Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [135]
28 January
Never have I imagined cold such as this. Even the frost-rimed dugout the officers share seems an oasis of warmth. Heaven is dry stockings, even if they are caked with dirt. Paradise would be a bed with clean sheets—but that is more than my mind can grasp. The earth no longer holds such things; all the world is half-frozen slime and ear-shattering noise.
A shell hit the neighbouring section of trench today; I went to help a wounded soldier to his feet only to discover he had no legs below the thigh. I shall never lose the sensation of lifting up a legless man. Thank God he was already dead.
And my first thought after the original shock was, I wonder if his feet are dry now. And then I started to laugh. I managed to reach the privacy of the dugout before my nerves gave way and the laughter turned to tears. The first time in days my nerves have gone like that, and not yet in front of the men. The mind toughens slowly.
4 February
Jerry’s shelling kept us pinned in our mud-holes four days after we were supposed to go back. There was finally a lull, and we could shift the wounded and trade places with the poor bas souls coming up to take our places. Baths and louse-free shirts and beds that don’t jump and twitch under us, hot food and a chance for the ears to cease their endless ringing. But we’ve pulled a short one this time for some reason—we’re headed back into it in three more days. Just in time for the lice to find us again.
Why don’t lice get trench foot, or freeze to death? God’s mysteries.
7 February
I’ve found myself, in recent days, thinking about the dome over the Hall in Justice, with its frescoes of what the prophet Amos calls the Day of the Lord. I have been reflecting that since I was a child, certainly at least a year or two before the archduke’s assassination set the spark to the Balkans, I have been aware that there would be a war, and that the war would be a good thing, however painful. I have been remembering those early days, when the older boys and the young men of the estate put on their proud uniforms and clasped to their breasts the opportunity to “trounce the Kaiser” and “show the Hun what for.” The nobility of their faces, their shared cause, made my boyish self burn with envy. I raged that they would do the job before I had a chance to join in.
“Why would you want the Day of the Lord?” Amos cries out in horror. Having come here, to the trenches, I understand exactly what Amos means: Why in heaven’s name would anyone want Armageddon, if they knew what it really meant, the innocent and the sinner alike crushed underfoot? As if a man fled from a lion to meet a bear, or took refuge in a house to be bitten by a serpent. We lusted after war, and by God, we were given the trenches. The Day of the Lord.
I myself thirst after those waters at the centre of the fresco, for the justice that will flow down like waters, the righteousness like an everflowing stream poised above us, ready to sweep through northern France and wash us all away, cleanse the land of howitzers and tanks, half-rotted corpses and gas canisters, filth and blood and terror and desperation. The land will be empty when the flood has passed through, but it will be clean.
Fancy, I know, but that is what I have been thinking, in recent days.
11 February
Writing this by the Very lights that Jerry’s been shooting up over our heads for a week now, one generation of which scarcely fades before the next comes up. I never want to see another display of fireworks as long as I live.
Our howitzers are going now, pounding our bones as we trade death with the men 150 feet away, in their holes, behind their