by Andy Remic
A world where hostility and anger are things of the past.
A world where there is no hate.
Once, I thought Heaven would be such a place. But why?
Why has God let us do this to one another? Why does he allow such atrocities to occur? Why should mankind suffer eternal war and damnation on earth? To gain entry to Heaven? To find peace after death?
None of it makes sense. It is not logical.
More probable is the possibility that God has abandoned us. Left us for dead in this stinking world of waste and blood and death . . .
I remember the words of the walrider from my dark dream which seems so many long years ago: Your God is of no use now, little man. Your God deserted you centuries ago. He left you stranded in a world you did not understand; he left you to destroy yourselves, so little did he think of you and your evolution. You are pitiful, and I despise you, and I can see the truth behind these words spat by a creature of hate, a creature of madness, a creature spawned by Hell and yet with a frightening clarity of insight. It reminds me of the prayer, from childhood, ejaculated from the burning lips of my righteous mother to a frightened child. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up.
God’s prediction?
Maybe one day, when I reach Hell, I will have my answers.
Part Two
Under a Burning Sky
The Forest of Bone. “War.” 19th. November 1917 (early evening).
JONES WALKED SLOWLY through the rain, listening to the distant sounds of battle, and he could remember with ice clarity the days of past dark dreams long ago at the Somme and Ypres and
Bainbridge crawling through mud, rifle dirty the barrel gleaming and Jones was beside him and they smiled, took deep breaths and surging to their feet fired shot after shot at the advancing tanks and behind them rose the men of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and machine guns roared kicking up mud and blood and shearing metal and flesh and they were sprinting, Bainbridge lost his helmet but still they ran on and suddenly aeroplanes from No 60 and No 7 squadrons howled overhead with Lewis and Vickers guns screaming, there were old Avros and SE5s and shells howled down towards the Austro-Hungarian lines and heavy artillery and machine gun nests were smashed and smashed, smashed into an unholy endless oblivion—
Jones halted, his breathing fast, irregular, heart pounding, chest on fire. He leaned against a cabin and took deep, slow breaths, then walking on unsteady feet, headed towards the trenches. Light was flashing in his eyes and he felt strange. The pain in his belly returned and he almost retched with the agony. A cold sweat broke out on his brow but he had made his decision, gritted his teeth, and continued on, wincing at the roar of guns, the scream of men, and climbed down a rough-hewn ladder into the nearest trench and headed for the ammunition store. He found himself a rifle; a young soldier gave him a helmet and a pouch for his ammunition and some empty magazines. He wished to God he had bullets for his SMLE, but the trusty old service rifle was now useless and spent—Jones shouted thanks over the roar of battle and started along the trench, boots soaking with mud and the duckboards shifting gently beneath his steps and . . .
the Hun spread out in a ragged line and screaming with adrenalin and anger and a sudden lust for battle the soldiers charged and fire lit up the mud and sky and earth and men went down in flames with hands scrabbling at faces and clothes and Bainbridge rugby-tackled Jones to the mud, and they went down, went under and fire swept across No Man’s Land. Jones could hear Bainbridge screaming “flammenwerfers get ——ing back, get back now!” and he was crawling, sprinting, fleeing with Bainbridge and other men of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers . . . Chauson, the poor bastard, was dead now, took a bullet in the eye, Simpson went down in the first line of flame and heat along with Allan and Jappo. Charlie and Toffee made it as far back as the trench, and slumped over the bags with Jones and Bainbridge but Charlie had a bullet in his leg which later turned black and was amputated too late to save his screaming, bubbling, thrashing life . . .
Jones sighed, leaning against the wall; soldiers pushed past him, running towards the front, and Jones suddenly realised one was Karn. He grabbed the man’s arm and Karn whirled, his eyes wide.
“Where’s Jorian?” asked Jones, face white and the pain in his belly gnawing at his thoughts, distracting his attention with its burning.
“At the front. Follow me,” snapped Karn, and Jones ran along behind the soldier, noting the man’s upper arm was bandaged and soaked in blood where he had grabbed hold. Jones looked down at his own fingers and saw that same blood staining his skin like indelible ink.
“It never changes,” he muttered, and carried on running, teeth gritted against the pain, and finally reached the new front lines. The Naravelle had pulled back and the battle had quietened for a few minutes. Bodies were dragged along the boards and Jones had to flatten himself against the wall several times to allow stretcher-bearers past with wounded, groaning men.
Jorian turned, his face and beard thick with blood, his eyes alight amongst the crimson. Jones nodded and Jorian came towards him, face suddenly breaking into a smile which cracked the fast-drying blood.
“Glad you could make it,” he said.
“I’m going to try for the Stoneway,” said Jones. “I need an exact location, a map if you’ve got one to spare. We have to end this atrocity. We have to wake from this nightmare.”
“I’ll arrange an escort,” said Jorian. “You’ll never get through the Naravelle alone.”
“No. I go alone. I’ll move faster. If a small group of infantry try and cut a path through the enemy, then we’ll all go down choking on blood. Alone, I stand more of a chance of slipping through.”
“So be it,” growled Jorian.
Jorian went to fetch a map, and Jones crouched down against the trench wall as several crumps howled overhead and the earth shook and
once more he was in No Man’s Land with the charging Tommies and the orders simple in his mind and Bainbridge screaming abuse at the Hun and his gun firm and solid and full of bullets and ready for the confrontation with the enemy firing hot metal into twisted walrider faces . . .
The Naravelle Offensive: Battle of Ra’eth Ke Larn. 19th. November 1917 (evening).
WITH UNIFORMS SLASHED OPEN and ripped, dirty and filled with gore, the Naravelle pushed forward inch by painful inch. Many of the walriders had been cut down by heavy gunfire, their powerful bodies stretched out in death and trampled by the advancing soldiers. But many walriders now held the guns of fallen Naravelle, and in their primal fury, with snarls and growls and drooling saliva from muzzles, pushed on alongside the men, so great was their need to spill human blood.
Bugles sounded, cursing, and they retreated from the Bone Forest lines. Once more, Naravelle artillery began a heavy bombardment of the front lines.
The mortars were proving their worth, but were very unstable weapons. Many refused to work, and many more had exploded in the faces of soldiers, leaving ragged, torn bodies on the ground next to smoking, jagged equipment ripped asunder. However, many of the mortars did work, if with dubious accuracy, and were pounding the barbed wire, the bone trees, and frontline trenches into a horrific mire, a chaotic charnel house of mud and shards.
With the taking of the recent trench, both sides had now bedded in. The retreating Femors had found new trenches to occupy and hold, whilst the Naravelle had won a solid base from which to launch their offensive.
The bombardment ended, and with battle screams the Naravelle charged with rifles thundering and the Femors firing back. Men were cut down in their tens, in their hundreds, as they swept across the killing ground firing rifles amidst the smoking remains of smashed bone trees, red and black and broken, stark on the uneven ground. Many Naravelle made it to the front lines and were met with fierce resistance as they leapt into the trench and were stabbed with bayonets and lon
g knives called shuriks; but they fought back with ferocity, and all was chaos and madness and the air was filled with screams and groans and the low, growling, metal song of slaughter.
General Randaska Rex did not make it as far as the enemy trenches because the man directly before him took a bullet in the neck which flattened, split the man’s skin and spun off, clipping Rex’s head on its glorious path towards the smoke-filled sky. Rex hit the ground hard and lay still for a few moments, dazed, feeling warm blood easing its way down his face.
He opened his eyes and lifted his hand. His hand was shaking, mud-covered, almost claw-like in its sudden entropic transformation, and he felt the blood on his face and traced it to its source, his finger accidentally slipping into the wound and making him scream, pull back, curse his own curiosity. Feeling suddenly tired and weak, he managed to find a handkerchief in his pouch and wiped the blood from above his eyes. Using the cloth as a dressing, he held it below the wound and started the long crawl back to his own recently occupied trench, and the surgeons that worked feverishly on the torn bodies of Naravelle wounded.
It took him what felt like a lifetime to crawl through the mud, and he lost his rifle on the way, but he pushed on, the handkerchief soaked and dribbling thin blood mixed with rain into his right eye and down his face and into his mouth so that his teeth and lips turned a brilliant crimson. He finally reached the trench, called out his rank in a quavering voice weak from blood loss, and allowed himself to be helped into the deep dark hole, black and ominous, a carved grin in the mocking ground.
“Well, well,” said a deep voice filled with humour. “Look what the dog’s just dragged in. Well met, brother, Rex. It’s good to see you, man.”
Rex looked up from where he was being manoeuvred onto a stretcher.
“Ragor Kan! It’s been years, brother.”
“How are you feeling, General?”
“My men are dead—killed, all of them! But not I. It takes more than a rabble of villagers to destroy me!”
“But you were wounded, brother.”
Rex’s eyes burned with a dark hate fever. “Yes, but the minute I am back out there I will raze that village, murder those defenders, every last ——ing man, woman, child and babe. I will make them ——ing extinct.”
Diary of Robert Jones. 3rd. Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers. 19th. November 1917.
I am going for the Stoneway. These are probably the last pages I will ever write, and I hope someday somebody will read this journal, will learn from it, will see me not as a man afflicted by madness, but as a man striving to do what is right, what he sees is right, despite his own faults and weaknesses. Battle—the battle now raging, the war now screaming—makes a mockery of man, a mockery of emotions and all life. I have lost faith. I have lost hope. I am going out there to die and nobody will mourn my passing.
The Stoneway is located out in No Man’s Land, past the Naravelle-occupied trench and amidst the Forest of Bone . . . somewhere. What are my chances of survival?
I will tell Orana. Say my farewells. Then I will leave.
A message. Jorian will be back soon, with the map; but I need to leave a message. If this is ever found, ever read, then I want it to be known that I am not insane, that I love my parents despite all they did to me, I loved Bainbridge and Webb and I am glad they are still with me, in spirit at least. That is a backbone, it gives me hope and a little courage. Most of all, I love Orana . . . a love I know is returned; she cares for me but she is chained to her village, her people, her mother and father, just as I am chained to her by love and guilt and shame.
I want her always, but she cannot be mine. Sometimes, when two people love one another, for whatever reason, they cannot be together. Like Romeo and Juliet, their love is tainted by too many external influences. And ultimately, they will die because of their love.
If I make it through this alive, I will write about the Stoneway and what it contains. Maybe this is just some Femorian myth, a story told for centuries around campfires as the walriders and the gren pace around outside the shadows, waiting for innocent fresh meat.
Jorian has given me the map. It is confusing. It seems to be on different . . . levels. Maybe underground tunnels? I will soon discover.
This is the private and personal journal of Robert Jones, a soldier who recently served under the flag of His Majesty George V, in the 3rd. Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers at Flers-Courcelette, Transloy Ridges, later at the Ypres Salient, and finally at Ra’eth Ke Larn—in a world I do not know.
The Forest of Bone. “War.” 19th. November 1917.
OUTSIDE, THE WORLD WAS ON FIRE. The Naravelle had drawn back once more and for precious seconds the earth was devoid of rifles and bullets and bombs. A thousand bone trees lay shattered all around, fractured, dead, finally smashed by the whizzing metal of man’s creation, devastated by the machines of man’s creation. They lay mutilated, like so many bodies in the earth, snapped teeth, splintered bones, the desecrated waste of once living, breathing trees. They lay, these once proud sentinels, stretched in death and shattered and smashed and torn, and the ground before and around them lay stinking and churned with mud and blood and flesh, and only a few horses struggled weakly from the midst of the carnage, mewling like newborn babes as their blood slowly leaked into the soil.
Jones moved away from the front, towards the hospital sections, and found Orana helping a Femor surgeon stem the flow of blood from a young lad’s stomach; the lad moaned for a while, and asked after a woman—and then gently relaxed back, and was silent.
“He is dead,” said the surgeon.
Orana nodded, face expressionless, wiped her hand on a gore-filled towel, and stepped out into the fresh air where she rested her head against the dugout wall and looked up into Jones’s face. All around lay the wounded, and so they moved away from people and found themselves under overhanging, rigid bows of bone trees, all red and angular, surviving, not yet smashed by the terrible weapons of war.
“I am leaving,” said Jones, finally. “I am going to the Stoneway. I will try and end this atrocity. This madness. Or die trying.”
“I will come with you,” said Orana, calmly, her voice matter-of-fact.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No!”
“Why?”
“Because I love you.”
“And that is why I must come.”
Jones took hold of her arms and looked into her face, into her grey eyes. With one hand he stroked her soft hair and then pulled her close, and hugged her, his hands tracing a path down her back and over her hips.
When he looked into her face he realised that he had tears in his eyes. “I am coming,” she said once more, her face tightening, becoming hard, her lips thin and white with tension. He felt her muscles tense under his grip. They felt hard as iron.
“I am going alone. This thing, you say it is something only I can do. Out there you would be shot to a million pieces . . .”
“Then I will be shot.”
“No. Stay here—I will be back soon, if I can. If I die, at least you know I tried, and you will know that I tried for you, for love, because I want to be with you forever and I want to live through this carnage . . .”
“Robert.” Her voice had changed, was suddenly, curiously primal as she gazed up at his scarred face.
“Yes?”
“Don’t go. Don’t leave me.”
“But I must.”
“We can stay here; Father has sent scouts requesting reinforcements; other units of Femors are nearby and maybe they’ll get here, and . . .”
“No. It will not happen.”
“It must!”
He could see the panic in her eyes then, the need to believe in something, in anything! And he realised, like a breath of fresh air arrow-straight through his soul, that she loved him more than life itself, a strange, carnal love deep down at the root of primal instinct and being and essence. He kissed her then, and she resisted—for a moment—and then melted i
nto him, and they stood embraced for minutes, enjoying the taste of one another, lingering, reliving a passion from another age.
It was Jones who broke away, suddenly, coldly aware of the scar tissue which now made up his face, a testament to the efficiency of Fritz mustard gas. He felt shame hammer his heart on a block of stone, and his cheeks reddened. He turned away. “I must go now. I will try to end the war. I will try to stop the murder.”
“Wait . . . I must tell you something. I—I have a husband. And a child.” Jones turned back and his face was pale in the gloom, eyes unreadable. Orana continued. “He went away to fight in the Femor army. He never came home. He is dead. The whole unit is dead!”
Jones came back, held her once more. “It does not matter,” he whispered into her ear, and for a second could smell the musk of wild berries and earth and woodsmoke and her skin was smooth and fine and her hair wild and he kissed her ear, kissed her gently on the forehead, finally kissed her willing lips, and then strode away through the trench, resisting the powerful urge to turn around, resisting the urge to look back at the woman he loved more than life itself.
“Come back,” whispered Orana.
But he did not. Could not. For sometimes it took greater courage and greater love to walk away from the one who was a part of your soul.
Jones strode across the duckboards and reached a trench nearing the front line; the Naravelle had started their attack, and Jones found Jorian at their agreed meeting place.
“You found one?”
“Yes,” nodded Jorian, and led Jones into the small, enclosed dugout.