Rewrite I no longer ride the war horse as it sweats blood profusely, snorts, and champs at the bit beneath me. No longer is Mars riding on my back and mocking us all - just fodder for the metal teeth of war. I no longer sit upon the barrels of the big guns and stare into the dark distance – looking for death lurking on the horizon; nor , do I crawl and claw my way through the loamy blood soaked mud and putrid water in the trench graves and along the embankments that are pock marked with craters from exploded shells. How long has it been? How long since I haunted the barren and shell wrecked countryside – and stumbled through the burned out villages, the wasteland that had once been so vibrant and beautiful - so alive? The blink of an eye or a lifetime? Sometimes it seems like just yesterday and other times as if it has been a life time ago. All gone now! But is it? I slowly become solvent within myself. I struggle to regain myself and to free myself from the grip of war and destruction. I am being reborn out of violence and death. I rise up like a phoenix in my mind where the embers still circle me. Out of the ashes of death, I am trying to re-form what I once was – when I was made of dust, flesh, blood and spirit. Peace! But is there such a thing? The word is meant to calm the mind - but is it something that hand or mind can grab a hold of? Can the future redeem the present for the past? Can such words act as balms to body, mind, and spirit? Perhaps they are the only things that can. When I gaze out the window, I see the pages of life turning as the countryside rolls by framed in acres and fences. Everything seems to pass in a detached silence. But then the vibrant colors of flowers give life to the animation of the fields, cities, towns, rivers, and forests again. Brown fields are redeemed by the bright hues of the blooms that I see bordering the land. Everyone is anonymous – I too am anonymous. Children play in the streets, while factory smoke stacks sting the once clear air. Freedom once resided in fields of clover that seemed to stretch to the ends of the earth – back before death rode across them on an ominous steed - bringing a collapsing horizon with him. Can it be so again? For years my eyes had seen only debris littered fields of blood, death, and rot. Can one be redeemed by a single blossom growing in a field where there had been nothing but destruction? Perhaps, if the field is in the mind. Gasping for air, I spring to the window and throw it open. Night has fallen and thousands of lights disappear into the distance while their colors fade. I breathe deeply capturing the fresh country air in my lungs. Alive. I carry a world with me – isolated in the island of my mind. I think back to The Battle of The Marne. And, it was in mid September of 1914 that we first commenced work on the trenches. You might say that all of the armies began digging their own mass graves beginning on the 15th of September of that year. It is appropriate that our word for trenches is Schützengräben – or “protection” and “graves” at the root of the meaning of the word. Eventually the trenches stretched from the Belgian Coast southward through France, and bulged to contain the feverishly contested Ypres Salient. Running outside such French towns as Arras,Soissons, Reims, Verdun, Saint-Mihiel and Nancy, with once luscious fields and villages becoming barren mass graves. The system finally reached its southernmost point in Alsace at the Swiss border near Pfetterhouse, where the hostilities of 1870 still lived in the minds of the locals. In total the trenches laid end-to-end, would stretch some 25,000 miles. Just under half of those miles occupied by the Entente, and the rest by the Central Powers. Novel by Metatron Von Bardeleben AKA Lloyd Bardell
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 08:02:00 +0000
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