And it was the shelling and always the shelling.  We huddled in the hole waiting for it to stop, but time froze against my face in the mud.  I could hear the pounding of the earth and the sudden rush of air against my head and the roar of voices shouting and the confusion.  It seemed like everyone had decided to go insane at that moment.
    I thought I’d never love mud as much as I did that day.  And I remember I prayed that it would rain.  I wanted it to rain every day.  I hated the sun.
    When the shelling stopped it took awhile to hear again.  I didn’t mind the silence.  The trench was thick with deaf ears and soldiers hiding under their helmets.  Their lips were moving, but no one could hear them.  And then the sergeant came by, his feet sinking into the mud, and I could almost hear the sucking sound of his boots.   He gave us a loud pep talk.  “Courage men,” he began.  But most of us were not listening; we were still humming from the early morning barrage.
    I remember thinking how pathetic he looked,  standing there with his rifle slung over his shoulder and his mud caked face and his mouth making noise.  I felt sorry for him.  He had no idea that his words fell in the dirt and sank in the mud like his boots.
    The wind suddenly changed and blew over us and the Sergeant disappeared in the smoke.  When he reappeared, I stared at his hands.  They were trembling.  He shoved them into his pockets and walked further down the trench.  I didn’t know if he was mad or scared.
    Then Crenshaw laughed.  Actually it sounded more like a scream.  He was lying next to me with his helmet off and staring at the sky.  Then he burst out laughing or screaming, I’m not sure anymore, but I looked up to see why he was making all that noise.  The sky was blue, with fast-moving clouds and long wisps of smoke.  The smoke was black and greasy looking.  Then I saw a flock of geese fly rapidly over us.  They honked as they swung low and then raced toward higher heights.
    “Look,” Crenshaw shouted.  He threw his arm in the air.  “They’re German spies,” he shouted.
    Sporadic gunfire broke out.  Some of the bullets whizzed over our trench and some of them went, rat-tat-tat, in the dirt, just above our heads.  Crenshaw was still waving his arm and shouting.  But before I realized what the Germans were doing, a bullet hit Crenshaw’s wrist and knocked his hand down like one of those ducks in a shooting gallery.
    "They hit me.  Some son-of-a-bitch hit me.”  He sat rocking and cradling his hand.  The blood leaked into the mud.  He kept on mumbling about being hit.  “I thought they were shooting at the geese,” he said to me as I wrapped his hand with my dirty handkerchief.  I used my belt as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.  His eyes were glassy.  I yelled for the corpsman.  Crenshaw pulled on my arm.  “You saw them, didn’t you?”
    “Yeah, I saw them,” I said.
    “I thought they were shooting at the geese,” he said.  Then his eyes rolled up into his head.  “I need a Goddamn corpsman over here!” I turned and shouted at the men around me.  Most of them had that far away look in their eyes, as if they had left their bodies.  Another burst of gunfire split the air.  Some of the bullets went, plunk, plunk, plunk into the mud on the other side of the trench.  I slapped Crenshaw as hard as I could.  Then I slapped him again and again and again.  I don’t know what came over me.  I wanted him to look at me.  So I slapped him harder.  I was crazy with it.  Even now, I don’t know why I did it.  Then I felt a bunch of hands pin my arm back.  But I wasn’t through with it.  I started kicking Crenshaw.  I wanted him to wake up.  I wanted to see his eyes.  I think that’s when I began screaming at him.  “Wake up, you son-of-a-bitch.  Wake up.”  Then something hard hit me on the jaw.  At first I thought, they got me too, and I fell back into the mud.  I couldn’t move.  My whole body was numb from the blow.  Only my eyes worked.  So, I looked at the sky.  Then I heard a voice giving orders.  I heard him say “stretcher” several times, and then the plunk, plunk, plunk of bullets slamming into the opposite side of the trench.  Suddenly, the sky grew dark with mortar and smoke.  I could hear the recoil of the cannons and the sound of the shells screeching through the sky and I prayed for rain and I didn’t want to die and I prayed for Crenshaw and I prayed, “Please God, don’t let me die like this.”
    Then I felt a pair of strong hands lift me and drag me over to the side of the trench.  It was the sergeant.
    “You’re not going to die, private,” he said.  “Here -- put your helmet on.”
    Then, for no reason, the shelling stopped.   The silence was worse than the shelling.
    “How’s your jaw?” the sergeant asked.
    “Fine,” I said.  I wiggled it from side to side.  I winced in pain but there was nothing broken.  I wasn’t bleeding, except where I'd bit my lip from the blow.
    “Pull yourself together, private.  We need everyone who can walk or crawl for the big push tomorrow,” he said as he stood bending over me.  I could smell the sweat on his face.  “Where're you from, private?”
    My mouth opened, but all I could do was breathe.
    “Your home, private.  Where'd you live before this stinking war?”
    “Virginia,” I said.
    “A fine place to be from.  They don’t kill the boys from Virginia.”
    I tried to smile but my jaw hurt.  The sergeant picked up his rifle and carried it in his hand, as he slouched away.
    “Crenshaw,” I yelled.
    The sergeant stopped and turned to me and shouted, “ . . . going home.”
    And for a moment, I thought I saw a sad and desperate look on his face.  A longing came over me and I swear I saw my mother’s face on all the faces staring at me.  I didn’t cry.  Maybe I should have, but I didn’t.

At dawn we fixed bayonets.  A fog had moved in during the night.  I was anxious to go.  This was the best time to go.  They wouldn’t see us coming.  I was sure the Germans wouldn’t see us.  I climbed over the trench and stood up to show how sure I was that the enemy couldn’t see us.  I stood there and waited for the orders to advance.  “They can’t see me,” I shouted.
    But the orders never came.  I jumped back into the trench as the fog began to thin out.  Why?  What are they waiting for?  Suddenly, someone barked, “Come on, boys!”  And then the shouting and the screaming started and the machine guns opened up and I jumped up and started running.  And I kept on running.  And the bodies kept on falling.  Some of them never reached the top of the trench and others sunk to their knees holding out arms that were not there, staring with  eyes that they would never see again.
    We ran with our rifles in our hands.  I could barely see the terrain in front of me.  I had to zig and zag around the shell holes.   And then I saw the lieutenant to my left, in front of the men, with his sword stuck in the air, cursing the boys to make speed.  I saw him fall several times and I thought he was hit.  But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bright glint of steel.  But there was no sun, only the bombs exploding.
    There he was again, ahead of me now.  How magnificent he looked.  He must be from Virginia, I thought.   I picked up speed and shouted, “Come on then!”  As I ran, I prayed that my boots wouldn’t get stuck in the mud and I kept thinking, any minute now and I’ll be hit.  And then I saw the barbed wire and the constant flash of the machine gun.   And I reached for the wire cutters, but there was nothing there.  I must’ve dropped them, and I kept trying to think of where I'd done it.  And the barbed wire and the flash of guns and the wire cutters.  Suddenly, I began to shout as I ran, “They won’t kill the boys . . . .”

Not too far from the front, near the town of Guise in northern France, in St. Bernadette Hospital, the wife awoke to the sound of a radiator tapping.  She opened her eyes and saw a weak ray of sunlight filtering through the white gauze curtains.  She rubbed the crick in her neck from sleeping with her head on the edge of the bed.  She saw a nurse bending over her husband and placing a thermometer between his thin fevered lips.
    When the wife saw her husband’s face wince with pain, she searched under the sheet and found the right arm, the left one was gone, and squeezed his fingers.
    The nurse shook the needle and stared at the tiny red numbers.  “His fever has gone down, Luv.” Then she shook it again, and placed it in her breast pocket.  She leaned just a little too far forward as she walked over to the window and pulled the curtains aside.  Her lips curled into a smile.  “Nice day, I’d say, wouldn’t you, Luv?”  But there was no gleam to her eyes.  Instead, they held that dull, empty look.  That short-handed look.  The look that said she had stayed up half the night listening to men cry, boys really, and she the only mum they had or the only wife they’d ever see again.
    The wife nodded her head.
    “Talked up a storm last night, he did.  Must of boxed your ears, Ma'am.  To listen to him I mean.”
    “Yes, no, I mean.”  She brushed lose strands of hair away from her eyes.  “I’m afraid I fell asleep,” she whispered.
    “Oh, that’s all right, I’m sure it didn’t matter in his condition and all.  I mean . . . well, his fever is down and that’s all that matters.”  The nurse slimmed her shoulders a little and went about her rounds.
    The wife looked down as if she were surprised that she was still holding her husband’s hand.
    After a few minutes, the nurse returned and stood at the foot of the bed.  She opened her mouth twice as if she were going to speak.  But anyone looking at her face could see, she couldn’t  stay quiet.  “Don’t look so sad, Luv,” she said.  “Your husband’s a lucky man to have you here with him.  Look around you.  These chaps have no one to hold onto, only us.  We are their surrogate mothers and surrogate wives.  I’ve had more proposals in a week then I ever did back home.”  She chanced a smile, but it didn’t hold.  Then she pulled her cap off.   Sandy colored wisps of hair fell from where they had been pinned under her white cap.  Sunlight streamed through the window.  She shook her hair free and let it fall to her shoulders.  Outside, an ambulance screeched to a halt.  She gathered her hair and twisted it tight into a knot and placed the cap back on.  Doors slammed; shouts, running feet.  “It’s not fair.  This bloody war is not fair.”
    The wife looked up as if she were going to reply.  She opened her mouth, but her lips were trembling.
    “And you’re lucky, too,” the nurse blurted out.  “Don’t you forget that.”  Then she turned curtly and walked quickly down the corridor and straight through to the heavy swinging doors.  She stopped suddenly behind the door.  “Oh, this bloody war,” she said and covered her mouth, stifling a cry.
    Another nurse stopped and approached her.  She was wearing an insignia on her white cap.  “Now, now, Margaret, we can’t have you blubbering all over the ward,” she said.  She touched the nurse Margaret’s arm.  “Pull yourself together, girl,” she said soothingly.  “We’ve seen worse and it’ll get much worse than this, before this bloody war is over.”
    She took Margaret’s arm in hers, and walked Margaret outside.  The sun was bright and warm for an autumn day in late October.  The leaves were fierce with color.  They speckled the lawn with bright reds and bright yellows.
    The two women walked, arm in arm, down the steps to a small pond at the edge of the hospital ground.  There were injured soldiers limping on canes and others being pushed in wheelchairs and a few standing still.
    The two nurses walked to the edge of the pond and sat on a grassy knoll.  There were geese gliding across the pond, pruning themselves.  Autumn leaves floated on the surface, as if they had been painted on the water.  And in the distance, the faint sounds of cannons, booming like thunder

JOSEPH M. FARIA is the award-winning author of a book of short stories, titled FROM A DISTANCE, dealing with residents of and immigrants from the Azorean island of Sao Miguel.  He has published poems and stories in Ishmael, Harbinger, Aldeberan, Rhode Islander Magazine and All Story Extra, and is now finishing up his first novel, KATIA.  He lives in Rhode Island.