I've Got Your Back

Once again it has been a short while since I last wrote for stolen moments are hard to come by now. Our living conditions are repulsive even to those who like me have grown up in poverty. The smell of raw sewage floating on the wind that causes you to retch; the fact you’re permanently up to your ankles in filth; the rats that scuttle across you when you finally surrender to sleep. I am lucky to an extent; at least I have known what it is like to be filthy, hungry and cramped. Matthew was horrified, he didn’t say so but I could see it from his face that he was. He had his own makeshift, minuscule ‘room’ however which was far more than most at least. When he is in front of his men or his superiors he smiles, throwing out endless words of encouragement, often starting songs or games that raise morale. The men look up to him, he is this beacon of hope and positivity. But on the first night of gunfire, when he thought nobody could see him, his beautiful face looked so terrified and so broken I couldn’t stop myself from reaching out and holding his shaking hand in the cover of darkness. Squeezing it tightly, trying to reassure him of my promise that we would be safe. Trying, if I’m honest, to convince myself of that too.

The horrors we have seen are more shocking than I could ever have imagined: men with limbs so mangled you can see bone; crumpled soldiers whimpering in agony as death takes far too long to claim them; mounds of bodies waiting for the end of each of the gunfire to be identified. But aside from all the drama, there is also a lot more waiting than I would have thought. Waiting with guns at the ready, breath bated, heart beating frantically, for another terrible onslaught that frequently, mercifully, never comes.

I would take a thousand monotonous hours of waiting over one hour of combat, as cowardly as that is to admit. For it seems more luck than anything that prevents one of the hundreds of flying bullets from hitting me or Matthew. I try to keep in front of him at all times so my body can act as a shield to him if a bullet was to reach us, but whenever he notices this he won’t have it. He whispered that he would rather die himself than lose me, a position I am all too familiar with. So far we have been lucky however, if survival is indeed that.

I question this fact, for whilst I do not know how it feels to die I have now become all too acquainted with how it feels to have killed; to have ended another person’s life. They are the enemy. A vicious, deadly enemy that are trying to kill us. But even that does not stop the guilt that envelops me each night, the sickening feeling that grips me as I remember those that my doings have slain. Shooting someone takes around 5 seconds, if that, yet the aftermath is apparently eternal, a feeling I doubt I will ever forget. Because when we strip back the two uniforms and take away our languages we are ultimately the same: scared, young men being forced to fight in this war, a war which I wager none of us fully understand. I told Matthew this once, on a rare moment where we were slightly away from others, but he cut across me and rather sharply said I could not afford to think of them like that, should not be feeling guilty for my actions which probably were saving the lives of some of OUR men. Matthew doesn’t understand that ultimately whether our men or their men, we are all men and all human beings in the end. Those that I killed would have felt fear in the split seconds before their death, they would have families at home drawing their own curtains, perhaps mothers that could not cope with another loss.

How can I live with that?

Matthew’s conscience is evidently less affected. He has proven himself to be one of the best riflemen we have. He hits nearly every time he shoots no matter the conditions. I suppose this is impressive, he certainly seems proud of it but in a way it repulses me. Now if there are fleeting moments where we can squeeze one another’s hands I don’t purely feel that hit of stomach-jolting electricity, although that certainly is still there. I also feel slight disgust because that hand has pulled the trigger which has led to many deaths or at least injuries. His beautifully un-calloused, comparatively small and lovely hand; the same hand that traced every curve of my body, which wrapped around me and sent me into pure ecstasy, has killed. Don’t misunderstand me, my feelings for him have not changed and it is not that I think Matthew is in any way worse than I am. It’s just that war and the things it has made us both do, has altered everything. War has complicated every emotion, added a new consideration into every area of my life.

That said, I still fall asleep nightly thinking of him, thinking of the last night we shared at camp together, thinking of what we shall do together in the privacy of his quarters when our three weeks at the front are over for a while. I’m itching to touch him; dying to trace the curves of his lips with mine, to remember what it is like to feel safe again rather than plagued by weakness and anger.