11 November 1918. Fighting in Eastern France had been enduring and cumbersome, with the loss of millions of good hearts. All for what gain?
His hope, behind him, lost in the vastness of the surging sea of corpses, never to be found again. A tremendous boom echoed across the desolate body-ridden fields. Decimation ensued, trees writhing and flailing, their moans of pain carried away by the wind. The fields that were once the livelihood of his family, now occupied by the corruptness of humanity. Not even the sandbags could repel the rancid smell of death that had infiltrated every crevice of the trenches. The men, cadaverous, weak and exhausted. The low hums of the bomber flying overhead rang inside their helmets. All hope for humanity had been lost for the human mind and spirit had been crushed by the brutality of war.
10:58
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Orders were deafened by the rain pummelling the ground, an impenetrable salvo of bullets. Ashes fluttered to the ground, like souls descending from the heavens. Shrieking in agony, he reached to mend the maim on his left leg. Snowflakes fell, like little angels kissing his head. Humanity needed redemption, but they were soldiers, like slaves laboring under the yolk of their superiors. His face bearing the expression of utter hopelessness.
He descried the picturesque scene of the village he had grown up in, with the little church he and his neighbors used to climb on the corner of the street had disappeared. The place that he once called home, now a barren wasteland, covered in an ominous cloud of fog, lost in time.
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One minute remained. Soft weeps of pain eventually fell silent. War is violent. War is futility. The charcoal firmament, threaded with golden streaks, a crack in the cloud layer where the sun streamed through as expeditious as water through a cracked dam. The screams of thunder rang through the trees as they wailed and groaned. Tears rolled down his furrowed face which had withstood the ravages of time. One final shot was fired, another shriek, another life, another spirit. There was only the crackling of fire to be heard.
11:00
Silence.
A fleeting moment of humanity swept across the battlefield. Commands were being shouted through the trenches. “Feuer einstellen! Der krieg ist jetzt vorbei, the war is over, cease fire”.
The whispers, like mice, scuttled across the barren land. The celebratory moment was tempered by the grief of the soldiers who mourned for the war dead. The putrid stench of fear scampered through the trenches. Never calmed, yet constantly still. Through the thick blanket of fog, he espied movement in no man’s land.
One by one, they limped out of their trenches, where they had survived for the past months. Hope was found. As he stepped out, he saw the bullet holes in the deathly face of his brother, now dead and decaying peacefully. They gathered over a barbed wire fence, the broken mess that was humanity. He approached a German. Quivering with fear, he uttered, “My name John Wright… this… my girlfriend”, he proved a small photo of a vivacious woman in an extravagant white ball gown. His voice stuttered in anxiousness. He observed the tears streaming down the German’s expressionless face. He chuckled mournfully, “Mein name ist Alphonse Baumann” whilst exchanging sweaty palms and exchanged identification tags and cigarettes. It became apparent to him, they weren’t out to kill them, they were humans, not ravaged monsters.
As the sun wrestled the caliginosity, the drums of war pounded against the golden horizon in the dead of night and the light of day. In the west it swallows all light, in the east, it births anew.
Hope.
Hope for humanity’s redemption. No description can truly capture its mysterious majesty, yet only a few words can express its beauty….
More than 11,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or listed as missing in the final hours of the horrific war to end all wars. With all hope for victory lost, a military unwilling to fight, and its allies defeated, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated on the 9th of November and signed the armistice on the 11th of November. The armistice was a significant turning point in the political, cultural, economic, and social climate of the world.
