Dead Silence

            It’s amazing how quickly the silence can settle over a battlefield.

            One minute there’s gunfire blasting from every direction, shells dropping all around and it’s like your ears are going to explode�"and then all of a sudden the noise is gone, and then even when you try to make a sound, fire off round after round until the magazine’s empty, nearly blow your legs off with badly thrown grenades, even when you try, you can’t hear anything.

            It’s the silence of the dead.

            Because all you can see for miles are fallen soldiers, blood-splashed uniforms and discarded weaponry. It seems like surely you’re the last one left. But once you’re used to the silence, you can pick out some sounds that don’t fit with the cacophony set on replay within your head. Things like screams and sobs and groans, and when you can feel your limbs again and turn your head you realize you’re not alone, not yet.

            In some ways, the silence is better. It helps you calm down; you aren’t constantly aware of every single sound, because there’s nothing to hear. And you aren’t constantly aware of every tiny detail in the landscape, because you can barely see. Your senses are almost completely shut down. It gives you some respite �" just for a few moments, but it’s enough.

            But then you’re defenseless at the same time. You can’t hear, can’t see, can’t feel. That’s when you have to hope against hope that all of the enemy are down, that the hopeless souls crawling across the snow are on your side.

            The situation never really seems real. Even when you’re back at base celebrating with the survivors, even more than a week after when all your injuries hurt the most, it just feels like a dream. It seems impossible that you could have gone through that and come out alive. The whole thing is just like one long nightmare.

            Or at least, that was how we were told to see it. If we let it get to us then we would break under the stress; it was best to keep distant, to stay sane. That was what our drill sergeant said, every morning, blasting our ears out with his ferocity.

            “You have to keep your head!” he would scream as we stared past him, shivering in our thin uniforms. At least the black material kept in some heat, even if it was hardly enough to keep our hearts beating. “Keep your head and you can take the enemy down! Lose your head and the enemy will take you down! Insanity is imperfect! Strive for perfection!”

            And we would shout it back at him, snapping our vocal chords with the desperate effort to wipe that disapproving frown off his face. “Insanity is imperfect! Strive for perfection!”

            Then he would continue, red-faced, with a question. “And if death is perfection, what will we do?”

            Even on the first day we had known the answer, and we were proud to cry it to the skies. “We will die for our country!”

Author's Note

The start of my brand new story~ What do you think?