders, the fire of half-aimed weapons, and the ominous swoop of grenades flying toward his destination were all but a river of blood flowing through his ears, its flow a serene gift of ignorance. Then, as he crested the thick wall of gas, there was a flash of fire.

The soldier looked up to where the sky should have been. Moonlight filtered through the mustard gas like candle light shrouded by a veil of silk. Blood washed over his eyes and ears and he smiled and cried, silent tears drenching his face as the cold and gentle stroke of death awakened him from his nightmare.