BTBD Challenge 2 - The sound of war

[m_findlow]

Title: The sound of war
Original fiction
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 647 words
Content notes: Written for Challenge 2 - Loud at beattheblackdog
Summary: It's not the sound that will kill you

There's absolutely no other way to describe it, he thinks. He's forgotten what the absence of noise sounds like, even thought he knows that thought, in and of itself, is an oxymoron. Silence doesn't sound like anything. Then again, silence to him sounds like death. It's the brief reprieve from the cacophony. He only wishes he were conscious enough to enjoy it.

If it's not one things it's another. It's the sound of dirt pattering down on their helmets in tiny clumps, making an endless chink chink sound as it rings down throughout the camp. When it's not the dirt, it's the actual rain. It doesn't just patter down gently and hit the earth with a subtle tap. It lashes down in torrents. In the confined space of the trench it echoes all around them, forming huge puddles around their feet, and the sound of it sloshing down the walls, sucking their boots into the thick gloopy mud it creates. That makes its own sound as soldiers try to unstick their feet from its clutches. Over and over they do it, because they know that the only thing that kills a man quicker than a bullet or a bomb is wet feet.

Then there's the captains and the lieutenants barking out orders, if not at you or your platoon, then at the next one who shares the narrow space beside you. Go, becomes the most feared word to be yelled out. Go means over the top, towards the enemy, toward uncertainty and probably death.

The sound of bombs and gunfire is constant. Even in the pouring rain it never lets up. The guns clatter endlessly with their magazines feeding the hungry metal beast, dozens every minute of rat a tat a tat a tat. The bombs are worse. There's a whinnying cry as they sail through the air, just moments before impact, but the whistling sound gives away nothing of its intended target. It could be miles from you, or bearing down just inches from where you're holed up. The sound is just a courtesy warning that you might be about to die right now.

But there's one sound worse than all of them. Underneath all of the other sounds, it hardly seems discernable, but to him it might as well be the loudest thing on earth. It's the screaming. The horrible, agonising sound of young men being cut down by artillery, missing whole limbs, or their skin burned off in the explosion, or lying in the mud watching their own entrails pouring out of their bodies. Some scream for the medic, some scream for their mothers, but most just scream because of the pain and the terror. The sound will echo through his head for long years to come. After all the bombs and the guns and the rain and the dirt and the generals are gone, the screaming will still be there, ringing loudly through every recollection, even where there was none.

Then he hears another sound. It's the captain again, shouting out the order to go. He pulls himself up the short ladder and over the top, bayonet in one hand, grenade in the other. He's barely made it twenty yards before the ground in front of him erupts in an explosion of dirt. No sound to warn him this time. A land mine. Something else before him has set it off, but he's so close that it flings him sharply to the ground several feet away. At first he doesn't realise what's happened. He thinks he's dead because the world  begins to move in silent slow motion. They force of the blast has burst both his eardrums. Now he's lying there, watching it all play out around him, like a movie, silent and devoid of colour.

Finally all then noise has disappeared and is replaced by pure, white silence. And it's absolutely deafening.

Comments

[bk_forever]

Bleak, chilling, this paints a horrifyinmg picture of the reality of war in the trenches. I know this is original fiction, but I could see this being Jack, or one of the men under his command.

Very well done.

[m-findlow.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

It started out as going to be a Jack fic, but I kinda figured it didn't have to be. War is just awful no matter who you are.

[bk_forever]

And worse for those who won't come back from death, who lose their lives so senselessly. I wish we could end war for good, but sometimes I think that will only happen when humanity manages to wipe itself out.