All Men are Casualties by Thomas Wood

Author:Thomas Wood [Wood, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781916413801
Publisher: BoleynBennett Publishing
Published: 2018-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

11

6th June 1944

01.32 hours

His story had ended there. He had nothing more to tell me. In between the weeping sobs I could make out the names of men who he had crewed with, men he had lived with, but they were no longer men, just mere memories.

I would never know if he had been the only survivor. I would never know how he made it out of that tank alive. My father had told all of his story that he could. What I did know, is that, in amongst the great gulps for air that he took, a few words snuck from his mouth, as if they’d disobeyed an order to stay inside his head.

“They aren’t all evil, Johnny.”

As my mother began hurrying into the room, my memory began to fade, and I was brought back to the present, the sound of her feet shuffling on the floorboards, replaced by the sounds of men waiting to die. I couldn’t help but think of my situation. I had seen men killed, decimated, transformed beyond all recognition in the name of what? A war to end all wars? My father’s war would end nothing, neither would mine, in fact it would probably just fuel wars for years to come.

The unborn generation, the generation I had directed so much anger and hatred towards before, now got my wholehearted compassion. They hadn’t seen their first daylight yet and it had already been decided that it would be them who fought in the next war. They would fight against larger armies, weapons more powerful and more destructive than the ones that went before, and they would undoubtedly experience death on a much larger scale than ever before.

I wondered what I would look like after my war. Was this it for me? Would I see it through this battle and move on to another mission? Would I make it through that one? I wondered what I would look like if I made it to the other end of my war.

I prayed desperately that I wouldn’t end up like my father, physically broken and harmed for life, needing a strong whisky to numb the pain, and then needing another one to prevent the memories, the nightmares of war. I subdued my tears, as I selfishly thought of myself. I already had death and destruction burned into my mind. I was already emotionally deformed.

I took in a deep drag of my cigarette and shuffled the Bren gun resting neatly on my pile of sandbags. The sky was still a midnight blue, as if it had been stained with a dye, just tarnished here and there with darkened clouds. The smell of cordite and death hung forebodingly in the air, while a padre ran around, reading last rites to the wounded, and blessing those of us still alive.

The clouds rolled by swiftly, every now and then passing over the moon and forcing us into a darkness.

The French civilian had begun distributing food and wine, he was celebrating. We had stopped the celebrating for now, the easiest part was over.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.