Unquiet on the Eastern Front by Wole Talabi

Author:Wole Talabi [Talabi, Wole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781645242734
Publisher: Subterranean Press

I love you, always.

Kenneth.

FOUR

20 October 1940

My Dear Mother,

The edge of the war has snuck upon us like a fog.

It is not at all what I expected. Today we passed a village that had been burned to the ground. Empty eye sockets stared back at us from razed, blackened bodies swarmed by flies. More than a dozen of them were children. It was horrific.

We lost Richard and a native soldier named Barinyima when bullets began to fly from the surrounding bush. We rapidly took cover and returned fire. When we found our attacker, he turned out to be a solitary hunter from the village (according to his tribal markings and dress). His eyes were sunken and red, and his face was gaunt. Three of our bullets had hit him in the chest and abdomen and he was bleeding out but still speaking. Muttering and mumbling in anger. Emeka thinks he must have mistaken us for some Italian soldiers who attacked and burned down his home. He said the man’s last words, gurgled through blood, sounded like, “The forest will eat all of you foreign devils.”

We buried the hunter and Richard in a mass grave along with the villagers we’d found. Phillip spat on the hunter’s body before we covered them all with earth as though his saliva were venom that could kill the man dead again. What was the point? He is so much like Father in his dislike of the people whose home he has come to and claims dominion over in the name of the King. At least Father has the shattered leg as an excuse for hating the people who resisted him so forcefully. I wonder what Phillip’s excuse for all the hatred is. In the end, we are all the same when we return to the earth. Human.

The war is suddenly very real now and we are yet to encounter the enemy. We have only seen the residue of their presence; felt the aftereffects of the damage they have done. They are not supposed to have made it here, this far south from the Sudan though, so I am curious about what happened in this village. A rogue company of soldiers? Perhaps it wasn’t the Italians at all. Whatever happened here, it is ugly. So ugly. I have not had this feeling since I was in Bonny.

I think all of this is starting to affect me deeply. As we left the place where we had buried the bodies, I even thought I saw the shadow-creature from my dream standing beside a tree, watching us. When I blinked it disappeared.

I am not sure I should be writing about this to you but who else in the world can I unburden myself to? I probably won’t send this letter. But I need to record my thoughts somewhere. So, I continue writing whenever we make camp.

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