In the distance there is a blue light, tiny, like a flickering gas flame. No idea what it is, but it doesn't look dangerous. Not something that will suddenly get closer and explode, not something I need to report.
It's starting to rain. Soon the trench looks like a stream, no matter how hard we try to scoop away the water. Meade is grumbling. When he kicks a rat away, he falls on his back and only gets back on his feet with great difficulty.
Then there is a great bang and I lie face down in the mud. Screams and panicked stumbling, buzzing in the immediate vicinity and further away. My ears are clogged and my breathing is the only thing I hear. Deep, slow and heavy, like a bellows.
A hand on my shoulder. Meade. “Everything okay?”
Yeah, everything okay. Only with my ears there is something weird. They seem to open and close quickly, like a valve. Silence, noise, silence, noise.
The corner of the trench is blown away. Only a mouldless mass remains of the connection with the other. There is also a body. The belly is ripped open. Protruding entrails and remnants of white beans, semi-digested and seeped with dark red blood.
Someone is yelling that the Germans are coming. A grenade breaks a breach in the barbed wire barrier. We shoot frantily at the approaching shadows, but the situation soon looks hopeless.
Meade pulls me along. 'Come away. It’s messed up here.'
  
We walk around the corner, into the next section. It is half destroyed. Again around the corner, to the left, to the right. Dead bodies, wounded men, chaos everywhere. Into the connecting trench, through to the second line. There, too, they have been pummelled with grenades. A sergeant shouts us back to the front line.
There, we see black smoke rising from one of the nearby trenches. Screams and shouts, the stench of nitrogen: a flamethrower. We walk into the no man's land. Our feet sink deep into the mud. My knees glow and the bones seem to cut through the skin. Machine-gun fire comes out of the forest. Bodies are falling down in front of me. I seek cover in a hole. Next to me lies an old corpse. A half-rotten face with pecked out eyes. Then I'm shot at. I get up and run forward, towards the forest, until a heavy explosion smacks me down.  
  
Reutelhoek, 11.10 am.
When I regain consciousness, everything is quiet. A thick fog hangs over the landscape. My body and the mud are one, as if I were a hump in the landscape.
I move my arms and legs: everything okay. Then I feel the hunger. My stomach sounds like the dull moaning of cattle and my throat is like cotton. I cough until I start gagging. Stomach acid and saliva run out of my mouth. There is a strange pressure in my left ear. And sometimes I hear murmurs, like muffled cries of crows, or rats squealing.
Ten metres further, the field goes up. Behind that must be the German trenches. Through the strings of fog I can see a wall, about thirty metres away from me. As I approach, I notice that a Canadian soldier is sitting against it.
I raise my hand and whisper. “Hey! Everything okay?”
At first he doesn't respond, then he pulls out his hands and starts smiling.
I sit down next to him, offer my field bottle.
“Thanks,” he says in a hoarse voice. He drinks so eagerly that it runs out of his mouth, apologises for drinking so much.
I reach out to him. "Edward."
“Owen.”
“Where are you from?”
“Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.”
“Barrie, Ontario. How long have you been here?”
“Two weeks. Today was my first day on the front line. I never thought it would be so bad.”
“I've been here a little more than a month. Second week on the front line. Yeah, it's hell.”
We look out in front of us and drink in turns.
“Your rifle?” I ask. “Lost?”
“It’s in a German. I stabbed him with my bayonet. It got stuck between his ribs. And then I was shot at and I had to run.”
  
Polygon Forest, 1.40 pm.
The fog has largely cleared. Here and there there are still thin strings, but visibility is quite normal. The landscape looks like a bowl, between two heights with patches of forest. Mud fields and craters filled with water, broken walls, blackened willows, like pillars in a lunar landscape. On the right is the Polygon Forest.
“Maybe we should go there,” says Owen. “We could hide there. Maybe catch a rabbit.”
“I wouldn't hazard it. Surely, there must be Jerry’s.”
I point to the slope in the distance. “There are the Nonnenbossen. And our trenches, if the Germans didn’t take them. That's where we have to go. As soon as possible. I'm out of water. Nothing to eat either. What about you?”
He shakes his head with a dark look on his face.
  
We move along, hiding behind the piles of earth that crown the craters, or behind willows. Some are split in two and form ghostly figures in the landscape.
Then there is an open zone of about thirty metres, up to a patch of forest. We shuffle forward with weak knees, on our guard for snipers. Every second I look to the right, to the edge of the Polygon, afraid to see a rifle barrel shining there. Sour air rises from my stomach, sets my throat on fire and causes excessive saliva to flow. Stains in front of my eyes. And still that bloody whispering in my ears. Owen stays close to me, as if I were a living shield.
When we get to the forest, he sits down and curses with both hands over his head.
“Headache?”
He nods with a growl.
“Me too. We need to find water. But those craters are too deep. If we descend, we'll never get out.”
We check the field bottles of the corpses. Most are looted, but then we find one with a still half-full bottle. He hasn't been there that long. The bottom of his face is shot away. The jawbone hangs loosely down, in a strange grimace. As if the face forever screams, or smiles.
  
Polygon Forest, 2.25 pm.
The fog is back. Then I also notice the blue light I saw this morning. It comes from a small building about twenty metres from us. A chapel. And next to it the remains of a bunker. Crumbling concrete and twisted iron rods like groping arms.
We walk towards it. Me in front with a shouldered rifle and Owen right behind me. The silence creeps between my sternum and forms an acid blob in my throat. My nose feels blocked and I have trouble breathing. My forehead, eyelids, ears and fingertips feel like they have been smeared with tiger balm.
We squat down near the bunker. I hear rustle on the other side. I sneak along the wall. Suddenly he appears around the corner. A big guy without a helmet. My finger glides over the trigger, but then I hear a dry bang and I see smoke rising from his rifle.
The bullet shaves past my shoulder and ricochets off the bunker. He looks at me with wide eyes, trying to recharge, with too cold hands, nervously breathing, as if that will help, as if that will make everything go faster. He is like a bird hanging on a cord, fluttering up and down until I’ll shoot him.
As the discharge reverberates between my ears, I see him clutching his throat. Every heartbeat blood gushes from the wound. He gurgles and gasps, groans from his belly, his hands around his throat as he tries to stay on his feet. And then he collapses like a heavy lump, with his arms at his sides, his face in a puddle.
We search the shelter. Owen is happy to have the rifle, but we find no cartridges anywhere, and mine don't fit. On the floor lies a blue glass globe with a statue of the Virgin Mary and a half-extinguished candle inside. The blue light. It still burns slightly as I hold it, but as soon as I put it down, it goes out.
We turn him onto his back. The bloodstain around the collar of his uniform jacket looks like a bib, and his ID tag glints between the buttons. With a snap of my fingers, I slide it out. Karl Greubach. From Simmerath. Born October 12, 1899.
“Almost my age,” Owen says. “Next week would have been his birthday.”
We go through his pockets, find a notebook with letters and photos. A beautiful woman in her forties. Then the same woman, together with a girl of about fourteen. Both with broad smiles and bright, hopeful eyes. As I stare at their faces, they fade and increasingly look gray. I leaf through the notebook for a few more minutes and put it back where I found it.
Owen is standing next to a horse, about ten yards away. “It’s still alive. But in bad shape. We have to finish it off.”
Bloody pieces of flesh and shreds of skin hang from its rump. Its nostrils twitch and red foam billows from its muzzle. I put my rifle to its head. The eye looks back at me. Dull brown with a grayish sheen, rolling nervously back and forth. I look away and pull the trigger, hearing the echo of the shot and the splatter of the bullet as it lodges in the brain.
The buttocks are charred black and riddled with shrapnel. We skin the shoulder with our bayonets and scrape off the flesh. It tastes like a bloody dishcloth.
In the chapel, we find a blanket. We sit next to each other against the wall and share it.
With the taste of horse blood in my mouth, I doze off.
  
Lotegat, 5.50 pm.
A fine drizzle on my face awakes me. I open my mouth and stick out my tongue, wiping the drops from my cheeks and chin toward my lips. A great tit is foraging by the wall, its black head glistening in the rain.
In the sky, a flock of crows. Above them, a German reconnaissance plane. We get down and remain still.
Owen looks at me, his eyes rolling. “What's he looking for? Has he seen us?”
“He's going to fly over our trenches. But if he has seen us, he might think we're coming back from a reconnaissance mission. He'll report that, of course. We gotta hurry.”
It's still a little over fifty meters to the foot of the slope. I can already see the spiked barrier and the barbed wire. Our lines must be behind them.
Suddenly, I hear Owen scream. “Damn it! Bloody varmint!”
He kicks at a pack of rats and sucks the knuckle of his right thumb. Then he sits down with his head between his knees, both hands on his chest. He looks like a cat about to throw up a hairball, but only air comes out.
I sit down next to him and place my hand on his shoulder.
We stay like this for several minutes.
“Come on, we have to get going,” I say.
He looks up at the sky with dark eyes and shakes his head despondently. “Go ahead. I'll stay here.”
His face is deathly pale. Sunken cheeks, glassy eyes. He looks twenty years older. When I try to help him up, he resists, deliberately letting himself fall down.
“Come on, don’t be silly,” I say.
He pounds his fists in the mud and lets out a desperate wail.
I wait until he's finished ranting and gently place my hand on his shoulder. “Come on, buddy. It'll pass. Come with me. I'll take you home. We'll stay together and take care of each other. Okay?” I look him straight in the eye. He presses his lips together and nods. Then I make another attempt to get him to his feet. “Come on. We’re almost there. Chin up. You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to stand up and walk to the lines. Okay? Lean on me and we’ll walk over there. Everything will be fine.”
He sits there staring for a moment, then scrambles to his feet. Step by step, he shuffles forward, his gaze fixed, mouth half open, like someone taking his first steps after a long illness.
  
Nonnenbossen, 6.50 pm.
We're in front of the slope. A hundred meters up, towards our trenches. It's so steep we sometimes slip backward. We keep getting stuck in the mud and have to pry ourselves free with our knees and elbows.
The spiked barrier and the barbed wire. Twenty meters up.
A few distant bangs. Flares. The flickering light dances across the landscape. We drop down.
Gunshots. We stick to the ground like locusts, crawling forward on our knees and elbows. More shots. My ears ring, and then all I hear is a dull rumble. And a muffled cry.
Owen holds his hand to his chest, with glazed eyes. A gray cataract covers them like a membrane. Sometimes his fingers move, trembling like insect legs. He wants to say something, but his words drown in the blood he vomits a second later. And then his jaw drops and it's over. For a moment, it's as if the oxygen is sucked out of the air. Then a shot rings out. And another. The bullets crash between us, closer to me than to him. Let it be quick. Quick and painless. One sudden blow and then nothing.
I close my eyes. With my forehead in the mud, I lie there breathing deeply, as if in a gas mask. My fingers cling to a dry clod of earth. I feel like I'm floating upward. The landscape below me shrinks and shrinks, spinning faster and faster. Everything blurs, and I feel myself getting lighter and lighter.
I open my eyes. The flares are gone, and it's completely dark. A breath of fresh air flutters over my neck. I fill my lungs, clench my fingers in the mud, and crawl on.