Robert Henry Jones. Aged 16

‘His dark hearing caught our wheels
And the choked soul stretched weak hands’
DEAD MAN’S DUMP Isacc Rosenberg

Faintly, almost beyond the compass of the human ear a bugle sounded an unfamiliar call, a haunting call, repeated again and again. There was something indescribably sad about the sound, as though a thousand newly dead spirits were keening together into the leaden sky. Like distant thunder a rumble of drums added an undercurrent of warning to the melancholy notes of the bugle.

I lay upon the hot grass, staring up at the blue sky as a strange film unwound itself upon the inner screen of my mind and that unearthly bugle echoed first in one grey cell and then in another.

Mud oozed between my fingers with the squishy softness of infant anal memory. It was very comforting. The pain had gone and so had the terror, that blind unreasoning, sphincter twitching terror that possessed me when the gun-carriage rattled by and I tried to tell them that I was still alive, that there was a human being alive behind these wide protruding eyes and this black, gaping hole of a mouth, but nothing seemed to work anymore. There were no links between my brain and the extremities of my being. Like a new-born baby I did not know where I ended and the rest of the world began. I just lay and sort of screamed inside my head, “I’m alive! God help me! I’m alive”. But they who rode the noisy gun limber heard no cry and went on by.

“Don’t they care?” I thought, “Don’t they know I’m here?” Surely somebody must be missing me? But I knew they weren’t, my mates were all dead or scattered, too busy holding in their own guts to wonder where I was.

Mum would miss me. Life would still be going on at home. Dad, off down the boozer for a pint and a game of darts. Mum up to her elbows in flour, baking. They’d miss me, but nothing would change just because I wouldn’t be there anymore. Little had changed by my coming and little would change by my going. Sad that. Futile like, as if I’d never been at all.

The mud oozed stickily into my ears, but I could still hear that plaintive bugle call. I wasn’t afraid anymore, just sad that no-one would ever know what it was like, how I died. “Why me?” I thought. Why war? Why anything? Sometimes I thought the carriage would come rattling by again and they would find me and everything would be alright, but I seem to have been here for eternity. I cry a lot now and I’m so tired.

The hot sun sucked at the tears on my cheeks as I lived the death of Robert Henry Jones, aged sixteen.