Beaky's Blather

He sat on a sand bag with his back against the earth trench wall and looked up at the sky above. Below a backwash of thin clouds, he saw a black fleck, a bird glide. It swooped over the armies below. He watched and wondered that it could move so careless of their desperation.

Where he now sat on a sand bag and waited, last night he’d stood guard and looked, looked into the dark between the lines and listened. Ahead, two hundred yards ahead, he supposed, they had looked too, and listened. Each side held  – forever it felt – in a balanced tension.

He shifted on his sandbag and touched his rifle. He moved his helmet and placed it to the side, its brim touching the stock of his rifle. Above, the bird turned and glided over him then disappeared towards the enemy.

‘Traitor bird,’ a twitch in his cheek signalled the margin of a smile that he recognised, didn’t make it.

‘Didn’t make it’. He considered the weight this euphemistic phrase now bore. So many ‘didn’t make it’. 

He no longer looked for friendship in the trench, where people ‘didn’t make it’.   And yet, the trench, he knew, was his friend. If you knew how to be, to move and to wait, the trench was your friend.  

Outside the trench, where he’d gone a year ago. Outside the trench in the wasp-zip of bullets when the machine gun clattered, he’d glimpsed it’s smoke as it jumped and ripped into their advance. 

He’d barely left the trench before he fallen into a shell hole yards ahead of where he now sat. He had lain in water up to his neck. It had seeped over his collar and oozed down into his armpits. He’d lain there until dark and then he’d slipped back to the Trench, his old friend. 

It was the new boys, the new boys who had been schoolboys in 1915 when he’d first squelched the mud of this trench. It was the new-from-training, just old enough boys who didn’t know the Trench as friend that wouldn’t make it. 

He looked along the trench and momentarily locked eyes with a veteran face he recognised. Someone who, like him, sat on a sand bag with his back to the enemy, against the earth wall. Neither smiled. 

He looked into the sky again, searched briefly but the bird had gone. He wondered if he’d every again see such freedom.