A Christmas in No Man's Land (standard:drama, 2722 words)
Author: TJC	Added: Dec 14 2004	Views/Reads: 3721/2420	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
In December of 1914, a young British soldier has both the best and worst Christmas of his life.

It was Christmas Eve and the shelling had finally stopped. The quiet was
as flagrantly obvious as had been the din of the exploding bombs. It 
was also just as hard on the nerves, for all too often the silence was 
a prelude to an attack by the enemy. Timothy Collins couldn't see any 
movement across the landscape of barbed wire that lay between the 
trenches.  He wondered what the actual name of this French soil was. To 
him it was Hell, pure and simple. Dusk was settling quickly on the 
battlefield. It was getting cold and he began to shiver slightly. 

“On to Berlin!” twenty year-old Timothy Collins had shouted some four
months earlier.  He and the rest of the British nation were full of 
patriotism when war with Germany was declared. It was to be a 
gloriously victorious adventure.  When asked to “take up the call for 
England,” he naturally jumped to and fro. Along with his buddies, 
Mitchell Hargrave and Ronald Rowe, he enlisted in the Army in August, 
1914, under the encouraging banner Join with your pals. 

The three of them had arrived in France the previous September and
immediately saw combat.  Any and all of their thoughts of romantic 
heroism were quickly destroyed in a violent and horrible way. The 
Germans outnumbered them three to one and attacked in successive waves, 
completely out in the open. Timothy couldn't believe his eyes; it was 
virtually impossible to shoot his rifle without killing a German, yet 
they kept coming.  Be it bravery or stupidity they kept attacking. It 
wasn't long before the British Army was in full retreat, doing its best 
to fight as it  back-peddled toward Paris.  The war was not supposed to 
be this way. Before the end of that first month his friend Ronald was 
killed in an artillery barrage, his left arm completely blown off, his 
chest and face full of shrapnel.  Timothy and Mitchell consoled 
themselves in the fact that it looked to have been a quick death.  The 
sight of his friend laying in the twisted mass of bodies that had once 
been British soldiers was an image that would be forever etched into 
Timothy''s memory. 

The German advance was eventually halted by British and French forces
twenty miles outside of Paris. The enemy was exhausted by the continual 
attack, and with reinforcements available to the defenders, the tide of 
battle began to turn.  For a time the Germans began to retreat, but 
soon decided against leaving French soil and began digging into the 
Earth in a defensive posture.  The Allies were forced to do the same 
thing to take cover from the shelling and machine gun fire.  A series 
of trenches grew along the French countryside. The war had become a 
stalemate. 

Trench warfare was, in Timothy Collins mind, an all too grisly example
of the depths to which the human condition could sink.  The Germans 
would attack and be cut to pieces, only to be followed by the Allies, 
who would go over the top and be butchered in the same fashion.  It was 
insanity.  No attack could be successful against a well fortified 
trench or machine gun nest.  Bodies littered the area between the 
opposing trenches and it became known to soldiers on both sides as “No 
Man's Land.” 

Rotting flesh and open latrines provided the background smells of life
in the trenches. Lice and flies were a constant nuisance, though 
nothing compared to the rats that plagued the armies like a scourge 
from Hades.  Foul beasts gorged themselves on human corpses and 
occasionally on dying soldiers too wounded to defend themselves.  The 
cold winter months cut down somewhat on the harsh odors, but the 
elements of rain, mud, and chill brought sickness and disease to the 
Western Front.  The change in season did nothing to curb the rat 
population.  On cold nights it was not uncommon for a rat or two to 
snuggle up to a soldier as a lover might in bed.  By far the most 
miserable aspect of life in the trenches, however, was the gloomy 
prospect that there appeared to be no end in sight. 

Mitchell was killed on December 4, 1914.  He had taken only a couple of
seconds to pop his head over the top of the trench, an area known as 
the parapet, and was shot by an enemy sniper.  He fell back onto the 
muddy puddle that was the floor of the trench with his lifeless eyes 
staring out toward eternity. The bullet had entered just to the side of 
his left ear under his temple.  Join with your pals, Timothy thought 
bitterly.  His pals were both dead. 

It was impossible for Timothy to peer out over the parapet without


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