The rain continues, torrential, endless, timeless. Mud claws up the side of the trench walls, hands of dead men aching for life. The consistent noise is enough to make even the most battle-worn soldier launch into fits, screams and spasms of the night begin to echo all around. There is no escape from this noise - it is one of the commonalities of modernised warfare, one missed by the papers and the propaganda. Glorious men standing proud and victorious over the defeated, over the broken, protectors and conquerors united under the flag of the Imperial Empire.
These conceptions were broken and destroyed as soon as the rain started. It stripped a man down to tribal instincts of survival. Even the occasional break in the weather didn’t lead to a break in the rain; droplets of metal, downpours of shrapnel, deluges of bullets destroyed not just the clearing of the clouds, but also a man’s will to continue. Not continue the fight for their country, but to give up on the basic needs of every being on this land. For this was an environment not of this land - this was hell. And hell has no place for survival.
Eduard rushes across my sightline, breaking me out of my stupor. He holds a length of rope, normally reserved for lashing wooden planks together. His length of stride tells me he is attending to a matter more important than wooden boards. Screams echo through dugouts next to our one, the screams of a fit. We must contain this lest it spread like a miasma through the ranks.
This has happened before - the last instance left seven men out of the fight, the majority had a peculiar fondness for throwing themselves onto the lacework of barbed wire a few feet away from our trench and insist for this all to stop. Eventually someone would put an end to their suffering. The last person in our trench to hold that responsibility was Mika.
Mika has a look in his eye that portrays utter determination to not take part in that sadistic ritual again as he follows behind Eduard, matching pace for pace - two reapers of death on their way to offer their mercy to the wicked, to the damned. I decide it a good idea to follow suit.
Bursting into a dugout a few yards away, a scene of hatred, rage and utter confusion is sprawled out in our path. Makeshift wooden tables and chairs strewn everywhere, splinters from fractured legs and braces littering the floor. Our eyes met with mess tins, candles and playing cards across the floorboards - curiously, the sole card to lay on its back was a singular joker.
The cries are ongoing, sound bouncing off every surface until it delivers unto us the dreadful screams of a shock-ridden man - I see now why Eduard brought the rope.
“Grab him”, he commands with calming authority. As if he was a General, me and Mika launch into action. A chair is moved, turned onto its legs so we have a workstation, the hysterical man is driven down in place.
“Ready” me and Mika echo in unison.
No more words are spoken between us as Eduard hoists the liability onto his shoulder. We watch him leave the frontline trenches heading toward a line of hastily dug communication trenches. He had deemed it a more merciful way to end this man's war; may he be one of the lucky ones, for our war has no beginning and no end.
The cries finally cease, leading to an uncharacteristic break in the noise. Silence takes us deep into her embrace, wrapping wounds with the gauze of hope; we haven’t felt this warmth in days. The English guns are to blame for this. Their everlasting peppering of our positions is nothing more than a daily routine - they have the same repetitiveness to them as the sun rise, the same necessity as respiring, the same ending that meets us all in the end.
We can distinguish between each calibre as it thunders in the distance; most feared are the English 25s. These unleash beasts of flame and force, leaving nothing but splinters, mud and gore wherever it meets the ground. They wreak a vile consequence on the land and reap an unholy impact on the psyches of the damned.
Eduard has a distinct hatred for these batteries. He has the exact features of a shell shocked man whenever the cannonade opens up. Mika is less tense, more freeflow in his descent into the bombardment. For stability and logic, one would look for Eduard; for a more realistic and human approach to the hellscape, one would look for Mika. Eduard has my vote.
Welcome to the Short Stories! This is an automated message.
The rules can be found on the sidebar here.
Writers - Stories which have been checked for simple mistakes and are properly formatted, tend to get a lot more people reading them. Common issues include -
Readers - ShortStories is a place for writers to get constructive feedback. Abuse of any kind is not tolerated.
If you see a rule breaking post or comment, then please hit the report button.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Honestly, the present tense isn't working for me at all. Present tense is WAY harder to do well than past tense. And since you're going to have multiple POVs in the work (I saw your last post) the first person is also maybe something you want to reconsider.
Those things aside, you're doing a lot of telling here when showing would be better, and your opener is too nebulous and ambiguous. I'd try to reduce the amorphous commentary and keep us in the scene with the narrator.
I appreciate the feedback. However, this will be a story focusing on the people in the story so first person was a go to for me. The point is to show the people in the situation
Just to weigh in on the whole 1st person thing, if you're absolutely set on sticking with it (which is fair enough, as maybe you want to practice and hone your skills with it), what I've tended to encounter in published works with multiple 1st person povs is that they start each chapter with the character name so that it is easy to follow and unambiguous. An example that springs to mind that I loved which did the whole multiple first person points of view thing is Sistersong by Lucy Holland (though I think that was past rather than present tense).
Anyway, just a thought that might help you keep things clear, but no pressure. You do you.
To be fair, I've written more and started each section with who's point of view it is. My vision is that this is a story which doesn't focus on the war but of how awful war can be. Imagine All Quiet On The Western Front but from two POVs
Edit: just to say, thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it :)
You can show people in the situation and "focus on the people in the story" with a third person/close perspective.
Authors have been doing it for hundreds of years.
First person is harder to do well than third, and multiple first person POVs get super confusing to the reader unless you can ABSOLUTELY NAIL the narrative voice for each of them, and that's a tall order for a new author.
First time posting, hoping for some advice on this section from my current work :)