Over the Top by Maryam Majid (15, Britain)

​The metallic air hangs heavy with the deafening silence of war. I cannot hear, nor see, nor remember; I am as ancient stones underground must be – laying still and unmoving in the earth as extreme pressures crush them; having experienced so much that all they can bear to be is cold, ashen granite. Into this abyss comes, as from a faraway fantasy, birdsong; a high trill of youth, hope and light, reaching me in my darkness. The sound feels strange in this grey, bleak desolation, like the ghost of happiness, like a figment of some faithful imagination. All at once, I am pulled back and my senses are assaulted, making me dizzy and turning the edges of my awareness fuzzy as nausea settles into the pit of my stomach.

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​The noise is stifling, like its absence was. The shouted commands, shuffling of feet and murmured prayers, all muffled for the ringing in my ears. Gunfire and grenades play their terrible symphony overhead, amid a backdrop of artillery and pattering rain – grey arrows shooting down from a grey sky, like icicle-bullets. It is cold. I shiver and my breathing becomes harsh and raspy. Dozens of men lined up beside me go through the same motions: wiping their sweaty palms on their trousers, exhaling cigar smoke and mumbling to themselves. Their boots squelch in the soddy mud, everything becoming wetter by the second as the rain intensifies. None are fully whole, blackened nubs where fingers were and stumps in place of limbs, heavy eyes and wavering strength, grumbling stomachs. A murky fog of warring notions as a conscience. We are the walking dead.

Each appears as an automaton, no more distinguishable from their neighbour than the rats crawling around our feet – among the bodies of fallen brethren, old, gangrenous and lice infested; we are not so far from that, hanging onto this side of the veil with the last threads of our humanity – are from each other. Like robots, the men check their rifles are in order, – I follow, the slick, steel surface of my gun feels like ice on my fingertips, the weapon a heavy burden – gulp down shots of whiskey, bite their nails and wipe perspiration from their brows. Their hands shaking, eyes twitching, with nerves. They have never seemed so little like individuals, such manifold, different countenances acting identically. And yet, beloved photos and rings, lockets or books of holy creed clutched in their hands, heads raised in prayer, each man fighting to inhale air that reeks of sweat, faeces, and blood – they have never seemed so human.

Someone retches; the stench of sick wafts over to me. My nausea is almost unbearable now, I take forceful, rapid gulps of air, but it is as though I can gain nothing from it but the coppery-rust smell of days-old blood, the scent mixing with all the other ubiquitous foulness of the trenches – gangrene, mould, earth full of dung, death, and decay. Everything feels like poison, the stale, war air – pervaded by the dense, iron and steel tang of weapons the permeates the front, for all the shovels, bayonets, and rifles, and swelling with the sulfurous, chemical incense of gunpowder at the core of every bullet – the compact quarters, with others equally void of hygiene or health, and the hard, dry food that crumbles in our mouths and rubs our tongues like sandpaper. Every foul odour fills my nostrils and makes my head light. I cannot think, everything blurs, my knees are weak.

I am terrified. I think how every bullet that meets its mark rips through a beating heart, wrenches apart a living, breathing being who felt anger and pain and passion – our weapons kill, and make killers of, human men. I feel a great foreboding, a horror like nothing I have felt before. I am scared to the point of hysteria – of the violent screams I hear in my sleep, the vacant look a man’s eyes take when the twinkling light of life leaves them, the unimaginable amount of blood that gushes forth from his veins. Are the enemy, just now, trying to mislead themselves that we are monsters, and losing the battle, even to their weathered consciences? There may as well be a mirror among the corroded barbed wire and crimson poppies across the centre of No Man’s Land. My mind plays images of me being run through with a bayonet, shot with a bullet, brains bashed with the butt of a gun – myself the executioner. I am afraid of death, of the Fire.

Bile rises in my throat; I arduously swallow it. I must leave, go somewhere else. I think of the sun as a yellow flower in the azure sky, watching over me as I raced through fields of wheat and corn, my mother kneading dough in our clay hut a-ways off, watching over my sisters playing with their dolls in its cool shadow. The wind whistled, passing through tall, faraway banyan trees, rustling their lush green leaves – gilded in golden rays of sunlight – and carrying the music back to me, accompanying tailorbirds and bulbuls singing to their mates. My brothers and I, laughing, running, chasing each other into a shimmery, rose-gold sunset. The memories are warm, infused with a jubilance, a carefree peace, in which I, in my innocence, felt secure, which my youth did not know to treasure.

I recall my wife – what a beautiful bride she made, what a lovely daughter she bore me, how their tears turned the world inside out, like a storm that could bow mountains and reshape valleys, and their laughter made it glisten as though bathed in starlight or covered in emeralds. I can smell the fragrance our home – the spices and the silken fabrics. It was warm, around the year – my homeland never grows as cold as it does here – and I can see the three of us gathered among quilts, our daughter crawling between us, my wife’s growing womb. The world then, seemed to me as though the most exquisite threads of happiness had been masterfully woven, by a generous, beneficent hand, into its every aspect.

Before the war. Before I was taken from my home and shipped to this continent to fight for kings, I had neither notion of nor loyalty to. I remember the excitement in the eyes of the new ones, how they went forward with cries of patriotism and a fervour for glory. There are no new ones now – everyone left knows, there is no coming back from this victorious. There is no coming back from this at all.

The whistle blows.